Command and Control

In December 1957, President Eisenhower traveled to a NATO summit in Paris, only weeks after his stroke, and announced that the United States would provide its European allies with access to nuclear weapons. He offered to create a separate nuclear stockpile for NATO and build intermediate-range missile sites in NATO countries. The offer stopped short of actually handing over missiles and bombs. The Atomic Energy Act prohibited the transfer of nuclear weapons to a foreign power; custody of the NATO stockpile would have to remain with the United States. The Eisenhower administration tried to strike a balance between physical control and legal custody, between sharing the weapons with allies in a meaningful way and obeying the will of Congress. As plans emerged to put intermediate-range missiles in Great Britain, Italy and Turkey, to store atom bombs and hydrogen bombs and atomic artillery shells at NATO bases throughout Europe, the tricky issue of command and control was resolved with a technical solution. The launch controls of the missiles and the locks on the weapon igloos would require at least two keys — and an American officer would keep one of them.

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The Mark 36 was a second-generation hydrogen bomb. It weighed about half as much as the early thermonuclears — but ten times more than the new, sealed-pit bombs that would soon be mass-produced for SAC. It was a transitional weapon, mixing old technologies with new, featuring thermal batteries, a removable core, and a contact fuze for use against underground targets. The nose of the bomb contained piezoelectric crystals, and when the nose hit the ground, the crystals deformed, sending a signal to the X-unit, firing the detonators, and digging a very deep hole. The bomb had a yield of about 10 megatons. It was one of America’s most powerful weapons.

A B-47 bomber was taxiing down the runway at a SAC base in Sidi Slimane, Morocco, on January 31, 1958. The plane was on ground alert, practicing runway maneuvers, cocked but forbidden to take off. It carried a single Mark 36 bomb. To make the drill feel as realistic as possible, a nuclear core had been placed in the bomb’s in-flight insertion mechanism. When the B-47 reached a speed of about twenty miles an hour, one of the rear tires blew out. A fire started in the wheel well and quickly spread to the fuselage. The crew escaped without injury, but the plane split in two, completely engulfed in flames. Firefighters sprayed the burning wreckage for ten minutes — long past the time factor of the Mark 36—then withdrew. The flames reached the bomb, and the commanding general at Sidi Slimane ordered that the base be evacuated immediately. Cars full of airmen and their families sped into the Moroccan desert, fearing a nuclear disaster.

The fire lasted for two and a half hours. The high explosives in the Mark 36 burned but didn’t detonate. According to an accident report, the hydrogen bomb and parts of the B-47 bomber melted into “a slab of slag material weighing approximately eight thousand pounds, approximately six to eight feet wide and twelve to fifteen feet in length with a thickness of ten to twelve inches.” A jackhammer was used to break the slag into smaller pieces. The “particularly ‘hot’ pieces” were sealed in cans, and the rest of the radioactive slag was buried next to the runway. Sidi Slimane lacked the proper equipment to measure levels of contamination, and a number of airmen got plutonium dust on their shoes, spreading it not just to their car but also to another air base.

The Air Force planned to issue a press release about the accident, stressing that the aircraft fire hadn’t led to “explosion of the weapon, radiation, or other unexpected results.” The State Department thought that was a bad idea; details about the accident hadn’t reached Europe or the United States. “The less said about the Moroccan incident the better,” one State Department official argued at a meeting on how much information to disclose. A public statement might be distorted by Soviet propaganda and create needless anxiety in Europe. The Department of Defense agreed to keep the accident secret, although the king of Morocco was informed. When an American diplomat based in Paris asked for information about what had happened at Sidi Slimane, the State Department told him that the base commander had decided to stage a “practice evacuation.”

Two weeks after an accident that could have detonated a hydrogen bomb in Morocco, the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission issued a joint statement on weapon safety. “In reply to inquiries about hazards which may be involved in the movement of nuclear weapons,” they said, “it can be stated with assurance that the possibility of an accidental nuclear explosion… is so remote as to be negligible.”