Command and Control

Ice clogged the carburetors, three of the six engines caught fire, and the bomber rapidly lost altitude. Captain Barry managed to guide the plane over the ocean not far from Princess Royal Island, in British Columbia, Canada. He ordered a copilot to open the bomb bay doors and dump the Mark 4. The doors were stuck and wouldn’t open. The copilot tried again, the doors opened, and the Mark 4 fell from the plane. Its high explosives detonated three thousand feet above the water, and a bright flash lit the night sky. The bomb did not contain a nuclear core.

Navigating solely by radar, Captain Barry steered the plane back toward land and ordered the crew to bail out. One of the copilots, Captain Theodore Schreier, mistakenly put on a life jacket over his parachute. He was never seen again. The first four men to jump from the plane also vanished, perhaps carried by the wind into the ocean. Captain Barry, the last to go, parachuted safely onto a frozen lake, hiked for miles through deep snow to the coast, and survived, along with the rest of his crew. The abandoned B-36 somehow flew another two hundred miles before crashing on Vancouver Island.

An accident could occur during the loading, unloading, or movement of weapons. On at least four occasions, the bridgewire detonators of Mark 6 atomic bombs fired when the weapons were improperly removed from aircraft. They were training weapons, and nobody got hurt. But with the new sealed-pit weapons, that sort of mistake would cause a full-scale nuclear detonation. At least half a dozen times, the carts used to carry Mark 6 bombs broke away from the vehicles towing them. During one incident, the cart rolled into a ditch; had it rolled in another direction, a classified report noted, “a live Mk6 weapon” would have “plunged over a steep embankment.” Dropping a nuclear weapon was never a good idea. Impact tests revealed that when the Genie was armed, it didn’t need a firing signal to detonate. The Genie could produce a nuclear explosion just by hitting the ground.

An accident could be made worse by the response. In the early days of the Korean War, amid fears that Japan and Taiwan might be attacked, a B-29 bomber prepared to take off from Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California. It was ten o’clock at night. The mission was considered urgent, its cargo top secret — one of the nine Mark 4 atomic bombs being transferred to Guam, at President Truman’s request. The cores would be airlifted separately. Brigadier General Robert F. Travis sat in the cockpit as a high-level escort for the weapon. Travis had displayed great courage during the Second World War, leading thirty-five bombing missions for the Eighth Air Force. As the B-29 gained speed, one of its engines failed near the end of the runway. The bomber lifted off the ground, and then a second engine failed.

The pilot, Captain Eugene Steffes, tried to retract the landing gear and reduce drag, but the wheels were stuck, and the plane was heading straight toward a hill. He put the B-29 into a steep 180-degree turn, hoping to land at the base. The plane began to stall, with a trailer park directly in its path. Steffes banked to the left, narrowly missing the mobile homes. The B-29 hit the ground, slid through a field, caught on fire, and broke into pieces. When it came to a stop, the crew struggled to get out, but the escape hatches were jammed.

Sergeant Paul Ramoneda, a twenty-eight-year-old baker with the Ninth Food Service Squadron, was one of the first to reach the bomber. He helped to pull Steffes from the cockpit. General Travis was found nearby, unconscious on the ground. Ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars soon arrived at the field, along with hundreds of enlisted men and civilians, many of them awakened by the crash, now eager to help out or just curious to see what was going on. The squadron commander, Ray Holsey, told everyone to get away from the plane and ordered the firefighters to let it burn. Flares and.50 caliber ammunition had begun to go off in the wreckage, and Holsey was afraid that the five thousand pounds of high explosives in the atomic bomb would soon detonate. The crowd and the firefighters ignored him. Holsey, the highest-ranking officer on the scene, ran away as fast as he could.