Command and Control 1706

I watched a documentary on Netflix last night “Command and Control.” The documentary was about a September 18, 1980 Titan 2 missile accident in Damascus, Arkansas.

Now before you think that was a long time ago and far away and not likely to ever happen again, read on.

Everything from Damascus in a 59 mile radius, even south past Little Rock would have been vaporized. The warhead was a 9 megaton hydrogen bomb with a radiation fallout kill zone of 5000 miles. Radiation would have killed US citizens as far north as New York and west to California, forget about it. It would have vaporized our ex-president Bill Clinton, then governor in Little Rock.

Way back in 1945 fully half of the scientists in the Manhattan project thought the detonation of the first atomic bomb would have burned the atmosphere and destroyed the world, but they detonated it anyway and that was just a low-level atomic bomb, nothing compared to a hydrogen bomb which is hundreds of of times more powerful.

The missile base in Damascus, #374-7 had at least one missile with a Hydrogen warhead in its Titan 2 silo. The missile had 5 stages and each stage had two tanks. One was an oxidizer and the other was liquid fuel. The command center was manned by 24 year-old young, newly minted officers. On that evening, the control panels started lighting up with fault indicators that looked like a Christmas tree. The control officers looked through all the manuals they had and there was nothing covering what they were experiencing. They called in a fuel control team that arrived hours later. The team went down into the silo to remove a pressure cap on the second stage below the warhead, 70 feet above the bottom of the missile. They had this 3 foot long ratchet and an 8 pound socket that did not fit properly on the ratchet. The team had to hold the socket on the ratchet to use it. They broke the cap loose, but dropped the socket as it came loose. The 8 pound socket fell most of the 70 feet down before it hit a steel girder and bounced off it and penetrated the missile fuel tank beside it. The fumes and fuel started spraying out of the tank. The fuel fumes began filling the 70 foot deep silo. The base command officers told the junior officers in the control area to abandon their post.

The commander of the base knew nothing about nuclear missiles. He went up the chain of command and the chain of command in the Strategic Air Command knew nothing about the missiles they were in control of either. SAC contacted Martin Marietta in Denver, the people who built the missiles and the warheads. They built it but did not know how to disable the warhead’s detonation feature. I suppose they never had it in the equation, figuring once launched and traveling through the upper atmosphere it would detonate after re-entry and hitting the ground.

The Sandia Labs formed after World War Two determined that somewhere between 50 and 200 nuclear weapons would destroy every inch of Russia. Nonetheless they went on to build 32,000 of them by 1965 and have built more than 70,000 at this point. There are still between 7,000 and 9,000 in active service.

Back to the missile silo, the missile maintenance guys were sent back in to do what they could. At the top of the silo they used a measuring device to find out the air/fuel mixture was 250 parts per million, optimum for ignition. As they went down into the silo they were ordered to turn on a huge ventilation fan. They clicked the fan switch (every time an electric switch is thrown there is a small electric arc) and the 70 foot by 20 foot cylinder of fuel fumes ignited!

The guys outside around the perimeter started running away, thinking the nuclear warhead had exploded, not that running would have worked if it was the warhead. The fuel exploding sent massive amounts of the silo flying through the air, some of them were reinforced concrete chunks as big as a city bus. After daylight, there were more than a thousand Air Force personnel fanning out through the open fields and woodlands looking for the warhead. They found it some distance away in a row of shrubbery.

You might be thinking that one incident (called a broken arrow in the nuclear business) in 35 years is not that bad.
In 1961 a B-52 bomber took off from Greenville South Carolina on a routine mission as part of our 24/7 airborne nuclear deterrent during the cold war. The bomber sprung a fuel leak, which ignited and exploded the plane. It was carrying a 4 mega-ton bomb. As the bomb fell through the then open bomb bay the hand operated cable that allows detonation caught on some metal and enabled ignition. The bomb fell to the ground but did not explode because during the loading process someone forgot to throw a secondary mechanical switch  which should have been enabled, otherwise had the bomber been sent to bomb Russia it would have dropped a dud. Had someone not flubbed his job during loading, Greenville would be a shiny glass parking lot today.
In the mid-nineties the Air Force lost a B-52 bomber for a week. The B-52 had 4 nuclear bombs on board. An air force pilot and crew landed it on a flight line in Louisiana and left the area for somewhere else, not telling the base command there were nuclear bombs on board.
Recently under pressure from reporters the Air Force admitted that there have been 30 Broken Arrow incidents since 1945. Another reporter filed a request under the freedom of information act for supporting documents. The documents he was sent showed 1000 incidents, not just the 30 the Air Force admitted to.

Rest peacefully tonight America, your nuclear deterrents are all around you, across the nation and on the coasts; you never know if tomorrow you will be in a permanent RIP.