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

A nuclear weapon might be stolen by a deranged or psychotic NATO soldier; by a group of officers seeking political power; or by the government of a host nation, for use against an enemy other than the Soviet Union. These scenarios were, unfortunately, plausible. A pair of NATO countries, Greece and Turkey, despised each other and would soon go to war over the island of Cyprus. Right-wing officers had staged two coups d’état in Turkey during the previous year, and Jupiter missiles were scheduled for deployment there in the fall of 1961. Covertly funded by the Soviet Union, the Italian Communist Party had strong support in the region where Jupiter missiles were based. Members of the party might seek to sabotage or steal a nuclear weapon. Concerns about theft weren’t absurd or far-fetched. A few months after the joint committee’s visit to NATO bases, a group of dissident French officers sought to gain control of a nuclear device in Algeria, as part of a coup. At the time, Algeria was the site of French nuclear tests — and a French colony fighting for independence. A nuclear test code-named “Gerboise verte” was promptly conducted in the Sahara desert so that the officers attempting to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle couldn’t get hold of a nuclear device. “Refrain from detonating your little bomb,” General Maurice Challe, one of the coup leaders, had urged the head of the special weapons command. “Keep it for us, it will always be useful.”

In addition to being loosely controlled by the United States, the nuclear weapons in the NATO stockpile were often old and poorly maintained. According to the joint committee’s report, NATO had been turned into “the dumping ground for obsolete warheads and weapon systems” that were, nevertheless, placed “in an ‘alert’ position of 15 minutes readiness without adequate safety precautions.” Congressman Holifield estimated that about half of the Jupiters wouldn’t take off, if the order to launch was ever given. The missiles were complicated, liquid fueled, and leaky. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted that, from a military standpoint, the Jupiters were useful mainly for increasing the number of targets that the Soviet Union would have to hit during a first strike. “It would have been better to dump them in the ocean,” Eisenhower later said of the missiles, “instead of trying to dump them on our allies.”

The Mark 7 atomic bombs carried by NATO fighters had been rushed into production during the Korean War, almost a decade earlier. The nickel cadmium batteries of a Mark 7 constantly had to be recharged, and its nuclear core had to be carefully placed into an in-flight insertion mechanism before takeoff. The bombs were not designed for use during an alert. Once the core was inserted, a Mark 7 wasn’t one-point safe. And the bomb had to undergo at least twenty different diagnostic tests, increasing the odds of a mistake during assembly and disassembly. It was plagued by mechanical problems and seemed to invite human error.

Harold Agnew was amazed to see a group of NATO weapon handlers pull the arming wires out of a Mark 7 while unloading it from a plane. When the wires were pulled, the arming sequence began — and if the X-unit charged, a Mark 7 could be detonated by its radar, by its barometric switches, by its timer, or by falling just a few feet from a plane and landing on a runway. A stray cosmic ray could, theoretically, detonate it. The weapon seemed to invite mistakes. A rocket-propelled version of the Mark 7 was unloaded, fully armed, with its X-unit charged, from a U.S. Navy plane in the spring of 1960. The ground crew had inadvertently yanked out the arming wires. An incident report noted defects in another Mark 7:

During initial inspection after receipt of a War Reserve Mk 7 Mod 5 bomb, it was observed that the safing and arming wires were in reversed locations in the Arm/Safe Retainer assembly, i.e., the arming wires were in the safing wire location and the safing wires were in the arming wire location. Four screws were missing from the assembly.

And a Mark 7 sometimes contained things it shouldn’t. A screwdriver was found inside one of the bombs; an Allen wrench was somehow left inside another. In both bombs, the loose tools could have caused a short circuit.