Bridget whirls around, flashing Howie a radiant smile. Again Howie fights to keep his gaze from dropping to the gaping placket of her blouse that’s inviting his eyes in. Song lyrics run through his mind, something about what makes a grown man cry.
“I’m a third year, a junior,” Bridget says in a Deep South drawl that comes out as june-yeah. “I’m so excited to hear what you have to say because I don’t have the slightest idea of what I want to do when I graduate. But I’ve been thinking of government so like I said, I’m really interested in seeing your presentation. And if it’s as good as I think it will be, it might just help me make up my mind, which would be a big help to me at this point in time.” As cute as she is, she’s cursed with the undergrad yap disease, prattling on incessantly about whatever. Fortunately, Bridget stops at a doorway, stands aside for Howie and motions him inside.
Peeking over her shoulder at the hall full of students, Howie’s kicking himself for accepting Drummond’s invitation. Lecturing to civic groups and garden clubs was cutting butter compared to a roomful of distracted twentysomethings. In addition, Thanksgiving break is right around the corner and if they are anything like Howie was back then, he knows the students are already smelling the barn.
Drummond saunters up, looking tweedy as ever, an invisible fog of pipe tobacco hovering around him, “Boot, good to see you,” he says in a low voice, wanting to acknowledge their personal relationship while keeping his students from overhearing a tenured professor stoop to using a nickname originating from a crass sporting event.
“Class, I’d like to introduce Howard Collyer.” A few of the students nod, many look like they’ve just tumbled out of bed, their eyes at half mast even though it’s almost eleven in the morning. Some wear earbuds, their skinny white cords snaking down their chests like strands of spaghetti. All are splayed helter-skelter in their seats, arms and legs scattered every which way, as if it’s an imposition to sit up straight. Howie knows he’s going to have to work hard to earn his honorarium—two seats in the president’s box for the Florida State game.
“Give me a few minutes to set up, Henry.” Howie leans down and begins to unpack his audio-visual materials.
“Can I be of any help, Mr. Collyer?” Bridget offers.
“Sure,” Howie says, handing her his laptop, “usually goes together pretty easy.”
“I’ll see if I can set the stage for you, Howie,” Drummond says. “How long before you’ll be ready?”
“Two, two and a half minutes if we’re lucky,” Howie says as he opens his case and slides out the projector.
Drummond turns to the class. “While Mr. Collyer is setting up, let me roughly sketch the frame for the picture that he will draw for us.”
He winds up and goes into a brief overview of the Cold War as Howie and Bridget fuss with the tangle of cables, an octopus of rubber and jangling metal connectors. Fortunately, Bridget is a technological wizard, keeps her lip zipped and makes short work of it, connecting Howie’s laptop and helping him set up the projector on a nearby table so that in no time his Windows desktop flashes up on the screen.
“You’re good to go, Mr. Collyer,” Bridget says, giving him another radiant smile. Howie has to fight the temptation to say, “Call me Howie,” instead he limits himself to a quick, “Thanks very much, Bridget,” as he takes his place. He clips through the few setup slides to get to his starting point.
“So without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Howard Collyer, a veteran Pentagon weapons specialist and our guest lecturer for Poli Sci 123.”
“Thank you for having me, Professor Drummond. And thanks to my friend Bridget here who helped me get all my equipment together.” Howie has saved a special smile for her.
Howie pauses to straighten up and furrow his brows, drops his voice a register, leans forward and delivers a shot across the bow of his sleepy audience.
“I’m going to take you back to a dark time in this nation’s history and show you things that are shocking and horrifying. But I hope you will put your revulsion and anguish to work. Because since our generation has turned its back on the problem, your generation has to step up. For your own sake. And for the good of the entire world.”
Howard Collyer taps the keyboard, flashing the first slide on the screen above his head. In the eighteen months since he was forced out of the Pentagon, he has culled the slides intended for a military audience, only keeping those that play for civilians. The garden club ladies always gasp out loud at the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the students are still snoozing though Howie sees some stirring here and there, a few sitting up, starting to pay attention.
The facial disfigurations of the men and women wandering helplessly through the smoking ruins of the Japanese city widen their eyes. Horrible scarring, lacerated and mutilated bodies, charred limbs and always somewhere in the picture the haunting face of a dazed child. Howie moves rapidly through the Army Medical Corps close-ups as he recites the statistics of the destruction. Forty-five thousand Japanese men, women, and children incinerated in the first few seconds. Thousands more so permanently affected by the radiation that their lives were no longer worth living.
In the twenty lectures he has given since he left the Pentagon, Howie has seen the power of his presentation. He’s watched the garden clubbers’ eyes tear up and the Rotarians quietly shake their heads. This audience is still half asleep but he begins to see students nudging each other, pointing at the slides projected over their heads. Born forty years after the cataclysmic events, though they might have read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki in history books, never has the raw truth of the devastation and the shocking human toll been so graphically presented to them.
Howie pauses to let his message sink in. Bridget is sitting in the first row, off to the side of the lectern. Her hand is clasped over her mouth and her eyes are reddening. She looks like she’s ready to pop someone in the nose.
He continues paging through his presentation, through the slides of Little Boy, the clumsy-looking, brutish black bomb that wreaked the devastation on Hiroshima, and the photos of the early generation of nukes, some sleek and skinny, others bulbous, ungainly green and brown barrels resting on steel and wood gantries, looking more like medieval siege cannons than weapons capable of obliterating an entire city, vaporizing millions and irradiating hundreds of thousands more. Howie talks about the absurdly suicidal Cold War policy of Mutually Assured Destruction— its acronym, MAD, accurately characterizing a policy of each side having enough nuclear weapons to wipe the other off the face of the earth.
Indignation spreads across the faces in his audience. Even the students who were half in dreamland when he started are now wide awake, a number of them busily jotting down notes. Howie brings up a list of the atomic bombs produced in the United States alone. Over seventy thousand nuclear weapons during the past fifty years, many with hundreds of times the force of the Hiroshima bomb.
Now Howie gets to the good part.
After showing slides of B-52 bombers, their crews shoehorned into cramped cockpits and wearing skin-tight high altitude pressure suits covered with tubes and endless rows of lacing making them look like early Russian cosmonauts, he launches into the animated portion of his lecture.
“Imagine how these B-52 crew members felt flying toward targets in Russia, their planes loaded with nuclear weapons, each one capable of causing infinitely more death and destruction than the bombs we dropped on Japan.”
His audience is sitting forward. In a couple more minutes, he’ll have steam pouring out of their ears.
Howie keystrokes the introduction to Operation Chrome Dome. His video shows a swarm of B-52s taking off from bases all over the country, their flight patterns crisscrossing the country. Soon the map of the United States is streaked with yellow lines showing as many as a hundred and fifty B-52s flying round the clock—thousands of missions being flown every week—each lurking around close to the Russian border with at least one nuke in its bomb bay, some t
wo, many three and four. The pilots waiting for the orders to set course for Kiev, Moscow, or Vladivostok.
“But fortunately the call never comes,” Howie continues. “So the bombers turn around, refuel over Spain and fly back over the pond.”
Bridget’s hand shoots up in the air. “Were all these bombs armed?” she asks, her voice anxious and concerned.
“Good question—and the answer is yes. They had to be because at that time they were our only defense against a Russian attack. Having planes in the air at all times with primed nukes guaranteed we would be able to immediately strike back if Russia launched missiles. Early on, the bombs had crude fuses that would explode on impact. So think of these B-52s as loaded guns, cocked and ready to fire.”
“So they were flying armed nuclear weapons over the United States?”
Howie smiles. She couldn’t have given him a more perfect setup.
“These airborne alert missions went on for a good ten years, Bridget. From 1958 to ’68. And that’s not the worst of it.”
The girl is half out of her seat she’s so angry. Howie sees the opportunity and skips forward, keystroking the command to run the video. Soon the sky is swarming with the gigantic bombers, all armed and streaming toward Russia, zooming out over the audience with their eight Pratt and Whitney jet engines roaring, the students sitting spellbound as the thundering racket echoes around the hall.
“B-52s took off from these bases around the country,” Howie says, dialing down the volume as green dots flash on the screen showing the scores of Air Force bases where B-52s were assigned. “All of this activity was highly classified. The Air Force called the flights training missions and never admitted that armed nuclear weapons were carried on the planes.”
A second student in the back of the lecture hall picks up on the direction Howie’s going and wildly waves his hand, blurting out his question before Howie can acknowledge him.
“If there were that many planes in the air at all times as you show, weren’t there accidents? Couldn’t one or two of these planes have gone down somewhere with nukes on board?”
“I’m glad you asked.” Howie clicks a key. Four red flares suddenly flower on the green southern coast of Spain. “On January 17, 1966, a B-52 collided with a tanker aircraft while refueling and both planes plummeted to the ground near Palomares, Spain, with four nuclear weapons aboard.”
“We nuked an ally?” the student in the back pipes up.
“Yes, two of the bombs exploded,” Howie answers. “Not completely, but the TNT in the other two detonated on impact and scattered radioactivity all over the Spanish landscape, which they are still retrieving today.” Howie keystrokes again. “And then two years later, another B-52 crash-landed on the polar ice near our Air Force base in Greenland and the explosions melted through the icecap releasing radioactive materials into the ocean.”
Another student has become involved, a thin girl with glasses and a pageboy sitting in the front row near Bridget. “How come no one knows about these incidents? Why hasn’t more been made of it?”
“I’ll get to that. But there’s more. A bomber with a nuke aboard crashed in North Africa.” Howie’s video zooms into the Moroccan base to show the burning aircraft. “One of our planes disappeared somewhere over the Mediterranean with two bombs aboard. We dropped two off the coast of British Columbia and had a scary accident in England where a plane went off the runway and crashed into a storage building housing three nukes and came within a hair’s breadth of detonating them.”
The students are chattering to each other, connecting the dots, recognizing the nerve-wracking implications. The student sitting next to Bridget sneers, “British Columbia is close enough. I certainly hope they didn’t drop any in this country.”
Howie winds up, his tone of voice restrained but ominous. “I wish they hadn’t.”
“You’re not going to tell us there are nuclear weapons lying around the United States?” Bridget is perched on the edge of her chair.
“Unfortunately, yes. A bomber came apart in mid-air and we dropped a couple of nukes on a farm in North Carolina. Here’s another jettisoned into the swamps off the coast of Georgia after a mid-air crash, two more discharged into the Atlantic somewhere off New Jersey after another aircraft mishap.”
His audience cannot believe what they are seeing. Eyes wide and mouths dropped open, the students stare mesmerized at the screen. Howie touches a key and looks over his shoulder at the simulation of a bomb plunging into rural farmland. “This nuke came too close for comfort—at least for a farm family in North Carolina. Accidentally dropped from a B-47, the TNT in the nuke blew a crater seventy feet wide and thirty feet deep, destroying the house and injuring six family members.”
“How come all this was never made public?” Bridget asks, on her feet with her hands planted on her hips. “Why didn’t someone tell us about this?”
“As I said, the Air Force claims these were training missions with no armed nukes aboard. And you have to remember there was no Internet back then, no CNN—only three networks with the news tightly controlled by the Pentagon. And we were at the height of the Cold War. People were building fallout shelters in their backyards, the Russian nuclear menace was on everyone’s mind.”
Not bothering to raise his hand, the student in the back row jumps up. “They have certainly recovered all these bombs?” he asks.
“Unfortunately—no.”
“Bombs are still out there?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Eleven—at last count.”
Howie brings up a slide. “Here are the eleven unrecovered nuclear weapons reputable sources believe are scattered around the United States. Could be one as close to you guys as the Chesapeake.”
Howie hears gasps from his audience. “If you think I’m kidding, go on the Net and search for yourself, check out my website—sleepingdogs.us.”
The room is dead quiet.
“This is where I need your help. No one in Washington will pay attention to this problem. It happened on someone else’s watch almost a half century ago. Many of the generals and admirals in the Pentagon were in diapers when these accidents happened. That’s why I call my website sleeping dogs. That’s the Pentagon’s approach, let sleeping dogs lie. I tried for ten years to get them to pay attention to the threat. And didn’t do my career any favors as a result.”
“Your job was affected by blowing the whistle on these lost nukes?”
“Let’s just say they got tired of listening to Howie Collyer and they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. The Pentagon’s version of forced retirement.”
A young man sitting in the middle of the audience who looks out of place in his pressed white shirt and thin black tie, his hair cropped short, raises his hand, stands and introduces himself, “Mr. Collyer, I’m Martin McFarlane.”
“Yes, Martin.” Howie had noticed the student scowling and shaking his head, right off the bat Howie chalked him up as a wiseass troublemaker.
“With all due respect, I’d like to point out that these weapons are fifty years old. Maybe they are duds, or buried so far down in the mud they don’t pose a threat. I can’t believe our government would allow a potential calamity such as you describe to imperil us like that.”
“You know, Martin, I had the same reaction. Our government, as you put it, wouldn’t put the nation in danger like that. Plus I was working at the Pentagon, I knew a lot of these people, they were my friends. I liked and trusted them. But the more I dug into it, the more I ran into denial and double talk. And over time, I began to get the feeling that no one, particularly at higher levels, wanted to deal with the subject. That’s when I decided that they were taking a let sleeping dogs lie approach.
And let me ask you a question. If they don’t think the bombs are a threat and are better off left alone, why did they spend six months and millions of dollars trying to find the one off Georgia before giving up?”
Howie reaches into his bag for the
DVD that’s his killshot, the piece of film that inevitably silences those who want to think the government couldn’t possibly allow nuclear weapons to lie around on American soil. He slips the DVD into his laptop as McFarlane protests, “Still, sir, I cannot help but think you are exaggerating the threat.”
“Okay, but let me run this video of a United States Senate committee meeting on August 3, 1992, and then tell me if I’m exaggerating,” Howie says. It’s one thing for him to talk about the missing nukes, it’s another to have a US senator discussing the problem on film.
“This is Senator J. Bennett Johnston from Louisiana speaking.” Howie rolls the grainy color tape of the sixty-year-old Democratic Senator, thin hair graying on the sides, his long face with its pointy chin dipping down to speak into a microphone in a Senate hearing room: “We have been very, very lucky in this country,” Senator Johnston says.
The video shows Johnston holding up a report. “I have here a description of thirty-two different nuclear weapons accidents—thirty-two. It makes absolutely fascinating and hair-raising reading to realize how close to absolute disaster we came. There was an accident in Palomares, Spain, where you had the weapon that hit the ground, there was a detonation of the high explosive, it spread plutonium over a very large area. Luckily, it was a rural area. But it spread plutonium over a large area. In Thule, Greenland, the same thing happened. In Alaska, the same thing happened. Perhaps the most hair-raising of all was the accident in North Carolina where a B-52 broke up in flight. Two nuclear weapons were released. One the parachute deployed and was recovered, and the other, the nuclear weapon went down and hit the ground. When the Air Force experts rushed to the North Carolina farm to examine the weapon after the accident, they found that only a single switch prevented the 24 megaton bomb from detonating and spreading fire and destruction over a large area.”
“This is public testimony from the United States Senate,” Howie continues. “The report goes on to substantiate eleven bombs are still out there. How many more are a switch away from detonating and setting off a nuclear holocaust right here in the United States? Read the report yourself. I have a handout with websites you can go to. And the more you dig into this, the worse it gets. A few of these lost nukes from the early years have primitive fuses. Who knows what could set them off? A fishing boat’s trawling net? A hurricane? Or maybe a terrorist finds the one in the Chesapeake, detonates it and obliterates our capital and half of Maryland and Virginia in the process?”
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