The weapon accidents often felt sudden and surreal. On December 5, 1965, a group of sailors were pushing an A-4E Skyhawk fighter plane onto an elevator aboard the USS Ticonderoga, an aircraft carrier about seventy miles off the coast of Japan. The plane’s canopy was open; Lieutenant Douglas M. Webster, its pilot, strapped into his seat. The deck rose as the ship passed over a wave, and one of the sailors blew a whistle, signaling that Webster should apply his brakes. Webster didn’t hear the whistle. The plane started to roll backward. The sailor kept blowing the whistle; other sailors yelled, “Brakes, brakes,” and held onto the plane. They let go as it rolled off the elevator into the sea. In an instant, it was gone. The pilot, his plane, and a Mark 43 hydrogen bomb vanished. No trace of them was ever found; the ocean there was about three miles deep. The canopy may have closed after the plane fell, trapping Webster in his seat. He had recently graduated from Ohio State University, gotten married, and completed his first tour of duty over Vietnam.
By the mid-1960s, sealed-pit nuclear weapons had burned, melted, sunk, blown apart, smashed into the ground. But none had detonated accidentally. The B-52 crash in Goldsboro, North Carolina, had been an awfully close call, gaining the attention of engineers at Sandia. Nobody wanted that sort of thing to happen again — and yet during the Goldsboro crash, the weapons had failed safe. Now that nuclear testing had resumed, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia were busy designing new warheads and bombs for every branch of the armed services. The need for new safety devices was not apparent. Again and again, the existing ones worked.
President Kennedy and Secretary of Defense McNamara had taken a personal interest in nuclear weapon safety. A few months after Goldsboro, Kennedy gave the Department of Defense “responsibility for identifying and resolving health and safety problems connected with the custody and storage of nuclear weapons.” The Atomic Energy Commission was to play an important, though subsidiary, role. Kennedy’s decision empowered McNamara to do whatever seemed necessary. But it also reinforced military, not civilian, control of the system. At Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia, the reliability of nuclear weapons continued to receive far greater attention than their safety. And a dangerous way of thinking, a form of complacency later known as the Titanic Effect took hold among weapon designers: the more impossible an accidental detonation seemed to be, the more likely it became.
The military’s distrust of use control and safety devices was encouraged by some of the early models. The first permissive action links — Category A PALs — did not always operate flawlessly. The batteries in their decoders had a tendency to run down without warning. When that happened, the weapons couldn’t be unlocked. And the gears in the Category A PALs were too loud. During a black hat exercise at Sandia, an engineer listened carefully to the sounds of a PAL, deciphered its code, and picked the lock.
The W-47 warhead had a far more serious problem. Designed at Lawrence Livermore in the late 1950s and rushed into production amid the anxiety about Sputnik, the warhead sat atop every missile in Polaris submarines. Its primary had a revolutionary new core — small and egg shaped, with only two detonators — that could generate a large yield for a weapon so compact. But the W-47 wasn’t one-point safe, by a significant margin. And the moratorium on nuclear testing, during Eisenhower’s last two years in office, prevented the sort of tests that could make it one-point safe. Edward Teller, now the director of Lawrence Livermore, considered using a more traditional core designed at Los Alamos, even though the two labs had competed fiercely for this contract with the Navy. Each Polaris submarine would have sixteen missiles, aligned closely together in two rows. An unsafe warhead could threaten the sub’s 150 crew members — and the port cities where it docked.
