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

by Eric Schlosser

Two days later, Khrushchev made a blunt, defiant statement. Above an island in the Arctic Sea, the Soviet Union detonated Tsar Bomba, “the King of Bombs”—the most powerful nuclear weapon ever built. It had a yield of 50 megatons.

A few minutes later the order was rescinded. The B-52 circling Thule had made contact with the base. It had not been destroyed by the Soviets. An investigation subsequently found that the failure of a single AT&T switch in Black Forest, Colorado, had shut down all the ballistic missile early warning circuits, voice communications between the SAC and NORAD command posts, and the “hot line” linking SAC’s commander to NORAD headquarters. AT&T had neglected to provide redundant circuits for some of the nation’s most important communications links, despite assurances that it had done so.

And America’s NATO allies suspected that a “no cities” approach would primarily spare the cities of the United States.

The Cuban deployment would triple the number of Soviet land-based missiles that could hit the United States.

Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them—if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin.

The Ballistic Missile Early Warning System was oriented to the north and the east, not the south. Missiles launched from Cuba might not be detected until their thermonuclear warheads hit American targets three or four minutes later.

Anything short of an air strike on Cuba, he told Kennedy, would be “almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich” that led to the Second World War. The remark was especially pointed: Kennedy’s father had long been criticized for supporting that appeasement of Hitler.

Fighter-interceptors patrolled American airspace with Genies and Falcons, atomic antiaircraft rockets, in case Soviet planes tried to attack from Cuba.

Aircrews slept on the ground beside their planes, which were loaded with hydrogen bombs, as commercial airliners took off and landed on nearby runways.

Well aware that the Soviet Union’s strategic forces were vastly inferior to those of the United States, Khrushchev had no desire to start a nuclear war. He did, however, want to test Kennedy’s mettle and see how much the Soviets could gain from the crisis. Khrushchev secretly ordered his ships loaded with missiles not to violate the quarantine. But in private letters to Kennedy, he vowed that the ships would never turn around, denied that offensive weapons had been placed in Cuba, and denounced the quarantine as “an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward . . . a world nuclear-missile war.”

Convinced that Khrushchev was being duplicitous, McNamara now pushed for a limited air strike to destroy the missiles. General Maxwell Taylor, now head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended a large-scale attack. When an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba, killing the pilot, the pressure on Kennedy to launch an air strike increased enormously. A nuclear war with the Soviet Union seemed possible. “As I left the White House . . . on that beautiful fall evening,” McNamara later recalled, “I feared I might never live to see another Saturday night.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis ended amid the same sort of confusion and miscommunication that had plagued much of its thirteen days.

But Kennedy also instructed his brother to meet privately with Ambassador Dobrynin and agree to the demands made in Khrushchev’s second letter—so long as the promise to remove the Jupiters from Turkey was never made public. Giving up dangerous and obsolete American missiles to avert a nuclear holocaust seemed like a good idea. Only a handful of Kennedy’s close advisers were told about this secret agreement.

Although Khrushchev never planned to move against Berlin during the crisis, the Joint Chiefs had greatly underestimated the strength of the Soviet military force based in Cuba. In addition to strategic weapons, the Soviet Union had almost one hundred tactical nuclear weapons on the island that would have been used by local commanders to repel an American attack.

“The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost,” Dr. Strangelove, the president’s eccentric science adviser, explains to the Soviet ambassador, “IF YOU KEEP IT A SECRET!”

In fact, there was nothing to stop the crew of a B-52 from dropping its hydrogen bombs on Moscow—except, perhaps, Soviet air defenses. The Go code was simply an order from SAC headquarters to launch an attack; bombers on airborne alert didn’t have any technological means to stop a renegade crew.

But one of the real advantages of SAC’s bombers was that their crews could be contacted by radio and told to abort their missions, if the Go code had somehow been sent by mistake. Ballistic missiles posed a far greater risk of unauthorized or accidental use.

Missiles being flight-tested usually had a command destruct mechanism—explosives attached to the airframe that could be set off by remote control, destroying the missile if it flew off course. SAC refused to add that capability to operational missiles, out of a concern that the Soviets might find a way to detonate them all, midflight.

When the officers in a control center turned their launch keys, the timer started. And when the timer ran out, if no message had been received from the other control centers, approving or opposing the order to launch, all the missiles lifted off. The problem with the timer, Rubel soon realized, was that a crew could set it to six hours, six minutes—or zero. In the wrong hands, it gave a couple of SAC officers the ability to wipe out fifty cities in the Soviet Union. An unauthorized attack on that scale, a classified history of the Minuteman program noted, would be “an accident for which a later apology might be inadequate.”

General Power had blocked significant changes in weapon allocation. The new SIOP divided the “optimum mix” into three separate target groups: Soviet nuclear forces, conventional military forces, and urban-industrial areas. The president could decide to attack only the first group, the first two groups, or all three.

The number of nuclear weapons in the American arsenal had increased by more than 50 percent since the Eisenhower administration. The United States now had about thirty thousand of them, and each one could potentially be lost, stolen, sabotaged, or involved in an accident.

Known for his cool, detached manner, McNamara was now prone to bouts of sobbing in his office.

LeMay had played a leading role in integrating the Air Force, and his support for equal rights, labor unions, birth control, and abortion seemed out of place in the Wallace campaign.

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.

Clay ejected at an altitude of four thousand feet. The B-52 made a full 360-degree turn and then crashed nose first into a barley field. The high explosives of both hydrogen bombs shattered on impact and didn’t burn or detonate. The weapons harmlessly broke into pieces. All eight members of the crew survived the crash. But an Air Force fireman, rushing to the scene, was killed when his truck overturned.

At one point firefighters dragged a burning hydrogen bomb fifty yards from the plane, dumped it into a trench, covered it with sand, and extinguished the flames.

The warhead wasn’t damaged, although its arming and fuzing package was torn off during the seventy-five-foot drop.

The sailor kept blowing the whistle; other sailors yelled, “Brakes, brakes,” and held on to the plane. They let go as it rolled off the elevator into the sea. In an instant, it was gone. The pilot, his plane, and a Mark 43 hydrogen bomb vanished. No trace of them was ever found;

When the tape corroded, it got stuck. And the little motor didn’t have enough torque to pull the tape out. Livermore’s mechanical safing device had made the warheads too safe. A former director of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Project Office Reentry Body Coordinating Committee explained the problem: there was “almost zero confidence that the warhead would work as intended.”

A large proportion of W-47 warheads, perhaps 75 percent or more, wouldn’t detonate after being launched. The Polaris submarine, the weapon system that McNamara and Kennedy considered the cornerstone of the American arsenal, the ultimate deterrent, the guarantor of nuclear retaliation and controlled escalation and assured destruction, was full of duds.

At dusk, members of the Spanish federal police led the Disaster Control Team to the first bomb, which had landed southeast of Palomares, about three hundred yards from the beach. The weapon was remarkably intact.

The second bomb was spotted from a helicopter, almost twenty-four hours after the crash. What was left of the weapon lay in the hills above the local cemetery. Its parachutes hadn’t opened. And its high explosives had partially detonated, digging a crater twenty feet wide, scattering bomb parts, and spreading plutonium across the hills.

The third bomb was found about an hour later. It had struck the base of a stone wall, amid a vegetable garden on the outskirts of Palomares. The hydrogen bomb had missed a farmhouse by about seventy-five feet. One of its parachutes had deployed, and some of the high explosives had gone off.

The fourth bomb couldn’t be found. Long lines of troops walked for miles, shoulder to shoulder, looking for it. Planes and helicopters looked for it. Hundreds of abandoned mine shafts, wells, and other holes in the ground were carefully explored for it. A month and a half after the crash, the Mark 28 was still missing, and the search of the countryside near Palomares was called off.

After weeks of bad publicity, the Pentagon finally acknowledged that a nuclear weapon was missing. The news brought to mind the plot of the latest James Bond film, Thunderball, and its underwater search for stolen hydrogen bombs.

On March 15, the crew of the Alvin spotted the bomb, wrapped in a parachute, at a depth of roughly half a mile. Nine days later, while it was being pulled from the sea, the line snapped—and the bomb disappeared again. The search resumed, another week passed, and Alvin found the bomb a second time. Aside from a small dent on the nose, it looked fine.

The B-52 had struck the ice at a speed of almost six hundred miles per hour, about seven miles west of Thule. The high explosives of the four hydrogen bombs fully detonated upon impact, and roughly 225,000 pounds of jet fuel created a large fireball.

The one-point safety tests of the Mark 28’s core, performed secretly at Los Alamos during the Eisenhower administration, had been money well spent. If the Mark 28 hadn’t been made inherently one-point safe, the bombs that hit the ice could have produced a nuclear yield. And the partial detonation of a nuclear weapon, or two, or three—without any warning, at the air base considered essential for the defense of the United States—could have been misinterpreted at SAC headquarters. Nobody expected the Thule monitor to destroy Thule.

The ice was about two feet thick; the water below it six hundred feet deep. Pieces of the bomb and the plane were carried away by the current or settled on the bottom of Bylot Sound.

The Air Force account of the accident, however, was deliberately misleading. Denmark had imposed a strict ban on nuclear weapons, and its NATO allies were forbidden to bring them into Danish territory or airspace. For more than a decade, the Strategic Air Command had routinely violated that prohibition at Thule.

And a B-52 secretly continued to fly back and forth above Thule, day and night, without nuclear weapons, just to make sure it was still there.

Was the risk one in a million for a single weapon—or for an entire weapon system? Was it one in a million per year—or throughout the operational life of a weapon? How the risk was defined made a big difference, at a time when the United States had about thirty thousand nuclear weapons.

forty-two pigs dressed in U.S. Army uniforms whose skin would respond to thermal radiation in a manner similar to that of human skin,

They were told to crouch in their trenches until the weapon detonated, then rise in time to brace against the blast wave and watch the explosion.

Spray had been concerned about weapon safety for years. While visiting the Naval Ordnance Test Station near Cape Canaveral, Florida, he’d watched a bent pin nearly detonate an atomic bomb during a routine test. The accident could have obliterated a large stretch of the Florida coast.

The Navy tested many of its weapons by placing them, unarmed, on the deck of an aircraft carrier, turning on all the ship’s radars and communications equipment, and waiting to see if anything happened. The electroexplosive squibs of a Navy missile detonated during one of those shipboard tests—and similar squibs were used in some nuclear weapons.

Although fission and fusion were radically new and destructive forces in warfare, the interior layout of bombs hadn’t changed a great deal since the Second World War. The wires from different components still met in a single junction box. Wiring that armed the bomb and wiring that prevented it from being armed often passed through the same junction—making it possible for current to jump from one to the other.

The first principle was incompatibility: there had to be a unique arming signal that couldn’t be sent by a short circuit or a stray wire. The second principle was isolation: the firing set and the detonators had to be protected behind a physical barrier that would exclude fire, electricity, and electromagnetic energy, that couldn’t be easily breached, and that would allow only the unique arming signal to enter it. The third principle was inoperability: the firing set had to contain a part that would predictably and irreversibly fail in an abnormal environment. That part was called a “weak link.” The hardened barrier was called a “strong link,” and combined with a unique arming signal, they promised a level of nuclear weapon safety that would meet or exceed Walske’s one-in-a-million standard.

Five months later, unwilling to let the issue drop and ready to escalate the battle, Peurifoy and Fowler put their concerns on the record. A letter to General Graves was drafted—and Glenn Fowler placed his career at risk by signing and sending it. The “Fowler Letter,” as it was soon called, caused a top secret uproar in the nuclear weapon community. It ensured that high-level officials at the weapons labs, the AEC, and the Pentagon couldn’t hide behind claims of plausible deniability, if a serious accident happened.

They didn’t want their names used as the source of any information. They were scared about getting into trouble. And most of all they were scared about what was happening at the Titan II silos in Arkansas. The missiles were old, the airmen said, and most of them leaked. The portable vapor detectors and the vapor detectors in the silos often didn’t work.