Command and Control

The crew descended two more flights and reached an enormous blast door at the bottom of the stairs, about thirty feet underground. The access portal and its metal stairway were not designed to survive a nuclear blast. Everything beyond this blast door was. The steel door was about seven feet tall, five feet wide, and one foot thick. It weighed roughly six thousand pounds. The pair of steel doorjambs that kept it in place weighed an additional thirty-one thousand pounds. The blast door was operated hydraulically, with an electric switch. When the door was locked, four large steel pins extended from it into the frame, creating a formidable, airtight seal. When the door was unlocked, it could easily be swung open or shut by hand. The launch complex had four identical blast doors. For some reason this first one, at the bottom of the access portal, was blast door 6.

Mazzaro picked up a phone near the door and called the control center again. He pushed a button on the wall, someone in the control center pushed a button simultaneously, and the pins in the door retracted from the frame. The crew opened the huge door and stepped into the blast lock, a room about eleven feet long and twelve feet wide. It was a transitional space between the access portal and the rest of the underground complex. Blast door 6 was at one end, blast door 7 at the other. In order to protect the missile and the control center from an explosion, the doors had been wired so that both couldn’t be open at the same time. Beyond blast door 7 was another blast lock, “the junction.” To the right of it, a long steel-lined tunnel, “the cableway,” led to the missile. To the left, a shorter tunnel led to the control center. These two corridors were blocked by opposing blast doors, numbers 8 and 9, that also couldn’t be opened at the same time.

Every Titan II launch complex had exactly the same layout: access portal, blast lock, then another blast lock, missile down the corridor to the right, control center down the corridor to the left, blast doors at the most vulnerable entry points. Every complex had the same equipment, the same wiring, lighting, and design. Nevertheless, each had its quirks. Blast door 9 at one site might require frequent maintenance; the control center air-conditioning might be temperamental at another. The typical crew was assigned to a single complex and pulled every alert there. Some crew members had spent two nights a week, for ten years or more, within the same underground facility. But an instructor crew served at different sites, depending on their availability. Al Childers had gotten to know all of the Titan II complexes in Arkansas and, for the most part, couldn’t tell the difference between them. Sometimes he had to look at the map on the wall of the control center to remember where he was. One launch complex, however, stood apart from the rest: 373-4 was known as the “ghost site.” It was the first complex where Childers was stationed, and odd things seemed to happen there. Pumps that could be operated only by hand suddenly went on by themselves. Lights turned on and off for no reason. Childers didn’t believe in the supernatural, and most officers laughed at the idea that the complex might be haunted. But some crew members thought that every now and then it felt pretty odd down there. Rodney Holder was once working in the silo at night with another crew member. The silo had a manually operated elevator that traveled from levels 2 to 8, and the men had left its door open. The bell in the elevator started to ring. It rang whenever the door was open and someone on another level needed the elevator. Holder couldn’t think of anyone who might need a ride. He called the control center and learned that nobody else was in the silo. The bell kept ringing. Holder and his partner were spooked, quickly finished their work, and returned to the control center.

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Launch Complex 373-4 had been the site of the worst Titan II accident thus far. On August 9, 1965, the complex outside Searcy, Arkansas, was being modified to make it more likely to survive a nuclear strike. Construction crews were hardening the silo, improving the blast doors, adjusting the hydraulics, installing emergency lights. The reentry vehicle and the warhead had been removed from the missile (serial number 62-0006). But its fuel tanks and oxidizer tanks were full. Four crew members manned the control center, as scores of construction workers labored underground and topside on a hot summer afternoon.