Command and Control

The oxidizer leak in January 1978 was the first sign that having a Titan II in the neighborhood might be a problem. Hutto was working in the barn when he heard about the leak. He was twenty-three years old, helping his father and his older brother, Tommy, run the farm. A few years earlier the family had sold the feed mill and gone into the dairy business. As a milk truck backed into the barn, the driver said something about passing through a bright orange cloud on the way over. Hutto stepped outside to take a look. Their farm was on a hillside about three quarters of a mile southeast of the launch complex, with Highway 65 running between them. Down below Hutto could see an orange cloud encircling the complex and slowly drifting south. He didn’t think much of it and went back to work. His father, who was chopping wood about two miles due south of 4–7, thought the cloud tasted funny as it drifted past. It gave him a headache but didn’t make him sick. When word spread that the orange fumes had killed some cattle and sent Sheriff Anglin to the hospital, the residents of Damascus began to wonder about the safety of the Titan II missile that sat about a mile from their elementary school. The Air Force response to the leak — the assurances that everything was under control and that the missile was perfectly safe — did not reassure them.

Sam Hutto was at home on the evening of September 18, 1980, with his pregnant wife and their one-year-old daughter. The baby was expected any day. Hutto’s father called at about half past seven and told him to get out of the house. There was another leak or something at the missile site. Sheriff Anglin had gone out there to see what was happening, bumped into an Air Force security officer near the fence, and asked him whether there was any need to evacuate. Nope, everything is under control, the security officer had said. The sheriff got on his radio and ordered an evacuation of all the homes within a mile of the launch complex. The Parishes lived the closest to the site, less than half a mile from the missile itself, and perhaps twenty-five other homes were within the evacuation zone, mainly on the east side of the highway. To the west of the complex, woods and open fields stretched for hundreds of acres. Sheriff’s deputies knocked on doors, and neighbors phoned one another to spread the word. Sam Hutto drove his family to his brother Tommy’s house in Damascus, helped them get settled, and then left.

It was a bad night to evacuate the farm. The heat cycles of the heifers had been synchronized, and about twenty were ready to give birth. They were grazing in a field right across the highway from 4–7. Hutto wanted to make sure the cows and their calves were all right. He knew the back roads of Damascus pretty damn well and felt confident that he could safely make his way to the farm.

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The Arkansas office of Emergency Services had been notified by the Air Force, at 6:47 P.M., that there was a fuel leak and possibly a fire at the Titan II complex outside Damascus. For the rest of the evening, however, the Air Force provided few additional details about what was happening and whether the leak could pose a threat to public safety. Despite repeated calls to Little Rock Air Force Base, the Office of Emergency Services was told only that the problem was being addressed — and that more information would soon be forthcoming. Spokesmen at SAC headquarters in Omaha were no more helpful, claiming that the Air Force didn’t know what had caused the fuel leak, the white cloud rising from the silo wasn’t toxic, and there was no danger of a nuclear incident.

State officials had good reason to be skeptical of reassuring words from the federal government. A few months earlier, when about fifty thousand gallons of radioactive water leaked at a nuclear power plant outside Russellville, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had waited five hours before telling the Office of Emergency Services about the accident. And then the NRC allowed radioactive gas to be vented from the reactor into the air above Pope County, ignoring objections by the Arkansas Department of Health.

The cultural differences between the Strategic Air Command and the Arkansas state government may have contributed to the feelings of mistrust. SAC’s devotion to order, discipline, secrecy, and checklists was at odds with the looser, more irreverent spirit that guided policy making in Little Rock. Steve Clark, the Arkansas attorney general, was thirty-three years old. Paul Revere, the secretary of state, was also thirty-three. And William Jefferson Clinton, at thirty-four, was the youngest governor in the United States.