Command and Control

“The possibility of any nuclear explosion occurring as a result of an accident involving either impact or fire is virtually nonexistent,” Secretary of Defense Wilson assured the public. His press release about the Genie didn’t mention the risk of plutonium contamination. It did note, however, that someone standing on the ground directly beneath the high-altitude detonation of a Genie would be exposed to less radiation than “a hundredth of a dose received in a standard (medical) X-ray.” To prove the point, a Genie was set off 18,000 feet above the heads of five Air Force officers and a photographer at the Nevada test site. The officers wore summer uniforms and no protective gear. A photograph, taken at the moment of detonation, shows that two of the men instinctively ducked, two shielded their eyes, and one stared upward, looking straight at the blast. “It glowed for an instant like a newborn sun,” Time magazine reported, “then faded into a rosy, doughnut-shaped cloud.”

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In January 1957 the Secretary of the Air Force, Donald A. Quarles, visited Sandia to attend briefings on the latest sealed-pit weapons. Quarles left the meetings worried about the safety of the Genie, and he was unusually qualified to pass judgment. He’d served for two years as assistant secretary of defense for research and development, helping to select new weapon systems, guiding the Pentagon’s investment in new technologies, and contemplating the future of warfare. He’d also spent a year as president of Sandia, immersed in the minutiae of atomic bombs. Small, wiry, brilliant, and intense, a high school graduate at the age of fifteen who later studied math and physics at Yale, Quarles felt the weight of his job, his place at the very epicenter of the arms race. He rarely took vacations and could often be found at his Pentagon office, late into the night, six or seven days a week. Only a handful of people understood, as well as Quarles did, how America’s nuclear weapons worked — and how the military planned to use them.

Within weeks of the briefings for Quarles at Sandia, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project created a safety board to scrutinize the design of every sealed-pit weapon in development. The Air Force soon commissioned wide-ranging studies of whether a nuclear weapon could be detonated by accident. And in July 1957, Quarles asked the Atomic Energy Commission to conduct the nation’s first comprehensive inquiry into the possibilities for increasing the safety of nuclear weapons. The AEC agreed to do it, and a team of Sandia engineers was given the lead role.

One of the inquiry’s first tasks was to compile a list of the accidents that had already occurred with nuclear weapons. The list would be useful for predicting not only what might happen to the new sealed-pit designs in the field but also the frequency of mishaps. The Department of Defense didn’t always notify the AEC about nuclear weapon accidents — and a thorough accounting of them proved difficult to obtain. The Air Force eventually submitted a list of eighty-seven accidents and incidents that had occurred between 1950 and the end of 1957. Sandia found an additional seven that the Air Force had somehow neglected to include. Neither the Army nor the Navy submitted a list; they’d failed to keep track of their nuclear accidents. More than one third of those on the Air Force list involved “war reserve” atomic or hydrogen bombs — weapons that could be used in battle. The rest involved training weapons. And all of the accidents shed light on the many unforeseeable ways that things could go wrong.

An accident might be caused by a mechanical problem. On February 13, 1950, a B-36 bomber took off from Eielson Air Force Base, about thirty miles south of Fairbanks, Alaska. The crew was on a training mission, learning how to operate from a forward base near the Arctic. The weather at Eielson was windy and snowy, and the ground temperature had risen in the previous few hours. It was about –27 degrees Fahrenheit. Captain Harold L. Barry and sixteen crew members had been fully briefed on the mission: fly to Montana, turn around, go to Southern California, turn again, head north to San Francisco, simulate the release of a Mark 4 atomic bomb above the city, and then land at a SAC base in Fort Worth, Texas. The mission would take about twenty hours.

In the middle of the night, as the B-36 reached an altitude of fifteen thousand feet, it started to lose power. Ice had accumulated on the engines, as well as on the wings and propellers. The crew couldn’t see the ice — visibility was poor, due to the darkness, cloud cover, and frost on the windows. But they could hear chunks of ice hitting the plane. It sounded like a hailstorm.