Command and Control (57 page)

A security police truck came toward them on the access road. Short slowed down but didn't stop. He stuck his head out the window and yelled, we've got Kennedy, Livingston is still on the complex, go down there and try to find him.

Roberts and Green had no idea who was in the truck, yelling at them. They didn't know what Livingston looked like or where he might be. But they were willing to look for him. Green thought about his six-year-old
boy, fast asleep at home, completely unaware of what his father was doing right now.

As they neared the complex, a large cylindrical object appeared in the road.

Well, damn, there's the warhead, Green thought. He carefully drove around it.

Green stopped the truck, and they walked to the northeast section of the complex, looking for a way to get through the fence. They didn't have a flashlight. Green climbed onto a light-all unit and tried to point it toward the fence, hoping to find a hole. It wouldn't budge.

The light-all unit was attached to a Dodge Power Wagon, and Green had an idea: I'll drive this big pickup right through that fence.

Green climbed into the driver's seat. Someone had left the motor running. He put the engine into first gear and floored it. The truck smashed into the fence, but the fence held. He backed up and tried again—still, no luck. The fence was too strong, and the truck felt kind of sluggish. He got out of the cab and noticed that all four tires had been blown out by the explosion. It was running on rims.

Green thought that Roberts must have returned to their pickup truck. He walked over to it, but nobody was there. He started the truck and followed the southern section of the fence, looking for a hole big enough to drive through. But he couldn't find one, and the pickup got stuck on some large pieces of cement. After ditching the truck, Green found a small hole in the fence, entered the complex on foot, and started calling for Livingston and Roberts. Nobody replied. It was hard to see anything, with all the smoke and dust. The lenses of his gas mask fogged up. He kept tripping over debris and falling down. He worried that something terrible had happened, that Roberts had fallen into a hole and gotten badly hurt. Green shouted for Livingston and Roberts and realized that he was lost.

•   •   •

J
IM
S
ANDAKER
HAD
BEEN
DROPPED
OFF
at the access control point by the two security officers, and he didn't plan to remain there for long. The men who'd just returned with Kennedy said that Livingston was still alive
but the fumes were pretty strong at the complex. Sandaker looked around for a RFHCO suit, found one, and started to get into it.

Under the Category I rules, you needed at least one other person in RFHCO, as backup, whenever you put on the suit. Colonel Morris objected to Sandaker reentering the complex by himself.

Given the circumstances, Sandaker thought those rules were total bullshit. He was going to look for Livingston.

I'll go with you, Richard English said, claiming to have been trained to wear the suit.

Sandaker had a feeling that English was lying. He couldn't believe this old guy was going to put on a RFHCO suit. He worried that English would have a heart attack. Doing anything in a RFHCO was hard work; the whole outfit, with the air pack, weighed almost sixty pounds. The two men had never met, but Sandaker was glad not to be heading into the complex alone.

Colonel Jimmie D. Gray had returned to the site, after looking for water at a nearby farmhouse. Gray had started the night at the Little Rock command post, drove to 4-7 with food and supplies before the explosion, and stuck around after it. He helped Sandaker and English get into the RFHCO suits, and Rossborough drove them to the complex in the mobile command post. This time, he wore a gas mask.

Sandaker and English rode on the back of the truck, dangling their legs over the taillights. Rossborough dropped them off. The communications system on the complex no longer worked, and the two men wouldn't be able to talk to each other with the headsets inside their helmets. They agreed to signal with their flashlights if one of them got into trouble. They found the hole in the fence and walked through it. From a distance they looked like astronauts exploring a hostile planet.

•   •   •

J
IMMY
R
OBERTS
HADN
'
T
SEEN
or heard Green slamming the Dodge Power Wagon into the fence. He'd wandered off, searched through Colonel Morris's battered pickup for a flashlight, failed to find one, and stumbled
upon a hole in the fence. Roberts climbed through it and, within minutes, felt completely lost. A couple of thoughts entered his mind: he didn't want to fall into a hole, and he didn't want that propane tank, hissing beside the road, to catch on fire and explode. He shouted for Livingston and Green, but got no response. He kept shouting their names—and then he heard someone reply.

“
Okay, keep on yelling,” Roberts said, “and I'll come to your voice.”

About twenty feet from the access portal, Roberts found David Livingston lying on the ground. His face was bloody, and he had a wound in his abdomen. But Livingston was conscious and alert.

Roberts picked him up and started to carry him toward the fence. It wasn't easy to carry someone while breathing through a gas mask. Roberts started to feel dizzy, and his mask clouded up with sweat.

•   •   •

A
T
THE
ACCESS
CONTROL
POINT
, Don Green suddenly appeared in a pickup truck. Green got out of the truck, looking distraught, and said that Roberts was missing, that he may have fallen into a deep hole. Green needed a new gas mask, he needed to go back to the complex and find Roberts. The others thought Green was delirious, but he felt like they just didn't understand. His gas mask was clogged, he had to get a new one and find Roberts. Mueller gave Green a shot of Benadryl and persuaded him to sit down for a moment.

•   •   •

W
ALKING
THROUGH
THE
COMPLEX
, Sandaker felt scared. He'd been told to watch out for the warhead and its high explosives. Debris was scattered everywhere, and in the darkness you couldn't tell what any of it was. The explosion had stripped the concrete off steel rebar, and the rebar had been twisted into all kinds of strange shapes, looming out of the smoke. Sandaker had worked at 4-7 many times, but now nothing seemed familiar. The RFHCO helmet prevented him from calling out for English and Livingston. Within minutes, he was lost.

•   •   •

R
OBERTS
COULDN
'
T
CARRY
L
IVINGSTON
ANYMORE
and put him on the ground.

Livingston pleaded with Roberts not to leave him.

“
Look, we're going to make it out of here,” Roberts said. “I'm going to have to carry you on my back.”

Roberts carried Livingston on his back for a while, but then had to put him down again, unable to carry him another step. Roberts said that he'd go find help and promised to come right back.

“
Please don't leave me,” Livingston said.

Roberts picked him up again and put him on his back.

•   •   •

S
ANDAKER
WANDERED
THROUGH
THE
COMPLEX
, looking for the access portal, but couldn't find it. He felt odd being lost in a place that he knew like the back of his hand. Sandaker spotted English, about thirty feet away. He was turning his flashlight on and off. That meant trouble.

English couldn't walk any farther in the RFHCO suit. He was exhausted and signaled to Sandaker that he was running out of air.

They turned around and tried to find their way out.

•   •   •

R
OBERTS
FEARED
HE
WAS
ABOUT
to pass out. He put Livingston down near the fence and promised to come back for him. He made his way to the battered pickup near the gate and saw two men in the distance wearing RFHCO suits. He flashed the headlights and honked the horn, but they didn't see him. And then Roberts saw another truck parked nearby. Someone was sitting in the front seat.

The door of the truck opened, and a man got out, with a flashlight. He was wearing a gas mask and a red bowling shirt.

Roberts thought, “Great.”

Rossborough and Roberts reentered the complex, found Livingston, picked him up, and carried him out. They carried him through bushes and
around debris. It felt like running an obstacle course in the dark. They got tired and had to put Livingston down.

As Sandaker and English took off their RFHCOs, they saw Rossborough and Roberts about twenty yards away. They ran over to help, carried Livingston to the truck, and gently lowered him into the back. Sandaker rode with his friend, while the others sat in the cab.

Livingston asked Sandaker not to tell his mother what had happened.

“
Please don't tell my mother,” he said, again and again.

•   •   •

A
BOUT
AN
HOUR
after the explosion, Colonel Jones and the rest of the Disaster Response Force returned to the access control point. Jones had been listening to Colonel Morris on the radio and suddenly thought: if he sounds OK back there, what am I doing in Damascus?

Mueller did the best he could to treat Kennedy in the ambulance. Kennedy was pale and thirsty and having difficulty breathing. Mueller started him on an IV and gave him some medicine to prevent pulmonary edema—an excess of fluid in the lungs that could be caused by oxidizer exposure. Kennedy also had a big hole in his right leg. His long johns reeked of rocket fuel, and Mueller cut them off.

Livingston arrived in the back of the pickup, and Mueller examined him there. In some ways, Livingston seemed to be in better shape than Kennedy. His face wasn't as pale, and he hadn't passed out. But the wound in his abdomen was deep. Pieces of concrete were lodged in there, and you could see his intestines. Mueller wanted to give him an IV but couldn't. The ambulance only had one.

Colonel Jones had already requested a helicopter to take Kennedy to the hospital. The command post in Little Rock said that the chopper was on its way. But there was no sign of it.

The helicopter had not yet departed from Little Rock Air Force Base. Its crew had been instructed to bring portable vapor detectors to 4-7. Nobody could find any, and the chopper sat there and waited, for more than half an hour, while people looked for the vapor detectors.

Jones couldn't understand why the helicopter hadn't arrived yet.
Kennedy and Livingston were in rough shape, and the ambulance wasn't equipped to deal with their injuries. Livingston needed an IV, right away. Jones told Colonel Morris that he was taking them to the hospital in Conway.

Hukle and Kennedy rode in the ambulance. Livingston remained in the back of the pickup truck with Sandaker, who kept him talking. And Colonel Jones led the way in a station wagon. The convoy had to drive slowly because Livingston was in so much pain.

The helicopter finally took off from Little Rock—without any vapor detectors, because none could be found. The pilot was told to meet the convoy at Launch Complex 374-6, near the town of Republican. But Jones and the others mistakenly drove past it. Instead they met the chopper at Launch Complex 374-5, outside Springhill. The chief of aerospace medicine at the base, another physician, and four medics immediately got to work on the injured men. Kennedy was given a shot of morphine, and Livingston finally got an IV. Sandaker said good-bye to them both, and the helicopter took off for Little Rock. It was five in the morning.

A couple of security police officers picked up Colonel Morris at the access control point and drove him to the hospital.

Colonel Jimmie Gray was the only person left at the site. He waited there, alone, as dawn approached, fires still burned, and the warhead lay somewhere in the dark.

A
t the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama,
Matthew Arnold was taught how to deactivate chemical and biological weapons. “
Chlorine is your friend,” the instructor told the class. The principal ingredient in household bleach would render almost every deadly pathogen, nerve agent, and blister agent harmless. That's good to know, Arnold thought. Although Redstone was an Army facility, he'd been sent there by the Air Force. The three-week course at Redstone was the first step toward becoming an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician. Students were no longer exposed to nerve gas and then told to inject themselves with atropine—an exercise to build confidence that the antidote would work during a chemical attack. Instead, they were shown footage of a goat being exposed to a nerve agent and given an injection. The goat lived. But the film and the lectures at Redstone suggested how dangerous the work of an EOD technician could be, and a number of people dropped out.

The attrition rate was even higher among those students who, like Arnold, reached the next step—seven months of training, six days a week, at the Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal School in Indian Head, Maryland.
About one third of the students typically flunked out or quit, and only one fifth completed the course on his or her first try. The classes at Indian Head focused mainly on conventional weapons. EOD trainees were required to study every kind of ordnance used by every military in the
world. The render safe procedures were similar for most munitions, regardless of their national origin: remove the fuze if it could easily be done, or just attach a small explosive charge to the weapon, retreat a safe distance, and blow it up.

Unlike the bomb squads run by law enforcement agencies, the Air Force EOD teams usually didn't care about preserving evidence. They were trained to get rid of the hazard, as quickly as possible, and then get out of the way. Arnold learned how to render safe all the conventional warheads, rockets, artillery shells, and bombs in the American arsenal. He also learned how to defuse the sort of handmade, improvised explosive devices used by terrorists groups like the Red Brigades and the Palestine Liberation Front. The handmade stuff could be tricky and unpredictable; the military ordnance, simpler but more powerful. An EOD technician had to approach both kinds with the same mental attitude—disciplined, thoughtful, patient, and calm.

Arnold performed well enough to enter Division Six, the program at Indian Head that taught students how to dismantle a nuclear weapon. The course began with a lesson on the dangers of radioactivity. Every class was shown the film of Louis Slotin dying from radiation sickness in 1946, after his criticality accident at Los Alamos. It was hard to watch. Slotin had been fully conscious and in enormous pain, as his skin swelled, changed color, blistered, and peeled away.

After learning how to use radiation detectors and calculate safe exposure times, the trainees became familiar with various nuclear weapon designs. At the time, the United States had about twenty-five different types—missiles, rockets, warheads, and bombs; artillery shells, depth charges, torpedoes, and mines; large weapons and small ones, atomic and thermonuclear. The most powerful were the Mark 53 bomb, delivered by aircraft, and the W-53 warhead carried by the Titan II. The least powerful was the Mark 54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), with a yield of less than 1 kiloton. The SADM weighed only sixty pounds. It was known as a “suitcase bomb” or a “backpack bomb” because of the preferred methods of delivery. One person would carry the SADM and place it in the right spot. Another would set the timer, and then they'd both leave in a hurry.

The instructors at Division Six offered some basic tips on how to deal with a nuclear weapon that's been in an accident. The first thing you want to do, they said, is find out whether the case of the weapon has been compromised and whether any components have shifted inside it. If your gamma ray detector is showing high levels of radiation, you've got a serious problem. Gamma rays will pass right through your protective gear. If you can detect gamma rays from a distance, back away immediately. The weapon may have partially detonated—or it may be about to detonate. But if lives are at stake, calculate how long you can work at the accident site without getting too much gamma radiation.

Always wear a bunny suit, they said, when you walk up to the weapon for the first time. It's the yellow jumpsuit with the hood. And keep an eye on your alpha and beta meters. If they detect anything, that probably means the weapon's case has been compromised. The alphas are emitted by the nuclear core, the betas by the tritium gas used to boost it. Your bunny suit will block them, and the respirator will prevent you from inhaling them. And remember: never take off your mask, even if there's no sign of radiation, until you're sure that the “skull” of the weapon is intact. The skull is the beryllium reflector around the core. Inhaling beryllium dust can be worse than inhaling plutonium. Both of them can be lethal.

In addition to an alpha meter, a beta meter, a gamma meter, and a tritium meter, an EOD team relied on more prosaic tools to handle a nuclear weapon accident—screwdrivers, ratchets, wrenches, and pliers. The tools were made with metal alloys unlikely to create a spark. If the weapon looked capable of detonating, an EOD technician would open its case with a screwdriver. The most important goal, by far, was to isolate the power sources and ensure that electricity could not reach the detonators. The best way to do that was simply to disconnect the batteries and yank them out. Capacitors that had already charged could be short-circuited with the touch of a screwdriver. But if the X-unit had already charged, an EOD technician had to be very careful. A wrong move could trigger it and detonate the weapon.

Arnold practiced the render safe procedures on dummy weapons that were identical to the real thing—except for the high explosives and fissile material, which were fake. The job was a meticulous process of
disassembly. You took the weapon apart, wrapped the parts in plastic, boxed them up, and got them ready for return shipment to the manufacturer. After months of training, Arnold passed all the tests at Indian Head and joined an EOD unit at Barksdale Air Force Base, outside Shreveport, Louisiana. He had learned how to defuse car bombs and biological weapons, to handle Broken Arrows and dismantle nuclear warheads. He was twenty years old.

•   •   •

W
HEN
S
ID
K
ING
GOT
TO
C
LINTON
, he hurried into the radio station and turned on the transmitter. KGFL was licensed to broadcast only during the daylight hours, but the Federal Communications Commission allowed a sunset station to go on the air during an emergency. King thought the explosion of an intercontinental ballistic missile qualified as one. Moments later, his wife arrived at the station, happy to see that he hadn't been killed. King described the blast to his listeners, and callers to the station shared what they'd seen. Soon the little studio at KGFL was crammed with people, as friends and neighbors gathered there, eager to find out what was going on.

The Air Force was refusing to disclose any information about the explosion. It would not explain what had just happened. It would not discuss the potential danger from toxic fumes. It would neither confirm nor deny that the Titan II was carrying a nuclear warhead. Journalists who called Little Rock Air Force Base were told to phone the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Omaha—and nobody at SAC headquarters would answer their questions.
SAC headquarters wouldn't even tell Frank Wilson, the director of environmental services at the Arkansas Department of Health, if the accident had spread radioactive contamination. SAC wouldn't tell him anything. And so Wilson called a Department of Energy office in Albuquerque. An official there asked him to describe the explosion. Wilson mentioned the fireball and the sparkly thing that seemed to emerge from it. The DOE representative said that the missile probably did carry a nuclear warhead—and it sounded like the high explosives of the weapon had detonated, spreading fissile material. Unable to get any confirmation from SAC, the state of Arkansas sent employees to Van Buren County with radiation detectors.

The Air Force's silence helped to sow panic and confusion. More than a thousand people left their homes, got into their cars, and fled the area around Damascus. One caller to KGFL said that he was leaving town to stay with family in Fairfield, Illinois, about four hundred miles away. Other callers told of windows being blown out, doors knocked off hinges, an ominous dark cloud that passed over their homes. The cloud smelled like rotten eggs, burned their eyes, and made them cough. The refusal to acknowledge that the missile carried a nuclear weapon made the Air Force seem foolish. One of KGFL's listeners phoned the station and said that he'd found the radio frequency that SAC was using at the missile site. The conversations with the Little Rock command post weren't being scrambled. And
the whereabouts of “the warhead” were being discussed.

•   •   •

A
FTER
TELLING
THE
TRUCKERS
in Bee Branch to hit the road, Sheriff Anglin got back into his squad car and drove south on Highway 65 toward Damascus. He wanted to make sure that everybody within five miles of the silo had been evacuated. He stopped at a roadblock north of Launch Complex 374-7. The security police manning it were wearing gas masks.

“
Hey, I need one of them masks,” Anglin said.

“
Oh, you don't need a mask,” one of the officers replied, his voice muffled by the mask.

“Well, give me yours, if you don't need it.”

Neither of them gave Anglin a gas mask, and he headed toward Damascus without one.

The chaos of the early-morning hours extended to the management of roadblocks. The Air Force had no legal authority to decide who could or couldn't drive on Arkansas roads. But SAC's failure to confer with state and local officials left a crucial question unanswered—who was in charge? At a roadblock south of 4-7, Air Force security officers refused to let journalists pass. Correspondents from the major television networks had arrived to cover the story, along with radio and newspaper reporters. Sheriff Anglin overruled the Air Force and allowed the media to park on the shoulder of Highway 65, across from the access road to the missile site. It was public
property. Not long afterward a reporter for the Arkansas
Democrat
was stopped at the same roadblock by Air Force security officers and told that he couldn't drive any farther. The reporter pointed out that his newspaper's competitors had just been allowed up the road—and then drove around the roadblock without permission and headed toward 4-7, ignoring the soldiers with M-16s. An Air Force security truck pursued him at high speed but gave up the chase. And the correspondent for the
Democrat
joined the crowd of journalists near the access road, who were shouting questions at every Air Force vehicle that entered or left the site.

•   •   •

A
FTER
LOADING
THE
WOUNDED
onto helicopters, Richard English and Colonel William Jones returned to 4-7. A convoy from Little Rock Air Force Base soon met them there. It brought specialized equipment and personnel that the Disaster Response Force lacked: portable vapor detectors, radiation detectors, bunny suits, fire trucks, firefighters, and an EOD unit.

A two-man radiation team traveled by helicopter to Launch Complex 374-6 and got a ride from a security police officer to 4-7, about ten miles away. Wearing protective gear, they walked down the access road in the dark, carrying alpha, beta, and gamma ray detectors. They went as far as the low hill overlooking the complex, found no evidence of radioactivity—a good sign—and walked back to the access control point near Highway 65.

English put on a bunny suit and prepared to search for the warhead. The suit was a lot lighter than the RFHCO he'd worn to find Livingston. English thought that he'd seen the warhead during one of his trips onto the complex. His second in command at Disaster Preparedness, Sergeant Franklin Moses, and the members of the EOD unit suited up, too. The half dozen members of the initial reconnaissance team, led by English, waited for permission from SAC headquarters to look for the weapon. The word came from Omaha: they could enter the complex at first light.

•   •   •

R
ODNEY
H
OLDER
WAS
STILL
WEARING
the T-shirt and old pants he'd put on to take a nap, just before the Klaxons sounded at 4-7. Almost twelve
hours had passed since then, and it felt like a long night. Now Holder and Ron Fuller were sitting on the access road to Launch Complex 4-6, outside the town of Republican. They'd hitched a ride from a security police officer at the grocery store in Damascus, hoping to get back to the base in Little Rock. But the officer had gone to 4-6 to pick up a two-man radiation team. And the helicopter had taken off from 4-6 without waiting for Holder and Fuller. The chopper's departure left them with a couple of options. They could return to the scene of the accident with the radiation team—or stay on the access road at 4-6. The security officer lent Holder his coat and drove off. It was still dark, and the two men sat in the road, exhausted, waiting for someone to give them a ride.

•   •   •

A
T
THE
B
APTIST
M
EDICAL
C
ENTER
in Little Rock, doctors tried to save the lives of Jeff Kennedy and David Livingston. The two were put into the intensive care unit, placed on ventilators, and given high doses of corticosteroids. Oxidizer released by the blast had induced a dangerous form of respiratory distress. Both of the men were now suffering from pulmonary edema, as fluid filled their lungs. Kennedy's wife left their children with a friend and rushed to the hospital. A young woman came to see Livingston as well, telling one doctor that she was his wife, another that she was his sister. Colonel Michael J. Robertson—the chief of aerospace medicine at the base who'd treated the injured airmen aboard the helicopter—didn't care who she was. He was just glad that Livingston had someone there. The worst effects of the oxidizer would usually appear about five hours after exposure. Like the phosgene gas used as a chemical weapon during the First World War, the oxidizer could kill you in an extremely unpleasant way. It was known as “
dry land drowning.”