Command and Control (35 page)

Livingston put his hand over the metal grate. He could feel the heat through his glove.

Colonel Morris told the command post that he was bringing Livingston back.

Livingston returned from the complex, took off his helmet, and leaned against the bed of the pickup.

“
It's hot as hell over there,” he said.

At the command post, members of the K crew assumed that the mission was over. The fuel vapor hadn't dissipated—like Martin Marietta had
suggested it would—and the portable vapor detector couldn't reveal how high the level really was. It was at least 250 ppm, the cutoff mark that everyone had agreed upon.
SAC headquarters ordered Devlin and Hukle to enter the launch complex.

The men put on their helmets and air packs and grabbed their equipment. They had a lot more gear than Livingston. Between the two of them, Devlin and Hukle carried a portable vapor detector, flashlights, the hydraulic hand pump, and a tool bag holding screwdrivers, Crescent wrenches, and pliers. They also brought a couple of crowbars.

The outer steel door and the door at the bottom of the entrapment area were locked—and could no longer be jimmied open with a credit card. Devlin and Hukle would have to break into the launch complex with crowbars. Nobody knew how difficult that would be since nobody there had ever done it.

The two young airmen in RFHCO suits, holding their flashlights and crowbars and tools, went through the hole in the fence.

O
n January 23, 1961,
a B-52 bomber took off from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina, for an airborne alert. The flight plan was a long, circular route along the East Coast. At the end of the first loop, the B-52 met its tanker a couple of minutes early and refueled. At the end of the second loop, after more than ten hours in the air, the bomber refueled again. It was almost midnight. Amid the darkness, the boom operator of the tanker noticed fuel leaking from the B-52's right wing. Spray from the leak soon formed a wide plume, and within two minutes about forty thousand gallons of jet fuel had poured from the wing. The command post at Seymour Johnson told the pilot, Major Walter S. Tulloch, to dump the rest of the fuel in the ocean and prepare for an emergency landing. But fuel wouldn't drain from the tank inside the left wing, creating a weight imbalance. At half past midnight, with the flaps down and the landing gear extended, the B-52 went into an uncontrolled spin.

Major Tulloch heard a loud explosion and ordered his crew to bail out, as the plane started to break apart at an altitude of ten thousand feet. Four of the men ejected safely, including Tulloch. First Lieutenant Adam C.
Mattocks managed to jump through the escape hatch, while the bomber was upside down, and survived. Major Eugene Shelton ejected but suffered
a fatal head injury. The radar navigator, Major Eugene H. Richards, and Technical Sergeant Francis R. Barnish died in the crash.

The B-52 was carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs, each with a yield of 4 megatons. As the aircraft spun downward, centrifugal forces pulled a lanyard in the cockpit. The lanyard was attached to the bomb release mechanism. When the lanyard was pulled, the locking pins were removed from one of the bombs. The Mark 39 fell from the plane. The arming wires were yanked out, and the bomb responded as though it had been deliberately released by the crew above a target. The pulse generator activated the low-voltage thermal batteries. The drogue parachute opened, and then the main chute. The barometric switches closed. The timer ran out, activating the high-voltage thermal batteries. The bomb hit the ground, and the piezoelectric crystals inside the nose crushed. They sent a firing signal. But the weapon didn't detonate.

Every safety mechanism had failed, except one: the ready/safe switch in the cockpit. The switch was in the
SAFE
position when the bomb dropped. Had the switch been set to
GROUND
or
AIR
, the X-unit would've charged, the detonators would've triggered, and a thermonuclear weapon would have exploded in a field near Faro, North Carolina. When Air Force personnel found the Mark 39 later that morning, the bomb was harmlessly stuck in the ground, nose first, its parachute draped in the branches of a tree.

The other Mark 39 plummeted straight down and landed in a meadow just off Big Daddy's Road, near the Nahunta Swamp. Its parachutes had failed to open. The high explosives did not detonate, and the primary was largely undamaged. But the dense uranium secondary of the bomb penetrated more than seventy feet into the soggy ground. A recovery team never found it, despite weeks of digging.

The Air Force assured the public that the two weapons had been unarmed and that there was never any risk of a nuclear explosion. Those statements were misleading.
The T-249 control box and ready/safe switch, installed in every one of SAC's bombers, had already raised concerns at Sandia. The switch required a low-voltage signal of brief duration to
operate—and that kind of signal could easily be provided by a stray wire or a short circuit, as a B-52 full of electronic equipment disintegrated midair.

A year after the North Carolina accident, a SAC ground crew removed four Mark 28 bombs from a B-47 bomber and noticed that
all of the weapons were armed. But the seal on the ready/safe switch in the cockpit was intact, and the knob hadn't been turned to
GROUND
or
AIR
. The bombs had not been armed by the crew.
A seven-month investigation by Sandia found that a tiny metal nut had come off a screw inside the plane and lodged against an unused radar-heating circuit. The nut had created a new electrical pathway, allowing current to reach an arming line—and bypass the ready/safe switch. A similar glitch on the B-52 that crashed near Goldsboro would have caused a 4-megaton thermonuclear explosion. “
It would have been bad news—in spades,” Parker F. Jones, a safety engineer at Sandia, wrote in a memo about the accident. “
One simple, dynamo-technology, low-voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe!”

With strong northerly winds,
the groundburst of that 4-megaton bomb in Goldsboro would have deposited lethal fallout over Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. And the timing would have been unfortunate: the new president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, had delivered his inaugural address only three days earlier, promising renewal and change, vowing to “
pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” The spirit of youthful optimism sweeping the United States would have been dimmed by the detonation of a hydrogen bomb in North Carolina and an evacuation of the nation's capital.

The Goldsboro accident, far from being an isolated or improbable event, was a portent of the nuclear threats that the Kennedy administration would have to confront. Robert S. McNamara, the new secretary of defense, learned about the accident during his third day on the job.
The story scared the hell out of him. McNamara knew remarkably little about nuclear weapons. The previous month, when Kennedy had asked him to head the Department of Defense, McNamara was the president of the Ford Motor
Company. He was a young, supremely self-confident businessman devoted to systems analysis and efficiency. At the Harvard Business School, he'd taught accounting. Aside from a three-year stint in the Army Air Forces—where he'd served in the Office of Statistical Control and helped General LeMay calculate optimal fuel use for the bombing of Japan—McNamara had no military experience. And he'd spent little time thinking about military strategy or procurement. Determined to shake things up at the Pentagon, McNamara found himself, instead, feeling profoundly shaken during his first week on the job.

The B-52 crash in North Carolina wasn't the only accident that involved fully assembled, sealed-pit weapons—and McNamara soon learned about others.
A B-47 carrying a Mark 39 bomb had caught fire while taking off at Dyess Air Force Base, near Abilene, Texas. At an altitude of about two hundred feet, the pilot realized the plane was on fire, banked to avoid a populated area, and ordered the crew to bail out. Three of the four crew members got out in time. The plane entered a vertical dive, hit the ground, and vanished in a fireball. The high explosives of the hydrogen bomb detonated but didn't produce a nuclear yield.
A few weeks later a B-47 carrying a Mark 39 bomb caught fire on the runway at Chennault Air Force Base in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The crew escaped, and the weapon didn't explode. It melted into radioactive slag.

In the skies above Hardinsburg, Kentucky, a B-52 carrying two hydrogen bombs collided with a tanker while attempting to refuel. The crew of the B-52 heard
a “crunching sound,” all the lights went out, the cabin rapidly decompressed, and the plane began to disintegrate. Four of the crew ejected safely. The other four were killed, as were all four members of the tanker's crew. The wreckage of the two planes covered an area of roughly twenty-seven square miles. The hydrogen bombs were torn open by the crash. The nuclear cores of their primaries were discovered, intact, resting on piles of broken high explosives.

At an air defense site in Jackson Township, New Jersey, a helium tank ruptured near a BOMARC missile, starting a fire. A pair of explosions soon followed inside the concrete shelter that housed the missile. Fifty-five other BOMARCs lay in similar shelters, beneath corrugated steel roofs,
nearby. When emergency personnel arrived, the fire was out of control. They put fire hoses in the entrances to the burning shelter and fled the area.
An Air Force security officer called the state police and mistakenly reported that a nuclear weapon had exploded at the site—spreading panic throughout central New Jersey and prompting civil defense authorities to go on full alert in New York City, seventy miles to the north.
Fallout from the BOMARC's 10-kiloton warhead, it was feared, could reach Trenton, the state capital, Princeton, Newark—and, possibly, Manhattan. Firefighters returned to the missile site about an hour and a half after the initial explosions and put out the fire. The warhead had fallen out of the nose cone. The high explosives had burned, instead of detonating, and the nuclear core had melted onto the floor. The shelter contained most of the radioactivity. But water from the fire hoses had swept plutonium residue under the doors, down the street, and into a drainage ditch.

The accidents in North Carolina and Texas worried Robert McNamara the most. In one crash, the failure of a single mechanical switch could have led to a full-scale, thermonuclear explosion; in the other, the detonation of the Mark 39's high explosives was the sort of one-point safety test that you never want to conduct in the real world. The Mark 39 had passed the test—this time. It wasn't something that McNamara wanted to see repeated. The lapses in weapon safety seemed to be part of a much larger problem: a sense of disarray and mismanagement at the Pentagon, extending from the budget process to the planning for nuclear war. In his view, the Department of Defense had been saddled with the previous administration's intellectual “
bankruptcy in both strategic policy and in the force structure.” McNamara was determined to bring order, rational management, and common sense to the workings of the Pentagon, as quickly as possible.

•   •   •

D
URING
THE
1960
CAMPAIGN
, John F. Kennedy had repeatedly attacked President Eisenhower for allowing the Soviet Union to surpass the United States in military power. “
The Communists will have a dangerous lead in intercontinental missiles through 1963,” the platform of the
Democratic Party declared, and “the Republican administration has no plans to catch up.” Kennedy argued that Eisenhower's strategy of massive retaliation had left the United States in a helpless position, unable to prevent the Soviets from subverting and overthrowing governments friendly to the West. An overreliance on nuclear weapons had made American promises to defend the free world seem hollow. “
We have been driving ourselves into a corner where the only choice is all or nothing at all, world devastation or submission,” Kennedy warned.

General Maxwell Taylor's book,
The Uncertain Trumpet
, and its call for a nuclear strategy of flexible response had greatly impressed Kennedy. He agreed with Taylor's central thesis: in a crisis, the president should have a wide range of military options. Kennedy wanted the ability to fight limited wars, conventional wars—and a nuclear war with the Soviets that could be stopped short of mutual annihilation. “Controlled response” and “controlled escalation” and “pauses for negotiation” became buzzwords in the Kennedy administration. If the American military had the means to prevail in a variety of different ways, with or without nuclear weapons, the United States could resist Soviet influence throughout the world. “
The record of the Romans made clear,” Kennedy later told his national security staff, “that their success was dependent on their will and ability to fight successfully at the edges of their empire.”

Despite the harsh, personal attacks during the presidential campaign, Eisenhower helped the new administration with its reappraisal of nuclear strategy. His science adviser's memo on the shortcomings of the Single Integrated Operational Plan was forwarded to McNamara and Kennedy. The memo supported many of the arguments against the SIOP made by General Taylor and leading officers in the Navy.
The chief of naval operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, warned that such a large, undiscriminating attack on the Soviet Union would deposit lethal fallout not only on American allies like South Korea and Japan but also on the U.S. Navy's Pacific fleet. A reappraisal of the nation's entire military stance now seemed urgent, and President Kennedy asked McNamara to lead it—to raise fundamental questions about how weapons were procured, what purpose they served, and whether they were even necessary.

Although a year older than the president, McNamara, at forty-four, was the youngest person, thus far, to head the Department of Defense. And he recruited a group of cocky and iconoclastic young men to join the administration, academics from Harvard and MIT, RAND analysts, economists, Rhodes scholars. Henry Rowen, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford who soon played a large role in nuclear planning, was thirty-six. Harold Brown, chosen to guide Pentagon research on new weapon systems and technology, was thirty-three. Alain Enthoven, an economist who rigorously applied cost-benefit analysis to the defense budget, was thirty. Later depicted as “
whiz kids,” “defense intellectuals,” “the best and the brightest,” McNamara's team was determined to transform America's nuclear strategy and defense spending.

Three days after the Goldsboro accident, McNamara met with members of the Pentagon's Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG). It had recently completed a study,
WSEG Report No. 50, that described the Soviet forces the United States would most likely face by the mid-1960s and compared the merits of different tactics to oppose them. Eisenhower's secretary of defense, Thomas B. Gates, had seen the report a few months earlier and thought McNamara should know about it. McNamara's briefing on WSEG Report No. 50, scheduled to last a few hours, wound up occupying a full day. The authors of the report had measured the economic efficiency of various American weapon systems—explaining, for example, that
the annual operating costs of keeping a B-52 bomber on ground alert was about nine times larger than the annual maintenance costs of a Minuteman missile. That was just the sort of data that Robert McNamara craved. But the authors of WSEG R-50 had also reached a conclusion that nobody in the Kennedy administration wanted to hear:
America's command-and-control system was so complex, outdated, and unreliable that a “controlled” or “flexible” response to a Soviet attack would be impossible. In fact, the president of the United States might not be able to make any response; he would probably be killed during the first moments of a nuclear war.