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Fri, 01 Nov 2013 08:22:35 GMT

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After taking the new job, Peurifoy made a point of reading the classified reports on every... major [nuclear] weapon accident, a lengthy catalog of fires, crashes, and explosions, of near misses and disasters narrowly averted. The fact that an accidental detonation had not yet happened, that a major city had not yet been blanketed with plutonium, offered little comfort. The probabilities remained unknown. What were the odds of a screwdriver, used to repair an alarm system, launching the warhead off a missile, the odds of a rubber seat cushion bringing down a B-52? After reading through the accident reports, Peurifoy reached his own conclusion about the safety of America’s nuclear weapons: “We are living on borrowed time.”

Peurifoy had recently heard about an explosive called [TATB]. It had been invented in 1888 but had been rarely used since then— because TATB was so hard to detonate. Under federal law, it wasn’t even classified as an explosive; it was considered a flammable solid. With the right detonators, however, it could produce a shock wave almost as strong as the high explosives that surrounded the core of a nuclear weapon. TATB soon became known as an “insensitive high explosive.” You could drop it, hammer it, set it on fire, smash it into the ground at a speed of 1,500 feet per second, and it still wouldn’t detonate. The explosives being used in America’s nuclear weapons would go off from an impact one tenth as strong. Harold Agnew was now the director of Los Alamos, and he thought using TATB in hydrogen bombs made a lot more sense— as a means of preventing plutonium dispersal during an accident— than adding two or three thousand extra pounds of steel and padding.

All the necessary elements for nuclear weapon safety were now available: a unique signal, weak link/strong link technology, insensitive high explosives. The only thing missing was the willingness to fight a bureaucratic war on their behalf— and Bob Peurifoy had that quality in abundance. He was no longer a low-level employee, toiling away on the electrical system of a bomb, without a sense of the bigger picture. As the head of weapon development, he now had some authority to make policy at Sandia. And he planned to take advantage of it. Three months into the new job, Peurifoy told his superior, Glenn Fowler, a vice president at the lab, that all the nuclear weapons carried by aircraft had to be retrofitted with new safety devices. Peurifoy didn’t claim that the weapons were unsafe; he said their safety could no longer be presumed. Fowler listened carefully to his arguments and agreed. A briefing for Sandia’s upper management was scheduled for February 1974.

The briefing did not go well. The other vice presidents at Sandia were indifferent, unconvinced, or actively hostile to Peurifoy’s recommendations. The strongest opponents of a retrofit argued that it would harm the lab’s reputation— it would imply that Sandia had been wrong about nuclear weapon safety for years. They said new weapons with improved safety features could eventually replace the old ones. And they made clear that the lab’s research-and-development money would not be spent on bombs already in the stockpile. Sandia couldn’t force the armed services to alter their weapons, and the Department of Defense had the ultimate responsibility for nuclear weapon safety. The lab’s upper management said, essentially, that this was someone else’s problem.

In April 1974, Peurifoy and Fowler went to Washington and met with Major General Ernest Graves, Jr., a top official at the Atomic Energy Commission, whose responsibilities included weapon safety. Sandia reported to the AEC, and Peurifoy was aiming higher on the bureaucratic ladder. Graves listened to the presentation and then did nothing about it. Five months later, unwilling to let the issue drop and ready to escalate the battle, Peurifoy and Fowler put their concerns on the record. A letter to General Graves was drafted— and Glenn Fowler placed his career at risk by signing and sending it. The “Fowler Letter,” as it was soon called, caused a top secret uproar in the nuclear weapon community. It ensured that high-level officials at the weapons labs, the AEC, and the Pentagon couldn’t hide behind claims of plausible deniability, if a serious accident happened. The letter was proof that they had been warned.

“Most of the aircraft delivered weapons now in stockpile were designed to requirements which envisioned... operations consisting mostly of long periods of igloo storage and some brief exposure to transportation environments,” the Fowler letter began. But these weapons were now being used in ways that could subject them to abnormal environments. And none of the weapons had adequate safety mechanisms. Fowler described the “possibility of these safing devices being electrically bypassed through charred organic plastics or melted solder” and warned of their “premature operation from stray voltages and currents.” He listed the weapons that should immediately be retrofitted or retired, including the Genie, the Hound Dog, the 9-megaton Mark 53 bomb— and the weapons that needed to be replaced, notably the Mark 28, SAC’s most widely deployed bomb. He said that the secretary of defense should be told about the risks of using these weapons during ground alerts. And Fowler recommended, due to “the urgency associated with the safety question,” that nuclear weapons should be loaded onto aircraft only for missions “absolutely required for national security reasons.”

And:

Random urine tests of more than two thousand sailors at naval bases in Norfolk, Virginia, and San Diego, California, found that almost half had recently smoked pot. Although nuclear weapons and marijuana had recently become controversial subjects in American society, inspiring angry debates between liberals and conservatives, nobody argued that the two were a good combination.

...At Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, thirty-five members of an Army unit were arrested for using and selling marijuana and LSD. The unit controlled the Nike Hercules antiaircraft missiles on the base, along with their nuclear warheads. The drug use at Homestead was suspected after a fully armed Russian MiG-17 fighter plane, flown by a Cuban defector, landed there unchallenged, while Air Force One was parked on a nearby runway. Nineteen members of an Army detachment were arrested on pot charges at a Nike Hercules base on Mount Gleason, overlooking Los Angeles. One of them had been caught drying a large amount of marijuana on land belonging to the U.S. Forest Service. Three enlisted men at a Nike Hercules base in San Rafael, California, were removed from guard duty for psychiatric reasons. One of them had been charged with pointing a loaded rifle at the head of a sergeant. Although illegal drugs were not involved in the case, the three men were allowed to guard the missiles, despite a history of psychiatric problems. The squadron was understaffed, and its commander feared that hippies—“ people from the Haight-Ashbury”— were trying to steal nuclear weapons.

More than one fourth of the crew on the USS Nathan Hale, a Polaris submarine with sixteen ballistic missiles, were investigated for illegal drug use. Eighteen of the thirty-eight seamen were cleared; the rest were discharged or removed from submarine duty. A former crew member of the Nathan Hale told a reporter that hashish was often smoked when the sub was at sea. The Polaris base at Holy Loch, Scotland, helped turn the Cowal Peninsula into a center for drug dealing in Great Britain. Nine crew members of the USS Casimir Pulaski, a Polaris submarine, were convicted for smoking marijuana at sea. One of the submarine tenders that docked at the base, the USS Canopus, often carried nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles. The widespread marijuana use among its crew earned the ship a local nickname: the USS Cannabis.

Four SAC pilots stationed at Castle Air Force Base near Merced, California, were arrested with marijuana and LSD. The police who raided their house, located off the base, said that it resembled “a hippie type pad with a picture of Ho Chi Minh on the wall.” At Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina, 151 of the 225 security police officers were busted on marijuana charges. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations arrested many of them leaving the base’s nuclear weapon storage area. Marijuana was discovered in one of the underground control centers of a Minuteman missile squadron at Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana. It was also found in the control center of a Titan II launch complex about forty miles southeast of Tucson, Arizona. The launch crew and security officers at the site were suspended while investigators tried to determine who was responsible for the “two marijuana cigarettes.”

The true extent of drug use among American military personnel with access to nuclear weapons was hard to determine. Of the roughly 114,000 people who’d been cleared to work with nuclear weapons in 1980, only 1.5 percent lost that clearance because of drug abuse. But the Personnel Reliability Program’s 98.5 percent success rate still allowed at least 1,728 “unreliable” drug uses near the weapons. And those were just the ones who got caught.

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