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

Robert Peurifoy was a senior at Texas A&M when a recruiter from Sandia visited the campus. America’s nuclear weapons program was expanding, and it needed engineers. Peurifoy was intrigued. Unlike his father — a prominent civil engineer who designed roads, buildings, dams, and other concrete structures — Peurifoy was drawn to the study of electricity. Recent inventions like radar, television, the transistor, and the computer promised to transform American society. The typical A&M student with a degree in electrical engineering went to work for Dallas Power & Light or other utility companies after graduation. Designing nuclear weapons at a mysterious, top secret laboratory sounded a lot more interesting to Peurifoy. And he was deeply patriotic. During the spring of 1952, the United States was at war. With the backing of Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, the Communist regime of North Korea had invaded South Korea two years earlier, starting a conflict that eventually killed more than two million civilians. The threat of Communist aggression was no longer hypothetical; young American soldiers were once again fighting and dying overseas. When Sandia offered Peurifoy a job, he eagerly accepted. It seemed like a good way to serve his country — and satisfy his curiosity.

Right after graduation, Peurifoy and his wife, Barbara, packed up their belongings in College Station and moved to a small rental house in Albuquerque, not far from the lab. He was twenty-one, ready to help the war effort, thrilled to be employed for $395 a month. But he was forced to work in Sandia’s “leper colony” for the first ninety days, denied access to the classified areas at the lab. While the FBI conducted a background check, he spent six days a week recording weather information onto IBM computer cards with a pencil. It was not a thrilling job. In the fall of 1952, Peurifoy obtained a “Q clearance,” allowing him access to top secret material and Tech Area I, the lab’s research facilities. But his early work at Sandia didn’t enable him to visit Tech Area II, a separate group of buildings surrounded by guard towers and a perimeter fence. It was America’s first atomic bomb factory.

Tests conducted in the Marshall Islands a few years earlier had shown that “composite” cores made from a mix of plutonium and uranium would detonate, ending fears at the Pentagon about a potential shortage of fissile material. The United States would have more than enough for a large stockpile of atomic bombs. In 1949 full-scale production of a new implosion bomb had begun at Sandia: the Mark 4. It had a composite core. It could be assembled in a couple of hours, then stored for a couple of weeks. And it was much safer than previous designs. According to the final evaluation report, the Mark 4 had a variety of features to “prevent premature detonation under all predictable circumstances.” The X-unit didn’t charge until the bomb fell from the plane, greatly reducing the risk to the aircrew. More important, the nuclear core was stored in the plane’s cockpit during takeoff and inserted through a trap door into the nose of the bomb, midflight. As long as the core was kept physically separate from the rest of the bomb, it was impossible for a plane crash to cause a nuclear explosion.

The days of handmade nuclear weapons were over. At Sandia the Mark 4 was now being manufactured with standardized, interchangeable parts — and so was its replacement, the Mark 6, a lighter, sleeker weapon with a yield as much as ten times larger than that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Once a weapon was assembled at Tech Area II, it was shipped to Site Able, an AEC storage facility tunneled into the nearby Manzano Mountains, or to Site Baker in Killeen, Texas, or to Site Charlie in Clarksville, Tennessee. The storage sites were located near SAC bases, so that in an emergency bombs could be quickly retrieved and loaded onto planes.

The military’s demand for nuclear weapons was so great that Sandia could no longer handle the production. An “integrated contractor complex” was being formed, with manufacturing increasingly outsourced to plants throughout the United States. Polonium initiators would be made by the Monsanto Chemical Company, in Miamisburg, Ohio; explosive lenses by the Silas Mason Company in Burlington, Iowa; electrical components by the Bendix Aviation Corporation in Kansas City, Missouri; and so on. What had begun as a handcrafted laboratory experiment was now the focus of a growing industrial system. And the idea of placing atomic bombs under international control, the idea of outlawing them, the whole notion of world government and world peace, now seemed like an absurd fantasy.

Bob Peurifoy was asked to help redesign the arming and fuzing mechanisms of the Mark 5 and the Mark 7, new bombs small enough to be carried by naval aircraft. Work had already begun on the Mark 12, the Mark 13, and the Mark 15, a bomb that promised to be more powerful than all the rest.