Command and Control (53 page)

“
Alpha, Charlie, Delta . . .” he heard, copying each letter down. And then his pilot's voice was shouting over the intercom.

“
Terminate, terminate, terminate.”

For some reason, the pilot was ending the drill. Zink felt scared for a moment, wondering why the pilot was yelling. He and the bombardier looked at each other. They couldn't see outside, had no idea what was happening—and then heard a loud bang. Something big had struck the right side of the plane. The lights went out, the cabin became pitch black, and Zink knew it was time to evacuate. The navigator was supposed to open the hatch for the rest of the crew and leave the plane first. But the gunner, who sat upstairs, had already jumped down, landed on the floor, and opened the hatch. And without a word, the gunner leaped through the hatch to the tarmac below. Zink's seat was closest to the hatch, yet four of the five other crew members managed to get out of the plane before him, like rats from a sinking ship. Through the open hatch, Zink could see a bright orange glow—not a good sign.

Zink didn't bother with the ladder. He jumped the five feet to the
runway, landed in a crouch, saw that the right wing of the bomber was on fire, and ran as fast as he could. Now he understood why the crew was in such a hurry. A B-52 had caught fire on the runway a few weeks earlier, at Warner Robins Air Force Base, near Macon, Georgia. Within minutes the plane had exploded, and it literally melted into the ground. But that B-52 hadn't been carrying nuclear weapons. This one was loaded with eight SRAMs and four Mark 28 bombs.

Zink ran for about three hundred yards, expecting to get knocked down at any second by an explosion. The wing commander's car pulled up beside him. A window rolled down, and the wing commander said,
“Get in.” Zink was glad to obey that order. He turned around and saw that the plane's number five engine was shooting flames like a blowtorch. It was the engine on the right wing closest to the fuselage, and the fire was cascading down the length of the aircraft. The wing commander was calling firemen on the radio, trying to solve the problem, well aware that not only the plane, but his career at SAC, might be going up in flames.

The nose of the B-52 was pointing toward the southeast, and a wind with
gusts of up to thirty-five miles per hour was blowing in that direction. The wind swept from the tail straight down the fuselage, keeping the fire away from the fuel tanks in the wings and away from the bomb bay. Although the power had been shut off on the plane, gravity continued to feed jet fuel into the number five engine. It had become a gigantic flamethrower. Fire trucks sprayed foam on the engine, and yet the steady supply of fuel kept the fire burning. For the moment, the strong wind was pushing the flames away from the B-52. But the wind could change direction, the plane was getting hotter, and its tanks still held another few hundred thousand pounds of fuel.

•   •   •

T
IM
G
RIFFIS
WAS
AT
HOME
with his family in Alvarado, Minnesota, a rural town with a population of about four hundred, when the phone rang. Griffis was a civilian fire inspector at Grand Forks Air Force Base, about forty-five miles to the south. His job mainly involved teaching the public
about fire hazards and looking at blueprints to make sure that new buildings complied with the fire code. His wife was a schoolteacher at the base. They had a six-year-old son and an eleven-year-old daughter. The kids had gone to bed.

George VanKirk, the fire chief at Grand Forks, was on the phone. The two men were good friends, and they both lived in Alvarado. A B-52 caught fire near the runway about forty minutes ago, VanKirk said. Did Griffis want to come along and help out? Griffis said yes. The two sped to the base as fast as they could in VanKirk's Ford Fiesta.

By the time Griffis and VanKirk arrived, the fire had been burning for about an hour and a half. The strong wind was still blowing the flames away from the bomber. But the fire trucks couldn't put out the fire. Some of the hoses were now being used to cool the wings and the fuselage. The copilot had admitted that he might have made a mistake before leaving the plane. Two of the steps in the emergency checklist may have been performed in the wrong order. The checklist said to pull the fire suppression handle for the number five engine, shutting off the fuel—and then turn the emergency battery switch off, cutting the power. The copilot may have turned off the battery first. Without any power, the fire suppression system wouldn't work, and fuel would continue to flow. Firefighters climbed into the plane twice, entering the cockpit and attempting to perform the steps in the correct order. But nothing happened.

SAC headquarters was on the radio, along with representatives from Boeing, trying to figure out what to do. By quarter to midnight, the fire had been burning for almost three hours. The right wing and the doors of the bomb bay were starting to blister. The fuel tank inside the wing would soon get hot enough to ignite. Boeing's recommendation was simple: pull the firefighters from the area, abandon the plane, and let it burn. The safety mechanisms on the nuclear weapons would prevent them from detonating, and nobody would get hurt. For some reason, SAC headquarters didn't seem to like that idea.

VanKirk looked at Griffis and said, “
What do you think?”

Griffis knew what the question really meant: somebody should make one last attempt to shut off the fuel.

“
Yeah, let me try it,” he replied.

Although Griffis's current job was fairly sedate, he'd worked for years as a firefighter at Castle Air Force Base in California, where many B-52 pilots were trained. He'd served as the crew chief of a rescue squad, a post that required him to lead men into burning planes as everyone else was leaving them. The interior layout of a B-52 had become awfully familiar, and Griffis thought he could find his way through one blindfolded. But just in case, he wanted Gene Rausch, one of his fire inspectors, to climb into the plane with him—and bring a flashlight.

Their conversation was brief.

“
Gene, you want to go with me?”

“Yeah.”

Griffis conferred with the wing commander, going over diagrams of the console and the position of switches in the cockpit. Griffis and Rausch borrowed “silvers,” hooded firefighting suits, from one of the trucks. The boots were two sizes too big for Griffis, and he had to grip the insoles with his toes to walk in them. He stuffed a handheld radio in his hood to communicate with VanKirk, and their conversation was recorded.

“
Chief, that engine is getting pretty hot,” Griffis said, five minutes before midnight, “it's starting to pop, if we're going to go in, we've got to do it now.”

“Yeah, go.”

Griffis and Rausch ran to the plane, entered through the bottom hatch, and climbed into the cockpit. Griffis realized he didn't need Rausch with him after all. The cockpit was so bright from the flames right outside the window that a flashlight was completely unnecessary. Rausch could have stayed outside in the truck. Griffis had been in burning planes before, but never in one where the fire was cascading with such force. He had no idea if the fuel could be shut off. But he'd give it a try—and if it didn't work, they'd get their asses out of there. He saw that the fire suppression handle had already been pulled. All he had to do was plug it in. He switched on the emergency battery, and the fire went out, like the burner of a gas cooktop that had just been turned off. And then Griffis and Rausch heard everyone cheering outside.

As Griffis walked from the plane, VanKirk handed him a radio and said, “
Here, somebody wants to talk to you.”

It was General Richard Ellis, the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command.

“
Mr. Griffis, I want to thank you,” Ellis said.

Griffis was impressed that the head of SAC knew his name. He subsequently received a Civilian Medal of Valor. But he didn't consider himself much of a hero. Climbing into a B-52 that was on fire, without power, in the middle of the night, loaded with nuclear weapons, was no big deal. If you're an Air Force firefighter, he thought, that's what you do.

During a closed Senate hearing, Dr. Roger Batzel, the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, subsequently testified that if the B-52 had caught on fire, the nuclear weapons inside it could have scattered plutonium over sixty square miles of North Dakota and Minnesota. The city of Grand Forks, with a population of about sixty thousand, would have been directly in the path of the radioactive plume. Batzel failed to mention that one of the Mark 28 bombs could have detonated. It would have destroyed Grand Forks and deposited lethal fallout on Duluth, Minnesota, or Minneapolis–Saint Paul, depending on the high-altitude winds. An Air Force investigation discovered
the cause of the fire in engine number five: someone had forgotten to screw a nut onto the fuel strainer. The missing nut was smaller than a penny.

Jeffrey Zink and his crew were taken to the hospital, given drug tests, and kept there until three in the morning. They later resented the obsession, among local newspapers, with the question of whether nuclear weapons had been on the plane. The Air Force would neither confirm nor deny it. The crew focused on a more immediate issue: how easily they could have lost their lives. Some of the bombers on alert that night were parked facing west. Had the nose of their B-52 faced west, the fire would have entered the plane the moment the hatch was opened. They would have been incinerated, and the flames would've quickly reached the SRAMs and the Mark 28 bombs. The difference between life and death was their parking space.

Not long after the accident, Zink and his wife were having a romantic, candlelit dinner. They were newlyweds. When his napkin brushed the
candle and caught on fire, Zink came unglued. All the feelings that had been suppressed hit him at once. He lost it, he felt like a complete basket case. He didn't have post-traumatic stress disorder or anything really debilitating, just a sudden realization that was hard to express, without sounding trite. Zink was twenty-five years old, and something abstract had become real. These planes are dangerous, he thought. People die in them.

•   •   •

T
HE
DAY
AFTER
THE
B-52 fire at Grand Forks,
Senator David Pryor once again introduced an amendment to a Senate bill, calling for the installation of warning sirens at every Titan II launch complex. The commander of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing, Colonel Moser, had informed Pryor that
at least nine accidents or propellant leaks had occurred at Titan II missile sites in Arkansas during the previous year.
At a launch complex near Heber Springs, a steel rod had fallen onto a circuit breaker, starting a fire and endangering the missile.
More than one third of the entire Titan II force had been patched for leaks. Pryor's amendment was cosponsored by Senator Bob Dole, among others, but it was still opposed by the Air Force. “
We have a responsibility to protect the civilians living in the communities and on the farms surrounding these missile sites,” Pryor said during the Senate debate. “
Accidents have occurred in the past, and we must take steps to reduce their recurrence and provide for the best course of action in case an accident should occur.”

The Air Force had recently submitted a lengthy report to the House and Senate armed services committees, addressing their concerns about the safety of the Titan II. The report acknowledged that the RFHCO suits and the silo's communications system could be improved. It also noted that the portable vapor detectors did a poor job of detecting fuel vapor and should be replaced. But the Air Force contended that
the accident rate at Titan II sites was lower than the rate at most American workplaces, that current maintenance procedures “
provide a high level of safety,” and that the physical condition of the missile was “
considered by many to be better now than when it was new.”
The safety record of the W-53 warhead was “commendable,” the report said—without mentioning that even the Pentagon
thought it needed a retrofit to be safe in abnormal environments. The Air Force argued that the risk of a major propellant leak was low, because the Titan II's fuel tanks and oxidizer tanks were so well maintained. “
Airframe rupture,” the report concluded, “therefore does not constitute a viable concern.”

The Air Force report was useful not only to the Strategic Air Command, which hoped to keep the Titan II on alert, but also to the defense contractors responsible for the missile, like Martin Marietta.
They were being sued by Airman Carl Malinger and other victims of the oxidizer leak at Rock, Kansas. But the report didn't help the Air Force in the Senate. Pryor's amendment was approved on September 16, 1980, almost a year after it had first been introduced.

Skip Rutherford and his wife were at home, having dinner with an old friend, a couple of days later, when the phone rang. Rutherford got up, took the call, and returned to the table looking white as a ghost.

His wife asked what was wrong.

Somebody dropped a socket in a Titan II silo near Damascus, Rutherford said. The skin of the missile has been pierced, and fuel's leaking out. The guy who just called says the missile's going to explode.

Rutherford phoned Senator Pryor, who was in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the state Democratic convention, along with Governor Bill Clinton and Vice President Walter Mondale.

“
This is serious,” Rutherford told the senator.

“
Well, how serious?”

“
They tell me it's going to explode.”

“
You're kidding me.”

Outside Rutherford's house, cars were driving past, kids were playing in yards—and none of them seemed to know that a nuclear disaster might be unfolding, just fifty miles away. Rutherford thought the whole thing was surreal. If the missile did explode, would the warhead detonate? Was the state of Arkansas really about to be wiped off the map? After the conversation with Senator Pryor, the phone at the house kept ringing. The calls were from other staff members, journalists, and the airmen who'd secretly
been warning him about the Titan II for months. They said the missile was going to explode, and they hadn't been wrong yet.