Command and Control

By six o’clock in the evening, the platforms had finally been repaired, and the PTS team was ready to do its work. Childers was in the control center, instructing the trainee. Mazzaro and Heineman, the PTS team chief, were there as well, going over the checklist for the procedure. Holder decided to get a few hours of sleep. Although the control center was underground and far removed from the world, it was always noisy. Motors, fans, and pumps were constantly switching on and off. Test messages from SAC were loudly broadcast over the speakers, and telephones rang. The sound had nowhere to go, so it bounced off the walls. Holder never slept well there, even with earplugs. The vibration bothered him more than the noise. The whole place was mounted on springs, and there was so much machinery running that the walls and the floors always seemed to be vibrating. It was the sort of thing you didn’t notice, until you became perfectly still, and then it became hard to ignore.

Holder took off his socks and shoes, put on a T-shirt and some pants from an old uniform, and had a bite to eat before bed. He was washing dishes when the Klaxon went off. The sound was excruciatingly loud, like a fire alarm, an electric buzzer inside your head. He didn’t think much of it. Whenever a nitrogen line was connected to an oxidizer tank, a little bit of vapor escaped. The vapor detectors in the silo were extremely sensitive, and they’d set off the Klaxon. It happened almost every time a PTS team did this procedure. The launch crew would reset the alarm, and the Klaxon would stop. It was no big deal. Holder kept doing the dishes, the Klaxon stopped — and then ten or fifteen seconds later it started blaring again.

“Dang,” Holder thought, “why’d that go off again?” He heard people scurrying on the level below and wondered what was going on. He went halfway down the stairs, looked at the commander’s console, and saw all sorts of lights flashing. He thought the PTS team must have spiked the MSA — the vapor detector manufactured by the Mine Safety Appliances Company. If the MSA became saturated with too much vapor, it spiked, going haywire and setting off numerous alarms. That didn’t mean anything was wrong. But it did mean one more hassle. Now the crew would have to conduct a formal investigation with portable vapor detectors.

Holder went back upstairs and grabbed his boots. When he came down again, Captain Mazzaro was standing and talking on the phone to the command post in Little Rock. Childers was giving orders to the PTS team topside. Something wasn’t right. Holder sat at the commander’s console and looked down at rows of red warning lights. OXI VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT was lit. FUEL VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT was lit. VAPOR SILO EQUIP AREA, VAPOR OXI PUMP ROOM, and VAPOR FUEL PUMP ROOM were lit. He’d seen those before, when an MSA spiked. But he’d never seen two other lights flashing red: FIRE FUEL PUMP ROOM and FIRE LAUNCH DUCT. Those were serious. There’s a problem, Holder thought. And it could be a big one.

Spheres Within Spheres

In the old black-and-white photograph, a young man stands at the bedroom door of a modest home. He wears khakis and a white T-shirt, carries a small metal box, and doesn’t smile for the camera. He could be a carpenter arriving for work, with his lunch or his tools in the box. A cowboy hat hangs on the wall, and a message has been scrawled on the door in white chalk: “PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR — KEEP THIS ROOM CLEAN.” The photo was taken on the evening of July 12, 1945, at the McDonald Ranch House near Carrizozo, New Mexico. Sergeant Herbert M. Lehr had just arrived with the unassembled plutonium core of the world’s first nuclear device. The house belonged to a local rancher, George McDonald, until the Army obtained it in 1942, along with about fifty thousand acres of land, and created the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. The plutonium core spent the night at the house, guarded by security officers. A team of physicists from the Manhattan Project was due at nine o’clock the next morning, Friday the thirteenth. After billions of federal dollars spent on this top secret project, after the recruitment of Nobel laureates and many of the world’s greatest scientific minds, after revolutionary discoveries in particle physics, chemistry, and metallurgy, after the construction of laboratories and reactors and processing facilities, employing tens of thousands of workers, and all of that accomplished within three years, the most important part of the most expensive weapon ever built was going to be put together in the master bedroom of a little adobe ranch house. The core of the first nuclear device would be not only home made but hand made. The day before, Sergeant Lehr had sealed the windows with plastic sheets and masking tape to keep out the dust.