DO NOT DROP!
"I cannot confirm or deny that there has been an accident" is the standard explanation heard from the US military and politicians. As shown in the recent documentary about the nuclear missile station accident in Damascus, Arkansas during 1980 we witness how our government and the local people handle nuclear weapons that are in our back yards.
The incompetence from the Strategic Air Command station in dealing with nuclear bomb accidents and the shifting of blame to men in the field was the acme of the reasons for what occurred in Damascus, AR. What most enlightening is the number thrown around of how many accidents have happened? Thousands...
The incompetence from the Strategic Air Command station in dealing with nuclear bomb accidents and the shifting of blame to men in the field was the acme of the reasons for what occurred in Damascus, AR. What most enlightening is the number thrown around of how many accidents have happened? Thousands...
The government has admitted to 32 broken arrows, or nuclear weapon accidents including the Damascus accident.
- 1980, another serious accident during the same week in 1980, Schlosser said, when a bomber loaded with 12 hydrogen bombs caught on fire at an air base in North Dakota
- May 16, 2014, two years ago at a Minuteman 3 missile site in Colorado, Schlosser said, that has received little attention. What we know about the Colorado accident “is very similar to what happens in the film,” Schlosser said. “There were some maintenance guys working on a Minuteman missile in the silo. They were doing some diagnostic tests and something went wrong. They brought in another team the next day and something really went wrong.” "The summary said the full report was classified on Nov. 9, 2015, by Gen. Robin Rand, who took over as commander of Air Force Global Strike Command in July 2015." from silo Juliet-07 (1 of 10 silos that straddles Co-Ne border). Under command by the 320th Missile Squadron and administered by the 90th Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, causing $1.8 million in damages
The American Experience Film, Command And Control
You Tube Video on PBS Show of Command and Control
Salon magazine article, The Night We Almost Lost Arkansas"
Sept 14, 2016 by Andrew O'Hehir, about the nonfiction book by Author Eric Schlosser and filmmaker Robert Kenner
Florida Today NEWS article (part of USA Today), Jan. 6, 2017, by James Dean
Titusville man, Jeff Devlin, recalls Damascus nuclear missile accident
Salon magazine article, The Night We Almost Lost Arkansas"
Sept 14, 2016 by Andrew O'Hehir, about the nonfiction book by Author Eric Schlosser and filmmaker Robert Kenner
You might assume that a massively powerful nuclear warhead, which Schlosser said was “three times more powerful than all the bombs used by all the armies in the Second World War,” including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, would have multiple and redundant safety features to protect it from such a fluke event. You would be wrong.
Schlosser pointed out, “We don’t know if the warhead was armed, and we don’t know how serious an accident it was. The Air Force by law is supposed to release an accident investigation report, and they’ve refused to do that in this case.”
Florida Today NEWS article (part of USA Today), Jan. 6, 2017, by James Dean
Titusville man, Jeff Devlin, recalls Damascus nuclear missile accident
Greg Devlin and his Propellant Transfer System teammates were told their participation was voluntary, but the young Air Force airmen felt it was their duty to help.
“We’re sitting there with this massive, monster missile leaking this extremely hazardous fuel,” recalled Devlin of Titusville, then a 21-year-old senior airman. “You realized the danger, but you’re thinking, let’s go make something happen, let’s go fix this thing or let’s get out of here.”
On top of the Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile at Launch Complex 374-7 in Damascus, Arkansas, on Sept. 18, 1980, was a nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead more powerful than all the bombs dropped in World War II combined.
If the missile collapsed and blew up, “what would happen to the warhead was anybody’s guess,” the commander at the time of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing at Little Rock Air Force Base says in “Command and Control,” a documentary airing Tuesday on PBS that recounts the scary accident.
Devlin is featured in the American Experience film, based on the 2013 book of the same title by Eric Schlosser, that warns of the risk of an accidental detonation at home by nuclear weapons that the public no longer worries much about.
He's one of at least four Brevard County residents who played roles in the Damascus accident that killed one airman and injured 21 more — Devlin among them — but fortunately did not result in the worst-case scenario.
Titusville residents Patrick "Buddy" Boylan and Rick Willinghurst also were on the teams that handled hazardous propellants, and North Brevard resident Matt Arnold helped recover the W-53 warhead, the most powerful weapon the nation has ever developed.
“If you survived that night, you were lucky to be alive afterward,” said Devlin, now a 57-year-old grandfather.
A dropped tool set the crisis in motion.
Two Propellant Transfer System technicians on an earlier shift, wearing space suit-like protective gear, were attempting to connect a nitrogen line to the Titan II to pressurize its upper-stage oxidizer tank, which was showing low pressure that would have prevented it from launching.
It was expected to be a simple, in-and-out job. But more than 11 hours into their shift, senior airman Dave Powell, then 21, had forgotten to bring a torque wrench into the underground silo.
He instead tried to disconnect a cap with an available socket wrench, which had been standard practice in prior years, but the wrench wasn’t working properly.
The nine-pound socket fell off the wrench, through a seal between the work platform and missile and dropped — seemingly in slow motion — about 70 feet. The socket hit the stand that held the Titan II upright and ricocheted into the base of the missile, puncturing a hole that immediately began to spurt a cloud of highly toxic fuel.
“As it was falling I was thinking, ‘Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no,” Jeffrey Plumb, then a 19-year-old airman in training, says in the film.
Launch Complex 374-7, one of 54 Titan II missile sites spread across three states, was evacuated as senior officials in Little Rock and at Strategic Air Command’s Omaha headquarters tried to figure out what to do.
Devlin remembers waiting and waiting for instructions.
Unbeknownst to him, missile manufacturer Martin Marietta had recommended staying away from the complex. But early on Sept. 19, Devlin and teammate Rex Hukle were asked to enter the complex to get readings confirming the concentration of fuel inside the silo.
He started the job with bolt cutters and a crowbar needed to get through a perimeter wire fence and a portal door.
“There’s only two guys in history to break into a nuclear missile complex,” he jokes now. “But that’s what we had to do, because there was no one in the silo, no commanders to electronically open the gate to let you in.”
Devlin and Hukle made it to a 6,000-pound blast door several stories underground, where they would normally gain entry by providing top secret codes that they immediately burned. But they were unable to open the door with a hydraulic pump that they had never used and did not install properly.
Their air packs permitted only about a half-hour of work, so they returned above ground to the perimeter about 100 feet from the silo and were replaced by teammates Dave Livingston and Jeff Kennedy, who successfully opened a series of blast doors.
In a room so thick with fuel vapor that it threatened to melt his suit, Kennedy confirmed detectors showing the concentration of fuel in the silo were maxed out and eight red warning lights were illuminated.
The missile exploded shortly after Kennedy and Livingston emerged from the silo, around 3 a.m.
The blast wave hit Devlin, still wearing protective gear on his legs, like a Mack truck. He was doubled over and launched backward, sliding 60 feet down an access road.
“I could see glowing steel and concrete that looked like lava blowing past me at a high rate of speed,” he said. “The only thing that went through my brain was, it’s over. I know I’m going to die here. I hope it’s not painful.
Devlin heard a scream close to his ear: “Run! Run!” He saw no one, and attributes the urgent warning to a guardian angel.
After he had run five steps, a chunk of concrete larger than a school bus landed where he had been lying. As he ran, a rod of inch-thick steel rebar shattered his left ankle, dropping him to the ground.
The W-53 warhead landed in a ditch across the road, perhaps 50 feet from Devlin. Separated from any power source, the warhead posed no risk, officials determined after finding it later in the day.
Buddy Boylan helped transport Devlin to a hospital on the bed of a truck, fearing he wouldn't make it. In addition to the ankle injury, Devlin required painful skin grafts to treat burns to his face, neck and back. The film shows photos of the injuries from his personal album.
Most people anywhere near the scene, including media gathered miles down the road, fled, fearing a nuclear blast. Windows shattered in homes miles away.
Livingston and Kennedy, presumed dead, were at first left behind before being rescued. Livingston reached a hospital but died within 12 hours. Kennedy died in 2011.
The Damascus accident was widely reported but quickly forgotten. The Air Force blamed the Propellant Transfer System technicians for having used the wrong tool, and some of those who heroically risked their lives to try to help prevent a disaster. Kennedy, who at one point broke protocol to collect fuel readings on his own instead of with a partner, was reprimanded.
Relegated to a cafeteria position, Devlin suddenly felt unwelcome in the Air Force, where he had planned to make a career. He was part of a group awarded the Airman's Medal for Heroism, but left the service soon after. He and three others later won small sums in a lawsuit against Martin Marietta.
The Air Force initially would not confirm that the Titan II was armed with a warhead. Official and some press accounts insisted the design of nuclear weapons made a detonation that could have wiped out Arkansas and blown a cloud of radiation eastward was impossible.
“Command and Control” suggests otherwise, arguing that the potential for an accident is systemic.
A combination of careful design, hard work and luck prevented a nightmare outcome in Damascus, and in hundreds of other accidents that went unreported, even to the top officials at the Sandia Laboratory in New Mexico.
“Nuclear weapons will always have a chance of an accidental detonation,” Bob Peurifoy, then head of weapon development at Sandia Laboratory, says in the documentary. “It will happen. It may be tomorrow, or it may be a million years from now, but it will happen.”
After the Air Force, Devlin found work on life support teams at Kennedy Space Center, helping crews who performed hazardous fueling operations and were among the first to meet a space shuttle after landing.
He left for more than a decade following the Challenger disaster but returned to the space space center, ultimately leaving in 2010 as a 100 percent disabled veteran. He suffers from a bad back that he traces to his injuries from the missile explosion.Devlin said he learned a lot from Schlosser’s reporting on the Damascus accident and others he hadn't known about, and is glad the story was told.
He expects that most readers and viewers, whatever their opinions on nuclear arms, will be surprised to learn that “we have nuclear weapons around us all over the place, and that there’s a minute, a slight possibility of one exploding.
“So the best thing is, if we have lots of people talking about it, hopefully we’ll figure this situation out,” he said. “Because while the risk of an explosion is slim, the slim still exists.”
