STORIES PG 5

The Commander answered, “Oppenheimer chose that name himself. According to Lansing Lamont’s book Day of Trinity, it so happens that when he got the phone call that General Groves’ deputy had finally chosen the place, he was reading a book of John Donnes's poems. He recalled the opening of a holy sonnet that he had read:

The events related above are factual, although the conversation is an excerpt from my novel based on my experiences on the Minuteman crew force. What follows actually did happen, and my impressions of those events are real. See if you feel the same way.

 

It was a cold and cloudy day in the spring of 1977. There was a light dusting of snow on the ground, and intermittent flurries were coming down. This was my first assignment as code officer (I was still a Second Lieutenant). I was sent to a Launch Facility (LF) in the 12th SMS, to the southwest of Great Falls, Montana. This missile, an older Minuteman - II with it's one big bomb, was undergoing a ‘can change,’ meaning that the guidance computer had failed and needed replacing. When I got there, the maintenance team already had the launcher lid open, but it would be a while before they would have the can pulled. So, I must await the Team Chief's call to duty, and try to stay warm in a drafty old pickup truck.

The whole reason I was out there today was to be part of a "Two-man/One officer" team to carry the Permutation Plug from this missiles' computer back to the Codes Vault at Malmstrom. The P-plug is one of several links in the two sided chain of launch and enable codes used to ensure that no unauthorized launch command reaches a missile. Since this can had malfunctioned, there was no way to be sure that it's codes have been overwritten, so it and the P-plug must be returned to base separately. Otherwise, the complete launch code may be together in a vulnerable environment, and that is a very big No-No.

Both the enlisted airman on the team and myself carry sidearms for this duty. He waits in the truck with me, studying for a biology course he is taking at the College of Great Falls. He wants to be a teacher when his hitch is up. We also carry a letter from the Wing Deputy Commander for Operations authorizing us to be armed, and stating that the strongbox we are carrying is a special federal shipment not subject to search by civilian authorities. The box is locked with two heavy duty combination padlocks. We each know the combination to only one of the locks.

In order to do a can change, it is necessary to first remove the warhead, since the can sits atop the third stage immediately below the re-entry vehicle (RV) containing the warhead. The can spans the full diameter of the third stage. To change the can, a special tractor-trailer rig, a big eighteen-wheeler known as a Payload Transporter (or "PT van" for short), is parked over the launcher lid with the wheels of the trailer straddling the lid. The maintenance team penetrates the LF and opens the lid. Then a crane is rigged from the trailer. The RV is pulled up into the truck through trap doors built into the floor of the trailer, and is then placed upon a special mount and bolted down while a new can is swapped out for the old one.

This was my first chance to see a real live missile on alert, so I badgered the Team Chief - an old Tech Sergeant who knew the ropes - to let me into the PT van for a look around. The RV was still attached to the missile. I looked down into the silo, seeing one team member on the "diving board" cantilevered out from the Launch Equipment Room (LER) which surrounds the missile. He was busily loosening the bolts attaching the RV to the can. Another man was in the LER behind him taking the bolts. Their task was lit by incandescent worklights shining down from the trailer.

And there it was! The beast was big and ugly, neon green in color. It was not very aerodynamic in appearance. These monsters did not rely much on finesse to reach their targets. Rather, they bulled their way down the fiery re-entry path through the atmosphere, hitting their targets with the brute force of some one hundred Hiroshimas. I couldn't help staring at the thing for at least a full minute in silence, not really knowing what to think. I ignored the men just a step away from an eighty foot fall to the bottom of the silo.

After a while my curiosity was satisfied, so I naively offered to lend a hand at the work. The Team Chief politely refused my offers of help - I really wouldn’t have been much help, anyway - and shooed me back to the Air Force pickup truck that I "own" for the day. So I sat in the truck drinking coffee from my Thermos, smoking my pipe, and trying to work on my Squadron Officers' School as I pondered the beast.

It is a very eerie, haunting feeling to stand an arm's length away from such terrible destructive power. Your never forget the first couple of times you get that close to a warhead containing more power than all of the explosive force released during the entire Second World War. It is at once seductive and frightening. I wondered if this feeling was something like what the builders of the first atomic bomb felt as they were experimenting with the nuclear core of the bomb, trying to determine how much fissionable material was needed to produce a nuclear explosion; and the corollary problem of how big a blast would result. These men referred to the process as "tickling the dragon's tail" - an apt description if ever I heard one. Some of them died doing it.

I was on crew in the 564th, which had the newer Minuteman - III missile. Our warheads were smaller than the one I had just seen, but were still roughly ten to twenty times more powerful than the early atomic bombs. The first atomic bomb, which was exploded at Trinity Site, New Mexico (on what is now the White Sands Missile Range) on July 16, 1945 yielded the equivalent explosive power of 20,000 tons of TNT.

Twenty thousand tons of TNT does indeed make a very big explosion: But compared even to the medium sized warheads on MM-III, those early bombs were mere firecrackers. It only took a few years to develop the so-called superbombs, otherwise known as fusion bombs, Hydrogen bombs, or more simply: The H-bomb. The smallest of them are about an order of magnitude more powerful than those early atomic bombs. Some of them have yields as large as 20 megatons, but most of today’s warheads are much smaller, usually falling in the range of 100 to 400 kilotons.

Even though the theoretical possibility of the H-bomb was known before the first atomic bomb was completed, the United States did not proceed to build these superbombs until after the Soviet Union exploded their own A-bomb in 1949. This event came as a real shock to the American atomic weapons community because they knew what a colossal effort the Manhattan Project was, and that only the unmatched industrial capacity of the United States, along with the brilliant scientists who fled from the Nazi terror in Europe, could have accomplished this task in so short a time. How could the Soviet Union, a country that was only beginning to become industrially competitive before the outbreak of World War II, now prostrate from the combined ravages Hitler and Stalin, have built their own atomic bomb in only four years? The obvious reason for this was the treachery of the early "atomic spies" like Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, among others. It takes more than theoretical scientific knowledge to build atomic weapons - it takes advanced engineering and industrial methods that the Soviets simply could not have possessed in the late 1940's without the crucial help of well placed spies. The information thus gained was of immense help in avoiding the numerous blind alleys and parallel development efforts that were a key part of the Manhattan Project. The United States had the money and industrial capacity enabling it to take this approach to speed development and ensure success; the Soviets did not.

We can only guess what direction the world would have taken had the Soviets not gotten the bomb for another ten or twenty years, as most American atomic weapons experts of the day had estimated. The Soviets would not have been in a position to threaten us and Europe, and we would not have had to spend such huge sums of money and other national resources on an atomic arms race. It is conceivable that the numerous episodes of Communist insurgencies and Soviet-supported coup de etat's around the world may not have happened, or at least there may have been fewer of them. Lacking a nuclear arsenal, the Soviets would have been no real competition for the United States, and they would have been far less attractive as a role model to the developing countries. It is even possible that the movement for international control of The Bomb would have succeeded, and that by the time the Soviets did manage to develop nuclear weapons on their own, the international community could have taken steps to stop them at an early point.

This, then, may be the true legacy of Hiroshima: A warning to humanity of the power we are capable of unleashing upon each other, and the ultimate stakes of this half-century long poker game we have been playing. Had those two Japanese cities not died, the power of nuclear weapons would have remained effectively theoretical. It is one thing go to the New Mexico desert and vaporize steel, turn sand to green glass, and blast a big crater in the ground. It is quite another thing to use one airplane and one bomb to obliterate one city in one second. I am convinced that without Hiroshima, the world would never have understood the situation, and we would eventually have suffered a real nuclear war. Then, we would not be debating over the loss of two cities and a couple of hundred thousand people... in fact, there may not be anyone left to debate anything.

A couple months later, I was at an LF in the 564th’s Tango flight for the same reason. I again climbed into the PT van to see the warhead. Probably because I knew that it was physically different. Maybe because it still held a weird fascination for me. You never quite get over that reaction. Maybe the guys who routinely maintain the bombs do, but not me. I had to be ready to launch them at any time - and that is anything but routine.

Coincidentally, at the time of my first code officer assignment, my wife Susan and I were planning to brighten up our house on base by painting the doors in each room. She agreed to shop for the paint while I was out on code officer duty that day. When I returned home that evening, I found that she had fulfilled my color request only too well. When I saw that the paint she bought perfectly matched the green of the warhead, I let out a loud groan that at first mystified her. When I explained where else I had seen that color on that same day, we both thought it was funny. Later, while painting the doors, a bit of the paint splashed on the side of my desk. To this day, whenever I notice that paint on my desk, I am reminded of my first encounter with the beast on that cold and snowy day on the Montana prairie so many years ago.

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