Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (30 page)

Local Greenlanders were called out to help with the cleanup. The Air Force personnel on the decontamination job had lots of special protective gear. The Danes … not so much. Aided by this underdressed Danish “civilian augmentation,” the Air Force collected 500 million gallons of radioactive ice, and you don’t want to know about the cancer rates of that Danish cleanup crew.

The Pentagon said forty years ago that all four nuclear bombs
exploded in that Greenland crash and were subsequently destroyed, which was almost true. But not quite. Using recently declassified documents and film, the BBC reported in 2008 that three bombs exploded, but the fourth was never found. The fourth bomb is thought to have melted through the sea ice and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Our military looked for it for a long time but figured that if they couldn’t find it, then no bad guys could either. Maybe after a few more decades of global ice melt, its location will reveal itself to us.

There’s also a large plutonium-packed bomb still stuck in a swampy field in Faro, North Carolina. In 1961 a busted fuel line caused a fire and then an explosion in a fully loaded nuclear B-52 during a predawn “training flight,” causing the plane’s right wing to more or less fall off, making it hard to fly. The crew managed to bail out before the explosion, and then the plane’s nukes separated from the plane in the general breakup of the falling aircraft. What happened to those two bombs keeps me up at night sometimes. One of the bombs had a parachute on it, and that one had a soft landing—or as soft a landing as a twelve-foot-long, five-ton missile can have. Strategic Air Command found it just off Shackleford Road, its nose burrowed eighteen inches into the ground, its parachute tangled in a tree overhead, its frangible bomb casing deformed but largely intact. That bomb, the bomb by the tree, had six fuzes on it designed to prevent an accidental full nuclear detonation. The first five of the six fuzes had failed. The last one held.

The second hydrogen bomb on board that plane did not have the benefit of an open parachute. When it hit a marshy field in Faro, it was traveling at more than seven hundred miles per hour, by knowledgeable estimate, and buried itself more than twenty feet deep in the swamp. A woman living nearby remembered the impact “lit up the sky like daylight.”
Whoopsie!

A farmer named C. T. Davis owned that field, and he said that when the military came out to look for the lost bomb—heading straight for the right spot, thanks to an enormous crater—they said they were looking for an ejection seat that they had lost. A very valuable ejection seat. But the field was so muddy, so quick-sandy, that they started to lose their excavating equipment into the crater before they could get the bomb out of the hole. So they decided to just leave it there, and got an easement from the Davis family that said nobody could ever dig deeper than five feet on that piece of land. If you’re ever in the neighborhood and want to play with your metal detector, you can find the exact spot on Google Earth. It’s just immediately west of Big Daddy’s Road.

Overall, the United States admits to having lost track of eleven nuclear bombs over the years. I don’t know about other countries, but that’s what we admit to. And we’re regarded as top-drawer, safety-wise. We’re known to go the extra mile, like in 1984, when a computer malfunction nearly triggered the launch of a Minuteman III ICBM, and some resourceful missileer parked an armored car on top of the silo in a heroic effort to prevent the accidental opening salvo of World War III. These things all happened back in the good old days, when we were really minding the store.

Here’s what happened more recently, since our awesome nuclear responsibilities slipped a bit from the forefront of our national consciousness: On August 29, 2007, at around 8:20 a.m., a weapons-handling team entered one of those Minot igloos (#1857, to be precise) to retrieve the first of two pylons, each with six twenty-one-foot-long cruise missiles attached. This had become a familiar drill in the previous few months, ever since the secretary of defense had ordered four hundred of these aging missiles off-line. The Minot team had already successfully
shipped about half of them to be mothballed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The crewmembers’ familiarity with the task may have been why they didn’t much bother with the safety checklist.

The first pylon in question, GZ377, had two letter-sized “TacFerry” signs attached to it, signaling that it had been prepped for the flight, or tactical ferry, to Barksdale. That meant that the silver nuclear warheads had been removed and replaced with harmless dummy weights. Nobody on the weapons crew followed the mandated procedure of shining a flashlight into a postage-stamp-sized, diamond-shaped window on the missile to verify that no nukes were on board. Nor did the tow-rig driver shine his light into that little window—as his Technical Order required him to—before hooking the pylon to his trailer. The driver later said he was “under the impression that this package for sure was TacFerry.” For sure.

The second missile pylon on the schedule sheet, GZ203, was stored just down the way in igloo 1854. The handlers were in and out of igloo 1854 in twenty-two minutes, not enough time to do the most cursory of checks. The junior member of the team was apparently told not to bother with the whole flashlight thing—not that he really knew what that meant, because he was new on the job and had never performed any such check. The second tow driver, as far as anyone could see, also failed to check the little window for signs of nuclear warheads aboard. In fact, one member of the team said he did not see anyone even carrying a flashlight that day, much less putting one to use.

Oh, and one more thing: the second pylon displayed no TacFerry signs, but this did not raise any red flags for the team. Nobody called a higher-ranking officer to ask why GZ203 lacked a TacFerry placard or checked the computer database to verify the status of the pylon. So nobody on the team got the information
that a few weeks earlier an officer at Minot had made a switch and ordered an older pylon prepped for shipment instead. She put it on the official schedule. Problem was, nobody ever checked the updated official schedule. So the prepped pylon with its dummy warheads sat undisturbed in its igloo that morning, while the tow driver carrying the unplacarded GZ203 pulled onto Bomber Boulevard, completely unaware that he was hauling six real operational nukes.

In the eight hours it took to attach the two pylons to a forty-five-year-old B-52H Stratofortress, no member of the loading crew noticed the warheads aboard, or the fact that one of the pylons was not marked for shipment. The six nuclear bombs strapped to the Stratofortress then sat on the runway unguarded except for a chain-link fence from five o’clock that afternoon until early the next morning, when an aircrew from the 2nd Bomb Wing out of Barksdale arrived to prep for flight. Happily, there was a member of the flight crew, the instructor radar navigator, whose job it was to check and see what exactly his aircraft was carrying before the bomber could take off.

But the navigator had apparently been infected with the general feeling about this mission of decommissioning old missiles; as one of his fellow airmen put it, “We’re only ferrying carcasses from Point A to Point B.” Others told investigators, without a hint of shame, that they weren’t sure that verifying meant, like, actually physically checking something. And so it was that “the Instructor Radar Navigator only did a ‘spot check’ on one missile, and only on the right pylon loaded with nuclear-inert payloads,” according to the report of an after-incident investigation. “If the IRN had accomplished a full and complete weapons preflight, the IRN should have discovered the nuclear warheads.” He did not.

The bomber, named, interestingly,
Doom 99
, departed North
Dakota on schedule on the morning of August 30, 2007. “The takeoff from Minot,” noted the after-incident report, “was uneventful.” The flight itself was notable: it was the first time in forty years a nuclear-armed bomber had traversed US airspace without clearance. Six nuclear warheads—each one capable of Hiroshima-size damage times ten—were unwittingly flown 1,400 miles, from up around the US–Canadian border to within a few hundred miles of the Gulf of Mexico, within plutonium-spittin’ distance of Sioux Falls and Sioux City and Omaha and Kansas City and Tulsa. The instructor pilot on
Doom 99
was not qualified for a nuclear mission. In fact, she later told investigators, she had never physically touched a nuclear weapon.

Happily, the nukes did get back to land without incident. They then sat unguarded on the runway at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for another nine hours before the ground crew there discovered that its command had accidentally acquired six new nuclear warheads, and they decided they’d better get them in a safe place, under guard. All told, six nuclear warheads were misplaced for a day and a half.

Here was the good news, according to the testimony of Air Force generals at the Senate Armed Services Committee on the occasion of presenting findings from the blue-ribbon review of the incident: “During the incident there was never any unsafe condition, and the incident was promptly reported to our national leadership including the Secretary of Defense and the President. These weapons were secure and always in the hands of America’s Airmen.”

“General,” the chairman of that Senate committee responded, “I’m a little taken aback by your statement that warheads were—there was never a safety issue and they were always under the control of American pilots. Did the pilots know they had nuclear weapons on board?”

“Sir, they did not.”

“So when you say they were under the control of the pilots, not knowing that you have nuclear weapons on board makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

“Yes sir, it does. The intent behind that statement is to make it clear that they never migrated off the aircraft anywhere else.”

Migrated?

As for whether or not an accident involving
Doom 99
could have occasioned a spread of plutonium from the warheads, one of the generals at the hearing was forced to plead ignorance. “I’m a logistician, not a technician. But knowing the knowledge of how a system is developed, and that’s part of the reliability of the system, is that there is no inadvertent detonation of the system.”

“I’m not talking about detonation,” the chairman said. “I’m talking about could the plutonium be released inadvertently if this weapon were smashed into the ground from fifteen thousand feet.”

“That piece,” said the general, “I would not know.”

It was left to the senator to remind the Air Force that the United States was still cleaning up pieces of Spain forty years after the Palomares accident.

One of the first things the Air Force did in the aftermath of the Minot-to-Barksdale debacle was to institute no-warning inspections, and the first one they ran was on the 2nd Bomb Wing. Thirty-one inspectors (including six civilian augmentees) were detailed to assess the Barksdale nuclear team, and they spent ten months’ worth of man-days doing it. (That was the assessment that turned up the wing fungus.) Barksdale’s first inspector-assigned task was to stick a pylon full of cruise missiles onto a Stratofortress bomber and ready the bomber for a combat mission. The first try failed because the $450,000
bomb hoists kept malfunctioning and the electrical generators crapped out three times. After fourteen hours and two separate “mating/demating” operations, the loading crew decided to give up and start from scratch. The second try was delayed when the loading team parked the weapons bay over uneven pavement and the bomb hoist could not gain proper purchase, and then delayed again when the bomb hoist “boogie wheel” failed. The second mating attempt was aborted after fifteen hours. On the fourth attempt—after only a minor lift-arm malfunction—the Barksdale technicians managed to generate a combat-ready mission.

The 2nd Bomb Wing received a rating of Excellent from the inspectors in the following areas:

They had to settle for a Satisfactory in Loading and Mating. The inspectors did give extra-credit points to the loading and mating team for gamely fighting through the failure of six weapons load trailers, five power generators, a power-controller-unit trailer malfunction, and a range of unfortunate tire-pressure issues. “The weapons loading community overcame numerous equipment malfunctions,” the inspectors reported. They also commented favorably on the loading community’s “strong two-person concept adherence,” its “cohesive squadron teamwork,” and its “highly effective communication.” The inspectors did ding the loading and mating team for not prepositioning chocks to keep the loading trailers from accidentally bashing
into the bomber, and suggested that they get some foam cutouts in the weapons expediter truck to keep the enabling switches and data cartridge safe during transport. But they gave Team Barksdale a thumbs-up for successfully preparing one bombing run … after three failed attempts … at somewhere past the thirty-hour mark.

“It’s very, very difficult to believe they could receive a passing grade on any kind of inspection when they were unable to generate a single successful nuclear sortie until the fourth attempt,” one weapons expert told the pseudonymous blogger (and former airman) “Nate Hale,” after reading the report that Hale had jimmied free from the Pentagon through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Hale quoted a second retired Air Force weaponeer, who was more to the point: “Tell me this is a joke.”

Still and all, the Air Force and the Pentagon decided the whole Minot-to-Barksdale mishap could be a lemons-into-lemonade moment. Apparently we needed some renewed attention to our nuclear-handling skills—we just hadn’t known it. That seemed all the more true when, a few months later, we discovered that we had erroneously shipped to Taiwan four nose-cone fuzes designed to trigger nuclear explosions in lieu of the helicopter battery packs Taiwan had requested, and that it had taken a year and a half to discover the accidental switcheroo. So the Air Force and the Pentagon embarked on some serious soul-searching, which took the form of a mess of incident investigations and blue-ribbon reviews and task-force studies to see how our atomic hair trigger was faring in the twenty-first century.