Technical Sergeant Melvin Wooten, the gunner, landed in a field about half a mile from Salisbury, Pennsylvania. The lights of the town were visible in the distance, but Wooten died before reaching it. He’d suffered severe head, chest, and leg injuries. Major Robert Payne, the navigator, walked for hours in the darkness, through snowdrifts two to three feet deep. He fell into a stream and froze to death. Major McCormick and a copilot, Captain Parker Peedin, landed near trees, about three miles apart. They waited until daylight to seek help. McCormick found refuge in a farmhouse, after walking for two miles. Peedin was spotted by a search plane, and both men were hospitalized with minor injuries. The hydrogen bombs were found amid the wreckage of the B-52, partially buried in snow. Their high explosives had neither detonated nor burned.
Another accident with a Mark 53 bomb took place on December 8, 1964. During a training exercise at Bunker Hill Air Force Base, about a dozen miles north of Kokomo, Indiana, a B-58 bomber turned onto an icy runway. The plane carried five hydrogen bombs — four Mark 43s and the Mark 53—with a combined yield of perhaps 13 megatons. As the B-58 turned, the plane ahead revved its engines. The strong, sudden gust of exhaust hit the B-58. The bomber slid off the runway, and the landing gear beneath the right wing collapsed. The pilot, Captain Leary Johnson, saw a bright flash; fuel had leaked and ignited. Johnson gave the order to bail out, jettisoned his canopy, climbed over the nose of the plane, leaped through flames, and caught on fire. He rolled through snow and puddles of water to put out the flames, suffering only minor burns. The defensive systems operator, Roger Hall, jettisoned his canopy, noticed the left wing was on fire, climbed onto the right one, jumped off the engine, and briefly caught on fire, too. His burns were superficial. Instead of climbing out, the navigator, Manuel Cervantes, Jr., triggered his escape capsule, and a rocket blasted it into the air. The capsule landed about 150 yards from the burning plane, but Cervantes was killed by the impact. He had two young sons.
The five hydrogen bombs incurred varying degrees of damage: two were intact; one was scorched; another was mostly consumed by the fire; and the fifth completely melted into the tarmac. None of the high explosives detonated. Fire crews aggressively fought the blaze, long past the time factors of the bombs. The fire threatened not only a SAC base crowded with bombers and nuclear weapons but also the fifty thousand inhabitants of Kokomo. At one point firefighters dragged a burning hydrogen bomb fifty yards from the plane, dumped it into a trench, covered it with sand, and extinguished the flames.
During the same week as the Bunker Hill accident, a couple of young airmen, Leonard D. Johnson and Glenn A. Dodson, Jr., drove out to a Minuteman missile site at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. A crew in the launch control center, about twenty miles away, had reported a problem with the security system around the silo. Johnson and Dodson were told to find out what was wrong. They entered the silo, opened the security alarm control box, and checked the fuses. Dodson had forgotten to bring a fuse puller, so he used a screwdriver instead. After removing each fuse, he’d put it back into place. You could hear the difference between a good fuse and one that had burned out. When a good fuse was inserted, it made a clicking sound. One of the fuses didn’t make that “click.” Dodson pulled it out again with the screwdriver, put it back, and heard a different kind of sound — a loud explosion.
The two airmen ran out of the launch duct and called the control center. Half an hour later, a Missile Potential Hazard Team ordered them to reenter the silo. They found it full of thick, gray smoke. One of the retrorockets atop the Minuteman had fired. The reentry vehicle, containing a W-56 thermonuclear weapon, had lifted a few inches into the air, flipped over, fallen nose first from the missile, bounced off the wall, hit the second-stage engine, and landed at the bottom of the silo. The warhead wasn’t damaged, although its arming and fuzing package was torn off during the seventy-five-foot drop. An investigation later found that the retrorocket had been set off by a fault in an electrical connector — and by Dodson’s screwdriver.
