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

To reach Launch Complex 374-7, the crew drove west through the towns of Hamlet and Vilonia, then north on Highway 65, a two-lane road that climbed into the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. Slavery had never reached this part of Arkansas, and the people who lived there were overwhelmingly poor, white, hardworking, and self-sufficient. It was the kind of poverty that carried little shame, because everyone seemed to be in the same boat. The local farms were usually thirty to forty acres in size and owned by the same families for generations. Farmers ran cattle, owned a few pigs, grew vegetables in the backyard. They were patriotic and rarely complained about the missiles in the neighborhood. Most of the income generated by the 308th was spent in the area around Little Rock. Aside from the occasional purchase of coffee and doughnuts, the missile crews passing through these rural communities added little to the local economy. For the most part, the airmen were treated warmly or hardly noticed. Despite the poverty, the feel of the place was bucolic. In early fall the fields were deep green, dotted with round bales of hay, and the leaves on the trees — the black gums, sweet gums, maples, and oaks — were beginning to turn.

The population of Damascus was about four hundred. The town consisted of a gas station, a small grocery store, and not much else. A few miles north along Highway 65, right after an old white farmhouse with a rusted tin roof, the combat crew turned left onto a narrow paved road, crossed a cattle guard, and drove half a mile. The launch complex was hidden from view until the road reached the crest of a low hill, and then there it was: a flat, square, three-acre patch of land covered in gravel and ringed in chain link, with the massive silo door in the middle, a couple of paved, rectangular parking areas on either side of it, half a dozen antennae rising from the ground, and a tall wooden pole that had three status lights mounted on top of it, one green, one yellow, one red, and a Klaxon. The green said that all was clear, the yellow warned of a potential hazard, and the red light meant trouble. It rotated like the red lights on an old-fashioned highway patrol car and, accompanied by the loud blare of the Klaxon, warned that there was an emergency on the site — or that the missile was about to take off.

The launch complex didn’t look like a high-security, military outpost. The gray concrete silo door could have passed, to the untrained eye, as the cover of a municipal wastewater treatment plant. The sign on the entry gate spelled it out. “WARNING,” it said, in red capital letters, followed by these words in capital blue: “U.S. AIR FORCE INSTALLATION, IT IS UNLAWFUL TO ENTER THIS AREA WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE INSTALLATION COMMANDER.” The barbed wire atop the chain-link fence discouraged a casual stroll onto the property, as did the triangular AN/TPS-39 radar units. Mounted on short metal poles and nicknamed “tipsies,” they detected the slightest motion near the silo door or the air intake shaft and set off an alarm.

Captain Mazzaro got out of the truck, picked up the phone at the gate, and notified the control center of their arrival. The gate was unlocked by the crew underground, and Mazzaro walked across the complex to the access portal, a sixteen-foot-square slab of concrete raised about a foot off the ground. Two steel doors lay flat on the slab; beneath one was an elevator, below the other a stairway. Mazzaro opened the door on the left, climbed down a flight of concrete stairs, and waited a moment to be buzzed through another steel door. After he passed through it, the door locked behind him. Mazzaro had entered the entrapment area, a metal stairway enclosed on one side by a wall and on the other by steel mesh that rose to the ceiling. It looked like he’d walked into a cage.

At the bottom of the stairs was another locked door, with a television camera above it. Mazzaro picked up the phone on the wall, called the control center again, pulled a code card from his pocket, and read the six-letter code aloud. After being granted permission to enter, he took out some matches and set the code card on fire. Then he dropped the burning card into a red canister mounted on the steel mesh. The rest of the crew was allowed to enter the complex. They parked the Suburban, checked the site for any signs of weather damage or a propellant leak, headed down the access portal, waited a moment in the entrapment area, then were buzzed through the door at the bottom of the stairs.