Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

by Maddow, Rachel

  Warheads, and the missiles that carry them, and all the nuts and bolts that support them from shelter to bomber wing and back again have been on the shelf for way too long. The nukes and their auxiliary equipment were generally designed to have a life span of about ten to twenty years. Constant manufacturing and modernization were the assumptions back in the glory days, especially with Team B’s armchair instigators kicking up all that magic fear dust. But by the start of the Barack Obama presidency, some of that hardware had been in service for forty or even fifty years.

  Bad enough that missiles were growing wing fungus and storage containers were rusting through, but at least those problems were mostly solvable with Lysol and Rustoleum. For the more serious nuclear maintenance issues, we had by then started shoveling money into something called the Stockpile Life Extension Program, which—even if you avoid the temptation to call it SchLEP—is still essentially a program of artificial hips, pacemakers, and penile implants for aging nukes. How’d you like to be responsible for operating on a half-century-old nuclear bomb?

  These were fixes that required real, hard-won technical nuclear expertise—expertise we unfortunately also seemed to be aging out of. Fuzes, for example, were failing, and there was nobody around who could fix them: “Initial attempts to refurbish Mk21 fuzes were unsuccessful,” admitted an Air Force general, “in large part due to their level of sophistication and complexity.” The fuze that previous generations of American engineers had invented to trigger a nuclear explosion (or to prevent one) were apparently too complicated for today’s generation of American engineers. The old guys, who had designed and understood this stuff, had died off, and no one thought to have them pass on what they knew while they still could.

  Then there was the W76 problem. W76s were nuclear bombs based mostly on the Navy’s Trident submarines. By refurbishing them, we thought we might get another twenty or thirty years out of them before they needed replacing. The problem with refurbishing the W76s—with taking them apart, gussying them up, and putting them back together—is that we had forgotten how to make these things anymore. One part of the bomb had the code name “Fogbank.” Fogbank’s job was to ensure that the hydrogen in the bomb reached a high enough energy level to explode on cue. But no one could remember how to make Fogbank. It was apparently dependent on some rare and highly classified X-Men-like material conjured by US scientists and engineers in the 1970s, but no one today remembers the exact formula for making it. Very embarrassing.

  The Department of Energy was not going to take this lying down; they promised the Navy, “We did it before, so we can do it again.” I like that can-do spirit! But sadly, no. It took more than a year just to rebuild the long-dismantled Fogbank manufacturing plant at the Oak Ridge nuclear lab, and from there, while a bunch of aging W76 warheads lay opened up like patients on an operating table, government scientists and engineers tried to whip up new life-extending batches of Fogbank. But even after years of trying, even after the Fogbank production program went to “Code Blue” high priority, the technicians were never able to reproduce a single cauldron of Fogbank possessed of its former potency. The Department of Energy, according to an official government report, “had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency.” The experts were gone. And nobody had bothered to write anything down!

  Maybe this should have been a sign. When all the scientists and engineers are dead, or senile, or at least just fishing, and the know-how is gone with them, isn’t it fair to say that a destroy-the-world-thousands-of-times-over nuclear weapons program has run its course?

  It’s not worth (at least here) querying the sanity of how we got all these nukes in the first place. There was a logic to it. In the Cold War, with the Soviet Union pointing Armageddon-making bombs in our direction, we answered in kind. The deterrent force of our nukes—you move to wipe us out, you’re going down with us—was rational, although kind of bizarre. The perfectly acronymed doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) required that we have whatever the Russians had, plus better, plus one. And the same for them toward us. Last superpower with a bullet in the chamber wins. At one remarkable moment in the completely MAD Atomic Age of the 1960s we possessed more than 31,000 armed nuclear warheads, scattered around the globe aboard submarines, in underground missile silos, or strapped on the underside of bomber wings. And most of the warheads in this sea-land-air triad were a simple key-turn away from launch. We had to be ready to fire those suckers in a hurry.

  If your desire is to discourage (in the biggest way possible) imminent thermonuclear war with the Soviets, MAD at least theoretically justified keeping that many missiles ready to fly on the shortest possible notice. Once the Soviet Union dissolved, though, what was the remaining justification for our keeping an arsenal of that size on hair-trigger alert?

  How about the fact that it is not a simple thing to walk away from a sixty-year, eight-trillion-dollar investment? Eight-trillion-dollar habits die hard. In 2005, Gen. Lance Lord, described as a “man with missile in his DNA,” said in a speech to a Washington think tank, “As the wing commander at F. E. Warren, routinely I was asked, ‘How does winning the Cold War change your mission?’ ” His answer: “It doesn’t.” Institutions have inertia. When the original justification for a huge investment goes away, the huge investment finds another reason to live. It’s not just the military; it’s true of pretty much all organizations. The more money and work and time it takes to build something, the more power it accrues, and the more effort it takes to make it go away.

  But in the case of the nuclear arms race, what built it wasn’t just money (tons of money), work, and time, it was also a grab-you-by-the-throat existential urgency. To convince ourselves we needed a nationwide web of hair-trigger-alert nuclear weapons capable of destroying the earth thousands of times over, we had to commit ourselves to a beautifully apocalyptic theory of how we would not just possess but also use these weapons. We would push the button, maybe even hundreds of times. We’d do it because we’d need to—because an enemy was in the act of doing the same or worse to us.

  After the Cold War, without the realistic threat of a massive, multistrike nuclear assault by the USSR, our bristling-with-nukes posture made no sense. If we wanted to keep this huge web of nukes in place, we needed a post-Soviet scenario for how and why we’d ever want to push the button, maybe even hundreds of times.

  Cue the American spirit of invention. In that same no-change-in-my-mission speech in 2005, General Lord ventured a new idea for why his Wyoming missileers should keep going to work every day tending their ICBMs: “The triad no longer means ICBMs, bombers, and submarines. The new triad consists of offensive strike, defensive capabilities, and highlights the revitalization of the defense infrastructure to meet emerging threats.” When military planners start talking about new paradigms and using nukes for offensive strikes, don’t look for the budget requests to go down.

  If we’re in the business of thinking up constructive new uses for all these nukes, let’s think big. After all, it’s not just us and the USSR anymore. The UK, France, China, Pakistan, and India have nukes too. Oh, and Israel, but that’s supposed to be a secret. Apartheid-era South Africa had them—yikes—but decided to get rid of them, as did the former Soviet states of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Brazil and Argentina could very well have had them, but they agreed to be part of a nuclear-weapons-free Latin America instead.

  Then there are the wannabes. On October 9, 2006, North Korea tested a nuclear device. The CIA director reportedly called the test a failure, but it sure didn’t feel like a failure internationally. Kim Jong Il, then the “Supreme Leader” of North Korea, wanted to join the most depressing club ever—the so-called nuclear club—and the prospect of his getting even close to that achievement was a real kick in the teeth. It was one thing to marvel at state-run news reports that Kim J
ong Il hit holes-in-one every time he golfed and that his birth was heralded by a double rainbow and a new star in the sky; it was another to imagine that same guy having the power to level part of the planet at the touch of a button.

  But as the world recoiled in collective horror at the idea of a nuclear-armed weirdo Dear Leader, the response of American conservatives to the North Korean nuclear test revealed the fact that mainstream Washington discussion about nukes had become pretty weird too. A week and a half after the North Korean nuclear test, conservative Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that the best response would be for the United States to persuade Japan to develop nukes as well.

  Japan. Nukes. Japan?! Nukes?!

  Krauthammer argued that if Japan were to say it was developing nuclear weapons in response to North Korea having them, China would so dislike that idea that the Chinese would force North Korea back in the box. Of course, back in reality, there was also the possibility that the Chinese would respond to the threat of a nuclear-armed Japan not by disarming their ally, North Korea, but by up-arming it. And why would they stop at North Korea—how about Burma? Indonesia? East Timor? Kazakhstan used to have nukes under the USSR—maybe they’d like them again?

  On the other hand, if you buy the principle that adding nuclear capability to “good” countries somehow reduces the threat of nukes in “bad” countries, then why stop at Japan? Why not South Korea, too? Why not Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, or Vietnam? Since Burma has such a disastrously bad government, maybe the United States should insist that every country that borders Burma get nuclear weapons just to be on the safe side. If so, let’s all welcome Bangladesh and Laos to the atomic age. Hey, Somalia sucks too—how about nukes for our ally Kenya? Or Djibouti? Does Djibouti have enough room for a fleet of nuclear-armed B-52 Stratofortresses?

  Something’s gone haywire in our politics if nonproliferation is still nominally the policy of the United States of America but a proposal like Krauthammer’s isn’t cause for a national spit-take. And it wasn’t. “Maybe Japan should give it more thought,” mused an editorialist in the Oklahoman while admitting, “understandably, that’s a touchy subject in Japan.”

  Meanwhile, lurking in the background as we conjure up new excuses to spread nukes around the world, is the unattractive aging process of our own stack of nuclear weapons.

  “It is becoming apparent that any number of serious problems may be waiting around the corner,” the commander of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center said in 2011. Then he quoted one of his predecessors: “Nuclear weapons, even when sitting on a shelf, are chemistry experiments. They are constantly changing from chemical reactions inside of them.” The military knows the potential of this nuclear woodpile they’re responsible for, not just its deliberate capacity as weaponry but its potential to be a catastrophic mess, too. So one must assume there are a lot of precautions and fail-safes and quintuple-checks and whatnot. One must assume that everyone working around these weapons takes extra-special precautions to make sure nothing ever goes wrong. The history of the program, one would think, would bear that out. Nope.

  In 1980, stray fuel vapors in an ICBM silo set off an explosion that blew off the 740-ton steel-and-concrete door covering the missile. The nuclear warhead was thrown more than six hundred feet toward the Ozarks. One airman was killed and twenty-one were injured. The warhead itself did not explode (praise be) or break apart and leak plutonium all over Damascus, Arkansas. So we got lucky there. The cause of that explosion was an Air Force maintenance worker who accidentally dropped a socket wrench into the darkness of the silo. The socket wrench punched a hole in the missile’s fuel tank, which loosed the combustible vapors. A socket wrench did all that.

  For much more of our nation’s nuclear history than you’d think, we designed our nuclear systems in a way that invited peril. Through almost all of the 1960s, it was someone’s genius idea that American bombers armed with live nuclear weapons should be in the air at all times, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The idea was that if the Soviet Union decided to annihilate the United States and succeeded in doing so, these poor pilots—somewhere over the earth—would lose radio contact with home, figure out that their country was a cinder, and, for the sake of the memory of what used to be the United States of America, make a beeline for anything Russian and drop their bombs. It would be one last “America from beyond the grave” nuclear attack on the Soviet bastards. This wasn’t some cockamamie idea for a science-fiction novel or a Dr. Strangelove sequel; it was an approved strategy, and the bombers really did fly those missions for years.

  B-52 Stratofortresses and their siblings, the B-52H high-altitude Stratofortresses, which were then in the healthful blush of youth, were supposed to be up there flying around the clock. Remember, this was an era when even television stood down for six or eight hours a night. Not our bombers. The Strategic Air Command kept a dozen or more of its bombers in the air at all times. A third of the SAC fleet was fully weaponized and ready for takeoff at a moment’s notice at all times. And not only would there be a dozen or so of these 160-foot-long, 185,000-pound behemoths in the air at any given moment, but each individual plane would be flying for twenty-four hours straight, fully loaded with live nuclear weapons, fully combat-ready. They called the operation “Chrome Dome.” They also called these flights “training missions,” on the theory that this would somehow mitigate public or international outcry if something went wrong.

  Of course, there was no way those B-52s could stay aloft for twenty-four hours at a stretch, given the way they devoured fuel. So in addition to being armed with multiple ready-to-release nuclear bombs, flying twenty-four-hour missions, they also had to refuel in midair, sometimes twice a day, every single day, 365 days a year.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  On January 17, 1966, a B-52 armed with four live hydrogen bombs smashed into a KC-135 tanker during a midair refueling. Conveniently enough, the way the flight patterns worked for these Chrome Dome missions, these two planes were 29,000 feet over a coastal region of Andalusian Spain while this refueling was taking place. (The tanker had taken off from an American air base in Spain called—I kid you not—Morón.) When the bomber came down, four of the live nuclear bombs came down along with it. One of them landed in a tomato field and did not blow up. One of them dropped into the Mediterranean and was found after much effort, two and a half months later, 2,600 feet down. They used a submarine.

  The other two nuclear bombs blew up in the Spanish countryside. There obviously was not a nuclear blast in Spain in 1966, but these two nuclear bombs did explode. They were essentially massive dirty bombs. The conventional explosives that form part of the fuze in these nukes blew the bombs apart and scattered radioactive particles and bomb fragments all over Palomares, Spain. Whoopsie!

  The United States arranged for 1,400 tons of radioactive Spanish earth to be removed from Spain. They shipped it to lucky, lucky Aiken, South Carolina, and kept it all as quiet as they could. And forty years later, while the United States continued to subsidize the Palomareans in their trips to Madrid for annual health checkups, and the local farmers continued to complain about depressed tomato and watermelon sales in the decades since the contamination, the incident was largely forgotten. Palomares, Spain, had become a kind of a tourist area. In 2004, they were starting the digging on a luxury condo-and-golf-course development and discovered the land there was still, as Gen. Curtis LeMay used to say, “a little bit hot.” So the Spanish government confiscated all the radioactive land it could find. And after a heartfelt request from the Spanish government, the United States agreed to pay $2 million to facilitate the removal of more of Spain’s accidentally overheated land.

  A one-off, right?

  Wrong. Just before the Palomares accident, another American plane carrying a nuclear weapon was on board an aircraft carrier called the USS Ticonderoga. Now, we were never supposed to have nuclear weapons anywhere near the Vietnam conflict, but … we did.
And the Ticonderoga was apparently sailing its nuclear-armed way from Vietnam, where we weren’t supposed to have nuclear weapons, to Japan, where we really, really, really were not supposed to have nuclear weapons for obvious historical and political reasons. And then something very bad happened. One of these fighter jets, armed with a nuclear bomb, had been hoisted up on the elevator from the lower deck when it slid right off the elevator platform, off the flight deck, and into the sea, where it sank to a depth of more than three miles—pilot, plane, nuclear bomb, and all. And it’s still down there. Whoopsie!

  A few years after the sliding-off-the-aircraft-carrier thing and the midair crash over Palomares, in 1968 it happened again: another B-52 on one of these Chrome Dome always-have-the-nukes-in-the-air missions crashed in Greenland, near an Air Force base there called Thule (thoo-lee). The B-52, again with four nuclear bombs on board, suffered a fire in the cockpit, and the pilots attempted to bring down the plane at an airstrip in Thule. They missed. The B-52 crash-landed on the ice and the nuclear bombs on board exploded: again, not nuclear explosions but massive dirty-bomb explosions that scattered highly radioactive particles everywhere. The people who saw it happen say that “the ice burned black.” Whoopsie!

  Local Greenlanders were called out to help with the cleanup. The Air Force personnel on the decontamination job had lots of special protective gear. The Danes … not so much. Aided by this underdressed Danish “civilian augmentation,” the Air Force collected 500 million gallons of radioactive ice, and you don’t want to know about the cancer rates of that Danish cleanup crew.