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

Green was the noncommissioned officer in charge of training at the 308th. He taught MART teams everything they needed to know about the Titan II. The teams escorted warheads to and from launch sites, kept an eye on warheads as they were being mated to missiles, and responded whenever an alarm went off. Officers learned how to deal with antiwar protesters, saboteurs, and all sorts of false alarms. A bird flying past the tipsies could set them off, and then a two-man MART team would have to visit the site and investigate what had tripped them — because the complexes didn’t have security cameras topside. A missile crew had no way of knowing whether the tipsies had been set off by a squirrel or a squad of Soviet commandos. A MART team usually stayed overnight at a launch control center in each sector, using that “home complex” as a base to oversee security at three or four neighboring sites.

Four-seven often served as a home complex, and one of Sergeant Green’s teams had pointed out a major security breach there, just a few weeks before the accident. Green had been amazed by their discovery: you could break into a Titan II complex with just a credit card. Once the officers showed him how to do it, Green requested permission to stage a black hat operation at 4–7—an unannounced demonstration of how someone could sneak into the launch control center undetected. SAC had a long history of black hatting to test the security at its facilities. Black hat teams would plant phony explosives on bombers, place metal spikes on runways, infiltrate a command post and then hand a letter to the base commander that said, “You’re dead.” General LeMay liked to run these tests and to punish officers who failed them. After Green received the go-ahead to stage a black hat at 4–7, his men secretly practiced the breakin.

On the day of the exercise, Green and two of his officers, Donald G. Mowles, Jr., and Larry Crowder, began the subterfuge by setting off the tipsies at Launch Complex 374-8—about ten miles from Damascus, in the town of Little Texas. When the alarm sounded there, the MART team stationed at 4–7 got a call and drove off to see what was wrong. Green and his men hurried to Damascus, jumped the perimeter fence at 4–7, carefully avoided the radar beams that set off the tipsies, and entered the access portal. Green picked up the phone and told the missile crew commander that “General Wyatt”—a fictitious, high-ranking officer — needed to see a schematic drawing in one of the technical manuals. When the crew commander hesitated, Green demanded his name and warned him the general would be unhappy with that response. The commander said he’d look for the drawing right away.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Crowder and Mowles jimmied the lock on the outer steel door with an ID card, ran down the stairs, and within seconds jimmied the door at the entrapment area, too. The men ran past the only security camera at the launch complex. But the missile crew wasn’t looking at the television monitor — they were probably searching for that tech drawing — and the entrapment area didn’t have a microphone to capture the sounds of a breakin.

Green ran back to the perimeter fence, climbed over it, got into his truck, drove a safe distance from the launch complex, and parked.

Crowder and Mowles hid outside blast door 6, waiting. When the MART team returned from the false alarm at the other launch site, it was given permission to reenter 4–7. The team was buzzed through the first two doors and walked downstairs to blast door 6—where it was surprised to hear a voice say, “You’re dead.”

One of Green’s men picked up the phone there and said, “Security team at blast door six.”

The door was opened, as were blast doors 7 and 8. Crowder and Mowles walked into the control center, feeling awfully pleased.

Steel plates were soon welded to the outer doors at Titan II sites so that intruders would need more than a credit card.

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The drive to Damascus seemed to be taking forever, as the PTS convoy picked up equipment at two launch complexes, made three stops, and obeyed the speed limit.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Senior Airman David Livingston said. “Somebody’s going to die out there tonight.”