In the absence of any information from the Air Force, officials from the Arkansas Department of Health and the Pollution Control and Ecology Department performed their own tests, looking for signs of radiation and oxidizer. About a dozen people in Guy, Arkansas, claimed to have been sickened by toxic fumes. Guy was about six miles from the missile complex. The small town hadn’t been evacuated, and its mayor, Benny Mercer, was among those feeling ill. Everyone seemed to be angry about the federal government’s response. “The Air Force wouldn’t tell us a damn thing when it happened,” a member of the Office of Emergency Services told the Democrat, “and they still won’t.” Gary Gray, the sheriff of nearby Pulaski County, said that he learned more from the radio than from the Air Force. Sam Tatom, the state’s director of public safety, tried to enter the missile site and speak with the commanding officer there, but security police stopped Tatom on the access road, not far from Highway 65.
Governor Bill Clinton found himself in a difficult spot. He had to pacify his own officials, reassure the public, and limit his criticism of the Carter administration, six weeks before the presidential election. After taking a call from Sheriff Gus Anglin, who let him know how poorly everything had been handled, Clinton urged the Air Force to release more details about the accident — and praised its leadership for doing “the best they could.” Vice President Mondale spoke to journalists at the Democratic convention in Hot Springs, accompanied by Governor Clinton, Senator Pryor, and Congressman Bill Alexander. Mondale would neither confirm nor deny the presence of a nuclear warhead. But Alexander was willing to state the obvious. “I assume they’re armed,” he said about the Titan IIs in Arkansas. “That’s why they’re here.”
At four in the afternoon, the secretary of the Air Force, Hans Mark, held a press conference at the Pentagon. Mark was a physicist, a nuclear engineer, and an expert in aerospace technology who’d previously led a research institute at NASA. Mark was the ideal person to explain the inner workings not only of the Titan II but also of the W-53 warhead. He’d been a rocket scientist and a weapon designer. As secretary of the Air Force, Mark provided the Carter administration’s view of the accident.
“I believe that the Titan missile system is a perfectly safe system to operate, just as I believe that the 747 aircraft is a perfectly safe aircraft to operate,” Mark told the press. “Accidents happen.”
When reporters suggested that the Titan II was dangerous, obsolete, and poorly maintained, Mark said that the problem in Damascus hadn’t been caused by equipment failure or a maintenance lapse — it was just an accident, and human error was solely to blame. He refused to answer any questions about the warhead, not even to correct an erroneous claim that plutonium might have been spread by the blast. The explosion was “pretty much the worst case” of what could happen at a Titan II site, he argued. Nobody was killed, no radioactive contamination had occurred, and the only people who got hurt were members of “the emergency teams whose job it is to take these risks.” Unless a more detailed investigation proved otherwise, Mark thought that “the emergency procedures worked properly.”
A couple of hours later, David Livingston died at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock. He’d celebrated his twenty-second birthday the previous week. He was planning to marry his girlfriend in the spring, perhaps leave the Air Force and move to California. She was at the hospital when he passed away; his parents were on an airplane, en route from Ohio, to see him. The official cause of death was pulmonary edema.
Jeff Kennedy remained in the intensive care unit, fighting for every breath.
The crowd of journalists in front of the access road swelled on September 20, a full day after the blast. Sid King was impressed by the large truck that a new television network had driven to Damascus. The Cable News Network (CNN) had gone on the air a few months earlier. It was the first television network to offer the news twenty-four hours a day, and the Titan II accident in Damascus was its first big, breaking story. The CNN truck, boasting a huge satellite dish, dwarfed the little Live Ear. CNN correspondent Jim Miklaszewski provided nonstop coverage from the missile site — and broadcast the only images of what appeared to be the warhead, lying on the ground, beneath a blue tarp. To get the shot, Miklaszewski and his cameraman borrowed a cherry picker from a local crew installing phone lines, and rode the cab fifty feet into the air. The Air Force tried, without success, to block their view.
