An important component of Joseph Masco’s "Nuclear Borderlands" is the paradox that nuclear weapons- which are immensely and incomprehensibly destructive- are produced in the name of keeping us safe. Much of the fear surrounding nuclear weapons revolves around their intentional use by belligerent nuclear powers or rogue actors, but this fear seems misplaced. No nuclear weapon has ever been stolen, and the only time they have only been used as weapons of war once by the United States. Indeed, the vastness of America’s nuclear arsenal seems to be effective in preventing such foreign attacks. However, while deterrence may work, this does not mean nuclear weapons are making the United States safer. In fact, there is a large amount of evidence that America’s nuclear arsenal poses a risk to itself. America’s nuclear technology is extremely complex, and although it is used and maintained by highly trained technicians, these specialists are nonetheless prone to human fallibility. It is this human fallibility, by our supposed nuclear protectors, which largely makes nuclear weapons so dangerous. I will account the role of fallibility in two nuclear mishaps which could have been particularly devastating: the Damascus Titan II Missile incident, in which a nuclear warhead was unintentionally ejected from a silo in Arkansas and landed just a few hundred feet away, and the 1961 Goldsboro Incident, in which an American B-52 bomber carrying nuclear weapons crashed in North Carolina and nearly caused an accidental detonation.
In January 1961, a U.S. Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bomber crashed near Goldsboro, North Carolina. The plane was carrying two Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs, both of which contained 4 megatons of nuclear material, totaling a destructive capacity nearly 500 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The plane was on an airborne alert mission, which was a common practice during the 1960s in which a B-52 carrying armed nuclear weapons circled the North American continent in order to be ready to quickly respond to a potential Soviet attack. The plane departed from the Seymour Johnson Air Force base in Goldsboro on the night of January 23rd. Because of its heavy payload, the plane expended a significant amount of fuel during takeoff, so it rendezvoused with a tanker to refuel approximately 12 miles north of Goldsboro. As they attempted to refuel the B-52, the crew of the tanker notified the bomber that it was leaking fuel out of its right wing and, after communicating with ground control, the plane’s commander, Major Walter Tulloch, was ordered to keep the plane airborne until the runway could be cleared for it to land. However, as the plane maintained its holding pattern, the leak intensified, and the plane risked stalling and crashing. After Tulloch communicated the increasing severity of the situation to ground control, he was ordered to return to Seymour Johnson base immediately. However, due to the lack of fuel, the plane was not able to descend properly, and began to shake violently. Fearing that he could no longer control the plane, Tulloch ordered his crew to bail using parachutes stored inside of the plane. Six members of the crew ejected from the falling plane about 3 miles above ground, and one died upon landing. Unfortunately, the other two crew members were not able to escape in time.
As the plane plummeted to the ground, it began to disintegrate from the friction caused by wind resistance. The violent shaking of the plane caused the two Mark 39 bombs to detach from the positions they were stowed in. Additionally, the vibrations caused the bombs to undergo many of the processes required to be armed. At approximately one thousand feet above ground, the bombs separated from the wreckage of the descending plane entirely. By this point, the failsafes on one of the bombs had nearly completely stopped working: 3 of the 4 steps required to prime the bomb for nuclear detonation had occurred on their own. While the technical details behind the inefficacy of these 3 failsafes is not accessible to the public, recently declassified reports indicate that the only thing keeping this bomb from detonating was a simple electric arm much like the safety switch found on a conventional firearm. If this cheap switch had an electrical shortage, it is quite likely that a nuclear detonation would have occurred in North Carolina. The other Mark 39 underwent two of the four steps required to arm itself when the plane fell, but it disintegrated upon impact with the ground and lost its ability to cause a nuclear reaction. However, it was sheer luck that one or both of the bombs did not detonate in North Carolina as they plummeted into the ground. If they had detonated, the results would certainly have been catastrophic. Based on their payload and geographic location, if either of the bombs had detonated, the number of instant casualties would have been over ten thousand--and this number does not account for the additional deaths that would have resulted from exposure to nuclear fallout. If both of the bombs had detonated, the number of casualties would be significantly higher, likely somewhere around twenty thousand.
While the full report on the flaws of the bomb’s design are still classified, the B-52’s wing design, which caused the fuel leakage that caused the plane to crash, is not. In the 1960s, Boeing, the manufacturer of U.S. B-52 bombers, altered their design and implemented a technology known as “wet wings.” These wings featured a built-in fuel delivery system unlike earlier models, which featured fuselage-based fuel delivery systems. The benefits of this new design included increased fuel efficiency-- B-52s could travel a greater distance using less fuel. However, there were also risks associated with this new design. Wet wings experienced significantly more strain from wind resistance, and if they were damaged, fuel delivery would be more severely compromised than with older B-52 models.
Some 20 years after the Goldsboro incident, another severe nuclear mishap occurred when a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a 9-megaton thermonuclear warhead was accidentally launched from its silo near Damascus, Arkansas. On September 18th, 1980, at about 7 pm, Senior Airmen David F. Powell and Jeffery L. Plumb, two nuclear technicians, were requested to perform routine maintenance on the Damascus II Titan Missile. The missile contained a tank full of a chemical oxidizer which, in the event of a launch, would be pumped into a secondary tank full of fuel and cause a violent combustion that would propel the missile at supersonic speed. The technicians were called in because there were indications that the oxidizer tank was at subnormal pressure levels. This was a fairly common issue caused by changes in temperature that could be remedied by adding coolant to the oxidizer tank. Powell used a wrench to unscrew the lid of the oxidizer tank so he could add more coolant. However, he left behind the torque wrench that was prescribed by the regulations and used a socket wrench instead. As he was tightening a bolt, the socket detached from the wrench and fell 70 feet, bouncing off the wall of the silo and puncturing the side of the secondary fuel tank. The fuel, when mixed with oxygen, formed a toxic and highly combustible steam. As the steam escaped from the puncture, Powell and Plumb were ordered to evacuate and an automated fire suppression system doused the toxic fumes with one hundred thousand gallons of water. However, the suppression system was ineffective, and the combustible fuel vapors continued to mix with the air, so all personnel were ordered to evacuate the silo.
After several hours, two Air Force specialists, Senior Airman David L. Livingston and Sergeant Jeff K Kennedy, entered the silo and attempted to plug the leaking fuel tank. However, by that point, the concentration of combustible fuel vapors in the air was reaching critical levels, and the technicians were ordered to evacuate. Soon after they did, the mingling of the fuel with the air caused an extremely powerful explosion. This explosion tore open the primary oxidizer tank, and the presence of additional combustible material catalyzed the blast. The force of the explosion destroyed the silo, which was built to withstand a direct nuclear strike, and launched pieces of the missile, including the nuclear warhead, hundreds of feet into the air. The warhead did not explode, but this was largely a matter of luck. If it had, the explosion of the 9 megaton thermonuclear warhead-- which contained more destructive force than all of the bombs used during World War II-- would certainly have killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. However, this does not mean the incident did not have severe consequences. The toxic fumes released from the secondary fuel tank caused David Livingston to die shortly after escaping the silo, and the poisonous fireball that erupted from the silo when the missile exploded injured 21 others.
In their essay, "The Hidden Cost of Deterrence: Nuclear Weapons Accidents 1950-88,"
Shaun Gregory and Alistair Edwards identify three types of human fallibility which are particularly relevant to mishaps regarding nuclear weapons. These include human error, irrationality as a result of drug use, and aberrant behavior due to stress. Some, or all, of these errors were present in both the Goldsboro and Damascus nuclear weapons incidents.
Gregory and Edwards define human error as “any deviation from a previously established, required, or expected standard of human performance that results in an unwanted or undesirable time delay, difficulty, problem, incident, malfunction or failures.” Human fallibility of this nature has no apparent cause; it occurs arbitrarily. In his book, Human Fallibility and Nuclear Weapons, Lloyd J. Dumas notes that “seemingly inexplicable, inconsistent, and unpredictable human ‘goofs’ account for fifty to seventy percent of all major weapons… that puts human errors ahead of mechanical, electrical, or structural failures… as a source of system troubles.”
It is clear how human error affected the Damascus Titan II Missile Incident. Senior Airman David F. Powell was an experienced nuclear technician and should have known better than to use the wrong wrench. His error, which initiated the chain of events that led up to the explosion, was a simple lapse of judgment that would have had minor implications in many other contexts, such as forgetting an item from a shopping list. However, in the case of nuclear weapons technologies, Powell’s mistake had a dire impact. Human error also accounts for the fact that the silo did not contain the explosion. The designers of the silo intended for it to be strong enough to withstand nuclear detonation, but flawed calculations resulted in a silo which was destroyed by a far weaker, non-nuclear explosion.
It is less easy to say how human error affected the Goldsboro Incident, but I will postulate a likely scenario in which human error played a role. Since the leak in the wing was detected so soon after the B-52 took off, the plane was probably somewhat compromised when it was still on the runway. The technician who inspected the plane before its departure likely didn’t notice that it was leaking, thusly causing the chain of events which culminated in the plane’s crash.
One cannot say if drug use was a factor in the Damascus Titan II missile incident, but it is a possibility. A U.S. study conducted at the time found that over a quarter of all military personnel consumed some form of illegal drug, mainly Cannabis, and/or alcohol to a degree which impaired their ability to work. However, drug use almost certainly played a role in the Goldsboro incident. For decades, the Air Force has given “Go-Pills,” commonly known as amphetamines, to pilots engaged in lengthy international patrols as a means of keeping them awake. The crew of the B-52 involved in the Goldsboro Incident was engaged in such a mission, so it is likely that they took Go-Pills prior to their deployment. While Go-Pills were intended to mitigate the risks associated with fatigue, they posed risks of their own, namely nervousness and impaired judgement. These side effects may have been partially responsible for the fact that Major Tulloch could not maintain control of the plane.
Aberrant behavior from stress is a much farther-reaching form of human fallibility which influenced both the Goldsboro and Damascus nuclear weapons incidents. Namely, Cold War anxieties led upper-level military authorities to favor readiness for nuclear war over the insurance that nuclear weapons were safe. Before the Cold War, nuclear weapons were maintained in a dismantled state so that accidental detonation was as unlikely as possible. As Cold War tensions increased, military officials favored stockpiling preassembled nuclear weapons so that they could attack the Soviet Union with more haste. This decision resulted in both the proliferation of nuclear missiles and planes armed with nuclear weapons. The military officials behind this decision were aware that as nuclear stockpiles increased, so did the risk of nuclear weapons accidents. However, their anxiety over the Communist threat surpassed this awareness, causing them to pursue nuclear proliferation in the face of an ever-increasing likeliness of nuclear mishap.
The legacies of the Goldsboro and Damascus nuclear weapons incidents helped correct this skewed trade-off between readiness and safety. Not long after the Goldsboro Incident, Mark 39 Nuclear Bombs were retired from service, and following the Damascus Incident the number of Titan II missiles in the United States possession was greatly reduced. Today, nuclear weapons are developed with much smaller payloads with an emphasis on accurate delivery systems. However, as the Goldsboro and Damascus incidents show, so long as nuclear weapons exist, there is an alarming potential for human fallibility to lead to their detonation.
Sources:
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