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

The Air Force had already taken an interest in those parachutes. Theodor W. Knacke, their inventor, had been brought to the United States after the Second World War as part of a top secret effort to recruit Nazi aerospace and rocket scientists. The program, known as Project Paperclip, had been run by Curtis LeMay, who later explained its aims: “rescue those able and intelligent Jerries from behind the barbed wire, and get them going in our various military projects, and feed them into American industry.” Theodor Knacke now worked for the U.S. Navy at an air base in El Centro, California. Agnew promptly flew to California, met with Knacke, and asked, hypothetically, if he could design a parachute strong enough to bear the weight of something that weighed forty thousand pounds. “Oh yes,” Knacke replied. “No problem.”

Inspired by the German designs, Project Caucasian, a collaboration between the Air Force and Sandia, developed a three-parachute system that would slow the descent of a hydrogen bomb and give an American bomber enough time to get away from it. The bomb would be dropped by a B-36 at an altitude of about forty thousand feet. A small pilot chute would open immediately, followed by a slightly larger extraction chute. The first two chutes would protect the bomb from being jerked too violently, and then the third chute would open — an enormous ribbon parachute, Theodor Knacke’s invention, with narrow gaps in the fabric that let air pass through it and prevented the whole thing from being torn apart. The hydrogen bomb would float gently downward for about two minutes, just a tiny little speck in the sky. And then it would explode, roughly a mile and a half above the ground.

Bob Peurifoy led the team at Sandia that designed the arming, fuzing, and firing mechanisms for the emergency capability weapons. Radar fuzes promised to be the most accurate means of detonating the bombs, but pinpoint accuracy wasn’t essential for a weapon expected to have a yield of about 10 megatons. Klaus Fuchs had most likely given the Soviet Union information about the Archies and other radar fuzes used on atomic bombs, raising concern that the Soviets could somehow jam those radars and turn America’s H-bombs into duds. A barometric switch or a mechanical timer seemed a more reliable way to trigger the X-unit, fire the detonators, and set off a thermonuclear explosion. Each of those fuzes, however, had potential disadvantages. If a mechanical timer was used and the main parachute failed, the bomb would plummet to the ground and smash to pieces before the timer ran out. But if a barometric switch was used and the main parachute failed, the bomb would fall to the designated altitude too fast and explode prematurely, destroying the B-36 before it had a chance to escape.

Peurifoy asked the Air Force to consider the risks of the two fuzes and then make a choice. One fuze might fail to detonate the bomb; the other might kill the crew. When the Air Force couldn’t decide, Peurifoy ordered that both fuzes be added to the firing mechanism. The decision could be made before the bomb was loaded on the plane, with or without the crew’s knowledge.

Sandia was no longer a small offshoot of Los Alamos. It now had more than four thousand employees, state-of-the-art buildings with blast walls for work on high explosives, and a year-round test site in the California desert. Plans were under way to open another division in Livermore, California, where the Atomic Energy Commission had recently established a new weapons laboratory to compete with Los Alamos. The University of California managed the labs at Livermore and Los Alamos, but Sandia was a nonprofit corporation operated by AT&T. The mix of public and private management, of academic inquiry and industrial production, helped to form a unique, insular culture at Sandia — rigorous, grounded, and pragmatic; eager to push the boundaries of technology, yet skeptical of wild and abstract schemes; highly motivated, collegial, and patriotic. Nobody took a job at Sandia in order to get rich. The appeal of the work lay in its urgency and importance, the technical problems to be solved, the sense of community inspired by the need to keep secrets. Most of the engineers, like Peurifoy, were young. They couldn’t tell their friends, relatives, or even spouses anything about their jobs. They socialized at the Coronado Club inside the gates of Sandia, hiked and skied the nearby mountains, conducted experiments on new fuzes and detonators and bomb casings. They perfected America’s weapons of mass destruction so that those weapons would never have to be used.

* * *