Command and Control (9 page)

Most of the casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki resembled those caused by incendiaries and conventional bombs. About half of the victims burned to death, and about one third were killed by debris. But two new types of casualty appeared.
Flash burns were caused by the extraordinarily hot, though brief, detonation of the atomic bombs. Traveling in straight lines at the speed of light, the thermal radiation was strong enough to kill everyone within a mile of ground zero who was unprotected by walls or other objects that could block ultraviolet and infrared rays. Serious burns were possible at a distance of two miles. Thick clothing offered some protection, because the flash lasted less than a second. White clothes tended to reflect thermal radiation, while darker colors absorbed it. A number of victims suffered flash burns that mimicked the dark and light patterns of their kimonos.

The effects of ionizing radiation—primarily gamma rays emitted during the first minute after detonation—were even more disturbing. Perhaps one fifth of the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were due to “
radiation sickness.” People who'd survived the blast and the fires soon felt nauseated and tired. Some became ill within hours, while others seemed perfectly healthy for days before feeling unwell. Gamma rays had damaged the ability of their cells to replicate. The symptoms preceding their deaths were horrific: fever, vomiting, delirium, bloody diarrhea, internal bleeding, bleeding from the eyes and the mouth.

For decades some historians have questioned whether the use of atomic bombs was necessary. They have argued that Japan was already militarily defeated, that the blockade of Japanese ports had strangled the country's economy, that an American invasion would never have been required, that a conventional bombing campaign alone could have forced a surrender, that the Soviet Union's declaration of war on Japan had a greater impact than the atomic bombs, that a demonstration of one atomic bomb would have provided a sufficient shock to the Japanese psyche, that a promise the emperor could retain his throne would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

These counterfactual arguments, though compelling, can never be proved. But the historical facts remain. Hiroshima was destroyed on August 6. Two days later the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Nagasaki was struck on the ninth, and the following day, General Korechika Anami, the minister of war, still urged the Japanese people to fight, “
even though we have to eat grass and chew dirt and lay in the field.” On August 14, Emperor Hirohito overruled his generals and agreed to an unconditional surrender. “
The enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs,” he explained, “and the heavy casualties are beyond measure.”

F
or a moment Powell and Plumb just stood there, stunned, looking down at the fuel pouring out of the missile and the white mist floating upward, reaching level 6, level 5, level 4.

Oh, my God, Plumb thought, we've got to get the hell out of here.

Powell radioed the control center. There's some kind of white, milky substance in the air at level 7, he said. And that's all he said.

Captain Mazzaro told the PTS team chief, Charles Heineman, that his men should leave the silo immediately. Heineman ordered them to evacuate and return to the blast lock.

Powell motioned to Plumb: let's go. The missile was now shrouded in fuel vapor, and the cloud was approaching the platform where they stood.

Mazzaro was puzzled. He wondered what this white substance could be. He thought about the maintenance that had been performed in the silo earlier in the day. What could the stuff be? He didn't want to notify the command post at Little Rock Air Force Base until he had a better idea of what was happening. Mazzaro asked Heineman, who was sitting nearby, if he could think of anything.

The Klaxon went off, and the
FUEL VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT
light on the commander's console began flashing red.

Powell and Plumb left the silo and closed the door. Powell wanted to take the elevator down to a lower level, look at the base of the missile, and assess the damage. But the team chief ordered him and Plumb to get out of
the cableway and enter the blast lock, where the backup team was stationed. Roger Hamm and Gregory Lester opened blast door 9 for them, let them in, and then Lester quickly pulled it shut. They popped the helmets off their RFHCOs, as Hamm locked the door. Powell threw the wrench handle onto the floor and cursed.

Mazzaro turned off the Klaxon. The
FUEL VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT
light made no sense. Why would that come on, when the PTS crew was pressurizing the stage 2 oxidizer tank? He asked for vapor readings from the mine safety appliance, which were displayed on a panel in the blast lock. Three old-fashioned gauges there showed the vapor levels in the silo. Needles on the gauges moved to the right as the amount of vapor increased. The PTS team reported that the oxidizer level was ten parts per million—and the fuel vapor level was forty parts per million, almost the maximum reading. One of those gauges had to be wrong. There couldn't be fuel vapors and oxidizer vapors in the silo at the same time; the two would have mixed and caused an explosion. Mazzaro wondered which gauge was correct. Then the needle on the fuel vapor gauge surged all the way to the right, and the MSA spiked.

The Klaxon went off again, and Al Childers looked up. He'd ignored it the first time, but now realized that something was wrong. He was sitting at a table behind the commander's console, filling out paperwork that recommended his student, Miguel Serrano, for another alert. Suddenly the console was lit up like a Christmas tree. Rows of warning lights were flashing red. Then Childers heard somebody say there was a fire in the hole, got up from the table, grabbed a copy of the
Dash-1
, searched the manual for the fire checklist, found it, and started going through each step. Now the
SPRAY
lights were lit, which meant that the fire suppression system had been automatically triggered. Thousands of gallons of water were pouring into the launch duct. Childers pushed the
SURFACE WARNING CONTROL
button, turning on the red beacon topside, and contacted the PTS team up there.

Eric Ayala was in his RFHCO suit, standing near the nitrogen tank on the hardstand, when he heard over the radio that Powell and Plumb were backing out of the silo. Then he heard
“fire in the hole” and Childers
ordering everyone topside to evacuate the site. Ayala and his partner, Richard Willinghurst, quickly took off their RFHCOs. The third member of the team, David Aderhold, was sitting in a truck parked near the access portal, monitoring the radio. The truck held four extra RFHCOs, air packs, dewar units to refill them with air, and a portable shower. After hearing the order to evacuate, he helped Ayala and Willinghurst pack up their suits. Everyone jumped into the truck, leaving an empty pickup behind, and then Willinghurst drove toward the gate. A white cloud floated from the silo exhaust shaft, like smoke rising from a chimney.

Childers called the command post and said there was a fire in the silo. Mazzaro was already on the phone with Little Rock. Holder came down the stairs, noticed the commotion, and sat at the commander's console. The warning lights didn't make sense—
FUEL VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT, OXI VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT, FIRE LAUNCH DUCT
. One of those might be correct, but not all three at the same time. Holder decided to go through the checklists for a fuel leak, an oxidizer leak, a fire. One of the first steps for any propellant leak was to check the propellant tank pressure monitor unit (PTPMU), the digital readout on top of the console. It displayed the pressure levels in each of the missile's four tanks. Holder pushed the buttons on the PTPMU and recorded the numbers in his log book. For some reason, the pressure in the stage 1 fuel tank seemed low.

It was 6:40 in the evening, about ten minutes after the first Klaxon had sounded. Ronald Fuller was going through all three checklists, too. He closed the blast valve—sealing the ventilation system, cutting off the control center from the air outdoors—and began to set up a portable vapor detector near blast door 8. It would warn if toxic fumes were seeping into the room.

The gate phone rang, and Childers answered it. The PTS crew topside wanted to leave the complex. Childers opened the gate for them and then returned to the fuel vapor checklist. He couldn't understand why the purge fan in the silo wouldn't go on. The purge fan was supposed to clear out any fuel vapors. He kept pushing the
PURGE
button but nothing happened. Then he remembered that if there was a fire, they didn't want the fan to go on. It would pull fresh air into the silo and feed the fire.

“
Can my people come back into the control center?” Heineman asked. Childers said yes. He'd thought it was useful to keep Powell, Plumb, and the others in the blast lock, monitoring the vapor levels on the panel. But then he remembered that the MSA automatically shut off whenever the sprays went on, so that water wouldn't be sucked into the vapor sensors. Too many things seemed to be happening at once; it felt hard to stay on top of them all. Powell and Plumb entered the control center in their RFHCOs, Hamm and Lester in thermal underwear. In the rush to get out of the blast lock, the two had left their RFHCOs in boxes on the floor there. Blast door 8 was swiftly closed and locked. Heineman joined his men, and the group huddled near the door.

“
There's got to be a malfunction,” Childers said, three or four times. Too many warning lights were flashing at once. But even if it was a malfunction, the crew had to act as though the hazards were real. Childers asked Serrano if he'd ever plotted a toxic corridor on a map.

Serrano replied that he'd once taken a class on it.

“
Well, get over here,” Childers said. “You're going to watch me do it.”

With a map, a compass, a grease pencil, and a protractor, Childers started to plot on a map where a cloud of fuel, smoke, or oxidizer would travel outdoors. The wind speed was almost zero, good news for the nearby houses and farms but not for the crew. A toxic cloud would hover and swirl directly above the missile complex.

Captain Mazzaro was still on the phone to the command post, where a Missile Potential Hazard Team was being formed. At the direction of the wing commander, the officers and airmen on the base who knew the most about the Titan II were being recalled to duty: maintenance and operations supervisors, the chief of safety, the chief of missile engineers, an electrical engineer, a bioenvironmental engineer, a backup missile combat crew, among others. Security police were calling homes and searching classrooms to gather the team. And a Missile Potential Hazard Net was being established—a conference call linking the command post at Little Rock with experts at SAC headquarters in Omaha, the Ogden Air Logistics Center at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, and the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. One of the command post's
first decisions was to send a Missile Alarm Response Team (MART) to the launch complex. A pair of security officers stationed at a nearby missile site grabbed their gas masks and hurried to Damascus.

While Fuller was setting up the portable vapor detector near the blast door, he overheard one of the PTS crew say something about a dropped socket. Fuller asked what had happened in the silo. After hearing the story, Fuller said they needed to tell the commander. Powell stepped forward, admitted to dropping the socket, and began to cry. He described how it fell and hit the thrust mount, how fuel sprayed from the missile like water from a hose. When he was done, the room fell silent.

“
Holy shit,” thought Holder.

Captain Mazzaro told Powell to come over to the phone and tell the command post exactly what had happened. Powell got on the line and repeated the story. The details were incredible—but plausible.

Things fell all the time in the silo: nuts, bolts, screwdrivers, flashlights, all sorts of tools. They always fell harmlessly into the
W
at the bottom of the silo, and then someone had to climb down and get them. You could drop a socket a thousand times from a platform at level 2 without its ever bouncing off the thrust mount and hitting the missile. And even if it did hit the missile, it would probably cause a dent, and nothing more, and nobody would ever know.

Half an hour after the accident, everyone realized what they were dealing with—a major fuel leak, maybe a fire. The
Dash-1
didn't have a checklist for this scenario. Now it was time to improvise, to figure out what could be done to save the missile and the warhead and the ten men in the underground control center.

•   •   •

S
ID
K
ING
WAS
HAVING
DINNER
at a friend's house when he got a call from the board operator at KGFL, the AM radio station in Clinton, Arkansas. It sounds like there's something going on at the Titan II silo in Damascus, the operator said, a leak or something. King was the manager and part-owner of KGFL, as well as its roving reporter. His friend Tom Phillips was the station's sales rep. Clinton was about seventeen miles north
of Damascus, along Highway 65—and Choctaw, where Phillips lived, was even closer to the missile site.

Let's run down there and check it out, King suggested. Phillips thought that sounded like a good idea. They said good-bye to their wives and got into KGFL's mobile unit, a Dodge Omni that King had fitted with a VHF transmitter and a big antenna. The nickname of the subcompact, the “Live Ear,” was painted on both sides, along with the station's call letters.

King was twenty-seven years old. He'd been raised in Providence, a town with a population of approximately one hundred, about an hour east of Damascus. His father was a jack-of-all-trades—a math teacher who also sold real estate, cut hair, and managed a movie theater to support the family and their small farm. King had an idyllic, small-town childhood but also dreamed of some day leaving rural Arkansas for Hollywood. At Arkansas State University, he studied radio and television, encouraged by a great uncle who'd been one of the first TV weathermen in Arkansas. During the summers, King was the drummer of the house band at Dogpatch USA, an amusement park in the Ozarks featuring Li'l Abner and other characters created by the cartoonist Al Capp. The house band played for hours every night, mainly Dixieland jazz, soft rock like “Joy to the World,” and show tunes like “Sunrise, Sunset,” from
Fiddler on the Roof
.

Working at Dogpatch was a lot of fun, and King got a full-time job there after college. He fell for Judi Clark, a tap dancer at the park, and the two soon got married. Backed by a brother-in-law, King started looking for a good place in Arkansas to open a new radio station. Clinton, they decided, was the place. It was the county seat of Van Buren County, in the foothills of the Ozarks, with a population of about 1,600 and a downtown that attracted shoppers from throughout the area. In 1977, KGFL went on the air as a 250-watt “sunset” station, licensed to broadcast only during daylight hours. King wanted the station to assume the role that a small-town newspaper would have played a generation earlier. KGFL started each day with the national anthem. It played gospel music for about half an hour, then switched to country and western. During the morning, it broadcast phone-in shows like “Trading Post,” a radio flea market that allowed local callers to buy and sell things. In the afternoon, when kids got out of
school, the station began to play rock-and-roll, and that's what it played until going off the air at dusk. King's wife opened a dance studio near the station, teaching jazz, tap, and ballet to children. Her studio was on the second floor of the only two-story building in downtown Clinton.

Sid King and Tom Phillips were about the same age. They'd met at Dogpatch, where Phillips had played Li'l Abner. And they were already familiar with the Titan II site in Damascus. KGFL had covered an accident there a couple of years earlier. At about three in the morning on January 27, 1978,
an oxidizer trailer parked on the hardstand had started to leak. The trailer was heated to ensure that the oxidizer remained above 42 degrees during the winter. But the thermostat was broken. Instead of keeping the oxidizer at about 60 degrees, the heater pushed it to more than 100 degrees, far beyond its boiling point. A brown plume of oxidizer floated from the trailer, eventually becoming a cloud half a mile long and a hundred yards wide.

The crew in the underground control center had no idea that the trailer topside was leaking oxidizer. The leak was discovered about five hours later by the missile crew arriving at the site to pull an alert that morning. The crew spotted the cloud of oxidizer from the road, turned around, drove back to Damascus, and called the command post from a pay phone. A PTS team with RFHCO suits was flown by helicopter to Launch Complex 374-7. They fixed the leak and lowered the temperature of the oxidizer by spraying the trailer with cold water for hours. The missile site's neighbors were not pleased by the incident. A cloud of oxidizer had drifted across nearby farms, killing more than a dozen cattle, sickening a farmer who'd gotten up early to milk his cows, and forcing the evacuation of a local elementary school. The farmer later filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Air Force and the companies that made the trailer.