Command and Control

It weighed roughly six thousand pounds: Cited in Stumpf, Titan II, p. 118.

steel doorjambs:…weighed an additional thirty-one thousand pounds: Ibid.

Rodney Holder was once working in the silo: Interview with Rodney L. Holder.

Launch Complex 373-4 had been the site of the worst Titan II accident: My account of the Searcy accident is based primarily on “Report of USAF Aerospace Safety Missile Accident Investigation Board, Missile Accident LGM-25C-62-006, Site 373-4,” Little Rock Air Force Base, August 9, 1965 (OFFICIAL USE ONLY); “Launch Operations and Witness Group Final Report,” submitted to USAF Aerospace Safety Missile Accident Investigation Board, Missile Accident LGM-25C-62-006, Site 373-4, n.d., (OFFICIAL USE ONLY); and Charles F. Strang, “Titan II Launch Facility Accident Briefing, Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas,” minutes of the Ninth Explosives Safety Seminar, Naval Training Center, San Diego, California, August 15–17, 1967 (NO FOREIGN WITHOUT THE APPROVAL OF THE ARMED SERVICES EXPLOSIVES SAFETY BOARD); and Stumpf, Titan II, pp. 215–21.

(serial number 62-0006): Cited in “Witness Group Final Report,” p. 1.

You and the Titan II: Ibid., p. 11.

an “explosive situation”: Ibid., p. 4.

Gary Lay insisted that nobody had been welding: See Linda Hicks, “Silo Survivor Tells His Story,” Searcy Daily Citizen, May 7, 2000.

the launch checklist went something like this: I have presented a somewhat abbreviated version of the checklist. For the complete one, see Technical Manual, USAF Model LGM-25C, Missile System Operation (Tucson: Arizona Aerospace Foundation, 2005). fig. 3–1, sheets 1–3.

The missile’s serial number was 62-0006: See “Titan II Class A Mishap Report, Serial Number 62-0006, 18 September 1980, Damascus Arkansas,” Eighth Air Force Mishap Investigation Board, October 30, 1980, p. 0–1.

“Dang,” Holder thought: Holder interview.

Spheres Within Spheres

Sergeant Herbert M. Lehr had just arrived: Interview with Herbert M. Lehr. I am grateful to Lehr for describing that historic day in New Mexico. His memory, at the age of ninety, seemed better than mine. An account of Lehr’s work for the Manhattan Project can be found at the Library of Congress: Herbert Lehr Collection (AFC/2001/001/12058), Veterans History Project, American Folklife Center.

the most expensive weapon ever built: By the end of 1945, about $1.9 billion had been spent on the Manhattan Project — roughly $24.7 billion in today’s dollars. See Richard G. Hewlett, and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume 1, 1939–1946 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), p. 723.

Ramsey bet the device would be a dud: For the yield predictions made by Ramsey, Oppenheimer, Teller, and other Manhattan Project scientists, see Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 657.

odds of the atmosphere’s catching fire were about one in ten: According to the physicist Victor Weisskopf, a fear that the atmosphere might ignite caused one of his colleagues at Los Alamos to have a nervous breakdown. See the interview with Weisskopf in Denis Brian, The Voice of Genius: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries (New York: Basic Books, 2001), pp. 74–75.

“tickling the dragon’s tail”: For the origins of the term, see Lillian Hoddeson, Paul W. Henriksen, Roger A. Meade, and Catherine Westfall, Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 346–48. For a firsthand account of the dangerous experiments, see Frederic de Hoffmann, “‘All in Our Time’: Pure Science in the Service of Wartime Technology,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1975, pp. 41–44.

“So I took this heavy ball in my hand”: Quoted in James P. Delgado, Nuclear Dawn: From the Manhattan Project to the Bikini Atoll (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2009), p. 59.

the “ultimate explosive”: H. G. Wells, The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1914), p. 117.

“carry about in a handbag: Ibid., p. 118.

“The catastrophe of the atomic bombs”: Ibid., p. 254. Wells was an early proponent of world government, and his complex, often contradictory views on the subject are explored in Edward Mead Earle, “H. G. Wells, British Patriot in Search of a World State,” World Politics, vol. 2, no. 2 (January 1950), pp. 181–208.

“it may become possible”: The full text of the letter, as well as Roosevelt’s response to it, can be found in Cynthia C. Kelly, ed., The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007), pp. 42–44.

“extremely powerful bombs of a new type”: Ibid., p. 43.