tonight... man: the warhead on top of the titan ii was three times as powerful as all the bombs used in the second world war. man: working on a weapon of mass destruction, you're counting on everything to work perfect all the time, and things just don't work perfect all the time. "command and control," on american experience. ♪ nasa announcer: lift-off, the clock is running. ringside announcer: schmeling is down!

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by the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation. american experience is also made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. (indistinct voices on radio) man (on radio): contact dca, you read? man 2: roger, loud and clear.

man 2: roger, station 7, prepare for pressurization of stage 2 oxidizer. man 3: roger. (hissing as suits pressurized) man: i was fairly new to working out on the missile sites. at the age of 19, you know, you've got that "no fear" mentality. man (on radio): wcb, we got a transient read on 54... (hatch opening and hissing) man: right above us was a nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead.

to see the magnitude of that weapon within ten feet from you, it was a monster waiting to go off. when you think about working on a weapon of mass destruction, you're counting on everything to work perfect all the time, and things just don't work perfect all the time. (piece hits floor) (alarms beeping) (urgent voices on radio) man 2: the first thing that my commander heard are the words, "uh-oh." man 3: the fuel vapors in the silo are just climbing and climbing and climbing. man 1: we need to get the hell out of this complex because this thing's going to blow up. man 4: do we let the world know? do i run out and say, "we got a potential nuclear explosion"?

what do you do? (men chatting) complex 3-1 has phase 14 missile age inspection. complex 3-2, instructor crew scheduled for... that day, september 18, it was basically five days before my 24th birthday. so i was 23. lieutenant childers was 24, was the deputy. when we went on alert in a titan system, we were on alert for 24 hours. that's what a tour was, 24 hours.

we had 18 silos spread all the way out to the eastern corner of arkansas. we went to a complex where there was supposed to be very little maintenance, and that was 4-7. we went up the main highway to a certain point, and then you had to pull off of the highway onto much smaller roads. until you came over a particular rise, you wouldn't even know that the missile complex was there. holder: as we drove up to missile complex 4-7, it's very unassuming. there's not a lot there. there's this huge door and there are some antennas. however, underneath that door was the most powerful warhead that the u.s. has ever operated.

childers: before you left the base, they gave you some codes that gave you access to the complex. man (on intercom): mcc, what is your ident code? man: ident code is alpha-niner-victor... childers: you would read the code to the commander and then you would take a lighter, set the codes on fire, and drop them down into a box so they would burn up and no one else could use those codes. (door buzzes) all four of the crewmembers went down three flights of stairs. at the bottom of that, you got to a blast door. (hissing and unlatching) there were a series of blast doors: 6, 7, 8, and 9. so you'd walk through this, and you'd step into the middle level

of the launch control center, with all of the equipment that you needed to maintain the missile. when we took charge of a complex, that meant that we owned that missile until the next crew came out. so if we went to war, we were prepared to launch those weapons on command. man: apps power, silo soft, guidance go. we're standing by for fire engine. we never knew what our specific targets were, because you didn't really want to know who you were going to destroy. man: turning on my command, everybody, turn keys. on the word "keys," we will turn. is the crew ready? your b-man? man 2: b-man's ready. man 1: mft? man 3: mft ready. man 1: deputy? man 4: deputy ready. man 1: crew is ready-- ready? childers: you had to be prepared to destroy an entire civilization, and we were trained on that. i still today refer to myself and other missileers as crew dogs.

you had to almost be rote in your actions and not question the fact that you were going to destroy an entire civilization if you had to launch those icbms. as heartless as it sounds, i never had a problem with it. i was doing it for my country, i was doing it to protect my country. the whole reason i sat out there was to prevent that kind of thing from happening. that's what deterrence was about. but deterrence is worthless if you don't demonstrate that you're willing to do it, too, and we always had to demonstrate that i would walk out there and turn those keys in a second and i would kill ten million people and never hesitate. every time i went onto a complex, every time i saw a titan ii missile,

i had the same sense of excitement. you couldn't see the warhead from the bottom because you were eight stories down, and the cone of the warhead disappeared off in the distance. the warhead on top of the titan ii was three times as powerful as all the bombs used by all of the armies in the second world war, including both the atomic bombs. when the crewmembers successfully turned the keys, the 330,000-pound missile would lift up out of the silo. holder: and it would head out for about five minutes of powered flight

to the edge of space, fly for another 20 minutes, and hit its target halfway around the world. childers: before september 18, the only warheads that we thought would go off in the united states would be soviet warheads. we never considered that our own warheads could detonate on our own continent. man: from the very beginning of the atomic age,

there has been a sense of this immense power just being on the verge of slipping out of our control. the world's first nuclear device was fully assembled in a small tent in the middle of the desert. nobody was sure what would happen when this thing would detonate. they were even concerned that when the first nuclear device detonated, the earth's atmosphere would catch on fire and every single living thing on earth would die. and yet they did the test anyway. (explosion roars and echoes)

after the war ended, an engineering section of the nuclear weapons program became known as the sandia laboratory, and sandia became america's first atomic bomb factory. man: i realized if i joined sandia, i would be working on atomic bombs, and that was okay with me. we were driven by the fear of the soviet union. you couldn't talk about what you did outside of the tech area, but you could feel a sense of, "this is the number one national priority." schlosser: the early atomic bombs were essentially handmade, and if you wanted to use one, it would take days

for a team of 20 or 30 people to put it together. my computer was a slide rule. you ever seen a slide rule? anybody? we pressed and pressed to improve the early product to make it smaller and more deadly. anything we conceived of the military wanted, and money was free. schlosser: as the technology improved, as the number of nuclear weapons in our arsenal increased, there were soon assembly lines for making nuclear weapons. we had bombers in the air at all times loaded with nuclear weapons. we had submarines that had missiles carrying nuclear warheads. it was feared that the soviets would have far more missiles than the united states,

so we went on a huge missile-building binge. at one point, we only thought we needed 50 to 200 nuclear weapons to completely annihilate the soviet union, and by the mid-1960s, we had 32,000 nuclear weapons. but every one of those weapons you build not only threatens your enemy, but poses a threat to yourself. man: one more time, ready? launch verification... (men running launch drill)

childers: september 18 was one of those days where nothing was going the way it was supposed to go. man: step one, power on/off switch: on. childers: what we did every day is we went through a daily shift verification checklist. we had a whole book full of checklists, and we lived by checklists. man: on/off rotary switch: on. holder: that day, september 18, we find out that we're going to actually have some major maintenance because they have a problem with the oxidizer tank, that the pressure is a little bit low. childers: each stage of the missile had two separate tanks. one was filled with fuel and the other was filled with oxidizer. holder: all you got to do is mix those two fuels

and you're going to have an explosion. we called back to base. they said, "we have a maintenance team coming out." a specialized unit, they called them the pts team. man: the difference between pts people and any other person on a missile site is, we get to play with fuel and oxidizer, and they don't. i loved pts. i loved my job. my major goal at that time was to be a pts team chief, and be the best pts team chief ever. man: when i arrived at little rock air force base, i would have been 19, yeah. ah, no, 18.

my birthday is in march, so i would have been one month away from being 19. i think i was ready to take on the world at that point. i wanted to go out to the field and work on that titan ii missile. you know, we called it a bird, and i wanted to work on the birds, you know? (gas hissing) james sandaker: rocket fuel is extremely poisonous. we were always told if we could smell it, it was already too much. powell: oxidizer, when you breathe it, it turns to nitric acid. and you basically drown in your lungs if you breathe enough of it. man: we would work 12-, 14-hour, up to 16-hour shifts, and then go to sleep, and then five hours later or so, you get up and head back in for another 12-, 13-, or 14-hour day.

powell: on september 18, we'd had a long week, we had the next day off, so when we finished the maintenance task at the site that we were at, you know, we thought we were done. (men talking) man: roger that, we'll send them back your way. powell: our team chief called back to the base to tell them we were on our way back and they said, "well, before you come back, we want you to stop over at 4-7 at damascus." when we got there, they didn't have the right part. they had to bring the part out on a helicopter. i would say we waited from 3:30 to about 6:00 in the evening

before we could actually enter the silo. we'd been on duty about 11 1/2 hours. powell: myself and airman plumb suited up into a rfhco. plumb: you're wearing this backpack for air, then you're going to slip into a stiff, neoprene rubber glove that your hand just floats around inside of. it's not tight. (men talking over radio) sandaker: the only communication we had was these radios, and they didn't always work correctly.

you could very easily misunderstand. (men talking over radio) powell: so we started down the cableway to the silo, when all of a sudden, i realized that i had forgotten the torque wrench up in the truck. there was a change in the checklist that we were supposed to use a torque wrench from here on out, but that was a recent change. i had spent three years basically taking the pressure cap off with a ratchet. and so instead of sending somebody back to get the torque wrench, i grabbed the ratchet to do that.

the ratchet's about three feet long and the socket's about eight pounds. and i radioed to the team chief that we're ready to begin the checklist for pressurization of stage 2 oxidizer tank. (hatch opens, air hisses) plumb: we had a problem with that ratchet. it wouldn't allow dave to actually get the socket to clip or snap into place to be secure. he held the socket up against the dust cap and he put the ratchet up against it. powell: basically you hold it with one hand on that ratchet handle, and one hand cradles the head of the ratchet

with the socket on it. plumb: and so i got on the end of it and kind of gave it a little force, and i remember saying to him, "you got this?" "yeah, i got it, i got it, let go of it." powell: and i go to pick it up, and the socket falls off the end of the ratchet. plumb: just boompf, right through the hole and just straight down. as it was falling, i was thinking, "oh, no, oh, no, oh, no." i wanted to jump after that thing. powell: anytime i want, i can close my eyes and see that socket. i see the socket bouncing off the platform. i see my rfhco glove reaching for it. and i see it falling in slow motion.

70 feet. hitting the thrust mount like it had eyeballs. (hissing) and then a stream of fuel coming out of the missile. plumb: i was just in total shock. i think we both just looked at each other for a second, and we're like, "oh, my god, what are we going to do?" that missile was just blowing fuel. then the magnitude set in as far as what could happen. the destructive force if that thing exploded, and we can't stop it.

schlosser: 19 years before the damascus accident, a b-52 bomber carrying two powerful hydrogen bombs took off on a routine mission over north carolina. during the mission, the plane experienced a fuel leak, and suddenly, the b-52 began to break apart mid-air. as the fuselage was spinning and heading back towards earth, the centrifugal forces pulled on a lanyard in the cockpit, and that lanyard was pulled exactly the way it would be if a crewmember wanted to release its hydrogen bombs over enemy territory. bombs are relatively dumb.

they sort of think that if you drop the bomb out of the bomb bay, you must have intended to do that. schlosser: one of the weapons in particular went through all of its arming steps to detonate, and when that weapon hit the ground, a firing signal was sent. and the only thing that prevented a full-scale detonation of a powerful hydrogen bomb in north carolina was a single safety switch. all it is is a two-position on-off switch. that prevented a four-megaton disaster. if the right two wires had touched, the bomb would have detonated. period. schlosser: the goldsboro accident occurred at a time when the number of nuclear weapons accidents

was increasing. peurifoy: i read through all of the known accident reports. and it scared the hell out of me. news announcer: the three bombs that fell on land weren't all recovered until five days after the crash. man: we were shocked when we realized all these years, we've been thinking along this nice, neat line. that's not reality. these orderly sequences of events

were not going to happen in an accident because an accident by definition is something not definable. schlosser: there had been all these statistical assurances that weapons wouldn't detonate in an accident. and then there was a realization that the weapons were nowhere near as safe as everyone had assumed. stevens: we knew that fire, for example, could set off these electro-explosive devices inside the warhead in a random way. schlosser: during a fire, the solder might melt on a circuit board. it created all kinds of new electrical pathways that could completely circumvent a safety device. peurifoy: of the 20,000 or 25,000 weapons that we had in stockpile,

i could not in good conscience swear that they were adequately safe. schlosser: you had bob peurifoy, one of the vice presidents of the lab, and bill stevens, the head of the safety department at sandia, saying thousands of weapons in the american nuclear arsenal were vulnerable during an accident, including the most powerful warhead on an american missile, the warhead on top of the titan ii. holder: i was sitting down

in the kitchen, eating a sandwich, when the klaxon went off. (alarm beeping) so i didn't think too much of it. i mean, it went off, it's like, "okay, they just... they're doing their procedures." but about ten seconds later, we got another klaxon. (alarm beeping) i got up and i walked about halfway down the stairs. and i looked down and i can see the commander's console. then the commander's console has lots of red lights flashing, and so i know something's wrong. childers: captain mazzaro was our crew commander. the first thing that mazzaro heard and that the other team members heard are the words, "uh-oh." mazzaro said, "what do you mean, uh-oh? what's going on?" they said, "there's smoke in the bottom of the launch duct."