Command and Control (15 page)

During the AFSWP's first attempt to assemble an atomic bomb, it took a team of thirty-six men two weeks to finish the job. That did not bode well for a quick retaliation against a Soviet attack. Through constant practice, the assembly time was reduced to about a day. But the Mark 3 bomb had a number of inherent shortcomings. It was a handmade, complicated, delicate thing with a brief shelf life. The electrical system was powered by a car battery, which had to be charged for three days before being put into the bomb. The battery could be recharged twice inside the Mark 3, but had to be replaced within a week—and to change the battery, you had to take apart the whole weapon. The plutonium cores radiated so much heat that they'd melt the explosive lenses if left in a bomb for too long. And the polonium initiators inside the cores had to be replaced every few months. By the end of 1948, the United States had the necessary
parts and cores to assemble fifty-six atomic bombs, enough for an atomic blitz. But the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project could
deploy only one bomb assembly team overseas. It would take months for that team to put together so many atomic bombs—and a stray wire, some static electricity, or a little mistake could end the entire operation in a flash.

•   •   •

R
OBERT
P
EURIFOY
WAS
A
SENIOR
at Texas A&M when a recruiter from Sandia visited the campus. America's nuclear weapons program was expanding, and it needed engineers. Peurifoy was intrigued. Unlike his father—a prominent civil engineer who designed roads, buildings, dams, and other concrete structures—Peurifoy was drawn to the study of electricity. Recent inventions like radar, television, the transistor, and the computer promised to transform American society. The typical A&M student with a degree in electrical engineering went to work for Dallas Power &
Light or other utility companies after graduation. Designing nuclear weapons at a mysterious, top secret laboratory sounded a lot more interesting to Peurifoy. And he was deeply patriotic. During the spring of 1952, the United States was at war. With the backing of Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, the Communist regime of North Korea had invaded South Korea two years earlier, starting a conflict that eventually
killed more than two million civilians. The threat of Communist aggression was no longer hypothetical; young American soldiers were once again fighting and dying overseas. When Sandia offered Peurifoy a job, he eagerly accepted. It seemed like a good way to serve his country—and satisfy his curiosity.

Right after graduation, Peurifoy and his wife, Barbara, packed up their belongings in College Station and moved to a small rental house in Albuquerque, not far from the lab. He was twenty-one, ready to help the war effort, thrilled to be employed for $395 a month. But he was forced to work in Sandia's “leper colony” for the first ninety days, denied access to the classified areas at the lab. While the FBI conducted a background check, he spent six days a week recording weather information onto IBM computer cards with a pencil. It was not a thrilling job. In the fall of 1952, Peurifoy obtained a “Q clearance,” allowing him access to top secret material and Tech Area I, the lab's research facilities. But his early work at Sandia didn't enable him to visit Tech Area II, a separate group of buildings surrounded by guard towers and a perimeter fence. It was America's first atomic bomb factory.

Tests conducted in the Marshall Islands a few years earlier had shown that “composite” cores made from a mix of plutonium and uranium would detonate, ending fears at the Pentagon about a potential shortage of fissile material. The United States would have more than enough for a large stockpile of atomic bombs. In 1949 full-scale production of a new implosion bomb had begun at Sandia: the Mark 4. It had a composite core. It could be assembled in a couple of hours, then stored for a couple of weeks. And it was much safer than previous designs. According to the final evaluation report, the Mark 4 had a variety of features to “
prevent premature detonation under all predictable circumstances.” The X-unit didn't charge until the bomb fell from the plane, greatly reducing the risk to the aircrew.
More important, the nuclear core was stored in the plane's cockpit during takeoff and inserted through a trap door into the nose of the bomb, midflight. As long as the core was kept physically separate from the rest of the bomb, it was impossible for a plane crash to cause a nuclear explosion.

The days of handmade nuclear weapons were over. At Sandia the Mark 4 was now being manufactured with standardized, interchangeable parts—and so was its replacement, the Mark 6, a lighter, sleeker weapon with a yield as much as ten times larger than that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Once a weapon was assembled at Tech Area II, it was shipped to Site Able, an AEC storage facility tunneled into the nearby Manzano Mountains, or to Site Baker in Killeen, Texas, or to Site Charlie in Clarksville, Tennessee. The storage sites were located near SAC bases, so that in an emergency bombs could be quickly retrieved and loaded onto planes.

The military's demand for nuclear weapons was so great that Sandia could no longer handle the production. An “
integrated contractor complex” was being formed, with manufacturing increasingly outsourced to plants throughout the United States. Polonium initiators would be made by the Monsanto Chemical Company, in Miamisburg, Ohio; explosive lenses by the Silas Mason Company in Burlington, Iowa; electrical components by the Bendix Aviation Corporation in Kansas City, Missouri; and so on. What had begun as a handcrafted laboratory experiment was now the focus of a growing industrial system. And the idea of placing atomic bombs under international control, the idea of outlawing them, the whole notion of world government and world peace, now seemed like an absurd fantasy.

Bob Peurifoy was asked to help redesign the arming and fuzing mechanisms of the Mark 5 and the Mark 7, new bombs small enough to be carried by naval aircraft. Work had already begun on the Mark 12, the Mark 13, and the Mark 15, a bomb that promised to be more powerful than all the rest.

J
eff Kennedy had just gotten home from playing racquetball when the phone rang. It was about seven in the evening, and he was getting ready for dinner with his wife and their two small children. The call was from job control.

There's a problem out at 4-7, the dispatcher said. The Klaxons are going off, and a white cloud is rising from the exhaust vents. We think there's a fire in the silo.

Kennedy had dealt with fuel leaks, oxidizer leaks, and all sorts of mechanical breakdowns—but he'd never seen a fire at a Titan II complex.

Report immediately to the command post, job control said. We're going to chopper you out to the complex.

Things must be pretty bad, Kennedy thought. He'd been in the Air Force for years, and this was the first time somebody had offered him a ride in a helicopter. He knew Charles Heineman, the PTS team chief working at 4-7 that day. Heineman was good, Heineman could tell the difference between fuel, smoke, and oxidizer. Maybe there was a fire in the silo. That would be incredible.

Kennedy put on his uniform, said good-bye to his family, and headed for the command post. He was a quality control evaluator for the 308th Missile Inspection and Maintenance Squadron. More important than his official title was a fact widely acknowledged in the 308th. Kennedy was the
best missile mechanic at the base. He understood the Titan II propulsion system better than just about anyone else. He knew how to fix it. And he seemed to embody the swagger and the spirit of the PTS crews. Kennedy was tough, outspoken, and fearless. He was six foot five and powerfully built, a leader among the enlisted men who risked their lives every day in the silos. Commanding officers didn't always like him. But they listened to him.

At Little Rock Air Force Base, Kennedy was briefed by Colonel John T. Moser, the wing commander, and Colonel James L. Morris, the head of the maintenance squadron. A large socket had been dropped in the silo, piercing the missile and causing a leak in the stage 1 fuel tank. The sprays were on, flooding the silo with water. The missile combat crew was trying to make sense of all the hazard lights flashing in the control center. The deputy commander, Al Childers, thought it was just a fuel leak. The missile systems analyst technician, Rodney Holder, thought there was a fire. The PTS team topside had reported seeing smoke—but then hurriedly left the scene and couldn't be reached. Nobody knew where they were. Pressure in the stage 1 fuel tank was falling. Pressure in the stage 1 oxidizer tank was rising. One was threatening to collapse, the other to burst.

Kennedy was surprised to hear how quickly the pressure levels had changed in the hour or so since the socket was dropped. The stage 1 fuel tank was now at 2.2 psi, about one fifth of what it should be; the stage 1 oxidizer was at 18.8 psi, almost twice as high as it should be. He'd never seen pressure levels change that fast.

Colonel Morris was preparing to leave for 4-7 by helicopter and wanted Kennedy to join him. The two men weren't particularly fond of each other. Morris was an officer in his midforties, cautious and by the book, just the sort of person that the PTS guys liked to ignore. He needed to know what was happening at the launch complex and thought Kennedy was the right man to find out. The Missile Potential Hazard Team had tentatively come up with a plan of action: enter the silo, determine the size of the hole in the missile, vent the fuel vapors, and try to stabilize the stage 1 fuel tank so that it wouldn't collapse. Of course, none of that would be possible if the silo was on fire. Was there smoke drifting from the
exhaust vents, fuel vapor, or both? That was the critical question. Morris and Kennedy left the command post, went to the flight line, climbed into a chopper, and took off.

Kennedy had never been in an Air Force helicopter. His job focused largely on machinery that was underground—and like most of the PTS guys, his career in missile maintenance had come as a surprise, not as the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition. Kennedy was born and raised in South Portland, Maine. He played basketball in high school, graduated, got married, and worked as a deckhand on the Casco Bay Lines, a ferry service that linked Portland to neighboring islands. In 1976 he decided that being a deckhand just didn't cut it anymore. He had a one-year-old daughter and another child on the way. He needed to earn more money, and his brother suggested joining the military. Kennedy met with recruiters from the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. He chose the Air Force because its basic training was the shortest.

After enlisting, Kennedy hoped to become an airplane mechanic stationed in Florida or California. Instead, he soon found himself learning about missile propellant transfer at Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul, Illinois. The training course did a fine job with the technical details of the missile system. But it didn't give a sense of how dangerous the work could be. The Titan II mock-up at Chanute was loaded with water, not oxidizer or fuel, and accidental spills didn't seem like a big deal. Kennedy learned about the risks through his on-the-job training with the 308th in Arkansas. During one of his first visits to a launch complex, the PTS team was doing a “recycle,” removing oxidizer from the missile. An enormous propane tank, known as a “burn bot,” sat near the silo door topside, burning excess propellant as it vented, roaring like a jet engine and shooting out a gust of flame. This sort of controlled burn was routine, like the flares at an oil field. Then the burn bot went out, the oxidizer leaked, a dirty orange cloud floated over the complex, and the sergeant beside Kennedy said, “You know that bullshit right there? You get that shit on your skin, it'll turn to nitric acid.”

Kennedy thought, “Wow,” and watched with some concern as the cloud drifted over the control trailer and the rest of the PTS team continued to
work, hardly noticing it. He felt like running for the hills. Clearly, the textbooks at Chanute didn't tell you what really happened in the field. Kennedy soon realized there was the way you were supposed to do things—and the way things got done. RFHCO suits were hot and cumbersome, a real pain in the ass to wear—and if a maintenance task could be accomplished quickly and without an officer noticing, sometimes the suits weren't worn. The PTS team would enter the blast lock, stash their RFHCOs against a blast door, and enter the silo unprotected. The risk seemed less important than avoiding the hassle. While disconnecting a vent hose in the silo, Kennedy once forgot to close a valve, inhaled some oxidizer, and coughed up nasty stuff for a week. On another occasion, oxidizer burned the skin off the top of his left hand. Working without a RFHCO violated a wide range of technical orders. But it forced you to think about the fuel and the oxidizer and the fine line between saving some time and doing something incredibly stupid.

Within a few years, Kennedy had become a PTS team chief. He loved the job and the responsibility that it brought. And he loved the Air Force. Where else could a twenty-five-year-old kid, without a college degree, be put in charge of complicated, hazardous, essential operations at a missile site worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The fact that a nuclear warhead was involved made the work seem even cooler. Over time, Kennedy had gained an appreciation for the Titan II, regarding it as a thing of beauty, temperamental but awe inspiring. He thought you had to treat the missile with respect, like you would a lady. Keeping the Titan IIs fueled and ready to go, ensuring the safety of his men—those were his priorities, and he enjoyed getting the work done.

The recycles were one of Kennedy's favorite parts of the job. They took weeks to prepare. The weather had to be just right, with at least three knots of wind and the outdoor temperature rising, so that a leak wouldn't linger over the complex. Once the valves were turned and the fuel or the oxidizer started to flow, the team chief was in charge of the operation, and the adrenaline kicked in. The danger was greatest when propellants were being loaded and off-loaded; that's when something bad was most likely to happen, something unexpected and potentially catastrophic. It always felt good
to finish a recycle, pack up the tools, load up the trucks, and send the PTS team home to Little Rock at the end of a long day.

Some of the missile combat crew commanders were a pleasure to work with, Kennedy thought, and some of them were real pricks—officers who liked to meddle with things they didn't know anything about. The launch control center and the silo were only a few hundred feet apart, but the distance between the men who worked in them often felt like miles. Once, while Kennedy was learning the ropes, his team chief was criticized by a missile crew commander, over the radio, for skipping a few lines in a technical order. “
Commander, if you want to tell me how to do my job,” the team chief replied, “then you get your ass off your chair, and you come and sit your ass in my chair.” Kennedy soon adopted a similar way of dealing with combat crew officers, most of whom seemed afraid of the propellants: just leave me alone, the work will get done the right way—and then I'll get the hell off your launch complex.

Most of all, Kennedy valued the intense loyalty among the PTS crews, a bond strengthened by the stress and the dangers of the job. They looked out for each other. At the end of a late-night shift, Kennedy's team members would sometimes flip a coin to see who'd babysit his kids. And then Kennedy's wife would dress in fatigues and sneak onto the base to join everybody for midnight chow in the cafeteria. The PTS crews didn't like it when someone couldn't take a joke. They didn't like it when someone couldn't work well with others. And they found all kinds of unofficial ways to impose discipline. At one missile complex a PTS team waited until an airman with a bad attitude put on his RFHCO. Then they grabbed him, stuck a hose down the neck of his suit, filled the suit with cold water, and left him lying on the ground, shouting for help, unable to stand up or take the RFHCO off, rolling around and looking like a gigantic water balloon. He got the message.

For the past year, Kennedy had served as a quality control evaluator, a job that required him to visit all the launch complexes and make sure that the work was being done properly. He'd been out to 4-7 many times. As the helicopter approached it, the command post radioed the latest pressure levels: the stage 1 oxidizer tank had climbed to 23.4 psi, and the stage 1
fuel had fallen to –0.7. The fuel reading unnerved Kennedy. The negative pressure meant a vacuum was forming inside the tank that supported the rest of the missile. The stage 1 fuel tank was like a tin can with the air getting sucked out of it—and a ten-pound can sitting on top of it. First the tank would crumple, then it would collapse. Word that the missile crew had just evacuated the control center pissed him off. That was chickenshit, Kennedy thought. That would make everything a lot more difficult. They would have been safe and sound behind those blast doors.

The chopper pilot circled the complex, shining a spotlight toward the ground. Amid the darkness, Kennedy could see a thick, white cloud rising from the exhaust vents. He told Colonel Morris that the cloud looked like fuel vapor, not smoke. It was a fuel leak, Kennedy thought, not a fire. And that meant maybe, just maybe, they could find a way to fix it.

•   •   •

A
ROUND
THE
SAME
TIME
that Kennedy got a call from job control, Jim Sandaker got one, too.
Sandaker was a twenty-one-year-old PTS technician with a wife and a baby daughter, and the call reached him at home on the base. Job control said there was a fuel leak at 4-7 and asked him to round up a bunch of other PTS guys to head out there. Sandaker hung up, told his wife, “
Well, I got to go,” put on his uniform, and went to the barracks. He was good natured and well liked, low key and solid, a country boy from Evansville, Minnesota, who'd dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade and joined the Air Force at the age of seventeen. When he reached the barracks and asked for volunteers, saying that it was an emergency, nobody believed him. They all thought it was a prank.

“
All right,” Sandaker said. “You call job control and ask them.”

Someone called and learned that Sandaker wasn't kidding. Airmen started throwing on their uniforms and hurrying to the PTS shop, not because they had to go, but because it felt like the right thing to do. Their buddies at 4-7 needed help. PTS Team B was assembled from a makeshift group of volunteers, the guys who were gung ho. They gathered things that might be needed at the site: RFHCO suits, air packs, dewars filled with liquid air, tool kits, radios. Their team chief, Technical Sergeant Michael
A. Hanson, told them to assume that nothing at 4-7 could be used and start from scratch. The PTS shop was a converted aircraft hangar, big enough to hold a few Titan IIs, with smaller rooms devoted to specialized tasks. The men of Team B loaded their gear onto half a dozen trucks, eager to leave, like reinforcements coming to the rescue.

In addition to the PTS team, a flatbed truck with about 450 gallons of bleach and a tractor trailer with about 5,000 gallons of mineral oil were sent to Damascus. The bleach could be used to neutralize rocket fuel and render it less explosive. The mineral oil, dumped by hose into the silo vents, might form a layer on top of the fuel, trapping the vapors. The “
baby oil trailer,” as some people called it, was brand new—and nobody had ever tried using baby oil to prevent an explosion at a Titan II missile site.

Elsewhere at Little Rock Air Force Base, the Disaster Response Force was getting ready to depart. Its commander, Colonel William A. Jones, was also the base commander and head of the 314th Combat Support Group, a squadron of cargo planes stationed there. Jones was new to Little Rock, having arrived just two months earlier. He had not yet taken a disaster control course and didn't have much experience with Titan II missiles. His cargo planes were part of the Military Airlift Command, the missiles were part of the Strategic Air Command—and although both commands shared the same base, their missions rarely intersected. The Disaster Response Force was supposed to handle any military emergency, large or small, that involved units at Little Rock. During his brief tenure as its commander, the only emergency that Jones had faced was a search for the missing tail gunner of a B-52 bomber. The tail gunner had ejected from the plane by mistake, afraid that it was about to crash. The B-52 landed safely, as did the tail gunner, whose parachute was easily spotted floating above the Arkansas River.