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

About fourteen minutes later, the nose cone would reach its apogee, its maximum height, about eight hundred miles above the earth. Then it would start to fall, rapidly gaining speed. It would fall for another sixteen minutes. It would reach a velocity of about twenty-three thousand feet per second, faster than a speeding bullet — a lot faster, as much as ten to twenty times faster. And if everything had occurred in the right order, at the right time, precisely, the warhead would detonate within a mile of its target.

In addition to creating an accurate guidance system, missile designers had to make sure that a warhead wouldn’t incinerate as it reentered the atmosphere. The friction created by a falling body of that size, at those speeds, would produce surface temperatures of about 15,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the melting point of any metal. In early versions of the Atlas missile, the nose cone — also called the “reentry vehicle” (RV) — contained a large block of copper that served as a heat sink. The copper absorbed heat and kept it away from the warhead. But the copper also added a lot of weight to the missile. The Titan II employed a different technique. A thick coating of plastic was added to the nose cone, and during reentry, layers of the plastic ablated — they charred, melted, vaporized, and absorbed some of the heat. The cloud of gases released by ablation became a buffer in front of the nose cone, a form of insulation, reducing its temperature even further.

The nose cone not only protected the warhead from heat, it also contained the weapon’s arming and fuzing system. On the way up, a barometric switch closed when it reached a specific altitude, allowing electricity to flow from the thermal batteries to the warhead. On the way down, an accelerometer ignited the thermal batteries and armed the warhead. If the warhead had been set for an airburst, it exploded at an altitude of fourteen thousand feet when a barometric switch closed. If the warhead had been set for a groundburst — or if, for some reason, the barometric switch malfunctioned — it exploded when the piezoelectric crystals in the nose cone were crushed upon impact with the target. Instead of being vaporized by reentry, the warhead was kept cool and intact long enough to vaporize everything for miles around it.

Three strategic missile wings were formed to deploy the Titan II, each with eighteen missiles, located in Arkansas, Kansas, and Arizona. The Air Force felt confident that the Titan II would be more reliable than its predecessors. At first, perhaps 70 to 75 percent of the missiles were expected to hit their targets, and as crews gained experience, that proportion would rise to 90 percent. Newspapers across the country heralded the arrival of the Titan II, America’s superweapon, “the biggest guns in the western world.” The missile would play a dual, patriotic role in the rivalry with the Soviet Union. It would carry SAC’s deadliest warhead — and also serve, in a slightly modified form, as the launch vehicle to send NASA’s Gemini astronauts into space. At Little Rock Air Force Base, the introduction of the Titan II was greeted with a nervous enthusiasm. The first launch crews had to train with cardboard mock-ups of equipment, and the number of operational launch complexes in Arkansas soon exceeded the number of crews qualified to run them. Vital checklists were still being written and revised as the missiles were placed on alert.

Ben Scallorn became a site maintenance officer for the 308th Strategic Missile Wing, eventually overseeing half a dozen Titan II launch complexes. He liked the new job and didn’t hesitate to wear a RFHCO and work long hours beside his men. Launch Complex 373-4 in Searcy was one of his sites. After the fire killed fifty-three workers there, he was part of the team that pulled the missile from the silo. It was a sobering experience. Thick black soot covered almost everything. But handprints could still be seen on the rungs of ladders, and the bodies of fallen workers had left clear outlines on the floor. Scallorn could make out the shapes of their arms and legs, the positions of their bodies as they died, surrounded by black soot. All that remained of them were these pale, ghostly silhouettes.

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Jeff Kennedy was furious. They were just sitting there in the dark, at the end of the access road, with their thumbs up their asses, doing nothing, while the missile got ready to blow. Colonel Morris said they’d been ordered to wait for further instructions — period. The decisions were being made elsewhere, and nothing, nothing was to be done without the approval of SAC headquarters. Morris hadn’t shared Kennedy’s latest plan with the command post, and nobody had asked to hear it. In fact, none of the PTS guys or launch crew members on the scene had been asked to give an opinion of what should be done.