Command and Control (37 page)

Members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy visited fifteen NATO bases in December 1960, eager to see how America's nuclear weapons were being deployed. The group was accompanied by Harold Agnew, the Los Alamos physicist who'd come up with the idea of attaching parachutes to hydrogen bombs and later helped to develop one-point safety standards. Agnew was an expert on how to design bombs—and how to handle them properly. At a NATO base in Germany, Agnew looked out at the runway and, in his own words, “
nearly wet my pants.” The F-84F fighter planes on alert, each carrying a fully assembled Mark 7 bomb, were being guarded by a single American soldier. Agnew walked over and asked the young enlisted man, who carried an old-fashioned, bolt-action rifle, what he'd do if somebody jumped into one of the planes and tried to take off. Would he shoot at the pilot—or the bomb? The soldier had never been told what to do. The wings of the fighters were decorated with the Iron Cross, a symbol that powerfully evoked two world wars. Agnew realized there was little to prevent a German pilot from taking a plane, flying it to the Soviet Union, and dropping an atomic bomb.

The custody arrangements at the Jupiter missile sites in Italy were even more alarming. Each site had three missiles topped with a 1.4-megaton
warhead—a weapon capable of igniting firestorms and flattening every brick structure within thirty square miles. All the security was provided by Italian troops. The launch authentication officer was the only American at the site. Two keys were required to launch the missiles; one was held by the American, the other by an Italian officer. The keys were often worn on a string around the neck, like a dog tag.

Congressman Chet Holifield, the chairman of the joint committee, was amazed to find three ballistic missiles, carrying thermonuclear weapons, in the custody of a single American officer with a handgun.
“All [the Italians] have to do is hit him on the head with a blackjack, and they have got his key,” Holifield said, during a closed-door committee hearing after the trip. The Jupiters were located near a forest, without any protective covering, and brightly illuminated at night. They would be sitting ducks for a sniper. “
There were three Jupiters setting there in the open—all pointed toward the sky,” Holifield told the committee. “Over $300 million has been spent to set up that little show and it can be knocked out with 3 rifle bullets.”

Foreign personnel weren't supposed to enter the nuclear weapon igloos at NATO bases. But little had been done to stop them. A lone American soldier manned the entrance to the igloos, serving as a custodian of the weapons, not as an armed guard. Once again, security was provided by troops from the host nation, who also moved weapons in and out of the storage facilities. Senator Albert A. Gore, Sr., could hardly believe the arrangement: “
Non-Americans with non-American vehicles are transporting nuclear weapons from place to place in foreign countries.” It was one thing to entrust these weapons to the Strategic Air Command, with its strict operating procedures and rigorous devotion to checklists. But the competence of NATO troops varied considerably. And their level of professionalism wasn't the most important consideration, when it came to guarding America's nuclear weapons. “
The prime loyalty of the guards, of course, is to their own nation, and not to the U.S.,” the joint committee said.

A nuclear weapon might be stolen by a deranged or psychotic NATO soldier; by a group of officers seeking political power; or by the government of a host nation, for use against an enemy other than the Soviet Union. These scenarios were, unfortunately, plausible. A pair of NATO countries,
Greece and Turkey, despised each other and would soon go to war over the island of Cyprus. Right-wing officers had staged two coups d'état in Turkey during the previous year, and Jupiter missiles were scheduled for deployment there in the fall of 1961. Covertly funded by the Soviet Union, the Italian Communist Party had strong support in the region where Jupiter missiles were based. Members of the party might seek to sabotage or steal a nuclear weapon. Concerns about theft weren't absurd or far-fetched. A few months after the joint committee's visit to NATO bases, a group of dissident
French officers sought to gain control of a nuclear device in Algeria, as part of a coup. At the time, Algeria was the site of French nuclear tests—and a French colony fighting for independence. A nuclear test code-named
“Gerboise verte”
was promptly conducted in the Sahara desert so that the officers attempting to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle couldn't get hold of a nuclear device. “
Refrain from detonating your little bomb,” General Maurice Challe, one of the coup leaders, had urged the head of the special weapons command. “Keep it for us, it will always be useful.”

In addition to being loosely controlled by the United States, the nuclear weapons in the NATO stockpile were often old and poorly maintained. According to the joint committee's report, NATO had been turned into “
the dumping ground for obsolete warheads and weapon systems” that were, nevertheless, placed “in an ‘alert' position of 15 minutes readiness without adequate safety precautions.” Congressman
Holifield estimated that about half of the Jupiters wouldn't take off, if the order to launch was ever given. The missiles were complicated, liquid fueled, and leaky.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted that, from a military standpoint, the Jupiters were useful mainly for increasing the number of targets that the Soviet Union would have to hit during a first strike. “
It would have been better to dump them in the ocean,” Eisenhower later said of the missiles, “instead of trying to dump them on our allies.”

The Mark 7 atomic bombs carried by NATO fighters had been rushed into production during the Korean War, almost a decade earlier. The nickel cadmium batteries of a Mark 7 constantly had to be recharged, and its
nuclear core had to be carefully placed into an in-flight insertion mechanism before takeoff. The bombs were not designed for use during an alert. Once the core was inserted, a Mark 7 wasn't one-point safe. And the bomb had to undergo at least twenty different diagnostic tests, increasing the odds of a mistake during assembly and disassembly. It was plagued by mechanical problems and seemed to invite human error.

Harold Agnew was
amazed to see a group of NATO weapon handlers pull the arming wires out of a Mark 7 while unloading it from a plane. When the wires were pulled, the arming sequence began—and if the X-unit charged, a Mark 7 could be detonated by its radar, by its barometric switches, by its timer, or by falling just a few feet from a plane and landing on a runway. A stray cosmic ray could, theoretically, detonate it. The weapon seemed to invite mistakes.
A rocket-propelled version of the Mark 7 was unloaded, fully armed, with its X-unit charged, from a U.S. Navy plane in the spring of 1960. The ground crew had inadvertently yanked out the arming wires. An incident report noted defects in another Mark 7:

During initial inspection after receipt of a War Reserve Mk 7 Mod 5 bomb, it was observed that the safing and arming wires were in reversed locations in the Arm/Safe Retainer assembly, i.e., the arming wires were in the safing wire location and the safing wires were in the arming wire location. Four screws were missing from the assembly.

And a Mark 7 sometimes contained things it shouldn't.
A screwdriver was found inside one of the bombs; an Allen wrench was somehow left inside another. In both bombs, the loose tools could have caused a short circuit.

The risk of a nuclear accident at a European base was increased by the fact that
the training and operating manuals for the Mark 7—indeed, for all the weapons in the NATO atomic stockpile—were written in English. But many of the NATO personnel who handled the weapons could not read or speak English. And few of them knew what to do if something went wrong. “
In many areas we visited,” the joint committee found, “little or no Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) capability was available in the
event of accidental radioactive contamination resulting from fire, carelessness, or accident, or in the event of threat to custody and security of the weapon requiring emergency disposal.” Western Europe was more densely populated than the United States, and a cloud of plutonium, released by a nuclear weapon, could threaten a large number of people. The possibility of such an accident was “
far from remote,” according to the joint committee. It cited
a mishap on January 16, 1961, just a few days before Kennedy's inauguration. The underwing fuel tanks of a U.S. Air Force F-100D fighter were mistakenly jettisoned when the pilot started the engines. The plane was on alert at the Lakenheath air base in Suffolk, England. The fuel tanks hit the runway and ruptured, some fuel ignited, and a Mark 28 hydrogen bomb mounted beneath the plane was engulfed in flames. Firefighters managed to extinguish the blaze before the weapon's high explosives could detonate or ignite. Because the accident occurred at a military base, away from the scrutiny of the press and the public, neither the American government nor the British would acknowledge that it happened.

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on Atomic Energy unanimously agreed that the Jupiter missiles should be removed from Italy—and should never be deployed in Turkey. The missiles seemed to pose more of a threat to NATO, one way or another, than to the Soviets. And placing missiles with thermonuclear warheads in Turkey, a politically unstable country that bordered the Soviet Union, might be viewed as a provocation at the Kremlin. The joint committee also recommended that the Mark 7 bomb either be removed from the NATO stockpile or fitted with a trajectory-sensing switch, so that a mistake by a ground crew would be less likely to cause an accidental detonation. Moreover,
the current “fictional” custody arrangements had to be replaced with measures that gave the United States “real” possession and control of its nuclear weapons in Europe.
A lone American sentry, ordered to stand on a runway for eight hours at a time, was bound to start “goofing off.” The committee wanted at least two American solders keeping an eye on the igloos, the missiles, the fighter planes on alert. It wanted American vehicles and troops, at every major NATO base, capable of
evacuating or destroying nuclear weapons that an enemy or an ally might want to seize. And most of all, the committee wanted some kind of mechanical device added to NATO's weapons so that unauthorized personnel couldn't detonate them.

Harold Agnew had recently met with Donald R. Cotter, a supervisor at Sandia, about the best way to install use controls on a nuclear weapon. Cotter mentioned an electromechanical lock that Sandia was developing for atomic land mines. The weapons were, essentially, time bombs that NATO troops could arm and then leave behind to destroy buildings, bridges, airfields, or units of an invading Red Army. The new lock had originally been conceived as a safety device. Because these weapons wouldn't be dropped from a plane or launched by a missile, a trajectory-sensing switch wouldn't help to prevent accidental detonations. The g-forces that a land mine would normally experience before being armed would be the same as those of the soldier carrying it. And the weapon might sit for hours or days before exploding. But a motor-driven lock inside the mine, connected by a long cable to a handheld decoder, would allow troops to arm the weapon from a safe distance. Agnew thought that sort of lock would solve many of the custody problems at NATO. A coded switch, installed in every nuclear weapon, would block the crucial arming circuits. It would make a clear distinction between the physical possession of a weapon and the ability to use one. It would become a form of remote control. And the power to exert that control, to prohibit or allow a nuclear detonation, would remain with whoever had the code.

Agnew brought an early version of the electromechanical locking system to Washington, D.C., for a closed-door hearing of the joint committee, putting the switch and the decoder in the seat next to him on a commercial flight from Albuquerque.
The coded switch that went inside a weapon weighed about a pound;
the decoder weighed about forty. It was a black box with knobs, numbers, and a series of colored lights on it, powered by a large internal battery. To unlock a nuclear weapon, a two-man custodial team would attach a cable to it from the decoder. Then they'd turn the knobs on the decoder to enter a four-digit code. It was a “split-knowledge” code—each custodian would be given only two of the four numbers. Once
the correct code was entered, the switch inside the weapon would take
anywhere from thirty seconds to two and a half minutes to unlock, as its little gears, cams, and cam followers whirred and spun. When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn't. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn't unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security.

The American military, however, vehemently opposed putting any locks on nuclear weapons. The Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Power at SAC, General Norstad at NATO—all of them agreed that locks were a bad idea. The always/never dilemma lay at the heart of military's thinking. “
No single device can be expected to increase
both
safety and readiness,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued. And readiness was considered more important: the nuclear weapons in Europe were “
adequately safe, within the limits of the operational requirements imposed on them.”

Although the description “adequately safe” was hardly reassuring, the possibility of America's nuclear weapons being rendered useless during wartime, when their locks somehow malfunctioned, was more worrisome to the Joint Chiefs. Even if the locking and unlocking mechanisms worked flawlessly, use of the weapons would depend on effective code management. If only a few people were allowed to know the code, then the death of those few or an inability to reach them in an emergency could prevent the weapons from being unlocked. But if the code was too widely shared, the locks would offer little protection against unauthorized use. The joint committee's desire for stronger use controls threatened to add complexity and uncertainty to the command and control of nuclear weapons. A State Department official summarized the military's position: “
all is well with the atomic stockpile program and there is no need for any changes.”