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

SRAM—Short-Range Attack Missile, a missile with a nuclear warhead, launched from the air to hit targets on the ground, that was carried mainly by B-52 bombers, from the early 1970s until 1993

TAC—Tactical Air Command, the organization that from 1946 until 1992 was responsible for the ground support fighter planes of the U.S. Air Force

TACAMO—Take Charge and Move Out, a communications system created by the U.S. Navy that uses aircraft to transmit a nuclear attack order during an emergency

TASS—Telegraphic Agency of the Soviet Union (Telegrafnoe Agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza), the official news agency of the Soviet government

TATB—1,3,5-triamino-2,4,6-trinitrobenzene, an “insensitive” high explosive that cannot easily be detonated by fire, shock, or impact

USAAF—United States Army Air Forces, the organization responsible for America’s land-based bombers during the Second World War

USAF—United States Air Force, the new and independent armed service that replaced the USAAF in 1947

WSEG—Weapon Systems Evaluation Group, a high-level research unit, employing both military and civilian personnel, that from 1948 until 1976 advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff

WWMCCS—World Wide Military Command and Control System, an organization formed during the Kennedy administration to combine the sensors, computers, command posts, and communications networks of the different armed services into a single centralized system

ZI—Zone of the Interior, a phrase used by the military to describe the continental United States

PART ONE THE TITAN

Not Good

On September 18, 1980, at about six thirty in the evening, Senior Airman David F. Powell and Airman Jeffrey L. Plumb walked into the silo at Launch Complex 374-7, a few miles north of Damascus, Arkansas. They were planning to do a routine maintenance procedure on a Titan II missile. They’d spent countless hours underground at complexes like this one. But no matter how many times they entered the silo, the Titan II always looked impressive. It was the largest intercontinental ballistic missile ever built by the United States: 10 feet in diameter and 103 feet tall, roughly the height of a nine-story building. It had an aluminum skin with a matte finish and U.S. AIR FORCE painted in big letters down the side. The nose cone on top of the Titan II was deep black, and inside it sat a W-53 thermonuclear warhead, the most powerful weapon ever carried by an American missile. The warhead had a yield of 9 megatons — about three times the explosive force of all the bombs dropped during the Second World War, including both atomic bombs.

Day or night, winter or spring, the silo always felt the same. It was eerily quiet, and mercury vapor lights on the walls bathed the missile in a bright white glow. When you opened the door on a lower level and stepped into the launch duct, the Titan II loomed above you like an immense black-tipped silver bullet, loaded in a concrete gun barrel, primed, cocked, ready to go, and pointed at the sky.

The missile was designed to launch within a minute and hit a target as far as six thousand miles away. In order to do that, the Titan II relied upon a pair of liquid propellants — a rocket fuel and an oxidizer — that were “hypergolic.” The moment they came into contact with each other, they’d instantly and forcefully ignite. The missile had two stages, and inside both of them, an oxidizer tank rested on top of a fuel tank, with pipes leading down to an engine. Stage 1, which extended about seventy feet upward from the bottom of the missile, contained about 85,000 pounds of fuel and 163,000 pounds of oxidizer. Stage 2, the upper section where the warhead sat, was smaller and held about one fourth of those amounts. If the missile were launched, fuel and oxidizer would flow through the stage 1 pipes, mix inside the combustion chambers of the engine, catch on fire, emit hot gases, and send almost half a million pounds of thrust through the supersonic convergent-divergent nozzles beneath it. Within a few minutes, the Titan II would be fifty miles off the ground.

The two propellants were extremely efficient — and extremely dangerous. The fuel, Aerozine-50, could spontaneously ignite when it came into contact with everyday things like wool, rags, or rust. As a liquid, Aerozine-50 was clear and colorless. As a vapor, it reacted with the water and the oxygen in the air and became a whitish cloud with a fishy smell. This fuel vapor could be explosive in proportions as low as 2 percent. Inhaling it could cause breathing difficulties, a reduced heart rate, vomiting, convulsions, tremors, and death. The fuel was also highly carcinogenic and easily absorbed through the skin.