Greg Devlin also left the Air Force within days of receiving the Airman’s Medal. His term of enlistment was over. And his lawsuit was settled out of court, as well. After attorney fees, court costs, and other charges were deducted, Devlin got a check for $6,400.
The accidents at Grand Forks and Damascus had occurred during the same week, and Bob Peurifoy hoped that they would prompt a serious interest in weapon safety at the Pentagon. He traveled to Washington, D.C., and briefed a group of Air Force officials on the design flaws that could detonate a Mark 28 hydrogen bomb during a fire — and the need to retrofit the bombs with new safety mechanisms. The Air Force inspector general and the head of the Air Force Directorate of Nuclear Safety attended the meeting. But it had little effect. A study commissioned by the Air Force later questioned the possibility of an accidental detonation and argued that the Mark 28 didn’t need to be removed from bombers on alert. The study did, however, urge the Air Force to “expedite the proposed retrofit of the 28 and, in the meantime, take extraordinary steps to prevent and ameliorate fires that might involve the unmodified 28s.” Neither of those recommendations was followed.
The Department of Defense had made its spending priorities clear: safety modifications on older weapons like the Mark 28, while desirable, could wait. But Peurifoy was determined to keep fighting the nuclear bureaucracy — and he was willing to engage in a bit of devious behavior, on behalf of weapon safety. After almost twenty years of fierce resistance, the Strategic Air Command had finally agreed to put locks in its bombs. The installation of permissive action links would require new control boxes in the cockpits of SAC’s bombers. Under a contract with the Department of Energy, those new control boxes would be produced by Sandia. Peurifoy quietly arranged for a unique signal generator to be installed in the boxes, along with the coded switch necessary to unlock the PALs. The officials at the Air Force Logistics Command who handled the contract may or may not have understood the purpose of this special, added feature. It allowed all of SAC’s bombers to carry nuclear weapons employing the latest safety devices. The planes would soon be ready — and now Peurifoy had to find a way to get those devices into the weapons.
The Reagan administration’s military buildup was expected to cost approximately $1.5 trillion during its first five years. About $250 billion would be spent on nuclear weapon systems. By the end of the 1980s, the United States would have about fourteen thousand strategic warheads and bombs, an increase of about 60 percent. The Navy would get new cruise missiles and Trident submarines. The Air Force would get new cruise missiles, two new strategic bombers, and one hundred long-range MX missiles, now renamed “the Peacemaker.” The Carter administration’s plan to hide MX missiles amid thousands of square miles in the American Southwest was soon abandoned. Instead, the missiles would be deployed in existing silos — defeating their original purpose and leaving them vulnerable to attack. The only military use of the Peacemaker would be a first strike on the Soviet Union.
The Army’s Pershing II missiles and land-based cruise missiles were among the most controversial weapons proposed by the Reagan administration. They were to be placed in Western Europe, as a counterbalance to the SS-20 missiles recently deployed by the Soviet Union. The SS-20 was not considered a “strategic” weapon — and therefore not covered by existing arms control agreements — because its range was only three thousand miles. An SS-20 missile couldn’t reach targets in the United States. But its three warheads could destroy NATO bases and European cities. The Army’s cruise and Pershing II missiles were intended as a nuclear tit for tat. And yet the Soviet Union considered their deployment extremely provocative. The Pershing II had a range of about a thousand miles and an accuracy of about two hundred feet. From bases in West Germany the Pershing II could destroy command centers in Moscow within five or six minutes. It would give the United States the capability to launch a “super-sudden first strike.”
