Peurifoy and William Chambers, who was representing Los Alamos, knew right away that they’d like General Light. He’d made the correct decision. The Air Force was eager to get the weapon out of that ditch as quickly as possible. A crowd of journalists had assembled near the access road on Highway 65, and a small plane carrying a photographer had already flown over the launch complex. But Peurifoy and Chambers thought there was no need to rush the dismantling of America’s most powerful thermonuclear warhead. Chambers knew a fair amount about the subject. He’d responded to the Broken Arrow at Palomares, advised the recovery effort at Thule, written EOD manuals for nuclear weapons, and helped to create the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), a secretive group that handled threats of nuclear terrorism within the United States. None of the work at Los Alamos and NEST had made Chambers feel anxious — not the weapon accidents, not the ransom note warning of a 20-kiloton bomb in Manhattan, not the warning of a terrorist attack on America’s bicentennial celebrations in 1976. He’d served with General George S. Patton’s Third Army during the Second World War, and the genuine horrors that he saw on the battlefield tempered his fear of hypothetical ones.
From the air, the launch complex looked like it had been hit by a bomb. The Accident Response Group traveled to the site by helicopter, and Peurifoy wondered about the condition of the warhead’s electrical system, his area of expertise. The moment he saw the weapon, Peurifoy thought: Well, my job here is done. General Light had used the wrong term to describe what was lying in the ditch. The “reentry vehicle” wasn’t intact — it was gone, nowhere to be seen, no doubt blown to pieces by the explosion. The warhead lay there by itself, stripped of the electrical power source necessary for a nuclear detonation. But that W-53 was looking pretty good, considering what it had been through. It was still, essentially, in one piece. The outer cover of the primary had been torn off — you could see the detonator cables, the high explosives, the tubing, wiring, capacitors. And the secondary was loose; it no longer sat directly below the primary, like a metal garbage can under a silver basketball. The damage was impressively slight, however, for an object that had flown through a fireball, climbed more than a thousand feet into the air, and hit the ground without a parachute.
Chambers walked over to a nearby Pettibone crane, a mobile all-terrain vehicle that was ready to lift the weapon from the ditch, and drained hydraulic fluid from it. He poured the oil into the holes and cracks of the warhead, coating the high explosives and making them less likely to be set off by a random spark — the kind of spark that might be generated by a chain wrapped around the metal casing of a nuclear warhead. Chambers wanted to know exactly what had happened inside the warhead before anyone tried to move it or take it apart. An X-ray would reveal the amount of damage, but the Accident Response Group hadn’t brought a portable X-ray unit to Arkansas. Until the damage could be properly assessed, Chambers said that nothing should be done. The Air Force had suffered enough embarrassment already. Another accident with this weapon could kill people and spread radioactive tritium, with a pack of journalists literally down the road.
When Matthew Arnold heard about the decision to do nothing until the weapon was X-rayed, he thought it was ridiculous. It was bullshit. It meant his unit would have to sit around in Arkansas for at least another day or two. These civilians don’t know what they’re talking about, he thought. They’re being overly cautious. The warhead doesn’t look that bad, and the render safe procedures wouldn’t be complicated. They were right out of the book.
We’re ready to rock-and-roll, Arnold told his EOD commander. This is what we train for, day after day. These eggheads should just get out of the way and let us go to work. Let’s get the weapon out of here and go home.
Arnold wasn’t allowed anywhere near the warhead. Instead, he was sent onto the launch complex to look for the remnants of retrorockets and other explosives carried by the Titan II. He’d lost his cool, and he knew it. Someone else should do the render safe, Arnold agreed — his mind was too preoccupied with the recent move, the unpacked boxes, the mess waiting for him at home. He wasn’t on top of his game. And much as Arnold hated to admit it, the guy from Los Alamos was probably right.
