Command and Control (59 page)

In the early-morning light Childers saw the scale of the destruction for the first time—and realized his life had been spared by sheer luck. The explosion had blown most of the debris toward the west, some of it landing almost half a mile from 4-7. Enormous pieces of steel and concrete lay in the fields of nearby farms. The silo door had been thrown more than two hundred yards, shearing off the tops of trees before crashing into the woods northwest of the complex. The door weighed about 150,000 pounds. Had the debris been blown to the east, toward Highway 65, it would have killed a lot of people.

Driving down the access road, Childers was amused when he saw where the warhead had landed. The object that he'd thought to be the warhead was actually a hydrogen accumulator—a large steel tank, tossed into the road, that looked like the weapon. While yelling for Silas Spann to get away from the tank, afraid that it was the warhead, Childers had been standing right next to the warhead.

Near the entrance to the complex, the road was blocked by debris. Childers and his escorts entered on foot. Smoke still drifted from the silo. The blast had obliterated its upper levels and widened the hole in the ground. What had once been a deep, concrete cylinder now looked like a huge funnel, with a rough edge of rocks and dirt. Security police officers seemed to be everywhere, guarding the site and searching through the wreckage. Childers entered through the access portal, walking down the stairs as Kennedy and Livingston had done earlier that morning. It was dark, and some of the walls and floors were charred. But Childers was
impressed that you could still walk through the blast doors and blast locks, that the place was there at all.

The control center felt eerie, like a dark, abandoned basement. Everything was exactly as they'd left it. The Coke that Childers had been drinking was still in its cup. The tech orders and tech manuals were still in their plastic binders, propped open on the floor—none of them had been knocked over by the explosion. The door of the safe was still slightly open, and the classified documents inside it hadn't moved so much as an inch. Childers and Holder had been right. They'd been right. They could have stayed in the control center. They could have monitored the tank pressures, remained in touch with the command post, turned equipment on or off. And they would have been just fine.

•   •   •

I
N
THE
ABSENCE
OF
ANY INFORMATION
from the Air Force, officials from the Arkansas Department of Health and the Pollution Control and Ecology Department performed their own tests, looking for signs of radiation and oxidizer.
About a dozen people in Guy, Arkansas, claimed to have been sickened by toxic fumes. Guy was about six miles from the missile complex. The small town hadn't been evacuated, and its mayor, Benny Mercer, was among those feeling ill. Everyone seemed to be angry about the federal government's response. “
The Air Force wouldn't tell us a damn thing when it happened,” a member of the Office of Emergency Services told the
Democrat
, “and they still won't.”
Gary Gray, the sheriff of nearby Pulaski County, said that he learned more from the radio than from the Air Force. Sam Tatom, the state's director of public safety, tried to enter the missile site and speak with the commanding officer there, but
security police stopped Tatom on the access road, not far from Highway 65.

Governor Bill Clinton found himself in a difficult spot. He had to pacify his own officials, reassure the public, and limit his criticism of the Carter administration, six weeks before the presidential election. After taking a call from Sheriff Gus Anglin, who let him know how poorly everything had been handled, Clinton urged the Air Force to release more details
about the accident—and praised its leadership for
doing “the best they could.” Vice President Mondale spoke to journalists at the Democratic convention in Hot Springs, accompanied by Governor Clinton, Senator Pryor, and Congressman Bill Alexander. Mondale would neither confirm nor deny the presence of a nuclear warhead. But Alexander was willing to state the obvious. “
I assume they're armed,” he said about the Titan IIs in Arkansas. “That's why they're here.”

•   •   •

A
T
FOUR
IN
THE
AFTERNOON
, the secretary of the Air Force, Hans Mark, held a press conference at the Pentagon. Mark was a physicist, a nuclear engineer, and an expert in aerospace technology who'd previously led a research institute at NASA. Mark was the ideal person to explain the inner workings not only of the Titan II but also of the W-53 warhead. He'd been a rocket scientist and a weapon designer. As secretary of the Air Force, Mark provided the Carter administration's view of the accident.

“
I believe that the Titan missile system is a perfectly safe system to operate, just as I believe that the 747 aircraft is a perfectly safe aircraft to operate,” Mark told the press. “
Accidents happen.”

When reporters suggested that the Titan II was dangerous, obsolete, and poorly maintained, Mark said that the problem in Damascus hadn't been caused by equipment failure or a maintenance lapse—it was just an accident, and human error was solely to blame. He refused to answer any questions about the warhead, not even to correct an erroneous claim that plutonium might have been spread by the blast. The explosion was “
pretty much the worst case” of what could happen at a Titan II site, he argued. Nobody was killed, no radioactive contamination had occurred, and the only people who got hurt were members of “
the emergency teams whose job it is to take these risks.” Unless a more detailed investigation proved otherwise, Mark thought that “
the emergency procedures worked properly.”

•   •   •

A
COUPLE
OF
HOURS
LATER
, David Livingston died at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock. He'd celebrated his twenty-second birthday the
previous week. He was planning to marry his girlfriend in the spring, perhaps leave the Air Force and move to California. She was at the hospital when he passed away; his parents were on an airplane, en route from Ohio, to see him. The official cause of death was pulmonary edema.

Jeff Kennedy remained in the intensive care unit, fighting for every breath.

•   •   •

T
HE
CROWD
OF
JOURNALISTS
in front of the access road swelled on September 20, a full day after the blast. Sid King was impressed by the large truck that a new television network had driven to Damascus. The Cable News Network (CNN) had gone on the air a few months earlier. It was the first television network to offer the news twenty-four hours a day, and
the Titan II accident in Damascus was its first big, breaking story. The CNN truck, boasting a huge satellite dish, dwarfed the little Live Ear. CNN correspondent Jim Miklaszewski provided nonstop coverage from the missile site—and broadcast the only images of what appeared to be the warhead, lying on the ground, beneath a blue tarp. To get the shot, Miklaszewski and his cameraman borrowed a cherry picker from a local crew installing phone lines, and rode the cab fifty feet into the air. The Air Force tried, without success, to block their view.

The Titan II explosion fit perfectly with the media narrative inspired by the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, the taking of American hostages in Iran, and the Carter administration's failed attempt to rescue those hostages. The United States seemed to have become weak, timid, incompetent. And the “official” version of events was never to be trusted. Although Pentagon rules allowed the disclosure of information about a nuclear weapon after an accident, “
as a means of reducing or preventing widespread public alarm,” the Air Force wouldn't release any details about the warhead in Damascus. When General Lloyd Leavitt threatened to end a press conference in Little Rock if anyone asked another question about the warhead, whose existence had already been televised on CNN, the whole issue became a joke.
A newspaper cartoon depicted three Air Force officers: one covering his eyes, one plugging his ears, and one covering his mouth.
“If
you're on the military's side, you can claim that the system worked because the nuclear warhead didn't go off,” columnist Art Buchwald wrote. “If you live in the area, you may find it hard to sell your house.”

The Soviet Union claimed that the Titan II explosion could have been mistaken for a surprise attack and precipitated “
a nuclear conflict.” Senator Pryor and two Republican senators, Bob Dole and Barry Goldwater, demanded a new investigation of the Titan II missile system. “
If it's not safe and effective, I don't know why you need it,” Dole said.

•   •   •

T
HE
A
CCIDENT
R
ESPONSE
G
ROUP
EXAMINED
the interior of the warhead with the aid of a “pig”—a highly radioactive block of cobalt-60 in a lead box. A sheet of photographic film was placed on one side of the weapon, the pig was put on the other, and the box was opened briefly with a lanyard. Everyone stayed a respectful distance from the pig until the box was shut. The device offered a simple but effective means of taking an X-ray, and it revealed that the warhead was safe to move. Contrary to protocol, the EOD unit from Little Rock was asked to render safe the weapon. Matthew Arnold's team from Barksdale had to stand and watch as EOD technicians who didn't even belong to the Strategic Air Command separated the primary from the secondary at 4-7, hidden from CNN's cameras by a tent. The two sections of the warhead were loaded into separate jet engine containers filled with sand. The containers were lifted onto a flatbed truck, and the truck left the complex as part of a convoy early in the morning on September 22.

“
Hey, Colonel, is that what you won't confirm or deny?” a reporter shouted at one of the passengers, as the truck turned onto Highway 65.

The officer smiled for the cameras and gave a thumbs-up.

R
onald Reagan didn't feel despair about the future, suffer from a crisis of confidence, or doubt the greatness of the United States. His optimism had tremendous appeal to a nation that seemed in decline.
Reagan soundly defeated Jimmy Carter in the presidential election, winning the popular vote by about 10 percent and receiving almost ten times the number of electoral votes. The Republican Party gained control of the Senate and drove four Democratic governors from office—including Bill Clinton, who lost a close race to his conservative opponent. At the age of thirty-four, Clinton became the youngest ex-governor in the United States. The election of 1980 marked a cultural shift, a rejection of liberalism, big government, and the self-critical, apologetic tone that had dominated American foreign policy since the end of the Vietnam War. The new sense of patriotism and nationalism appeared to have an immediate effect. As President Reagan concluded his inaugural address on January 20, 1981, the fifty-two Americans who'd been held hostage for more than a year were released by the government of Iran.

“
Peace through strength” had been one of Reagan's campaign slogans, and his administration soon began the largest peacetime military buildup in the history of the United States. Over the next five years,
America's defense budget would almost double. And the arms race with the Soviet Union would be deliberately accelerated—out of a belief that the United
States could win it.
Reagan opposed not only détente, but every arms control agreement that the United States had signed with the Soviet Union. In a 1963 speech, he said that President Kennedy's foreign policy was “
motivated by fear of the bomb” and that “in an all-out race our system is stronger, and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause.” The following year Reagan described the Soviets as “
the most evil enemy that has ever faced mankind.” His views on the subject remained largely unchanged for the next two decades. He was the first president since Woodrow Wilson who sincerely believed that American military power could bring an end to communism in the Soviet Union.

Most of Reagan's foreign policy advisers belonged to the Committee on the Present Danger, and they pushed for bold nuclear policies. The counterforce strategy once proposed by Robert McNamara—long associated with RAND and the youthful self-confidence of the early Kennedy administration—was now embraced by conservative Republicans. But the word “counterforce” had become problematic. It sounded aggressive and implied the willingness to fight a nuclear war. Much the same strategy was now called “damage limitation.” By launching a nuclear attack on Soviet military targets, the United States might “limit the damage” to its own territory and, perhaps, emerge victorious.

The new secretary of defense, Caspar “Cap” Weinberger, was, like McNamara, a businessman who'd served in the Army during the Second World War but knew little about nuclear weapons. As a result, his undersecretary of defense for policy, Fred Iklé, played an important role in the Reagan administration's strategic decisions.
Iklé was still haunted by the possibility that deterrence might fail—through an accident, a miscalculation, the actions of a fanatic in the Kremlin. And if that happened, millions of Americans would die. Iklé considered the all-or-nothing philosophy of “assured destruction” to be profoundly immoral, a misnomer more accurately described as “
assured genocide.” Aiming nuclear weapons at civilian populations threatened
a “form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages—the mass killing of hostages.” He pushed the Reagan administration to seek a nuclear strategy that would deter the Soviets from attacking or blackmailing the United States, maintain the ability to fight a
“protracted nuclear war,” limit American damage if that war occurred, and end the war on terms favorable to the United States. A blind faith in mutual deterrence, Iklé believed, was like a declaration of faith during the Portuguese Inquisition—“
an
auto-da-fé,
an act that ends in a mass burning.”

•   •   •

T
WO
A
IR
F
ORCE
REPORTS
on the Titan II were released to the public in January 1981. One assessed the overall safety of the missile, and the other provided a lengthy account of the accident at Damascus. According to the Eighth Air Force Missile Accident Investigation Board, Launch Complex 374-7 and its Titan II were
destroyed by three separate explosions. The first occurred when fuel vapor ignited somewhere inside the complex. The vapor could have been ignited by a spark from an electric motor, by a leak from the stage 1 oxidizer tank, or by the sudden collapse of the missile. A small explosion was followed by a much larger one, as the stage 1 oxidizer tank ruptured, allowing thousands of gallons of fuel and oxidizer to mix. The blast wave from this explosion tore apart the upper half of the silo, tossed the silo door two hundred yards, and launched the second stage of the Titan II into the air. The door was already gone by the time the missile left the silo. The second stage soared straight upward, carrying the warhead, and then briefly flew parallel to the ground. Its rocket engine had been shoved into its fuel tank by the blast. Fuel and oxidizer leaked, causing the third explosion, producing a massive fireball, and hurling the warhead into the ditch.

The accident investigation board determined the sequence of events by examining the fragmentation patterns of the missile and silo debris. Pieces of the second stage were found almost half a mile from the silo, while most of the first stage was scattered within three hundred feet of it. The narrative offered by the report was factual and thorough. But the Air Force seemed more interested in describing how the accident unfolded than in establishing why it happened. “
It may not be important whether the immediate cause that initiated the explosive events is precisely known,” the board argued, “since, over a period of time, there were so many potential ignition sources available. . . .”

The Titan II Weapon System Review Group report was prepared for members of Congress. The report contained a number of criticisms and a long list of recommendations for making the missile safer. It said that
the vapor detectors in Titan II silos were broken 40 percent of the time, that
the portable vapor detectors rarely worked, that
the radio system at launch complexes was unreliable and needed to be replaced, that
missile combat crews should be discouraged from evacuating the control center during an emergency, that
the shortage of RFHCO suits often forced maintenance teams to be selected on the basis of who'd fit into the available suits instead of who knew how to do a particular job, that
the suits and helmets were obsolete, that
the air packs were obsolete, that
some of the missile's spare parts were either hard to obtain or no longer manufactured, that
security police officers should always be provided with maps, that lightning arrestors and other “
modern safing features” should be added to the W-53 warhead so that it would meet “
modern nuclear safety criteria for abnormal environments.” The report also said that having
a warning siren at every launch complex might be useful. The Titan II missile system was “
potentially hazardous,” the Air Force concluded, but “basically safe” and “
supportable now and in the foreseeable future.”

Jeff Kennedy was angered by both of the reports. He'd spent weeks in the hospital, battling the damage to his respiratory system, and credited a young pulmonologist, Dr. James S. Anderson—not the Air Force—for saving his life. Anderson had sat at Kennedy's bedside for almost forty hours straight, forcing him to cough up phlegm and clear his lungs. And Anderson had to improvise the treatment for nitrogen tetroxide exposure, since
guidance in the medical literature was scarce and
nobody from the Air Force would speak to him, for three days after the accident, about the oxidizer or its harmful effects.

The reports were part of a cover-up, Kennedy thought: the Air Force cared more about preserving the image of the Titan II missile than protecting the lives of its own men. The accident investigation board said that Kennedy and Livingston were never ordered to turn on the fan in the launch complex. “
Do not operate the switch,” Sergeant Michael Hanson
told them over the radio, according to the accident report. “Just go to the switch and stand by.”

Kennedy thought the report was wrong. He and Livingston had both heard the order to turn on the fan. Livingston had signaled that he'd go back down and do it; that was one of Kennedy's last memories before the explosion. Turning on the fan wasn't part of their original checklist. It was Hanson's idea. Hanson had suggested it earlier in the evening, while Kennedy and others were arguing that all the electricity should be shut off. And Kennedy had absolutely no doubt that a spark from the fan had caused the explosion. But now Hanson was saying that an order to turn on the fan had never been given, and Colonel Morris was backing Hanson, making the source of ignition seem like some great big mystery. You didn't need to be a rocket scientist, Kennedy thought, to figure out why the missile exploded. Livingston obeyed the order, turned on the fan—and seconds later the whole place blew up. And the man who was killed by the error was now being blamed for it.

Livingston's death deeply affected Kennedy. They were close friends, and his death seemed completely unnecessary. Kennedy thought that his commanders at SAC had made a series of mistakes—the decision to evacuate the control center, the refusal to open the silo door and vent the fuel vapor, the endless wait to reenter the complex, the insistence upon using the access portal instead of the escape hatch, the order to turn on the fan. Worst of all was the feeling that he and Livingston had risked their lives for nothing—and then been abandoned. Livingston had lain on the ground for more than an hour, without his helmet, inhaling oxidizer, before anyone came to help. And the delay in sending a helicopter was incomprehensible.

The morale among the PTS crews at Little Rock Air Force Base was terrible.
Airman David Powell, who'd dropped the socket that hit the missile,
blamed himself for Livingston's death. A number of PTS technicians refused to work on Titan II missiles, citing the danger of the job, and their security clearances were revoked. Drug and alcohol use increased. The commander of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing, Colonel John Moser, was abruptly reassigned to a desk job at Fort Ritchie in Maryland, overseeing
the monthly replacement of computer tapes for the SIOP—a career-ending move. Moser was well liked, and he hadn't made the crucial decisions that led to the explosion. Nobody at SAC headquarters was fired. Many of the enlisted men in the 308th thought the Air Force was scapegoating the little guys in order to hide problems with the Titan II and protect the top brass.

A few weeks after the accident investigation board's report was made public,
Jeff Kennedy was served with a formal letter of reprimand by the Air Force. It rebuked him for violating the two-man rule and entering the control center at 4-7 without permission. No mention was made of the valuable information he'd obtained there or the bravery he'd displayed trying to save the missile.
Air Force regulations permitted a violation of the two-man rule during an emergency, if lives were at risk. But Kennedy wasn't granted an exemption from the rule. His punishment sent a clear message: the rowdy, hell-raising culture of the PTS crews would no longer be tolerated. They were held responsible for what had gone wrong, not aging equipment or the decisions made at SAC headquarters. And to enforce strict discipline, an officer now accompanied a PTS crew everywhere, like a babysitter, whenever it visited a missile site.

David Powell was given an Article 15 citation—“dereliction of duty”—for attaching the socket to the wrong tool. Powell thought that if he accepted the charge, he'd be admitting negligence and assuming responsibility for the accident. Powell refused to sign and faced the risk of a court-martial instead, where he could defend himself before a panel of military judges. The Air Force didn't seek a court-martial and gave him a lesser punishment.

Jeff Kennedy had planned to spend the rest of his career in the Strategic Air Command; now he desperately wanted to leave it. Kennedy applied for a medical discharge, hoping to return home and attend college in Maine. The Air Force balked at the request, despite his injuries. Kennedy was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, for a medical evaluation. He was
placed in the psychiatric ward there—along with Greg Devlin, who was also pursuing a medical disability claim.

Devlin had torn his Achilles tendon, suffered burns on his face, neck, back, and hands. He spent ten days at a Little Rock hospital recovering
from the skin grafts. But the Air Force was not pleased with Devlin. He'd spoken to reporters about the accident, without SAC's permission. And he'd filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against the manufacturer of the Titan II, Martin Marietta; members of the armed forces cannot sue the federal government for damages after an injury. David Livingston's family and Rex Hukle had also decided to sue Martin Marietta. One of the attorneys suing the defense contractor,
Bill Carter, was an Air Force veteran and a former Secret Service agent who hoped to obtain compensation for his clients—and to establish in court that the Titan II missile system was unsafe. Carter owned a farm near Damascus and had represented a neighbor sickened by the oxidizer leak there in 1978. During that case, the surgeon general of the Air Force had denied that inhaling oxidizer was bad for you, claiming it was “
a substance no more dangerous than smog.”

Devlin could not believe that he and Kennedy had been confined in a mental ward, after everything they'd been through. The place was full of crazy people, like a scene from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Devlin already felt shunned by the Air Force. After returning to duty, he'd been put to work selling hot dogs at the base—a job usually reserved for airmen caught with illegal drugs or facing a dishonorable discharge. But selling hot dogs was preferable to staying in a loony bin. Kennedy would have none of it. He told the staff to release them immediately and move them to a different wing at the hospital—or he'd contact the press. They were promptly transferred. After being examined by physicians, Kennedy was denied a medical discharge, and Devlin was denied a full medical disability. It would have allowed him to use Air Force hospitals for the rest of his life.