Command and Control (31 page)

The K crew advised Colonel Moser to order an evacuation. Sergeant Michael Hanson—the chief of PTS Team B, who was in the command post, preparing to lead a convoy to the site—agreed. He didn't think the
control center would survive a blast. And he wanted his buddies to get out of there, right away.

Captain Charles E. Clark, the wing's chief technical engineer, said that the crew should stay right where they were. He had faith in the blast doors. And he warned Colonel Moser that if the crew left, the command post would have no way of knowing the tank pressures inside the missile and no means of operating the equipment within the complex. Clark argued that the crew should remain in the control center, monitor the status of the missile—and open the massive silo door above it. Opening the door would dilute the fuel vapor with air, making the vapor less flammable. The temperature in the silo would drop, and as the oxidizer tanks cooled, they'd become less likely to burst. Opening the door wouldn't pose much of a threat to Damascus. Unlike the oxidizer, the fuel would dissipate rapidly in the atmosphere. It wouldn't travel for miles, sickening people and killing cattle. First Lieutenant Michael J. Rusden, the bioenvironmental engineer, had calculated that with the winds prevailing at the moment, a toxic corridor would extend only four hundred to six hundred feet beyond the silo.

After consulting with SAC headquarters, Colonel Moser
ordered everyone to evacuate the control center. And he asked SAC if the crew should open the silo door before they left.

That door was not to be opened under any circumstances, General Leavitt said. The idea wasn't even worth discussing. Leavitt wanted the fuel vapors fully contained in the silo. He did not want a cloud of Aerozine-50 floating over nearby houses and farms. More important, he didn't want to risk losing control of a thermonuclear weapon. Leavitt felt absolutely certain that if the missile blew up, the warhead wouldn't detonate. He'd been around nuclear weapons for almost thirty years. In 1952 he'd been secretly trained to deliver atomic bombs from a fighter plane, in case they were needed during the Korean War. He had complete faith in the safety mechanisms of the W-53 warhead atop the Titan II. But nobody could predict how far the warhead would travel, if the missile exploded with the silo door open. Leavitt didn't want a thermonuclear weapon landing in a backyard somewhere between Little Rock and St. Louis. Maintaining
control of the warhead was far more important, he thought, than any other consideration.

The K crew waited tensely to hear if the men had made it out of the control center. Before abandoning the complex, the launch crew had left the phone off the hook—and when the intruder alarm suddenly went off at 4-7, the sound could be heard over the phone in the command post. That meant someone topside had opened the door to the escape hatch. More time passed without any word, and then Sergeant Brocksmith was on the radio, saying that he had everyone in his pickup truck.

Sergeant Hanson left the command post and went to the PTS shop, where Sandaker and the other volunteers were gathering their equipment. The Disaster Response Force left the base at about nine o'clock, but PTS Team B needed more time to get ready. Once they arrived at 4-7, Hanson thought the plan would go something like this: two men would put on RFHCOs, enter the complex through the access portal, open the blast doors, walk down the long cableway to the silo, and try to vent the missile. Perhaps they'd also turn on the purge fan to clear vapors from the silo.

Unsure of what equipment was available at 4-7, Hanson decided that PTS Team B had to bring everything it needed. They had to gather the gear, load it into five trucks, stop at two other missile complexes, and pick up items that the shop didn't have. Although PTS Team B wanted to get to 4-7 as quickly as possible, logistical problems delayed them, including an unexpected stop for water. Hanson's truck was the only one with a radio. Whenever he needed to communicate with the others, the entire convoy would have to pull over to the side of the road, and someone would get out of the truck to explain their next move.

The Little Rock command post continued to have communications difficulties, as well. Once the control center was evacuated, the radio in Sergeant Brocksmith's truck became the only way to speak with people at the missile site. Unfortunately, the radio transmissions from his truck weren't scrambled or secure. Anyone who knew the right frequency could listen to them, and the sound quality was less than ideal. Major Joseph A. Kinderman—the head of the wing's security police, who manned the radio
at the command post—found that conversations were sometimes garbled and difficult to understand.

At about half past nine, Major Kinderman reported the latest set of tank pressures, and a sergeant added them to the chalkboard. For a moment, everyone focused on the pressure in the stage 1 fuel tank. During the hour since the last reading, it had fallen from -0.7 to -2 psi. Those numbers were disturbing, they suggested the tank was on the verge of collapse—and then a member of the K crew wondered, how the hell does anyone know what the tank pressures are? The control center had been evacuated at about half past eight. Kinderman asked Colonel Morris where those numbers came from.

Morris had provided the numbers, but didn't answer the question. He was sitting in Brocksmith's security police truck, parked at the end of the access road, off Highway 65.

Kinderman waited for a reply, and then Captain Mazzaro got on the radio and said that Kennedy had reentered the control center, without permission, violating the two-man rule.

Members of the K crew couldn't believe what Kennedy had just done. Colonel Moser was more upset than angry, and he wasn't thrilled about telling SAC headquarters. But the information that Kennedy obtained was extremely useful. Moser shared the numbers with everyone on the net and described Kennedy's unauthorized behavior. General Leavitt seemed unperturbed. Although one of SAC's cardinal rules had just been broken, Leavitt appreciated the importance of having the latest tank pressures—and the personal risk that Kennedy had taken to get them.

Colonel Morris was told not to allow any further actions at the launch complex without the approval of SAC headquarters. And while the PTS convoy drove to 4-7, the discussion on the net turned to whether the power at the complex should be completely shut off. The crew had turned off everything they could before leaving, but the water pumps on level 8 of the silo were still running, as were a series of fans, motors, and relays connected to the air-conditioning and ventilation systems. General Leavitt worried that a spark from one of these motors or the slightest bit of electrical arcing could ignite the fuel vapor in the silo. The command post called the Petit
Jean Electric Company, the local utility in Damascus, and asked it to send over workers who could climb the poles and disconnect the jacks from power lines leading to the complex.

The majority of the hazard team in Little Rock wanted to leave the power on. If the power were cut, the phone in the control center would go dead, and they wouldn't be able to monitor the vapor detector left behind there. The sound of the detector going off would signal that fuel vapor had seeped past blast door 8. Anyone who reentered the complex to save the missile would find the job more difficult, without power. You wouldn't be able to check tank pressures, turn on the purge fan, or do anything in the silo, aside from removing the pressure cap by hand and venting the stage 1 fuel tank.

The workers from Petit Jean were told to stand by, and for the time being, the power stayed on. An executive from Martin Marietta, the manufacturer of the Titan II, had joined the net, giving estimates of the tank pressures at which the stage 1 fuel tank was likely to collapse and the oxidizer tank to burst. The situation felt grim. Nevertheless, members of the hazard net debated how PTS Team B should proceed, step by step, upon their arrival at 4-7. First, everyone had to reach a consensus on the proper course of action—and then they had to write a checklist for it. The audio quality of the conference call was mediocre, and with so many people involved in the discussion, at half a dozen locations, it was often hard to figure out who was saying what.

One of the most authoritative voices had a strong Texan accent. It belonged to Colonel Ben Scallorn, the deputy chief of staff for missiles at Eighth Air Force headquarters in Louisiana. Moser had served under Scallorn at Whiteman Air Force Base and phoned him right after hearing about the accident in Damascus, wanting to get his opinion, privately, of how bad it sounded. Scallorn didn't sugar the pill; he thought it sounded really bad. He knew the Titan II as well as just about anyone else at SAC. He'd worked long hours in silos wearing a RFHCO and seen firsthand how dangerous the missile could be. During the discussions on the Missile Potential Hazard Net, he was blunt about what needed to be done at 4-7, regardless of whether anyone would listen.

•   •   •

W
HEN
B
EN
S
CALLORN
FIRST
REPORTED
to Little Rock Air Force Base in 1962, the Titan II silos there were still being dug. The missile maintenance department consisted of three people: a first lieutenant who ran it, a sergeant who served as his clerk, and a secretary. The 308th Strategic Missile Wing had not yet been activated, and the Air Force was eager to get the Titan IIs into the ground. Scallorn was glad to be in Little Rock, preparing to study missile maintenance. His previous assignment in the Air Force had been “recreational services.” For years he'd managed softball fields, swimming pools, movie theaters, and service clubs at SAC bases everywhere from Mississippi to Morocco. He was thirty-three, with a wife and three small boys. Helping to deploy America's largest ballistic missile, at the dawn of the missile age, promised to be a more rewarding career path. He was sent to Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, to learn how the Titan II worked—and six weeks later returned to Little Rock as chief of maintenance training at the 308th.

Scallorn visited the launch complexes around Little Rock as they were being constructed. Each one was a massive endeavor, requiring about
4.5 million pounds of steel and about
30 million pounds of concrete. Elaborate water, power, and hydraulic systems had to be laid underground. The silo door was too heavy to be transported by road; it arrived in eight pieces for assembly at the site. In order to bring missiles on alert as quickly as possible, the Air Force relied on
a management practice known as “concurrency”: work began on the Titan II complexes long before a Titan II missile had flown. Both would be completed at roughly the same time.

The Air Force also used concurrency to speed the deployment of other ballistic missiles. Led by the Army Corps of Engineers, tens of thousands of workers dug hundreds of silos to hide missiles beneath the landscape of rural America. It was
one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken by the Department of Defense. In addition to Arkansas, underground launch complexes were placed in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. Between Malmstrom Air
Force Base in Montana and Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, missile silos were dispersed across
an area extending for thirty-two thousand square miles.

About an hour north of Santa Barbara, along a stretch of the central California coast with forty miles of pristine beaches and rocky cliffs, the Air Force built a missile research center and the first operational missile site. Later known as Vandenberg Air Force Base, it provided a clear shot to target sites at Eniwetok and Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. Like the missile complexes in America's heartland, Vandenberg was rushed to completion. Within a few years of its opening in 1957, the base had launchpads, silos, underground control centers, storage facilities, administrative buildings, and
a population of about ten thousand.

Although concurrency sped the introduction of new weapons, it also created problems. A small design change in a missile could require costly changes in silo equipment that had already been installed. The prototype of a new airplane could be flight-tested repeatedly to discover its flaws—but a missile could be flown only once. And missiles were expensive, limiting the number of flight tests and the opportunity to learn what could go wrong. A successful launch depended on an intricate mix of human and technological factors. Design errors were often easier to correct than to anticipate. As a result, the reliability of America's early missiles left much to be desired. “
Like any machine,” General LeMay noted, with understatement, “they don't always work.”

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. On long-distance flights, it
missed by an average of twenty miles or more. During one test launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida,
a Snark that was supposed to fly no farther than Puerto Rico just kept on going, despite repeated attempts by range safety officers to make it self-destruct. When the slow-moving missile passed Puerto Rico, fighter planes were scrambled to shoot it down, but they couldn't find it. The Snark eventually ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the Amazonian rain forests of Brazil. Air Force tests
later suggested that during wartime, only one out of three Snarks would leave the ground and only one out of ten would hit its target. Nevertheless, dozens of Snarks were put on alert at Presque Isle Air Force Base in Maine. The missile carried a 4-megaton warhead.

Again and again, the symbolism of a missile seemed more important than its military usefulness.
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.