Always wear a bunny suit, they said, when you walk up to the weapon for the first time. It’s the yellow jumpsuit with the hood. And keep an eye on your alpha and beta meters. If they detect anything, that probably means the weapon’s case has been compromised. The alphas are emitted by the nuclear core, the betas by the tritium gas used to boost it. Your bunny suit will block them, and the respirator will prevent you from inhaling them. And remember: never take off your mask, even if there’s no sign of radiation, until you’re sure that the “skull” of the weapon is intact. The skull is the beryllium reflector around the core. Inhaling beryllium dust can be worse than inhaling plutonium. Both of them can be lethal.
In addition to an alpha meter, a beta meter, a gamma meter, and a tritium meter, an EOD team relied on more prosaic tools to handle a nuclear weapon accident — screwdrivers, ratchets, wrenches, and pliers. The tools were made with metal alloys unlikely to create a spark. If the weapon looked capable of detonating, an EOD technician would open its case with a screwdriver. The most important goal, by far, was to isolate the power sources and ensure that electricity could not reach the detonators. The best way to do that was simply to disconnect the batteries and yank them out. Capacitors that had already charged could be short-circuited with the touch of a screwdriver. But if the X-unit had already charged, an EOD technician had to be very careful. A wrong move could trigger it and detonate the weapon.
Arnold practiced the render safe procedures on dummy weapons that were identical to the real thing — except for the high explosives and fissile material, which were fake. The job was a meticulous process of disassembly. You took the weapon apart, wrapped the parts in plastic, boxed them up, and got them ready for return shipment to the manufacturer. After months of training, Arnold passed all the tests at Indian Head and joined an EOD unit at Barksdale Air Force Base, outside Shreveport, Louisiana. He had learned how to defuse car bombs and biological weapons, to handle Broken Arrows and dismantle nuclear warheads. He was twenty years old.
When Sid King got to Clinton, he hurried into the radio station and turned on the transmitter. KGFL was licensed to broadcast only during the daylight hours, but the Federal Communications Commission allowed a sunset station to go on the air during an emergency. King thought the explosion of an intercontinental ballistic missile qualified as one. Moments later, his wife arrived at the station, happy to see that he hadn’t been killed. King described the blast to his listeners, and callers to the station shared what they’d seen. Soon the little studio at KGFL was crammed with people, as friends and neighbors gathered there, eager to find out what was going on.
The Air Force was refusing to disclose any information about the explosion. It would not explain what had just happened. It would not discuss the potential danger from toxic fumes. It would neither confirm nor deny that the Titan II was carrying a nuclear warhead. Journalists who called Little Rock Air Force Base were told to phone the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Omaha — and nobody at SAC headquarters would answer their questions. SAC headquarters wouldn’t even tell Frank Wilson, the director of environmental services at the Arkansas Department of Health, if the accident had spread radioactive contamination. SAC wouldn’t tell him anything. And so Wilson called a Department of Energy office in Albuquerque. An official there asked him to describe the explosion. Wilson mentioned the fireball and the sparkly thing that seemed to emerge from it. The DOE representative said that the missile probably did carry a nuclear warhead — and it sounded like the high explosives of the weapon had detonated, spreading fissile material. Unable to get any confirmation from SAC, the state of Arkansas sent employees to Van Buren County with radiation detectors.
The Air Force’s silence helped to sow panic and confusion. More than a thousand people left their homes, got into their cars, and fled the area around Damascus. One caller to KGFL said that he was leaving town to stay with family in Fairfield, Illinois, about four hundred miles away. Other callers told of windows being blown out, doors knocked off hinges, an ominous dark cloud that passed over their homes. The cloud smelled like rotten eggs, burned their eyes, and made them cough. The refusal to acknowledge that the missile carried a nuclear weapon made the Air Force seem foolish. One of KGFL’s listeners phoned the station and said that he’d found the radio frequency that SAC was using at the missile site. The conversations with the Little Rock command post weren’t being scrambled. And the whereabouts of “the warhead” were being discussed.
