An investigation of the accident later found the cause of the leak. Someone hadn’t put a filter inside the oxidizer line. But the small rubber O-ring designed to hold the filter had been left inside the line. The O-ring blocked the poppet valve from closing fully, allowing oxidizer to pour out. Nobody accepted responsibility for failing to insert the filter. Oxidizer flowed more quickly without a filter in place — and someone may have deliberately omitted the filter to save time and load the tank quickly.
The blast door leading to the control center wouldn’t open because someone had propped open the blast door across from it with a bungee cord — and both doors couldn’t be open at the same time. Hepstall had used the manual override to unlock blast door 8, and by entering the control center, he’d contaminated it with oxidizer.
Robert J. Thomas was killed by a leak in his RFHCO, most likely at the spot where it intersected with the left glove. Oxidizer may have poured into the suit as he tried to reconnect the line to the missile. The Air Force recommended, in the future, that black vinyl electrical tape be used to seal the interface between the glove and the RFHCO suit more securely. Thomas left a widow and two young sons.
Erby Hepstall died a week and a half later, at the age of twenty-two, his lungs destroyed by oxidizer. His son had just turned two. A small tear in the left leg of Hepstall’s RFHCO suit, about seven eighths of an inch long, had allowed oxidizer to enter it.
Carl Malinger had a stroke, went into a coma, suffered lung and kidney damage, lost the use of his left arm, and spent the next several months in the hospital. He’d enlisted to get training as an automobile mechanic, and his mother later felt enormous anger at the Air Force. Its report on the accident said that Hepstall and Malinger had failed to “comply with [Technical Order] 21M-LGM25C-2-12 which states ‘if disconnect starts to leak… screw disconnect to fully connected position immediately.’” The report suggested that Malinger — never trained for the task and working in a Titan II silo for the first time — was somehow to blame for what happened.
General Curtis LeMay had created an institutional culture at the Strategic Air Command that showed absolutely no tolerance for mistakes. People were held accountable not only for their behavior but for their bad luck. “To err is human,” everyone at the command had been told, “to forgive is not SAC policy.”
Blaming young enlisted men for the accident at Rock, Kansas, didn’t eliminate the problems with the Titan II. The Pentagon had announced in 1967 that the Titan II was no longer needed and would be decommissioned, with the first missiles coming off alert in 1971. But every year the Air Force successfully battled to keep the Titan II. Its warhead was more than seven times more powerful than the warhead carried by the Minuteman II. The United States had about one thousand land-based missiles — and the fifty-four Titan IIs represented roughly one third of their total explosive force. SAC didn’t want to lose all that megatonnage without getting new weapons to replace it. As the Titan II aged, however, its ability to reach the Soviet Union became more uncertain. The last test-launch of a Titan II occurred in 1976, and no more were planned, due to a shortage of missiles and parts.
When Senator Pryor and Skip Rutherford visited a Titan II site in Arkansas, the place looked impressive. But one of Rutherford’s confidential sources later told him that there’d been an oxidizer leak at a nearby launch complex that day — and that the vapor detectors in thirteen of the state’s eighteen silos were broken. Pryor came up with a relatively inexpensive plan for protecting rural communities from fuel and oxidizer leaks at Titan II missile sites: install a siren, at every complex, that would blare whenever the crew turned on the red warning beacon topside. The siren could easily be mounted on the same pole. It would warn neighboring homes and farms of a leak. The Air Force opposed the idea, arguing that a siren “might cause people to leave areas of safety and evacuate into or through areas containing propellant fumes.” Colonel Richard D. Osborn told Pryor that during those rare occasions when civilians needed to be alerted, the combined efforts of Air Force personnel and local law enforcement officers would ensure public safety. Pryor nevertheless decided to seek funding for the sirens through an amendment to a Senate bill.
