Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

by Eric Schlosser

The nose cone on top of the Titan II was deep black, and inside it sat a W-53 thermonuclear warhead, the most powerful weapon ever carried by an American missile. The warhead had a yield of 9 megatons—about three times the explosive force of all the bombs dropped during the Second World War, including both atomic bombs.

The missile was designed to launch within a minute and hit a target as far as six thousand miles away. In order to do that, the Titan II relied upon a pair of liquid propellants—a rocket fuel and an oxidizer—that were “hypergolic.” The moment they came into contact with each other, they’d instantly and forcefully ignite.

The fuel, Aerozine-50, could spontaneously ignite when it came into contact with everyday things like wool, rags, or rust. As a liquid, Aerozine-50 was clear and colorless. As a vapor, it reacted with the water and the oxygen in the air and became a whitish cloud with a fishy smell. This fuel vapor could be explosive in proportions as low as 2 percent. Inhaling it could cause breathing difficulties, a reduced heart rate, vomiting, convulsions, tremors, and death. The fuel was also highly carcinogenic and easily absorbed through the skin.

The missile’s oxidizer, nitrogen tetroxide, was even more hazardous. Under federal law, it was classified as a “Poison A,” the most deadly category of man-made chemicals.

Plumb had been with the 308th for just nine months. He wasn’t qualified to do this sort of missile maintenance or to handle these propellants.

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.”

The eighteen Titan II missile complexes in Arkansas were scattered throughout an area extending about sixty miles north of Little Rock Air Force Base and about thirty miles to the east and the west.

The decision to put ICBMs in rural Arkansas had been influenced by political, as well as military, considerations. One of the state’s congressmen, Wilbur D. Mills, happened to be chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee when Titan II sites were being chosen.

Slavery had never reached this part of Arkansas, and the people who lived there were overwhelmingly poor, white, hardworking, and self-sufficient. It was the kind of poverty that carried little shame, because everyone seemed to be in the same boat.

Every Titan II launch complex had exactly the same layout: access portal, blast lock, then another blast lock, missile down the corridor to the right, control center down the corridor to the left, blast doors at the most vulnerable entry points. Every complex had the same equipment, the same wiring, lighting, and design. Nevertheless, each had its quirks.

Men were busy in all nine levels of the silo, some of them painting, others flushing the hydraulic system that raised and lowered the steel platforms beside the missile. Lay heard a big puff, like the sound of a gas stove being lit, and felt a warm breeze. Then he saw bright yellow flames rising from the floor to the ceiling. He ran to the escape ladder and tried to climb down, but the ladder was jammed with workers. Moments later, the lights went out. Black smoke filled the silo, and it soon felt like the darkest place on earth. Workers were shouting, panicking, desperately trying to find a way out.

The flash fire in the equipment area on level 2 had filled the silo with smoke, then sucked the oxygen out. The exit to the cableway from level 2 offered the only possibility of escape. Some workers had mistakenly climbed down the ladder toward the bottom of the silo. Others were blocked trying to climb up. One was trapped in the elevator when the power went out. Workers weren’t killed by the flames. They were asphyxiated by the smoke.

Without power, the site lacked air-conditioning, and as the temperature in the silo rose, so did the pressure in the missile’s oxidizer tanks. Nitrogen tetroxide expanded in the heat; its boiling point was only 70 degrees Fahrenheit. By five o’clock that evening, the temperature in the silo was 78 degrees and rising.

At seven o’clock, SAC headquarters in Omaha warned that if the temperature in the silo wasn’t reduced, the missile’s stage 2 oxidizer tank was likely to reach an “explosive situation” around midnight.

Assuming that everything worked as planned, the Titan II would be gone within seconds. Its warhead would strike the target in about half an hour.

The Titan II would not launch, however, unless the two keys were turned at the same time; the launch switches were too far apart for one person to activate them both. SAC’s “two-man policy” had been adopted to prevent a deranged or fanatic crew member from starting a nuclear war.

THE COMMANDER AND the deputy commander at every Titan II site were issued .38 caliber revolvers, in case an intruder penetrated the underground complex or a crew member disobeyed orders. Transferring the weapons was part of the turnover checklist, when a new crew arrived for duty.

The silo’s nine levels were crammed with equipment, and the checklist there took about two hours to complete. It had hundreds of steps. Sometimes crews would cut corners to speed things up. They’d divide the labor—you check this air compressor, I’ll check that one—and violate the SAC two-man rule, roaming separately through the silo and comparing notes later. It was faster that way, the violation seemed trivial, and officers in the control center had no way of knowing what the enlisted men were doing in the silo.

At the ranch house, Slotin placed a neutron initiator, which was about the size of a gumball, into one of the plutonium hemispheres, attached it with Scotch tape, put the other hemisphere on top, and sealed a hole with a plutonium plug. The assembled core was about the size of a softball but weighed as much as a bowling ball. Before handing it to Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, Slotin asked for a receipt. The Manhattan Project was an unusual mix of civilian and military personnel, and this was the nation’s first official transfer of nuclear custody.

The idea of an “atomic bomb,” like so many other technological innovations, had first been proposed by the science fiction writer H. G. Wells. In his 1914 novel The World Set Free, Wells describes the “ultimate explosive,” fueled by radioactivity. It enables a single person to “carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.”

After British researchers concluded that such weapons could indeed be made and intelligence reports suggested that German physicists were trying to make them, the Manhattan Project was formed in 1942. Led by Leslie R. Groves, a brigadier general in the U.S. Army, it secretly gathered eminent scientists from Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, with the aim of creating atomic bombs.

The appeal of a nuclear explosion, for the Manhattan Project scientists, was the possibility of an even greater destructive force. A plutonium core the size of a tennis ball had the potential to raise the temperature, at the point of detonation, to tens of millions degrees Fahrenheit—and increase the air pressure to many millions of pounds per square inch.

bombarding certain heavy elements with neutrons could not only cause them to fission but could also start a chain reaction. Neutrons released from one atom would strike the nucleus of a nearby atom, freeing even more neutrons. The process could become self-sustaining. If the energy was released gradually, it could be used as a source of power to run electrical generators. And if the energy was released all at once, it could cause an explosion with temperatures many times hotter than the surface of the sun.

Two materials were soon determined to be fissile—that is, capable of sustaining a rapid chain reaction: uranium-235 and plutonium-239. Both were difficult to obtain. Plutonium is a man-made element, created by bombarding uranium with neutrons. Uranium-235 exists in nature, but in small amounts.

A series of experiments was conducted to discover the ideal sizes, shapes, and densities for a chain reaction. When the mass was too small, the neutrons produced by fission would escape. When the mass was large enough, it would become critical, a chain reaction would start, and the number of neutrons being produced would exceed the number escaping. And when an even larger mass became supercritical, it would explode.

The final design was a sphere composed of thirty-two shaped charges—twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons. It looked like a gigantic soccer ball and weighed about five thousand pounds.

The physicist Luis Alvarez and his assistant, Lawrence Johnston, invented a new type of detonator for the job—the exploding-bridgewire detonator. It sent a high-voltage current through a thin silver wire inserted into an explosive. The current vaporized the wire, created a small shock wave, and detonated the explosive. Donald F. Hornig, who was one of the youngest scientists at Los Alamos, devised a contraption, the X-unit, that could store 5,600 volts in a bank of capacitors and then send that electricity instantaneously to all the detonators.

In theory, the X-unit and the exploding bridgewires would set off thirty-two explosive lenses at once, creating the perfect shock wave and imploding the plutonium core.

The nuclear device was an assortment of spheres within spheres: first, an outer aluminum casing, then two layers of explosives, then a thin layer of boron and plastic to capture neutrons that might enter from outside the core, then more aluminum, then a tamper of uranium-238 to reflect neutrons that might escape from inside the core, then the ball of plutonium, and finally, at the very center, the gumball–size neutron initiator—a mixture of beryllium and polonium that would flood the device with neutrons, like a nuclear fuse, when the shock wave from the lenses struck. Inside the metal shed atop the tower, the detonators were installed by hand, two for every explosive lens, linked to a pair of X-units. The device now looked like something concocted in a mad scientist’s laboratory—a six-foot-tall aluminum globe with a pair of large boxes, the X-units, attached to it and thirty-two thick electrical cables leaving each box, winding around the sphere, and entering evenly spaced holes on its surface.

The test was pushed back to 5:30 in the morning, right before dawn. The rain ended, and the weather cleared. The radio frequency used to announce the final countdown was similar to that of a local station. Thanks to interference, at the moment of detonation, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings cheerfully played in the control bunker. Kistiakowsky stepped out of the bunker to see the fireball and was knocked to the ground by the blast wave. He was about six miles from where the tower had just stood. This is what the end of the world will look like, he thought—this is the last thing the last man will see.

Kenneth Bainbridge, the supervisor of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Within minutes the mushroom cloud reached eight miles into the sky. • • • THE ATOMIC BOMB was no longer the stuff of science fiction, and the question now was what to do with it.

Aerial bombardment promised to make the trench warfare of the previous world war—long a symbol of cruel, pointless slaughter—seem almost civilized and quaint. In April 1937 the German air force, the Luftwaffe, had attacked the Spanish city of Guernica, killing a few hundred civilians. Eight months later, the Japanese had bombed and invaded the Chinese city of Nanking, killing many thousands. An era of “total war” had dawned, and traditional rules of warfare seemed irrelevant.

Unlike “tactical” strikes aimed at an enemy’s military forces, “strategic” bombing focused on transportation systems and factories, the economic infrastructure necessary for waging war. Strategic assets were usually found in the heart of cities.

Bombarding residential neighborhoods, it was hoped, would diminish the will to fight.

During Operation Gomorrah in July 1943, RAF bombs started a fire in Hamburg with hurricane-force winds. The first “firestorm” ever ignited by aerial bombardment, it killed about forty thousand civilians.

Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb was influenced by many factors, and the desire to save American lives ranked near the top. An invasion of Japan was scheduled for November 1. Former President Herbert Hoover warned Truman that such an invasion would cost between “500,000 and 1,000,000 American lives.”

When a bomb was released at an altitude of about 30,000 feet, arming wires that linked it to the plane would be pulled out, starting a bank of spring-wound, mechanical clocks inside the weapon. After fifteen seconds, the clocks would close an electrical switch and send power to the firing circuits. At an altitude of 7,000 feet, a set of barometric switches, detecting the change in air pressure, would close another circuit, turning on four radar units, nicknamed “Archies,” that pointed at the ground. When the Archies sensed that the bomb was at an altitude of 1,850 feet, another switch would close and the firing signal would be sent.

In the gun-type device, that signal would ignite small bags of cordite, a smokeless gunpowder, and shoot one piece of uranium down the barrel at the other. In the implosion device, the firing signal would set off the X-units. Both bomb types were rigged to detonate about 1,800 feet above the ground. That was the altitude, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “appropriate for the maximum demolition of light structures.” Had the bombs been aimed at industrial buildings, instead of homes, the height of the airburst would have been set lower.

Code-named “Little Boy,” the bomb was ten feet long and weighed about 10,000 pounds. It contained almost all the processed uranium in existence, about 141 pounds.

At three in the morning on August 6, 1945, Parsons and another weaponeer, Morris Jeppson, left the cockpit and climbed into the bomb bay of a B-29 named Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mother. The plane was flying at an altitude of five thousand feet, about sixty miles off the coast of Tinian.

After making sure that three green safing plugs were inserted into the bomb, Parsons unscrewed the back of it while Jeppson held a flashlight and air turbulence bounced the plane. Nobody had ever done this procedure to a weapon containing fissile material, let alone to one dangling from a single hook in a darkened bomb bay. The men kneeled on a narrow aluminum platform that had been installed the previous day. It took Parsons about twenty minutes to put four small silk bags of cordite into the breech of the gun barrel, reattach the primer wires, and close the back of the bomb.

The green safing plugs blocked the electrical circuit between the fuzing system and the cordite. Jeppson replaced them with red arming plugs. Little Boy was now fully armed, drawing power from its own batteries and not from the plane.

The bomb was dropped from the Enola Gay at about 8:16 A.M., fell for about forty-four seconds, and detonated at an altitude of roughly 1,900 feet. At ground zero, directly beneath the airburst, the temperature reached perhaps 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone on the bridge was incinerated, and hundreds of fires were ignited. The blast wave flattened buildings, a firestorm engulfed the city, and a mushroom cloud rose almost ten miles into the sky. From the plane, Hiroshima looked like a roiling, bubbling sea of black smoke and fire.

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...

Fat Man was scheduled for delivery on August 11, with the city of Kokura as its target.

At around midnight, the night before the bomb was to be loaded onto a Silverplate B-29, a technician named Bernard J. O’Keefe noticed something wrong with the master firing cable that was supposed to connect the Archies to the X-unit. The cable and the X-unit both had female plugs. Somehow the cable had been installed backward.

With help from another technician, he broke one major safety rule after another, propping the door open to bring in extension cords and using a soldering iron to attach the right plugs. It was risky to melt solder in a room with five thousand pounds of explosives. The two men fixed the cable, connected the plugs, and didn’t tell anyone what they’d done.

After the bomb was loaded onto a B-29 called Bockscar, one of the plane’s fuel pumps malfunctioned before takeoff. Major Charles W. Sweeney, the twenty-five-year-old pilot commanding his first combat mission, decided to proceed with six hundred gallons of fuel inaccessible in a reserve tank.

Four hours after leaving Tinian, flashing red lights on the flight test box suddenly indicated that the bomb’s fuzes had been activated. The red lights could mean the weapon was fully armed and ready to explode. Sweeney considered jettisoning the bomb over the ocean, but let Philip Barnes, the assistant weaponeer, tinker with the flight test box. Barnes quickly checked the blueprints, looked inside the box, and found that a couple of rotary switches had been set in the wrong position. The bomb wasn’t armed,