Toward the end of the Eisenhower administration, amid the fiery rhetoric of the missile gap, Bob Peurifoy became concerned that the Soviet Union might attack the United States. With help from his wife, Barbara, and a local contractor, Peurifoy built a bomb shelter underneath the garage at the family home in Albuquerque. Other engineers at Sandia added bomb shelters to their houses, too. The laboratory was a prime target for the Soviets, and the series of international crises during the first two years of the Kennedy administration made the decision seem wise. The Peurifoy shelter had food, water, a dosimeter to measure radiation levels, a door that could be sealed shut, a hand-cranked ventilation fan, a gun, and enough room for five people. He later viewed it as a youthful folly. When the family moved to another house in 1967, a few miles from the nuclear weapon storage facility at Site Able, he didn’t bother to build another shelter. Peurifoy couldn’t dig a hole deep enough to protect his family from the thermonuclear warheads likely to hit the neighborhood. And by the mid-1970s, he was preoccupied with a different threat. Although Peurifoy was conservative and anti-Communist, a Republican and a supporter of increased spending on defense, the nuclear weapons in the American arsenal were the ones keeping him up at night.
The Fowler Letter’s only immediate effect was to raise the possibility that Glenn Fowler would lose his job. His urgent safety warning didn’t persuade the Air Force to remove nuclear weapons from its bombers on ground alert. At the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, the anger provoked by the letter was intense. High-ranking officials from both organizations flew from Washington, D.C., to meet with the head of Sandia. In preparation for the meeting, Peurifoy asked Stan Spray to put together an exhibit of weapon components that had been subjected to abnormal environments. Perhaps seeing would be believing: the melted solder on charred circuit boards seemed like irrefutable evidence that nuclear weapons could behave unpredictably during a fire. Spray’s presentation was soon known as the Burned Board briefing. Donald R. Cotter, the assistant to the secretary of defense for atomic energy, and Major General Ernest Graves, the AEC official to whom Fowler’s letter had been sent, weren’t impressed. They found the evidence unconvincing. And they were outraged that Sandia had put these claims on the record. The American stockpile contained dozens of different types of nuclear weapons, and the Fowler Letter didn’t assert there was a minor safety problem with one of them. It suggested that none were demonstrably safe.
Don Cotter was particularly upset. He knew Peurifoy and Bill Stevens well. Before going to the Pentagon, Cotter had worked at Sandia for years. He’d designed the electrical systems of nuclear weapons, championed early safety devices, and helped Fred Iklé prepare the RAND report on weapon safety. Cotter was offended by the Fowler Letter. His response to it was blunt: “It’s our stockpile. We think it’s safe. Who do you guys think you are?” Peurifoy’s team had challenged not only the conventional wisdom about weapon design but also the readiness of some NATO units and the Strategic Air Command.
Fowler kept his job. But the recommendations in his letter weren’t followed. No air-delivered weapons were taken out of service or retrofitted with new safety mechanisms. Instead, a series of government studies was commissioned to explore the issue of nuclear weapon safety, a classic bureaucratic maneuver to delay taking any action. The Department of Defense argued that “the magnitude of the safety problems is not readily apparent”—and it now had unprecedented influence over the nuclear stockpile. The Atomic Energy Commission was disbanded in 1975. It was replaced by the Energy Research and Development Administration, an agency that lasted only two years, before being subsumed into the Department of Energy. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy — which had served for three decades as a powerful civilian counterweight to the military — was abolished in 1977. The Pentagon wielded largely unchecked power over the management of nuclear weapons, and its Defense Nuclear Agency had a set of priorities that differed from Bob Peurifoy’s. “The safety advantages gained by retrofitting existing stockpile weapons… will be a costly program that in all probability will reduce funds available for future weapons,” the DNA said.
The Air Force deployed most of the weapons that Peurifoy wanted to fix. And it supported the use of new safety devices, so long as they didn’t require:
Modification of any current operational aircraft
Additional crew actions and
Expenditure of Air Force money.
