Colonel Jimmie Gray was the only person left at the site. He waited there, alone, as dawn approached, fires still burned, and the warhead lay somewhere in the dark.
At the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, Matthew Arnold was taught how to deactivate chemical and biological weapons. “Chlorine is your friend,” the instructor told the class. The principal ingredient in household bleach would render almost every deadly pathogen, nerve agent, and blister agent harmless. That’s good to know, Arnold thought. Although Redstone was an Army facility, he’d been sent there by the Air Force. The three-week course at Redstone was the first step toward becoming an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician. Students were no longer exposed to nerve gas and then told to inject themselves with atropine — an exercise to build confidence that the antidote would work during a chemical attack. Instead, they were shown footage of a goat being exposed to a nerve agent and given an injection. The goat lived. But the film and the lectures at Redstone suggested how dangerous the work of an EOD technician could be, and a number of people dropped out.
The attrition rate was even higher among those students who, like Arnold, reached the next step — seven months of training, six days a week, at the Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal School in Indian Head, Maryland. About one third of the students typically flunked out or quit, and only one fifth completed the course on his or her first try. The classes at Indian Head focused mainly on conventional weapons. EOD trainees were required to study every kind of ordnance used by every military in the world. The render safe procedures were similar for most munitions, regardless of their national origin: remove the fuze if it could easily be done, or just attach a small explosive charge to the weapon, retreat a safe distance, and blow it up.
Unlike the bomb squads run by law enforcement agencies, the Air Force EOD teams usually didn’t care about preserving evidence. They were trained to get rid of the hazard, as quickly as possible, and then get out of the way. Arnold learned how to render safe all the conventional warheads, rockets, artillery shells, and bombs in the American arsenal. He also learned how to defuse the sort of handmade, improvised explosive devices used by terrorists groups like the Red Brigades and the Palestine Liberation Front. The handmade stuff could be tricky and unpredictable; the military ordnance, simpler but more powerful. An EOD technician had to approach both kinds with the same mental attitude — disciplined, thoughtful, patient, and calm.
Arnold performed well enough to enter Division Six, the program at Indian Head that taught students how to dismantle a nuclear weapon. The course began with a lesson on the dangers of radioactivity. Every class was shown the film of Louis Slotin dying from radiation sickness in 1946, after his criticality accident at Los Alamos. It was hard to watch. Slotin had been fully conscious and in enormous pain, as his skin swelled, changed color, blistered, and peeled away.
After learning how to use radiation detectors and calculate safe exposure times, the trainees became familiar with various nuclear weapon designs. At the time, the United States had about twenty-five different types — missiles, rockets, warheads, and bombs; artillery shells, depth charges, torpedoes, and mines; large weapons and small ones, atomic and thermonuclear. The most powerful were the Mark 53 bomb, delivered by aircraft, and the W-53 warhead carried by the Titan II. The least powerful was the Mark 54 Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM), with a yield of less than 1 kiloton. The SADM weighed only sixty pounds. It was known as a “suitcase bomb” or a “backpack bomb” because of the preferred methods of delivery. One person would carry the SADM and place it in the right spot. Another would set the timer, and then they’d both leave in a hurry.
The instructors at Division Six offered some basic tips on how to deal with a nuclear weapon that’s been in an accident. The first thing you want to do, they said, is find out whether the case of the weapon has been compromised and whether any components have shifted inside it. If your gamma ray detector is showing high levels of radiation, you’ve got a serious problem. Gamma rays will pass right through your protective gear. If you can detect gamma rays from a distance, back away immediately. The weapon may have partially detonated — or it may be about to detonate. But if lives are at stake, calculate how long you can work at the accident site without getting too much gamma radiation.
