Command and Control (47 page)

Peurifoy had recently heard about an explosive called 1,3,5-triamino-2,4, 6-trinitrobenzene (TATB). It had been invented in 1888 but had been rarely used since then—because TATB was so hard to detonate. Under federal law, it wasn't even classified as an explosive; it was considered a flammable solid. With the right detonators, however, it could produce a shock wave almost as strong as the high explosives that surrounded the core of a nuclear weapon. TATB soon became known as an “insensitive high explosive.” You could drop it, hammer it, set it on fire, smash it into the ground at a speed of 1,500 feet per second, and it still wouldn't detonate. The explosives being used in America's nuclear weapons would go off from an impact one tenth as strong. Harold Agnew was now the director of Los Alamos, and he thought using TATB in hydrogen bombs made a lot more sense—as a means of preventing plutonium dispersal during an accident—than adding two or three thousand extra pounds of steel and padding.

All the necessary elements for nuclear weapon safety were now available: a unique signal, weak link/strong link technology, insensitive high explosives. The only thing missing was the willingness to fight a bureaucratic war on their behalf—and Bob Peurifoy had that quality in abundance. He was no longer a low-level employee, toiling away on the electrical system of a bomb, without a sense of the bigger picture. As the head of weapon development, he now had some authority to make policy at Sandia. And he planned to take advantage of it. Three months into the new job, Peurifoy
told his superior, Glenn Fowler, a vice president at the lab, that all the nuclear weapons carried by aircraft had to be retrofitted with new safety devices. Peurifoy didn't claim that the weapons were unsafe; he said their safety could no longer be presumed. Fowler listened carefully to his arguments and agreed. A briefing for Sandia's upper management was scheduled for February 1974.

The briefing did not go well. The other vice presidents at Sandia were indifferent, unconvinced, or actively hostile to Peurifoy's recommendations. The strongest opponents of a retrofit argued that it would harm the lab's reputation—it would imply that Sandia had been wrong about nuclear weapon safety for years. They said new weapons with improved safety features could eventually replace the old ones. And they made clear that the lab's research-and-development money would not be spent on bombs already in the stockpile. Sandia couldn't force the armed services to alter their weapons, and the Department of Defense had the ultimate responsibility for nuclear weapon safety. The lab's upper management said, essentially, that this was someone else's problem.

In April 1974,
Peurifoy and Fowler went to Washington and met with Major General Ernest Graves, Jr., a top official at the Atomic Energy Commission, whose responsibilities included weapon safety. Sandia reported to the AEC, and Peurifoy was aiming higher on the bureaucratic ladder. Graves listened to the presentation and then did nothing about it. Five months later, unwilling to let the issue drop and ready to escalate the battle, Peurifoy and Fowler put their concerns on the record. A letter to General Graves was drafted—and Glenn Fowler placed his career at risk by signing and sending it.
The “Fowler Letter,” as it was soon called, caused a top secret uproar in the nuclear weapon community. It ensured that high-level officials at the weapons labs, the AEC, and the Pentagon couldn't hide behind claims of plausible deniability, if a serious accident happened. The letter was proof that they had been warned.

“Most of the aircraft delivered weapons now in stockpile were designed to requirements which envisioned . . . operations consisting mostly of long periods of igloo storage and some brief exposure to transportation environments,” the Fowler letter began. But these weapons were now being used in
ways that could subject them to abnormal environments. And none of the weapons had adequate safety mechanisms. Fowler described the “possibility of these safing devices being electrically bypassed through charred organic plastics or melted solder” and warned of their “premature operation from stray voltages and currents.” He listed the weapons that should immediately be retrofitted or retired, including the Genie, the Hound Dog, the 9-megaton Mark 53 bomb—and the weapons that needed to be replaced, notably the Mark 28, SAC's most widely deployed bomb. He said that the secretary of defense should be told about the risks of using these weapons during ground alerts. And Fowler recommended, due to “the urgency associated with the safety question,” that nuclear weapons should be loaded onto aircraft only for missions “absolutely required for national security reasons.”

The scope of the Fowler Letter had deliberately been limited to the weapons whose safety devices were Sandia's responsibility—mainly bombs carried by airplanes. The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force were responsible for the arming and fuzing mechanisms of the nuclear warheads carried by their missiles. And the safety of those warheads in an abnormal environment was even more questionable than the safety of the bombs. The batteries, accelerometers, barometric switches, and safety devices weren't located inside the warhead of a ballistic missile. They were in an adaptation kit a few feet beneath it—which meant the arming wires traveled a good distance to the detonators. That distance made it easier for stray voltage to enter the wires. And the missile was constantly linked to sources of electrical power inside the silo. In 1974 the oldest nuclear warhead deployed on a ballistic missile was also the most powerful, the W-53 atop the Titan II, designed in the late 1950s. Tucked away inside a silo, the W-53 was less likely to encounter abnormal environments than a bomb. But how the warhead would respond to them was less clearly understood.

D
uring the summer of 1979,
James L. “Skip” Rutherford III was working in the Little Rock office of Senator David H. Pryor. Rutherford was twenty-nine years old. He'd grown up in Batesville, Arkansas, a small town in the northern part of the state, attended the University of Arkansas, and edited the student newspaper there. After graduation he did public relations work for a bank in Fayetteville. The job introduced him to Pryor, who was running for a seat in the United States Senate, after two terms as the governor of Arkansas. Pryor was a new breed of southern Democrat, an opponent of racism and segregation, a supporter of women's rights, a progressive who greatly enjoyed meeting with voters, rich or poor, in every corner of the state. Rutherford worked as a volunteer for the campaign and joined Pryor's staff after the election, representing the senator at events throughout Arkansas. And then one day Rutherford took a call from someone at Little Rock Air Force Base, a young airman who wanted to meet with Pryor confidentially. The airman sounded nervous. When Rutherford asked what this was about, the airman said: “
It's about the Titan missiles.”

Skip Rutherford didn't consider himself an expert on intercontinental ballistic missiles. But he'd served in the Arkansas Air National Guard for six years, spending one weekend a month at Little Rock Air Force Base. He knew a lot of people at the base and felt comfortable there. The airman
agreed to meet with Rutherford at the federal building in Little Rock, after hours, to avoid being seen—and brought a couple of other guys who worked with the Titan II. They were about Rutherford's age. They didn't want their names used as the source of any information. They were scared about getting into trouble. And most of all they were scared about what was happening at the Titan II silos in Arkansas.

The missiles were old, the airmen said, and most of them leaked. The portable vapor detectors and the vapor detectors in the silos often didn't work. Spare parts were hard to find. The Propellant Transfer System crews were overworked, sometimes spending fifteen or sixteen hours on the job. And many of the young PTS technicians weren't adequately trained for the tasks they were being ordered to perform. After that first meeting, Rutherford secretly met with other airmen from the base and took their calls from pay phones late at night. He spoke to roughly a dozen members of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing, promising not to reveal their identities to the Air Force. And they all said basically the same thing: the Titan II was a disaster waiting to happen.

Rutherford told Senator Pryor about the meetings.
Pryor was disturbed by the information and decided that something had to be done. He wrote to Dr. Hans S. Mark, the secretary of the Air Force, asking for details about the staff shortages and training deficiencies at Little Rock Air Force Base. And Pryor learned that
other members of Congress were concerned about the Titan II. Representative Dan Glickman, a Democrat, and Senator Bob Dole, a Republican, had already asked the Air Force to launch a formal investigation of safety problems with the Titan II. Glickman and Dole were both from Kansas, where some of the missile's flaws had been revealed during an accident the previous summer.

•   •   •

A
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533-7, about an hour southeast of Wichita, Kansas, the final stages of a missile recycle were being completed. A Titan II had been removed from 3-7 and returned to McConnell Air Force Base, where it would undergo routine maintenance checks. A replacement missile
had been lowered into the silo. On the morning of August 24, 1978, a PTS crew arrived at the complex to pump oxidizer into the tanks. The fuel would be added the following day, and then the warhead would be placed atop the Titan II, finishing the recycle. On the main floor of the control center, the head of the PTS crew, Staff Sergeant Robert J. Thomas, briefed the missile combat crew commander, First Lieutenant Keith E. Matthews, about the work that would be done that day. A trainee, Airman Mirl Linthicum, would be acting as PTS team chief, supervising the procedure from the control trailer topside.

Oxidizer lines were attached to the stage 1 and stage 2 tanks, and both were full in about an hour. The lines were thick, heavy hoses through which the propellant flowed. Airman Erby Hepstall and Airman Carl Malinger put on RFHCO suits and entered the silo to disconnect the lines.
Malinger had never been inside a Titan II silo before. He was nineteen years old and new to the Air Force, accompanying Hepstall that day for on-the-job training. The removal of the stage 2 lines, near the top of the missile, went smoothly. Hepstall and Malinger rode the elevator down to disconnect the lines from stage 1. Standing on a platform near the bottom of the missile, they unscrewed one of them. A powerful stream of oxidizer, like water suddenly released from a fire hydrant, hit Malinger's chest and the faceplate of his helmet and knocked him down. Hepstall tried to reconnect the line, but it wouldn't screw back on. Oxidizer poured from the missile, fell into the
W
below it, and then rose as a thick, reddish brown cloud of vapor.

Inside the top level of the control center, Lieutenant Matthews was preparing his lunch when a Klaxon sounded. Down below, the deputy commander, Second Lieutenant Charles B. Frost, sat at the launch control console. Frost wore a headset and monitored the PTS team on the radio. He pushed a button on the console and turned off the Klaxon, assuming that a puff of oxidizer had set it off when the lines were disconnected. That happened all the time. The Klaxon sounded again, and Frost heard screams over the radio.

“
Oh my God, the poppet.”

“
What was the poppet?” Frost said into his headset. “What's wrong?”

Matthews came down the stairs as warning lights flashed on the console:
OXI VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT, VAPOR SILO EQUIP. AREA, VAPOR OXI PUMP ROOM.

“
Get out of here, let's get out,” a voice yelled over the radio.

“
Where are you?” Frost asked. The sounds on the radio were chaotic. People were talking at the same time, they were shouting and screaming and drowning one another out. Frost pushed the override button, blocking everybody else's radio transmission, and ordered: “
Come back to the control center.”

“
I can't see,” somebody said.

Lieutenant Matthews walked over to the blast door protecting the control center. He tried to open the door and see what was going on. The blast door wouldn't open. And Matthews got a whiff of something that smelled a lot like Clorox bleach. It smelled like oxidizer.

In the control trailer topside, Airman Linthicum, the trainee running his first recycle, heard the shouting on the radio but couldn't understand what was being said. Linthicum ran out of the trailer, trying to get better reception on a portable headset, and saw a reddish cloud rising from the exhaust vents. Another member of the PTS crew left the trailer, found Sergeant Thomas—the most experienced technician at the site—and told him something had gone wrong. Thomas was twenty-nine years old. He saw the oxidizer, ran to the access portal, and asked the control center for permission to enter the launch complex.

Lieutenant Frost granted the permission, unlocking the outer steel door for Thomas and then the door at the bottom of the entrapment area. All the hazard lights on Frost's console seemed to be flashing at once, including
FUEL VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT
, which made no sense. Frost kept asking the PTS team chief where they were in the checklist when the accident happened, hoping to find the right emergency checklist for dealing with it. But the radio still didn't work properly. Frost pulled out different tech manuals and flipped through their pages. He wasn't sure what they were supposed to do.

“
Hey, I smell Clorox,” Matthews said. He told the missile crew to set up
a portable vapor detector in front of the door, to close the blast valve and the blast damper, protecting the air supply of the control center.

The missile facilities technician, Senior Airman Glen H. Wessel, placed a vapor detector near the blast door. He could smell oxidizer. The detector
quickly registered one to three parts per million; somehow the stuff was getting into the control center. Wessel told his commander that the room was being contaminated with oxidizer. They both tried to open the blast door, but it wouldn't budge. The crew was locked inside the control center.

The two PTS technicians waiting in the blast lock, serving as backup, had no idea what was happening in the silo. They could hear screams on the radio, but nobody would answer them. And then the door from the long cableway suddenly swung open, and Hepstall appeared. Oxidizer had turned the faceplate of his helmet white. It was so opaque you couldn't see his face.

Hepstall pulled off the helmet. He was sobbing. He said Malinger's still down there, we have to go and get him out. If anything happens to Malinger, he said, I'll never forgive myself.

Hepstall had left his trainee in the silo, amid a thick cloud of oxidizer, found his way to the elevator, and ridden it five levels to the long cableway.

The door to the blast lock opened, and Sergeant Thomas walked inside. He saw Hepstall sobbing, heard that Malinger was missing, and put on one of the backup team's RFHCO suits. Without a moment's hesitation, Thomas had decided to search for Malinger.

Hepstall offered to go with him and grabbed a fresh helmet. Wearing the RFHCOs, they opened the door and headed down the long cableway toward the silo. The air was becoming thick with oxidizer.

The PTS backup team waited anxiously in the blast lock. Moments later, the door swung open. Hepstall stumbled inside and fell to the ground coughing. He hadn't made it very far. The new helmet leaked, and oxidizer was getting into his RFHCO. Hepstall took off the suit, got into another one, and left for the silo again.

On the bottom floor of the control center, Wessel was amazed by how
hard it was to open the escape hatch. The ratchet that you needed to use felt really heavy. He and the ballistic missile analyst technician, Danford M. Wong, took turns with it, wearing their gas masks. They were highly motivated. The blast door still wouldn't open, and this looked like their only way out.

Lieutenant Frost was still attempting, without success, to reach the PTS team in the silo, Sergeant Thomas, and the PTS guys in the trailer, using the telephone and the radio. It wasn't easy with a gas mask on. Frost would pull off the mask momentarily, speak, put the mask back on, and listen for some response. Nobody answered him. And then, clear as a bell, he heard Malinger shouting over the radio.

“
My God, help us, help us, we need help.”

“
Hey, door eight is locked, we're locked in, you guys get out,” Frost told him.

Malinger kept repeating that he needed help, and Frost tried to make him understand that the blast door was stuck.

The emergency phone rang, and Frost answered it. Someone was outside blast door 8, asking for help.

“
Hey, you guys, get out of here, get out of here now,” Frost said, “just get out, door eight is locked, so you guys get out.”

Wessel and Wong could hear the commotion on the floor above them and cranked the ratchet on the escape hatch as fast they could.

Blast door 8 swung open, and Malinger ran into the control center, carrying his helmet, yelling that Sergeant Thomas was dead. A cloud of oxidizer followed him, and then Hepstall came in, without a helmet, and collapsed onto the floor. He landed near the stairs, as Malinger kept screaming. None of it made sense to the missile crew.

Commander Matthews said, “
Come help me,” to Frost, and they entered the blast lock. Sergeant Thomas lay unconscious on the floor. They picked him up, carried him into the control center, and shut the door. Thomas was having convulsions, his head nodding side to side in the RFHCO helmet. Malinger took off the helmet and started to give him mouth-to-mouth.

“
This is three-seven,” Frost told the command post at McConnell Air
Force Base. “The locks are on the safe and the keys are in it. We got one man possibly down and we're evacuating now.”

Thomas died on the floor, staring at the ceiling.

“
Where's the dep, where's the dep?” Wessel shouted, calling for Frost, their deputy commander. They were getting tired, and they needed his help to open the escape hatch. The light grew dimmer as the control center filled with oxidizer.

Malinger didn't want to leave Thomas behind. It seemed wrong. After getting knocked down by the powerful stream of oxidizer, Malinger had gotten lost in the silo, near the base of the missile, unable to see more than a few feet, unaware that Hepstall had taken the elevator and left him down there. Sergeant Thomas had found him and brought him out, and now Malinger didn't want to leave Thomas on the floor.

“
We'll get him later,” Frost said, heading downstairs to work on the hatch.

Matthews helped Malinger and Hepstall down the stairs and then helped them take off their RFHCO suits. They said their skin was burning. “
My God, please help me,” Hepstall said. “It's in here with me, it's with me.”

Matthews went back upstairs and checked the other two levels of the control center, looking for stragglers, just in case. The cloud of oxidizer was now so thick that he couldn't see more than two or three feet ahead.

The escape hatch was open, finally. Wessel went into it first, crawled through the tunnel, and climbed the ladder as fast as he could. It felt like climbing up a chimney full of smoke, as the oxidizer filled the narrow air shaft. At the top, Wessel pulled the pins and then pushed the metal grating open with his head. Wong was right behind him, and then Frost, who'd paused every few rungs to pull Hepstall up the ladder. Frost wanted to help him—and didn't want him falling onto Malinger. Lieutenant Matthews went last, closing the hatch behind him to trap the oxidizer in the control center.