To avoid the embarrassment of relying on a Los Alamos design, Teller used Livermore’s new core but added a mechanical safing device to it. A strip of cadmium tape coated with boron was placed in the center of the core. Cadmium and boron absorb neutrons, and the presence of the tape would stop a chain reaction, making a nuclear detonation impossible. During the warhead’s arming sequence, the tape would be pulled out by a little motor before the core imploded. It seemed like a clever solution to the one-point safety problem — until a routine examination of the warheads in 1963 found that the tape corroded inside the cores. When the tape corroded, it got stuck. And the little motor didn’t have enough torque to pull the tape out. Livermore’s mechanical safing device had made the warheads too safe. A former director of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Project Office Reentry Body Coordinating Committee explained the problem: there was “almost zero confidence that the warhead would work as intended.” A large proportion of W-47 warheads, perhaps 75 percent or more, wouldn’t detonate after being launched. The Polaris submarine, the weapon system that McNamara and Kennedy considered the cornerstone of the American arsenal, the ultimate deterrent, the guarantor of nuclear retaliation and controlled escalation and assured destruction, was full of duds. For the next four years, Livermore tried to fix the safety mechanism of the W-47, without success. The Navy was furious, and all the warheads had to be replaced. The new cores were inherently one-point safe.
The Strategic Air Command’s safety procedures had become so effective that the risks of its airborne alert were easily overlooked. During the first five years of the program, SAC conducted tens of thousands aerial refuelings — with only one fatal accident. But the laws of probability couldn’t be escaped. On January 17, 1966, at about ten fifteen in the morning, a B-52 on a Chrome Dome mission prepared for its second refueling, a couple of miles inland from the southern coast of Spain. It had left Goldsboro, North Carolina, the previous evening and needed more fuel, after seventeen hours of flight, for the trip home. The B-52 approached the tanker too quickly, flew into the fuel boom, and started to break apart. Flames traveled straight through the boom. The tanker exploded, incinerating its four-man crew.
Major Larry G. Messinger, a copilot who was flying the B-52 at the time, bailed out first. His ejection seat cleared the plane, his parachute opened, and high winds carried him out to sea. The morning sky was clear enough for him to watch the coast of Spain receding in the distance. Messinger landed in the ocean, eight miles from shore, and inflated a life raft. Captain Ivans Buchanan, the radar navigator, left the plane, passed through a fireball, couldn’t get out of his ejection seat — and couldn’t get his parachute to open. Stuck in the chair as it plummeted and spun, Buchanan removed the parachute from the pack by hand. The chute finally opened, but the weight of the seat caused a hard landing. It hurt his back, broke his shoulder, and knocked him unconscious. Captain Charles J. Wendorf, the pilot, broke an arm ejecting from the plane. Although his parachute caught on fire, it deposited him safely in the ocean, about three miles out.
Lieutenant Michael J. Rooney, another copilot, was sitting below the cockpit, reading a book, when the two planes collided. He wasn’t near an ejection seat. The g-forces of the falling bomber delayed his exit for a few long minutes, tossing him against the walls, the roof, the floor. He managed to crawl out through the navigator’s escape hatch and opened his parachute. A burning engine pod flew right past him, close enough to singe hair. Rooney landed in the ocean, not far from Wendorf, and started to swim.
Rooney and Wendorf were picked up by fishing boats within half an hour, and Messinger was rescued about fifteen minutes later. Residents of Palomares, a nearby village, discovered Buchanan sitting in a field, strapped into the ejection seat, still unconscious. They took him to a hospital. Sergeant Ronald Snyder, the gunner, and Lieutenant George Glesner, the electronic warfare operator, died in the plane. Lieutenant Stephen Montanus, the navigator, bailed out, fell thirty thousand feet in his ejection seat, and hit the ground. For some reason, the parachute hadn’t opened. Montanus was the youngest member of the crew, just twenty-three, and his wife was only nineteen.
