Fail Safe: Thirty-Six Years After Damascus
Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation and, most recently, the book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, that catalogs in terrifying, clinical detail the hundreds and hundreds of nuclear accidents over the last half-century, was eerily calm as he described what the room full of people had just witnessed.
After screening the new documentary by filmmaker Robert Kenner, based on the book, Schlosser sedately informed the audience at Civic Hall on Sept. 13 that the threat of nuclear weapons is as real as it has ever been.
On September 18, 1980, an accident at a Titan II silo in Damascus, Arkansas nearly detonated a thermonuclear warhead after the rocket, leaking fuel for hours, exploded — killing one airman, Sgt. David Livingston, and injuring more than a score of others. The “Damascus Incident” quickly faded out, but was resurrected by Schlosser’s book, in which he describes it as one of more than 1,000 accidents known as “broken arrows.” To date, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) has publicly acknowledged 32 accidents.
Schlosser believes “there are two existential threats that we face: one is climate change and the other is the threat of nuclear weapons.” While “not diminishing the importance” of raising consciousness about it, Schlosser said that while “we may be able to slow the pace of climate change” and “deal with some of the harmful effects, the detonation of a nuclear weapon is instantaneous and its effects are irreversible.” Nuclear weapons “are often a forgotten topic despite its importance,” Tamara Patton, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University’s Nuclear Futures Lab, said. Schlosser, while doing research for his book, was “struck by how this is the most important issue that nobody’s really talking about.”
Kenner, the filmmaker, began by saying that after he read “Eric’s amazing book,” the “challenge was figuring out where the images would come from. Then when Eric sent me a picture of a Titan II missile silo, the only one in existence, and found out that we could film in that silo, I thought it would be incredible to go tell the story of Damascus.” Kenner vividly remembers “ducking under desks to protect myself” at school in the event of nuclear attack and the massive demonstrations in the 1980s “against nuclear weapons, which actually affected policy. Reagan and Gorbachev listened to those demonstrations and we cut back by thousands of weapons.”
What happened in Damascus, Arkansas thirty-six years ago is the central case study of “the management of our arsenal from the dawn of the atomic era until the present day.” Schlosser wants a national “dialogue on nuclear weapons,” in which citizens ought to know “these machines are out there and they’re ready to kill you.” Murmurs of nervous chuckles followed. He added that he “was very fortunate to have some high-level people from the outset who thought that what I was doing was worthwhile and helped me do it,” naming theoretical physicist Sidney Drell as “a mentor.” Drell, a fellow at the Hoover Institute, “happened to be at the head of the congressional panel on nuclear weapons safety.”
Schlosser asked Drell if the warhead that sat atop of the Titan II missile “could have detonated, and he said, ‘Yes.’” Other sources, including those who were former SAC officials, “gave me an insight that I would not have been able to get from the public record.” He added that “somebody who shall remain nameless gave me a document that wasn’t a classified document,” though it contained “an extensive bibliography of the names of classified documents, classified memos — because the titles were not classified. We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of citations.”
After submitting the most relevant titles he could find to the Departments of Energy and Defense via FOIA requests, “there was no way for them to deny that these things existed.” Once those documents were declassified, “they would be censored in a way that was absurd: I got different documents on the same subject and they’d been censored in different ways, so when you put them together, you could figure out what one person had left out.” Upon hearing this, one person in the room applauded. “What was consistently true,” Schlosser said, acknowledging the need for secrecy when discussing “how to build weapons of mass destruction, but again and again, what was being censored was information that might embarrass government officials.”
The so-called Damascus Incident was “a story that was reported for a few days and then disappeared,” Kenner said, “about a missile that exploded; there was never any recognition that there was a warhead on that missile that could have exploded.” The accident happened “during the Afghanistan war, a big presidential election coming up. People heard about it, but it was not a really big story,” Kenner said, even though “the whole East Coast was in danger and it would have been a huge story if it wasn’t kept secret.” On a note of comic relief, Schlosser added that “‘Dynasty’ was on that week, too.”
Sharon Squassoni, a senior fellow on proliferation prevention at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, pointed out that the Cold War was still going on at the time. “The younger generation can’t even remember, but the Cold War ended 25 years ago. There was a culture of secrecy that I think we are now trying to climb out of, but it’s very, very difficult.” Squassoni added that “we are spending $52 billion a year” on a nuclear complex, of which “a very small proportion is devoted to threat reduction and arms control. And we’re about to embark on a modernization program where we’re going to spend a trillion dollars over the next 30 years.”
Nuclear accidents “were not being reported to the people who had designed the weapons and knew the safety problems in the weapons,” Schlosser said, “and the guys out in the field didn’t have access to information about safety problems with weapons they were handling.” As “with any technology,” he said, “there’s a learning curve, and it’s only once these things are out in the field and being used, no matter how hard they tried to anticipate what might go wrong, there were constantly surprises.
Even the best engineers do not know what the problems will be. “We learned through experience that it’s not a good idea to have airplanes loaded with nuclear weapons flying 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Schlosser said. “No matter how skilled the pilots, no matter how maintained the airplanes, if you have crashes with nuclear weapons onboard, at the very least you have a scattering of plutonium but at worst you get a full-scale detonation.” The lethal accident at Damascus was not the first time a nuclear weapon nearly detonated on American soil. For instance, in 1961 a B-52 bomber over North Carolina caught fire and disintegrated mid-air, dropping one of its thermonuclear warheads — only a simple switch prevented a full-scale detonation of a hydrogen bomb.
Damascus “was a microcosm of many of those stories,” said Kenner, adding that “in this story it’s called ‘human error’: a man drops a socket and almost blows up the eastern seaboard, but the fact is human beings make mistakes — it’s not hard to drop a socket, the Air Force didn’t feel the need to put a safety net under the socket. Earlier that week there happened to be a bigger accident that took place in North Dakota where 12 thermonuclear weapons almost exploded because someone forgot to put a screw in a plane and thousands of gallons of fuel caught on fire and engulfed the plane. Luckily the wind was blowing in the right direction,” said Kenner.
Schlosser noted that “there was a very strong pressure to blame human error and blame the operator of the system rather than publicly acknowledge that there were problems with the system. In the case of the Titan II, this was an aging weapons system. In many ways, it was obsolete, and yet at the height of the Cold War it would have been difficult for us to unilaterally just take all these missiles out of service without getting anything in return from the Soviets in arms control negotiations.” The secretary of defense at the time, Harold Brown, used the Titans as “a bargaining chip that we knew was dangerous but we kept alive.”
Squassoni, the nuclear insider, said that in the field “they talk about ‘walk away safe,’ right? We’re gonna a nuclear power reactor that if there’s ever an accident you’ll be able to walk away and leave it for 72 hours and everything will be fine. We’ve been hearing this for 40, 50, 60 years. Right? In terms of nuclear power. In the modernization right now, at least with respect to warheads,” she said, “we need to make something that’s so robust, make it even simpler, because we’re not testing nuclear weapons anymore. That’s a good thing. We haven’t been testing since 1992. You’ve got to make trade-offs: how simple is it, how robust is it…all of that is bound to change.”
The Sept. 20, 1980, edition of the Washington Post (“Blast Kills 1, Injures 21 at Missile Silo … Nuclear Warhead, Tossed 200 Yards Lands Undamaged”) reported that “an explosion that lit up the night sky like daylight” and “catapulted” a “powerful nuclear warhead” out of the silo. The article, written by Art Harris and George Wilson, continued:
Hours before the explosion, one member of the Air Force mantenance [sic] crew — performing what Air Force officials called “routine” mantenance [sic] — dropped a three-pound wrench socket from scaffolding inside the silo. The tool fell 70 feet bounced off the missile’s thrust mount and punctured the first stage of the missile’s 10,000-gallon fuel tank. As maintenance men struggled to neutralize the leak, hauling a truckload of bleach to the site in the hope of stopping any chemical reaction between the fuel and the oxidizer, the volatile fuel exploded. The blast had enough force to blow off the 740-ton silo door of reinforced concrete and steel.
Ed Stallcup, a 55-year-old state emergency services officer “monitoring the fuel leak from an underground bunker in nearby Conway,” said it “seemed like everything that would have taken the missile to Russia went up all at once.” Bob Dole, then a senator in Kansas, where a serious accident took place two years earlier, “called for a congressional investigation. ‘If it’s not safe and effective, I don’t know why you need it.’ … Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton said Air Force officials told him that no nuclear explosion could have occurred inside the silo.” Titan II missiles, Harris and Wilson wrote, “have been underground and on ready-t0-fire status since 1963.” The local sheriff, Gus Anglin, “accused the Air Force of trying to downplay a serious incident.”
In the New York Times, Wendell Rawls reported that “about 1,400 residents within a five-mile radius of the site were evacuated” and that the secretary of the Air Force, Hans Mark, “insisted that there ‘was absolutely no evidence of radioactive debris in the area’ and that ‘the warhead is not in danger of being ignited because it was designed with fail-safe devices.’” Rawls noted that “this was the third fatal accident since 1965 involving missile fuel leaks.” He gave the following description of what happened:
A maintenance team was working last night at the third level of the 103-foot-tall Titan missile, pressurizing the second stage. A technician dropped a three-pound wrench socket that fell 70 feet, bounced off a thrust mount and struck the missile, rupturing the thin skin of a fuel tank. The crew noticed fuel vapors escaping, and within 24 minutes, shortly after 8 P.M., the crew in the command control area had indications of fire in the silo and loss of fuel tank pressure. The maintenance crew evacuated the silo immediately and the concentration of fuel vapors in the air continued to rise. When it reached a certain point of mixture with the air, another automatic safety sequence was initiated: 100,000 gallons of water was sprayed into the silo, washing down the sides of the missile. The water rose only as high as the fire deflector in the bottom of the silo, however — not high enough to cover the engines or the fuel tank.
At around 3 o’clock in the morning, several hours after the leak began, “All the fuel from the first stage of the rocket exploded. … Sheriff Anglin immediately radioed his deputies that people should ‘get the hell out of here.’ … There were reports that the missile warhead had been blown free of the silo.” That silo was one of 18 in the state of Arkansas alone: “In the last two years, eight other leakage accidents have occurred in Arkansas.” Francis Clines, in the Times, reported that the “Air Force has not confirmed that the warhead was blown out of the silo.”
Clines added that “many of the more than 500 people in Damascus and nearby hamlets who scattered in the night said they were patriotic and saw the need of keeping nuclear weapons ready somewhere. But the fact that the early morning explosion had left them largely to their own devices undermined their confidence in the Government now.” In another report, Clines quoted a 25-year-old farmer named John Stacks as saying, “I guess these missile programs are needed, but with all the money that’s spent you’d think they’d have safer maintenance procedures.”
Art Harris, writing for the Washington Post, quoted Stacks, who filed a lawsuit against the Air Force for the 1978 leak, as saying the service “acted as if I had made the whole thing up.” When the missile exploded “without warning, a rain of concrete and steel followed by ‘a glare and balls of fire that shook the whole house. We didn’t know if it was all over or not.’”
Rawls reported that the Air Force “continued today [Sept. 20] to refuse even to confirm or deny the existence of a nine-megaton nuclear warhead … and some angry state officials and local residents insisted that the military should tell them whether it had recovered the warhead and what condition it was in. … Sheriff Carl Stobaugh of Conway County had learned from monitoring Air Force radio transmissions that the warhead remained on the ground about 200 yards from the silo and that military crews were encasing it with timber. … Sam Tatum, director of the State Department of Public Safety, was visibly angry about the apparent lack of communication between the military and local officials.”
Walter Pincus, writing for the Post, reported on Sept. 21 that Harold Brown, then the Secretary of Defense, “has ordered the Air Force to reexamine the safety of the entire Titan II missile system, less than six months after a congressionally mandated study declared the missile safe. … Brown also announced yesterday that the Titans are scheduled to be replaced by the solid-fueled MX missile,” which “is not expected to start being deployed until 1986. … According to sources familiar with the Titan, it was the first time there had been a major leak of its volatile fuel, Aerozine-50.” Secretary Brown “told reporters that he does not know of the 1972 note then President Richard Nixon gave Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev assuring the Soviets that the United States had no intention of taking down the Titan IIs and replacing them with submarine-launched missiles.”
Richard Burt, writing in the Times, reported that Brown testified, “for the first time,” that “the Soviet Union might now be able to destroy all 1,053 of the Air Force’s land-based missiles in their underground silos in a surprise nuclear ‘first strike.’ … The mainstay of the Air Force’s nuclear bomber forces, the B-52, is about 20 years old, and officials report that the planes suffer from an increase in expensive maintenance problems. The service’s 53 Titan 2 missiles, meanwhile, have also been in place for two decades and have recently been plagued by a series of well-publicized accidents,” Burt wrote. “The problems besetting the Titan 2 were vividly demonstrated in Damascus, Ark., last week when a fuel tank of one of the missiles, punctured by a falling socket wrench, exploded and sent a cloud of toxic chemicals into the air.” He went on to say that
most military experts, in and out of the Government, consider the impending vulnerability of the Air Force’s Titan 2 and Minuteman missiles the most pressing nuclear problem confronting Washington. In part, this is because analysts fear that in a severe military crisis, Moscow might be tempted to launch a pre-emptive strike against American land-based missiles, for fear that Washington might launch its rockets first.
Rawls reported that “a flatbed truck left the silo area about 7:30 this morning [of Sept. 22], carrying two lead containers, one blue and the other silver and green, that were labeled ‘Do Not Drop.’ … When the convoy moved away from the site, one reporter asked an Air Force colonel who was directing the maneuver, ‘Is that what you wouldn’t confirm or deny?’ The colonel grinned and responded with a thumbs-up sign.” Tatum, the state public safety director, remarked that “saying the Air Force has not cooperated at all would be putting it mildly.”
Rex Peters, a resident of Damascus, used to live in Los Alamos. Clines quoted him as saying, “It kind of reminded me of the old days — going up to Nevada to watch the test shots. For a minute, it was the same deal as an A-bomb. The sound, the big fireball going up, just a whole wild roll of fire, pink fire, and I said, ‘Good Lord!’”
Two days after the explosion, Rawls reported that Defense Secretary Brown “adhered to established security policy” by “refusing even to acknowledge the warhead’s existence.” Brown told CBS News “there was never a time when a warhead was not outside the security control of the Air Force.” Further down the article, Rawls recorded that “sources in Washington who confirmed the existence of the missile’s warhead explained the military’s reluctance to talk about the warhead as an effort to protect against a precedent of either confirming or denying the presence of nuclear weapons.”
Pincus reported on Sept. 23 that the House Armed Services Committee “will hold a hastily arranged hearing today on the military need for continued deployment of the aging force of Titan II missiles. … Since their introduction into the U.S. strategic force in 1963, the Titans have been targeted primarily on cities. They are far less accurate than any other U.S. missile, according to figures supplied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last year by former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Nitze.”
Earlier in the year, an Air Force report “noted that as of last year,” Pincus wrote, “19 Titan II missiles have required one or more patches on their tanks to repair surface cracks.” An Associated Press dispatch from the 23rd stated that the Air Force, “following longstanding practice, still refused to acknowledge that a nuclear device was involved in the explosion.” The warhead that didn’t exist “is believed to be in the nine-megaton range, with an explosive force equal to that of nine millions [sic] tons of TNT, making it among the largest in the United States nuclear arsenal.”
On Sept. 26, Harris reported in the Post that residents of Guy, Ark., five miles away from the site, “have had trouble breathing. At least 12 persons, including the mayor and fire chief, have complained of symptoms ranging from nausea and vomiting to stomach pains, fever, headaches and shortness of breath.” The mayor, Benny Mercer, along with Richard Kincaid, “an IBM systems engineer, and George Poole, the volunteer fire chief, all complained Wednesday [Sept. 24] to Lt. Gen. Lloyd Leavitt, deputy commander of the Strategic Air Command at Little Rock Air Force Base, and found themselves whisked off to a base doctor. … The Air Force refused to release results of the medical tests and denied that the health problems were caused by the explosion at the underground silo.”
In November, according to an AP bulletin, “More than 100 people protesting the presence of Titan 2 missiles in Arkansas marched in a drenching rain today… The protesters sang anti-nuclear songs and some carried signs that read ‘Russia and the U.S. Stop’ and ‘Evacuate Titan 2’s, Not Us.’” Susan Pharr, a resident of Eureka Springs who organized the march, said, “This goes beyond conservative and liberal labels. People are concerned.”
By January 1981, the Air Force “concluded that the nation’s Titan 2 missiles are basically safe, but can be made safer, Congressional sources said today.” On February 12, Pincus reported that “one of the heroes of the accident,” Sgt. Jeffrey Kennedy, “was given an official letter of reprimand.” On March 7, Pincus wrote Air Force officials said “major safety modifications on aging Titan II missiles may be two years away.” The final “dismantling of the 17 Titans in Arkansas,” according to an AP story published on October 4, 1982, “is not scheduled to begin for two to four years.”
At the New America NYC event, Squassoni said “it shouldn’t be business as usual: we should not simply just say, ‘Look, these items are ending their service lives and we need to replace them and we’ll tweak them a little bit and they’ll be a lot better and they’ll be more sophisticated. We need a national discussion about how much do we really wanna rely on these nuclear weapons. President Obama started that, but it’s not finished.” She added, “For that, we need citizen involvement, we need sanity in Congress” — eliciting laughter — “which is harder to get than it sounds.”
Schlosser observed that “there are some aspects of our nuclear weapons complex right now that are reminiscent of September 1980. Our principal land-based missile, the Minuteman, was first deployed in 1970 and was supposed to be retired in the early 1980s. Our principal nuclear bomber is the B-52, which was designed right out of the Second World War and has not been manufactured since John F. Kennedy was president. These systems are aging. There was a nuclear weapons accident in Colorado in May 2014.”
He continued: “The government has declined to reveal the details of it, but it’s remarkably similar: there was a work crew on a Minuteman silo in a small town in the plains of Colorado, they were doing routine maintenance, they did something wrong — no one ever revealed what they did — they brought in another crew the next day and they severely damaged the missile, multi-million-dollar damage to the missile. The Air Force won’t say anything more than that, except once again the workers were disciplined, they had to go back for retraining, which meant that clearly they had done something wrong.”
Schlosser said the Associated Press has filed a FOIA request “because the Air Force is legally supposed to release the accident investigation board report on an accident like this, and they classified it.”
