Command and Control

by Eric Schlosser

As Powell used a socket wrench to unscrew the pressure cap, the socket fell off. It struck the platform and bounced. Powell grabbed for it but missed. Plumb watched the nine-pound socket slip through the narrow gap between the platform and the missile, fall about seventy feet, hit the thrust mount, and then ricochet off the Titan II. It seemed to happen in slow motion. A moment later, fuel sprayed from a hole in the missile like water from a garden hose. “Oh man,” Plumb thought. “This is not good.”

Childers had faith in the logic of nuclear deterrence: his willingness to launch the missile ensured that it would never be launched.

At 9:00 P.M., Hornig climbed to the top of the hundred-foot tower as rain began to fall. He brought a collection of humorous essays, Desert Island Decameron. His reading was interrupted by the arrival of a violent electrical storm. Atop the tower in a flimsy metal shed, Hornig sat alone with the book, the fully armed device, a telephone, and a single lightbulb dangling from a wire. He was twenty-five years old and had recently earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at Harvard. Having designed the X-unit, he knew better than anyone how easily it could be triggered by static electricity.

A small amount of fissile material was responsible for the devastation; 98.62 percent of the uranium in Little Boy was blown apart before it could become supercritical. Only 1.38 percent actually fissioned, and most of that uranium was transformed into dozens of lighter elements. About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.

The limited range of B-29 and B-50 bombers might require some American crews to fly one-way “suicide” missions. “It will be the cheapest thing we ever did,” Major General Earle E. Partridge said. “Expend the crew, expend the bomb, expend the airplane all at once. Kiss them good-bye and let them go.”

We must insure that our military techniques do not strip us of self-respect,” Ofstie said.

I’ll tell you what war is about,” LeMay once said. “You’ve got to kill people and when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”

We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo,” he later recalled, “than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” And he didn’t lose any sleep over the morality of Truman’s decision. Killing was killing, whether you did it with a rock, a rifle, or an atom bomb.

After visiting Los Alamos, Lilienthal met with President Truman in the Oval Office and told him how many atomic bombs would be available in the event of a war with the Soviet Union: at most, one.

As files and storerooms at Los Alamos were searched for information about Little Boy’s design, a machinist offered to demonstrate how one of the bomb’s aluminum tubes had been forged. He’d wrapped the metal around a Coke bottle.

The Mark 3 was considered too dangerous to be flown, fully assembled, over American soil. But no safety restrictions were imposed on flights of the bomb over Great Britain.

The electrical system was powered by a car battery, which had to be charged for three days before being put into the bomb.

The Navy also sought high-tech replacements for many conventional weapons: atomic depth charges, atomic torpedoes, atomic antiship missiles.

During secret testimony before a congressional committee, one of Ridgway’s closest aides, General James M. Gavin, later spelled out precisely what the Army required: 151,000 nuclear weapons. According to Gavin, the Army needed 106,000 for use on the battlefield and an additional 25,000 for air defense. The remaining 20,000 could be shared with America’s allies.

Peurifoy asked the Air Force to consider the risks of the two fuzes and then make a choice. One fuze might fail to detonate the bomb; the other might kill the crew. When the Air Force couldn’t decide, Peurifoy ordered that both fuzes be added to the firing mechanism. The decision could be made before the bomb was loaded on the plane, with or without the crew’s knowledge.

In 1953, after an implosion device mysteriously failed to detonate at the Nevada Test Site, he’d climbed two hundred feet to the top of the shot tower and pulled out the firing cables by hand.

Warned that if he didn’t put out his cigar, the bomber he was sitting in might explode, LeMay replied: “It wouldn’t dare.”

The computerization of society,” the technology writer Frank Rose later observed, was essentially a “side effect of the computerization of war.”

Given the choice between an accident that might cause a nuclear explosion and one that might send a cloud of plutonium over an American city, the Air Force preferred the latter.

To prove the point, a Genie was set off 18,000 feet above the heads of five Air Force officers and a photographer at the Nevada test site. The officers wore summer uniforms and no protective gear. A photograph, taken at the moment of detonation, shows that two of the men instinctively ducked, two shielded their eyes, and one stared upward, looking straight at the blast.

The Air Force eventually submitted a list of eighty-seven accidents and incidents that had occurred between 1950 and the end of 1957. Sandia found an additional seven that the Air Force had somehow neglected to include. Neither the Army nor the Navy submitted a list; they’d failed to keep track of their nuclear accidents.

On at least four occasions, the bridgewire detonators of Mark 6 atomic bombs fired when the weapons were improperly removed from aircraft. They were training weapons, and nobody got hurt. But with the new sealed-pit weapons, that sort of mistake would cause a full-scale nuclear detonation. At least half a dozen times, the carts used to carry Mark 6 bombs broke away from the vehicles towing them. During one incident, the cart rolled into a ditch; had it rolled in another direction, a classified report noted, “a live Mk6 weapon” would have “plunged over a steep embankment.” Dropping a nuclear weapon was never a good idea

Sergeant Ramoneda wrapped his baker’s apron around his head for protection from the flames and returned to the burning plane, searching for more survivors. Moments later, the high explosives in the Mark 4 detonated. The blast could be heard thirty miles away. It killed Ramoneda and five firefighters, wounded almost two hundred people, destroyed all of the base’s fire trucks, set nearby buildings on fire, and scattered burning fuel and pieces of molten fuselage across an area of about two square miles.

The plane veered off the runway during the fourth and slammed into a storage igloo containing Mark 6 atomic bombs. A SAC officer described the accident to LeMay in a classified telegram: The B-47 tore apart the igloo and knocked about 3 Mark Sixes. A/C [aircraft] then exploded showering burning fuel overall. Crew perished. Most of A/C wreckage pivoted on igloo and came to rest with A/C nose just beyond igloo bank which kept main fuel fire outside smashed igloo. Preliminary exam by bomb disposal officer says a miracle that one Mark Six with exposed detonators sheared didn’t go. Fire fighters extinguished fire around Mark Sixes fast. The cores were stored in a different igloo. If the B-47 had struck that igloo instead, tearing it open and igniting it, a cloud of plutonium could have floated across the English countryside.

Acceptable Military Risks from Accidental Detonation of Atomic Weapons.” It looked at the frequency of natural disasters in the United States during the previous fifty years, quantified their harmful effects according to property damage and loss of life—and then argued that accidental nuclear explosions should be permitted on American soil at the same rate as similarly devastating earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes. According to that formula, the Army suggested that the acceptable probability of a hydrogen bomb detonating within the United States should be 1 in 100,000 during the course of a year. The acceptable risk of an atomic bomb going off was set at 1 in 125

But if the United States kept ten thousand hydrogen bombs in storage for ten years, the odds of an accidental detonation became much higher—one in a thousand. And if those weapons were removed from storage and loaded onto airplanes, the AFSWP study proposed some acceptable probabilities that the American public, had it been informed, might not have found so acceptable. The odds of a hydrogen bomb detonating by accident, every decade, would be one in five. And during that same period, the odds of an atomic bomb detonating by accident in the United States would be about 100 percent

Less than a month later, Walter Gregg and his son, Walter Junior, were in the toolshed outside their home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, when a Mark 6 atomic bomb landed in the yard. Mrs. Gregg was inside the house, sewing, and her daughters, Helen and Frances, aged six and nine, were playing outdoors with a nine-year-old cousin. The Mark 6 had a variable yield of anywhere from 8 to 160 kilotons, depending on the type of nuclear core that was used. The bomb that landed in the yard didn’t contain a core. But the high explosives went off when the weapon hit the ground, digging a crater about fifty feet wide and thirty-five feet deep. The blast wave and flying debris knocked the doors off the Gregg house, blew out the windows, collapsed the roof, riddled the walls with holes, destroyed the new Chevrolet parked in the driveway, killed half a dozen chickens, and sent the family to the hospital with minor injuries.

The pilot told the navigator, Captain Bruce Kulka, to enter the bomb bay and insert the locking pin by hand. Kulka couldn’t have been thrilled with the idea. The bomb bay wasn’t pressurized, the door leading to it was too small for him to enter wearing a parachute, and he didn’t know where the locking pin was located, let alone how to reinsert it. Kulka spent about ten minutes in the bomb bay, looking for the pin, without success. It must be somewhere above the bomb, he thought. The Mark 6 was a large weapon, about eleven feet long and five feet in diameter, and as Kulka tried to peek above it, he inadvertently grabbed the manual bomb release for support. The Mark 6 suddenly dropped onto the bomb bay doors, and Kulka fell on top of it. A moment later, the eight-thousand-pound bomb broke through the doors. Kulka slid off it, got hold of something in the open bomb bay, and held on tight. Amid the gust and roar of the wind, about three miles above the small farms and cotton fields of Mars Bluff, he managed to pull himself back into the plane. Neither the pilot nor the copilot realized the bomb was gone until it hit the ground and exploded.

In fact, a hydrogen bomb had been mistakenly released over Albuquerque the previous year. Knocked off balance by air turbulence while standing in the bomb bay of a B-36, the plane’s navigator had steadied himself by grabbing the nearest handle—the manual bomb release. The weapon broke through the bomb doors, and the navigator held on to the handle for dear life. The H-bomb landed in an unpopulated area, about one third of a mile from Sandia. The high explosives detonated but did not produce a nuclear yield. The weapon lacked a core.

General Power had inflamed public opinion by telling a British journalist, who’d asked whether American aircraft routinely flew with nuclear weapons above England, “Well, we did not build these bombers to carry crushed rose petals.”

An] assistant cook improperly obtained a charge of TNT in order to blast fish. He lighted it with a cigarette. As he was examining it to make sure it was ignited, the explosion took place. The man was blown to pieces.

Private B and I each found a rifle grenade. We carried them back to our tent. Private K told us that we had better not fool with the grenades and to get rid of them. Private B said, ‘What will happen if I pull this pin?’ Then the grenade exploded.”

Marine found a 37-millimeter dud and turned it in to the Quartermaster tent. Later, a sergeant came into the tent and saw the dud. In disregard of orders and safety, he aimed the shell at a hole in the wooden floor of the tent and dropped it. He commented that he would make “a pretty good bombardier.” He dropped the shell at least six times. Finally, inevitably, it exploded. The sergeant was killed and 2 others were injured.

The Army didn’t like Peurifoy’s idea. A switch that operated as the W-49 warhead fell to earth, the Army contended, might somehow make the weapon less reliable. The Army also didn’t like what Sandia engineers called the switch: a “handling safety device” or a “goof-proofer.”

During a test run of the first Titan silo, overlooking the Pacific at Vandenberg, a control valve in the elevator’s hydraulic system broke. The elevator, the Titan, and about 170,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and fuel fell all the way to the bottom of the silo. Nobody was hurt by the explosion, though debris from it landed more than a mile away. The silo was destroyed and never rebuilt. While Atlas and Titan missiles

Ballistic missiles were extraordinarily complex machines, symbols of the space age featuring thousands of moving parts, and yet their guidance systems were based on seventeenth-century physics and Isaac Newton’s laws of motion.

Although the Titan II’s onboard computer didn’t rely on integrated circuits, at only eight pounds, it was still considered a technological marvel, one of the most powerful small computers ever built. It had about 12.5 kilobytes of memory; many smart phones now have more than five million times that amount

If the missile’s velocity were miscalculated by just 0.05 percent, the warhead could miss its target by about twenty miles.

It would reach a velocity of about twenty-three thousand feet per second, faster than a speeding bullet—a lot faster, as much as ten to twenty times faster.

Green had been amazed by their discovery: you could break into a Titan II complex with just a credit card.

At 20,000 ppm, the fuel vapor could spontaneously combust, without any exposure to a spark or flame, just from the friction caused by the movement of air. Waving your hand through the fuel vapor, at that concentration, could ignite it.

As the aircraft spun downward, centrifugal forces pulled a lanyard in the cockpit. The lanyard was attached to the bomb release mechanism. When the lanyard was pulled, the locking pins were removed from one of the bombs. The Mark 39 fell from the plane. The arming wires were yanked out, and the bomb responded as though it had been deliberately released by the crew above a target. The pulse generator activated the low-voltage thermal batteries. The drogue parachute opened, and then the main chute. The barometric switches closed. The timer ran out, activating the high-voltage thermal batteries. The bomb hit the ground, and the piezoelectric crystals inside the nose crushed. They sent a firing signal. But the weapon didn’t detonate. Every safety mechanism had failed, except one: the ready/safe switch in the cockpit.

When Air Force personnel found the Mark 39 later that morning, the bomb was harmlessly stuck in the ground, nose first, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree.

The other Mark 39 plummeted straight down and landed in a meadow just off Big Daddy’s Road, near the Nahunta Swamp. Its parachutes had failed to open. The high explosives did not detonate, and the primary was largely undamaged. But the dense uranium secondary of the bomb penetrated more than seventy feet into the soggy ground. A recovery team never found it, despite weeks of digging.

A year after the North Carolina accident, a SAC ground crew removed four Mark 28 bombs from a B-47 bomber and noticed that all of the weapons were armed. But the seal on the ready/safe switch in the cockpit was intact, and the knob hadn’t been turned to GROUND or AIR. The bombs had not been armed by the crew. A seven-month investigation by Sandia found that a tiny metal nut had come off a screw inside the plane and lodged against an unused radar-heating circuit. The nut had created a new electrical pathway, allowing current to reach an arming line—and bypass the ready/safe switch.

As Peterson sat in the commander’s chair, the number above the map began to climb. When it reached 4, NORAD officers ran into the room. When it reached 5, Peterson and the other executives were quickly escorted out and put in a small office. The door was closed, and they were left there believing that a nuclear war had just begun. The vice commander of NORAD, Air Marshal C. Roy Slemon, a dapper Canadian with a small mustache, managed to track down the head of NORAD, General Laurence S. Kuter, who was in an Air Force plane above South Dakota. “Chief, this is a hot one,” Slemon said. The BMEWS indicated that the Soviets had launched an all-out missile attack against North America. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were on the phone, awaiting confirmation. The United States had only minutes to respond. “Where is Khrushchev?” Slemon asked his officers. Khrushchev’s in New York today, at the United Nations, NORAD’s chief of intelligence said. Slemon immediately felt relieved. The Soviet Union was unlikely to launch an attack that would kill the first secretary of its Communist Party.

A subsequent investigation found the cause of the computer glitch. The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.

Within months the NATO stockpile would include atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, thermonuclear warheads, nuclear artillery shells, nuclear depth charges, nuclear land mines, and the Davy Crockett, a recoilless rifle, carried like a bazooka by an infantryman, that fired small nuclear projectiles.

But none of these weapons, except the land mines—formally known as Atomic Demolition Munitions—had any sort of lock to prevent somebody from setting them off without permission. And the three-digit mechanical locks on the land mines, like those often found on gym lockers, were easy to pick.

According to one adviser, when Secretary of Defense McNamara heard that hundreds of American nuclear weapons stored in Europe were poorly guarded, vulnerable to theft, a...