Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

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.

The intermediate-range missiles that President Eisenhower offered to NATO were also problematic. The Thor missiles sent to Great Britain were stored aboveground, lying horizontally. They had to be erected and then fueled before liftoff. It would take at least fifteen minutes to launch any of the missiles in a Thor squadron and even longer to get them all off the ground. The missiles’ lack of physical protection, lengthy countdown procedures, and close proximity to the Eastern bloc guaranteed that they’d be among the first things destroyed by a Soviet attack. The four-minute warning provided by Great Britain’s radar system wouldn’t offer much help to the RAF officers in charge of a Thor squadron that might need as much as two days to complete its mission. They might not have time to launch any Thors. The missiles would, however, be useful for a surprise attack against the Soviet Union — a fact that gave the Soviets an even greater incentive to strike first and destroy them. Instead of deterring an attack on Great Britain, the Thors seemed to invite one.

The military value of the Jupiter missiles offered to Italy and Turkey was equally dubious. Jupiters were also slow to launch, stored aboveground, and exposed to attack. Unlike the Thors, they stood upright, encircled by launch equipment hidden beneath metal panels. When the panels opened outward before liftoff, a Jupiter looked like the pistil of a huge, white, sinister flower. Sixty feet high, topped by a 1.4-megaton warhead, and deployed in the countryside, the missiles were especially vulnerable to lightning strikes.