Command and Control (4 page)

Perhaps the most influential bestseller of the year was
The Third World War: August 1985
, a novel written by a retired British officer, General Sir John Hackett. It offered a compelling, realistic account of a full-scale war between NATO and the Soviet bloc. After a long series of European tank
battles, the British cities of Birmingham and Wolverhampton are incinerated by a Soviet nuclear strike. The Russian city of Minsk is hit by nuclear weapons in retaliation, and the shock of its destruction causes the swift collapse of the Soviet Union. The moral of the story was clear: the United States and its allies needed to increase their military spending. “
In the last few years before the outbreak of war the West began to wake up to the danger it faced,” Hackett wrote, “and in the time available did just enough in repair of its neglected defenses to enable it, by a small margin, to survive.”
Ronald Reagan later called
The Third World War
an unusually important book. And it helped to launch a new literary genre,
the techno-thriller, in which military heroism was celebrated, the intricate details of weaponry played a central role in the narrative, and Cold War victories were achieved through the proper application of force.

On television,
The Waltons
, a long-running drama about an ordinary family's struggles during the Great Depression, was facing cancellation. Instead of worrying about how the show's young protagonist, John-Boy, would overcome adversity, American viewers were now far more interested in who'd shot J.R., the wealthy lead character of a new series,
Dallas
. Other family dramas about the rich and dysfunctional soon followed:
Dynasty, Falcon Crest, The Colbys
. Situation comedies dealing with topical or working-class issues—like
M*A*S*H
,
Maude
,
Sanford
and Son
,
All in the Family—
were relics of a different era. In Hollywood, the year 1980 marked the end of the highly personal, director-driven filmmaking of the previous decade. Aside from Martin Scorsese's
Raging Bull
and Robert Redford's
Ordinary People,
due to open on September 19, the most notable movies were big-budget comedies, action pictures, and sequels like
Smokey and the Bandit II.

The popular music of a historical moment can be more memorable and evocative than its books, politics, or films. A number of songs released in 1980 had the ability to worm their way into your brain and resist all attempts to dislodge them: “Do That to Me One More Time,” by Captain & Tennille; “You May Be Right,” by Billy Joel; “Sailing” and “Ride Like the Wind,” by Christopher Cross. Disco was finally dead, its fate sealed by the closing of the nightclub Studio 54 and the opening of
Can't Stop the Music
,
a movie starring the Village People. Punk was dead, too, and taking its place was the lighter, dance-oriented New Wave of Devo, The Police, The B-52's, and Talking Heads. The hard rock of The Rolling Stones had given way to the softer pop sounds of “Emotional Rescue.” Led Zeppelin broke up, transforming Van Halen into America's favorite heavy metal band. Turning the radio dial, on almost every FM station, you could hear rough edges becoming smooth. Outlaw country no longer threatened the Nashville establishment. It had fully entered the mainstream, with Willie Nelson's hit “On the Road Again” and Waylon Jennings's “Theme from the
Dukes of Hazzard.
” Bob Dylan now refused to sing any of his old songs. Born again and on the road, he played only gospel. John Lennon was in New York City, recording a new album for the first time in years and looking forward, in a few weeks, to his fortieth birthday. “
Life begins at forty,” Lennon told an interviewer. “It's like:
Wow!
what's going to happen next?”

In retrospect, it's easy to say that a particular year marked a turning point in history. And yet sometimes the significance of contemporary events is grasped even in the moment. The United States of the 1960s and the 1970s, with its liberalism and countercultural turmoil, was about to become something different. The year 1980, the start of a new decade, was when that change became palpable, in ways both trivial and telling. During the first week of September, the antiwar activist and radical Abbie Hoffman surrendered to federal authorities after more than six years on the run. Before turning himself in, Hoffman sat for a prime-time television interview with Barbara Walters. Another radical leader, Jerry Rubin, had recently chosen a different path. In 1967, Hoffman and Rubin had tossed dollar bills over the balcony at the New York Stock Exchange as a protest against the evils of capitalism. In 1980, Rubin took a job as an investment analyst on Wall Street. “
Politics and rebellion distinguished the '60's,” he explained in the
New York Times
. “Money and financial interest will capture the passion of the '80's.” Rubin had once again spotted a cultural shift and tried to place himself at its cutting edge. At the time,
the highest-paid banker in the United States was Roger E. Anderson, the head of Continental Illinois National Bank, who earned about $710,000 a year. The incomes on Wall Street would soon rise. Suits and ties were back in fashion.
Mustaches, beards, and bell-bottoms had become uncool, and an ironic guide to the new zeitgeist,
The Official Preppy Handbook,
was just arriving in stores. During a speech at the Republican convention that summer, Congressman Jack Kemp had noted what others did not yet acknowledge or see: “
There is a tidal wave coming, a political tidal wave as powerful as the one that hit in 1932, when an era of Republican dominance gave way to the New Deal.”

A
t the predeparture briefing, Childers and his crew learned that “major maintenance” was scheduled at Launch Complex 374-5 that day. The missile was being taken off alert so that the reentry vehicle containing its warhead could be replaced. For an instructor crew, major maintenance was a waste of time. Lieutenant Serrano was training to become a deputy missile combat crew commander, and he needed to practice routine tasks in a control center. Captain Mazzaro found a commander who would switch complexes. Instead of 4-5, the instructor crew would go to 4-7, outside Damascus. The change of plans solved the training issue but delayed the departure of both crews. Entry codes had to be swapped, duty orders rewritten and authenticated. The only important difference between the two launch complexes was their distance from Little Rock Air Force Base. Four-seven was a lot farther away, which meant Childers and his crew probably wouldn't be getting home until noon the next day.

Mazzaro, Childers, Holder, Fuller, and Serrano tossed their bags into the back of an Air Force blue Chevy Suburban, climbed into it, and began the hour-long drive to Damascus. Within a mile, the Suburban's alternator light came on. So they had to turn around, go back to the base, find a new vehicle, move their gear, and fill out paperwork before leaving again. The day was not getting off to a smooth start.

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 missiles were dispersed roughly seven to ten miles from each other, so that in the event of a surprise attack, one Soviet warhead couldn't destroy more than one Titan II silo. In the American West, ICBMs were usually set amid a vast, empty landscape, far from populated areas. In central Arkansas, the Titan II complexes were buried off backcountry roads, near small farms and little towns with names like Velvet Ridge, Mountain Home, Wonderview, and Old Texas. It was an unlikely setting for some of the most powerful nuclear weapons in the American arsenal. 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.

To reach Launch Complex 374-7, the crew drove west through the towns of Hamlet and Vilonia, then north on Highway 65, a two-lane road that climbed into the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. 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. The local farms were usually thirty to forty acres in size and owned by the same families for generations. Farmers ran cattle, owned a few pigs, grew vegetables in the backyard. They were patriotic and rarely complained about the missiles in the neighborhood. Most of the income generated by the 308th was spent in the area around Little Rock. Aside from the occasional purchase of coffee and doughnuts, the missile crews passing through these rural communities added little to the local economy. For the most part, the airmen were treated warmly or hardly noticed. Despite the poverty, the feel of the place was bucolic. In early fall the fields were deep green, dotted with round bales of hay, and the leaves on the trees—the black gums, sweet gums, maples, and oaks—were beginning to turn.

The population of Damascus was about four hundred. The town consisted of a gas station, a small grocery store, and not much else. A few miles
north along Highway 65, right after an old white farmhouse with a rusted tin roof, the combat crew turned left onto a narrow paved road, crossed a cattle guard, and drove half a mile. The launch complex was hidden from view until the road reached the crest of a low hill, and then there it was: a flat, square, three-acre patch of land covered in gravel and ringed in chain link, with the massive silo door in the middle, a couple of paved, rectangular parking areas on either side of it, half a dozen antennae rising from the ground, and a tall wooden pole that had three status lights mounted on top of it, one green, one yellow, one red, and a Klaxon. The green said that all was clear, the yellow warned of a potential hazard, and the red light meant trouble. It rotated like the red lights on an old-fashioned highway patrol car and, accompanied by the loud blare of the Klaxon, warned that there was an emergency on the site—or that the missile was about to take off.

The launch complex didn't look like a high-security, military outpost. The gray concrete silo door could have passed, to the untrained eye, as the cover of a municipal wastewater treatment plant. The sign on the entry gate spelled it out. “WARNING,” it said, in red capital letters, followed by these words in capital blue: “U.S. AIR FORCE INSTALLATION, IT IS UNLAWFUL TO ENTER THIS AREA WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE INSTALLATION COMMANDER.” The barbed wire atop the chain-link fence discouraged a casual stroll onto the property, as did the triangular AN/TPS-39 radar units. Mounted on short metal poles and nicknamed “tipsies,” they detected the slightest motion near the silo door or the air intake shaft and set off an alarm.

Captain Mazzaro got out of the truck, picked up the phone at the gate, and notified the control center of their arrival. The gate was unlocked by the crew underground, and Mazzaro walked across the complex to the access portal, a sixteen-foot-square slab of concrete raised about a foot off the ground. Two steel doors lay flat on the slab; beneath one was an elevator, below the other a stairway. Mazzaro opened the door on the left, climbed down a flight of concrete stairs, and waited a moment to be buzzed through another steel door. After he passed through it, the door locked behind him. Mazzaro had entered the entrapment area, a metal stairway enclosed on
one side by a wall and on the other by steel mesh that rose to the ceiling. It looked like he'd walked into a cage.

At the bottom of the stairs was another locked door, with a television camera above it. Mazzaro picked up the phone on the wall, called the control center again, pulled a code card from his pocket, and read the six-letter code aloud. After being granted permission to enter, he took out some matches and set the code card on fire. Then he dropped the burning card into a red canister mounted on the steel mesh. The rest of the crew was allowed to enter the complex. They parked the Suburban, checked the site for any signs of weather damage or a propellant leak, headed down the access portal, waited a moment in the entrapment area, then were buzzed through the door at the bottom of the stairs.

The crew descended two more flights and reached an enormous blast door at the bottom of the stairs, about thirty feet underground. The access portal and its metal stairway were not designed to survive a nuclear blast. Everything beyond this blast door was. The steel door was about seven feet tall, five feet wide, and one foot thick.
It weighed roughly six thousand pounds. The pair of
steel doorjambs that kept it in place weighed an additional thirty-one thousand pounds. The blast door was operated hydraulically, with an electric switch. When the door was locked, four large steel pins extended from it into the frame, creating a formidable, airtight seal. When the door was unlocked, it could easily be swung open or shut by hand. The launch complex had four identical blast doors. For some reason this first one, at the bottom of the access portal, was blast door 6.

Mazzaro picked up a phone near the door and called the control center again. He pushed a button on the wall, someone in the control center pushed a button simultaneously, and the pins in the door retracted from the frame. The crew opened the huge door and stepped into the blast lock, a room about eleven feet long and twelve feet wide. It was a transitional space between the access portal and the rest of the underground complex. Blast door 6 was at one end, blast door 7 at the other. In order to protect the missile and the control center from an explosion, the doors had been wired so that both couldn't be open at the same time. Beyond blast door 7
was another blast lock, “the junction.” To the right of it, a long steel-lined tunnel, “the cableway,” led to the missile. To the left, a shorter tunnel led to the control center. These two corridors were blocked by opposing blast doors, numbers 8 and 9, that also couldn't be opened at the same time.

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. Blast door 9 at one site might require frequent maintenance; the control center air-conditioning might be temperamental at another. The typical crew was assigned to a single complex and pulled every alert there. Some crew members had spent two nights a week, for ten years or more, within the same underground facility. But an instructor crew served at different sites, depending on their availability. Al Childers had gotten to know all of the Titan II complexes in Arkansas and, for the most part, couldn't tell the difference between them. Sometimes he had to look at the map on the wall of the control center to remember where he was. One launch complex, however, stood apart from the rest: 373-4 was known as the “ghost site.” It was the first complex where Childers was stationed, and odd things seemed to happen there. Pumps that could be operated only by hand suddenly went on by themselves. Lights turned on and off for no reason. Childers didn't believe in the supernatural, and most officers laughed at the idea that the complex might be haunted. But some crew members thought that every now and then it felt pretty odd down there.
Rodney Holder was once working in the silo at night with another crew member. The silo had a manually operated elevator that traveled from levels 2 to 8, and the men had left its door open. The bell in the elevator started to ring. It rang whenever the door was open and someone on another level needed the elevator. Holder couldn't think of anyone who might need a ride. He called the control center and learned that nobody else was in the silo. The bell kept ringing. Holder and his partner were spooked, quickly finished their work, and returned to the control center.

•   •   •

L
AUNCH
C
OMPLEX
373-4
HAD
BEEN
the site of the worst Titan II accident thus far. On August 9, 1965, the complex outside Searcy, Arkansas, was being modified to make it more likely to survive a nuclear strike. Construction crews were hardening the silo, improving the blast doors, adjusting the hydraulics, installing emergency lights. The reentry vehicle and the warhead had been removed from the missile (
serial number 62-0006). But its fuel tanks and oxidizer tanks were full. Four crew members manned the control center, as scores of construction workers labored underground and topside on a hot summer afternoon.

It was Gary Lay's first day on the job. He was seventeen years old and had just graduated from high school in Searcy. His father had found him work at the complex. Lay was glad to have it. The money was good, and the temperature in the silo was a hell of a lot cooler than it was outdoors. Lay had been hired for the summer to do menial tasks and clean up after other workers. He'd never visited a missile complex before. His safety training consisted of watching
You and the Titan II,
a one-hour film. When it was over, Lay was handed a mask with a filter and told, in case of emergency, to use the elevator. He spent the morning at the bottom of the silo, quit for lunch around noon, and came back an hour later.

At approximately one o'clock, Lay was standing in the underground cableway when someone asked him to grab a bucket and a mop from the silo. He walked down the corridor, which entered the silo at level 2. A few minutes later, he was talking to a group of workers in the level 2 equipment area, not far from the emergency escape ladder. 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. Lay somehow managed to get back to the level 2 equipment area. He blindly felt his way along the wall, fell down, got back up, and instinctively headed toward the origin of the fire while others ran away from it.

At about the same time that Lay heard the big puff and felt the heat, the
FIRE DIESEL AREA
light in the control center began to flash red. Klaxons sounded throughout the complex, and the revolving red status light on the outdoor pole lit up. Captain David A. Yount, the crew commander, told everyone to evacuate, giving the order three times over the public address system. And then the power went out.

Pipe fitters who'd been working on the blast doors ran up the access portal stairway. Smoke pouring from a vent in the silo door told workers topside that something was wrong. A number of them tried to get down to the silo but were driven back by thick clouds of smoke. Lay made it to the cableway, then to the control center, suffering from second- and third-degree burns. He was placed in a decontamination shower. While Lay was being rinsed off with cold water, two crew members, Sergeant Ronald O. Wallace and Airman First Class Donald E. Hastings, put on air packs, grabbed fire extinguishers, and prepared to enter the silo. Amid the commotion, they noticed that another worker, Hubert A. Saunders, was calmly sitting in the control center. Saunders had been painting at level 1A of the silo, near the top of the missile, when smoke started drifting toward him. The lights went out just as he reached a ladder, and he climbed twenty feet down in the pitch black. Saunders had worked at Titan II complexes for years and knew the layout. He held his breath while passing through the level 2 equipment area, then crawled on his hands and knees down the cableway. Aside from inhaling some smoke, he was fine. And he'd never let go of his paint can and brush. Wallace and Hastings rushed down the long, dark cableway to battle the fire and rescue survivors. The smoke was so dense that they could not see the floor.