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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.
Oops.
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.
After two of these accidents, I think we have to ask ourselves if there was just something wrong with the design.
Handholds that do not drop nuclear bombs out of an aircraft seems like a reasonable thing to add. And, maybe color code the things that are safe to grab.I don't know if we would want the things that are bad to grab to be a bright warning color, or whether that would make people more likely to see them and grab them. UX designers are needed.
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.”
There were other bombers designed to carry crushed rose petals, but that was only because there was a nerve agent made from rose petals.
Moser told his wife to go without him, put on his uniform, got in his car, and headed to the command post. They lived on the base, and the drive didn’t take long.
The drive from the Mosers' house to the command post was about three city blocks.
Meanwhile, his wife walked 17 miles into town for the concert, wearing high heels. She considered taking the car as she passed it, but she had forgotten to bring car keys.
Moser was a great believer in checklists.
The checklists, however, did not believe in Moser.
Colonel Moser asked Mazzaro if the PTS team had done anything in the silo that could have caused the problem.
"Umm... Guys? Is this your fault?"
The missile wing’s chief of safety sat at the conference table, along with the head of its technical engineering branch, a bioenvironmental engineer, an electrical engineer, and the K crew. The “K” stood for “on-call,”
Morris absorbed the news, told job control to track down Jeff Kennedy, and ordered the dispatcher not to contact the launch complex again.
"Listen, I mean this in the best thing of all possible ways, but, well, fuck you, you're on your own."
The PTS men topside had RFHCOs and air packs and a full set of equipment in their trucks. Ideally, they’d go into the complex. But nobody knew where they were. After leaving the complex, they’d probably driven beyond the range of the radios in their helmets.
Several of them just kept on driving, eventually even taking off their helmets.
Because their socket was now lying somewhere at the bottom of the silo, they’d have to remove the pressure cap on the stage 1 fuel tank with pliers. And if that didn’t work, they might have to push open the tank’s poppet valve with a broom handle.
The first intercontinental missile deployed by the United States, the Snark, had wings, a jet engine, and a range of about six thousand miles. It was a great-looking missile, sleek and futuristic, painted a fiery red. But the Snark soon became legendary for landing nowhere near its target.
The Army’s Redstone missile was rushed into the field not long after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Designed by Wernher von Braun and his team of German rocket scientists at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, the missile was a larger, more advanced version of the Nazi V-2. The Redstone often carried a 4-megaton warhead but couldn’t fly more than 175 miles. The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.
The missiles’ lack of physical protection, lengthy countdown procedures, and close proximity to the Eastern bloc guaranteed that they’d be among the first things destroyed by a Soviet attack. The four-minute warning provided by Great Britain’s radar system wouldn’t offer much help to the RAF officers in charge of a Thor squadron that might need as much as two days to complete its mission. They might not have time to launch any Thors. The missiles would, however, be useful for a surprise attack against the Soviet Union—a fact that gave the Soviets an even greater incentive to strike first and
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Unlike the Thors, they stood upright, encircled by launch equipment hidden beneath metal panels. When the panels opened outward before liftoff, a Jupiter looked like the pistil of a huge, white, sinister flower. Sixty feet high, topped by a 1.4-megaton warhead, and deployed in the countryside, the missiles were especially vulnerable to lightning strikes.
The missile would be filled with propellants underground, about fifteen minutes before launch, and then would ride an elevator to the surface before ignition. The elevator was immense, capable of lifting more than half a million pounds. But it didn’t always work. 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
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The officers on County Road 836 were forced to stop short of their assigned position. They’d encountered an old wooden bridge, and they were afraid to drive their truck over it.
A bird flying past the tipsies could set them off, and then a two-man MART team would have to visit the site and investigate what had tripped them—because the complexes didn’t have security cameras topside. A missile crew had no way of knowing whether the tipsies had been set off by a squirrel or a squad of Soviet commandos.
They might even be soviet squirrel commandos! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
PTS Team B unloaded their gear just past the cattle guard, along the road to the launch complex, relying on flashlights to see what they were doing. The television crews had better lights.
The Goo Factory gave me a flashlight -- 3,000 lumens. It would have done the trick.
About half an hour earlier, Leavitt had called Governor Clinton in Hot Springs. Their conversation was brief and polite. He told Clinton that a team was about to reenter the complex and that the situation was under control. Clinton thanked him for the update and went to bed.
Too be fair, Governor Clinton was not going to bed alone -- there was one of his flurry of floozies waiting for him.
This brings up my favorite Clinton joke.
Q: Why did teenage pregnancy drop so much during Bill Clinton's administration?
A: The Presidency is a very time consuming job.
The 656 missiles of the Polaris fleet would be aimed solely at “countervalue” targets—at civilians who lived in the major cities of the Soviet Union.
tree-full-of-owls type of so-called professional ‘defense intellectuals’ who have been brought into this nation’s capital.”
Seven Days in May,
I've been meaning to watch this.
LeMay and McNamara, polar opposites who’d battled over a wide range of national security issues, each convinced that the other was dangerously wrong, now found themselves in much the same place. They ended 1968 in humiliation and disgrace, their views repudiated by the American people.
And, like he did with Powers, LeMay began shopping the idea around to all the networks, claiming it was like a Laurel and Hardy meets Gomer Pyle.
Although his parachute caught on fire, it deposited him safely in the ocean, about three miles out.
"Safely" is clearly a relative term here. Safer than being on a beach with an umbrella for shade, watching girls in bikinis while drinking fruity drinks with names you will never remember brought to you by cabana boys every bit as lovely as the girls in bikinis? No, not by a long shot. But, safer than being in a burning airplane carrying fully functional nuclear weapons.
Although nuclear weapons and marijuana had recently become controversial subjects in American society, inspiring angry debates between liberals and conservatives, nobody argued that the two were a good combination.
Nobody other than Allen Ginsberg, that is.
President Nixon was equally appalled.
When you have appalled a man as appalling as Nixon, you have accomplished something. Probably not something good, but something.
Brzezinski had allowed his wife to sleep through the whole episode, preferring that she not be awake when the warheads struck Washington.
During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. And as a final act of defiance, SAC demonstrated the importance of code management to the usefulness of any coded switch. The combination necessary to launch the missiles was the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the combination to the shield in Spaceballs -- it does have more digits, but it is the first number a brute force attack would hit.
The navigator of a B-52 sat at a desktop in the “chin” of the plane, a lower level beneath the pilot. Beside the navigator sat the bombardier. They both had ejection seats that fired downward.
At a decent altitude that seems perfectly reasonable.
The B-52 had originally been designed to attack the Soviet Union at an altitude of about 50,000 feet. But Soviet air defenses now forced the bomber to approach at a low altitude—very low. For three to four hours during a training flight, Zink’s plane would fly 150 to 350 feet off the ground.
Oh, well, that downward face ejection system will just force them straight into the ground now. They would probably leave little craters.
The folks on the upper deck wouldn't fare much better, though, would they? Pushed up to 500 feet or so, would their parachutes even open?
“I’ll throw up later,” he’d tell himself. “I have too much to do right now.”
This is pretty much how I feel when working at Amazon.
At low altitudes, the B-52 was an extraordinary sight, a huge plane with a wingspan about sixty yards wide, hugging the terrain, casting a long shadow, traveling seven or eight miles a minute.
60 years is 180 feet. And they would fly between 150 and 350 feet from the ground. Eesh.
The two sped to the base as fast as they could in VanKirk’s Ford Fiesta.
Within 2 hours, the Ford Fiesta had made the treacherous 12 mile journey across suspiciously well maintained pavement.
The difference between life and death was their parking space.
But the Air Force contended that the accident rate at Titan II sites was lower than the rate at most American workplaces,
The consequences of an accident have to be considered along with the rate at which an accident happens.
If an accident causes a worker to break a leg, that might be a reasonable consequence for a 1:1,000 risk over a year. If the consequence is vaporizing a medium sized city of 300,000 people, a 1:1,000 risk has an expected value of 300 people vaporized per year.
We're not even up to the Reagan administration, and this book is terrifying.
The outer door was a real bitch.
Pedophile.
Devlin was in pretty good shape from boxing, but the air pack and the RFHCO suit made the work more difficult.
Hukle was also in pretty good shape from his time spent dancing in a cage in a bar in Little Rock. He wasn't as muscular as Devlin, but his small, wiry frame was surprisingly flexible and strong, and he had excellent endurance.
His time spent under the hot lights of the stage, and the fiery gaze of Arkansas's elite, meant that he was better adapted to the hot RFHCO suits than Devlin, but even he found the suits difficult to maneuver in.
Hukle felt uneasy.
He had always gazed at Devlin across the room, and thought about running his hands across the man's strong biceps and huge pectoral muscles -- he was always afraid of what he might say or do if they were working closely together.
And this was not a situation where he could afford to be distracted. Luckily, the RFHCO suits did everything possible to depersonalize the situation, and mask Devlin's incredible body. But every time Devlin spoke, or cleared his throat, or sighed that incredibly manly, sexy, and world-weary sigh, Hukle would be reminded of Devlin, and was unable to picture anything other than the sweat dripping down his well-chiseled six pack.
Hukle hoped that the RFHCO covered the missile in his pants as well as the cement blast doors covered the Titan II.
hand pump
They were the only people on the complex. Hukle figured anything could happen and prepared himself for the worst.
Devlin wasn’t having dark thoughts. He just wanted to open the damn door.
Neither of the men had ever used the emergency hand pump before—and the blast door wouldn’t open, no matter how hard they pumped.
Sergeant Hanson, the chief of PTS Team B, led the effort to reenter the control center. He told Devlin and Hukle to read the instructions for the hand pump, grab fresh air packs, go back down there, and try the door again.
"Listen, it's obvious that neither one of you have ever seen, let alone used, a hand pump before, and I don't have time to show you how to do crap like this. There's a book, look it up, and then get back down there and do your damned jobs. And stop giving each other those weird damned lovey-dovey googley eyes. There's a broom closet, go in there and work it out. I don't have time to disapprove, but you could do so much better than him."
Neither Hukle nor Devlin knew which one Hanson thought could do so much better than the other.
Jeff Kennedy thought the whole plan was idiotic. They should be going through the escape hatch, not the access portal.
"Go in through the out door!" he said to anyone who would listen, and yelled at anyone who wouldn't.
Devlin and Hukle would be close to the missile, surrounded by fuel vapors, vulnerable to all kinds of bad things.
Let me do it, Kennedy said. I know how to work the pump.
Kennedy gestured as he spoke, pumping his fist up and down rhythmically and giving it a bit of a twist at the top. As Kennedy's pumping got faster and faster, Hukle looked on and quietly said "that man sure knows how to work a hand pump."
Devlin nodded in silent agreement.
I’ll go with him, David Livingston said.
When they got to the building, the door was locked, and the combination they’d been given didn’t work. Wallace had to break into the place. Inside, they found a short rubber garden hose.
This was actually a bondage chamber.
Christal was a missile pneudraulics technician.
