Command and Control

The B-52 crash in North Carolina wasn’t the only accident that involved fully assembled, sealed-pit weapons — and McNamara soon learned about others. A B-47 carrying a Mark 39 bomb had caught fire while taking off at Dyess Air Force Base, near Abilene, Texas. At an altitude of about two hundred feet, the pilot realized the plane was on fire, banked to avoid a populated area, and ordered the crew to bail out. Three of the four crew members got out in time. The plane entered a vertical dive, hit the ground, and vanished in a fireball. The high explosives of the hydrogen bomb detonated but didn’t produce a nuclear yield. A few weeks later a B-47 carrying a Mark 39 bomb caught fire on the runway at Chennault Air Force Base in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The crew escaped, and the weapon didn’t explode. It melted into radioactive slag.

In the skies above Hardinsburg, Kentucky, a B-52 carrying two hydrogen bombs collided with a tanker while attempting to refuel. The crew of the B-52 heard a “crunching sound,” all the lights went out, the cabin rapidly decompressed, and the plane began to disintegrate. Four of the crew ejected safely. The other four were killed, as were all four members of the tanker’s crew. The wreckage of the two planes covered an area of roughly twenty-seven square miles. The hydrogen bombs were torn open by the crash. The nuclear cores of their primaries were discovered, intact, resting on piles of broken high explosives.

At an air defense site in Jackson Township, New Jersey, a helium tank ruptured near a BOMARC missile, starting a fire. A pair of explosions soon followed inside the concrete shelter that housed the missile. Fifty-five other BOMARCs lay in similar shelters, beneath corrugated steel roofs, nearby. When emergency personnel arrived, the fire was out of control. They put fire hoses in the entrances to the burning shelter and fled the area. An Air Force security officer called the state police and mistakenly reported that a nuclear weapon had exploded at the site — spreading panic throughout central New Jersey and prompting civil defense authorities to go on full alert in New York City, seventy miles to the north. Fallout from the BOMARC’s 10-kiloton warhead, it was feared, could reach Trenton, the state capital, Princeton, Newark — and, possibly, Manhattan. Firefighters returned to the missile site about an hour and a half after the initial explosions and put out the fire. The warhead had fallen out of the nose cone. The high explosives had burned, instead of detonating, and the nuclear core had melted onto the floor. The shelter contained most of the radioactivity. But water from the fire hoses had swept plutonium residue under the doors, down the street, and into a drainage ditch.

The accidents in North Carolina and Texas worried Robert McNamara the most. In one crash, the failure of a single mechanical switch could have led to a full-scale, thermonuclear explosion; in the other, the detonation of the Mark 39’s high explosives was the sort of one-point safety test that you never want to conduct in the real world. The Mark 39 had passed the test — this time. It wasn’t something that McNamara wanted to see repeated. The lapses in weapon safety seemed to be part of a much larger problem: a sense of disarray and mismanagement at the Pentagon, extending from the budget process to the planning for nuclear war. In his view, the Department of Defense had been saddled with the previous administration’s intellectual “bankruptcy in both strategic policy and in the force structure.” McNamara was determined to bring order, rational management, and common sense to the workings of the Pentagon, as quickly as possible.

* * *

During the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy had repeatedly attacked President Eisenhower for allowing the Soviet Union to surpass the United States in military power. “The Communists will have a dangerous lead in intercontinental missiles through 1963,” the platform of the Democratic Party declared, and “the Republican administration has no plans to catch up.” Kennedy argued that Eisenhower’s strategy of massive retaliation had left the United States in a helpless position, unable to prevent the Soviets from subverting and overthrowing governments friendly to the West. An overreliance on nuclear weapons had made American promises to defend the free world seem hollow. “We have been driving ourselves into a corner where the only choice is all or nothing at all, world devastation or submission,” Kennedy warned.