Most of Reagan’s foreign policy advisers belonged to the Committee on the Present Danger, and they pushed for bold nuclear policies. The counterforce strategy once proposed by Robert McNamara — long associated with RAND and the youthful self-confidence of the early Kennedy administration — was now embraced by conservative Republicans. But the word “counterforce” had become problematic. It sounded aggressive and implied the willingness to fight a nuclear war. Much the same strategy was now called “damage limitation.” By launching a nuclear attack on Soviet military targets, the United States might “limit the damage” to its own territory and, perhaps, emerge victorious.
The new secretary of defense, Caspar “Cap” Weinberger, was, like McNamara, a businessman who’d served in the Army during the Second World War but knew little about nuclear weapons. As a result, his undersecretary of defense for policy, Fred Iklé, played an important role in the Reagan administration’s strategic decisions. Iklé was still haunted by the possibility that deterrence might fail — through an accident, a miscalculation, the actions of a fanatic in the Kremlin. And if that happened, millions of Americans would die. Iklé considered the all-or-nothing philosophy of “assured destruction” to be profoundly immoral, a misnomer more accurately described as “assured genocide.” Aiming nuclear weapons at civilian populations threatened a “form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages — the mass killing of hostages.” He pushed the Reagan administration to seek a nuclear strategy that would deter the Soviets from attacking or blackmailing the United States, maintain the ability to fight a “protracted nuclear war,” limit American damage if that war occurred, and end the war on terms favorable to the United States. A blind faith in mutual deterrence, Iklé believed, was like a declaration of faith during the Portuguese Inquisition—“an auto-da-fé, an act that ends in a mass burning.”
Two Air Force reports on the Titan II were released to the public in January 1981. One assessed the overall safety of the missile, and the other provided a lengthy account of the accident at Damascus. According to the Eighth Air Force Missile Accident Investigation Board, Launch Complex 374-7 and its Titan II were destroyed by three separate explosions. The first occurred when fuel vapor ignited somewhere inside the complex. The vapor could have been ignited by a spark from an electric motor, by a leak from the stage 1 oxidizer tank, or by the sudden collapse of the missile. A small explosion was followed by a much larger one, as the stage 1 oxidizer tank ruptured, allowing thousands of gallons of fuel and oxidizer to mix. The blast wave from this explosion tore apart the upper half of the silo, tossed the silo door two hundred yards, and launched the second stage of the Titan II into the air. The door was already gone by the time the missile left the silo. The second stage soared straight upward, carrying the warhead, and then briefly flew parallel to the ground. Its rocket engine had been shoved into its fuel tank by the blast. Fuel and oxidizer leaked, causing the third explosion, producing a massive fireball, and hurling the warhead into the ditch.
The accident investigation board determined the sequence of events by examining the fragmentation patterns of the missile and silo debris. Pieces of the second stage were found almost half a mile from the silo, while most of the first stage was scattered within three hundred feet of it. The narrative offered by the report was factual and thorough. But the Air Force seemed more interested in describing how the accident unfolded than in establishing why it happened. “It may not be important whether the immediate cause that initiated the explosive events is precisely known,” the board argued, “since, over a period of time, there were so many potential ignition sources available….”
