Command and Control by Eric Schlosser Read Free Book Online

level 2 offered the only possibility of escape. Some workers had mistakenly climbed down the ladder toward the bottom of the silo. Others were blocked trying to climb up. One was trapped in the elevator when the power went out. Workers weren’t killed by the flames. They were asphyxiated by the smoke. Of the fifty-five men who’d returned to the silo after lunch, only Saunders and Lay left there alive.
    Helicopters brought firemen from Little Rock Air Force Base to 373-4, but their work was hampered by the poor visibility. They managed to extinguish a few small fires on level 2, but fire was no longer the real danger. Without power, the site lacked air-conditioning, and as the temperature in the silo rose, so did the pressure in the missile’s oxidizer tanks. Nitrogen tetroxide expanded in the heat; its boiling point was only 70 degrees Fahrenheit. By five o’clock that evening, the temperature in the silo was 78 degrees and rising. Opening the silo door would help cool the missile and vent the smoke—but the door couldn’t be opened without electrical power. Smoke had seeped into the control center as well, complicating efforts to manage the crisis. All four blast doors had been propped open so workers could freely move within the complex. The pins on blast door 8, at the entrance to the control center, had deliberately been left extended so the door wouldn’t shut. And without power, the pins couldn’t be retracted. At seven o’clock, SAC headquarters in Omaha warned that if the temperature in the silo wasn’t reduced, the missile’s stage 2 oxidizer tank was likely to reachan “explosive situation” around midnight.
    Firemen and PTS teams worked in the hot, smoke-filled complex to recover bodies, restore power, and prevent an explosion. At ten o’clock, the temperature in the silo reached 80 degrees, then started to fall. Portable lighting units, generators, and industrial air-conditioners were hooked up, and by early morning an even greater disaster had been averted. The fifty-third body was carried from the silo at daybreak.
    An Air Force Accident Investigation Board later concluded that a worker who’d been welding on level 2 inadvertently struck a temporary hydraulics line. When the spray of hydraulic fluid hit the arc of the electric welder, it caught fire. The Air Force attributed the accident to human error. ButGary Lay insisted that nobody had been welding on level 2 and that a mechanical fault had started the fire. He thought that a hydraulics line must have ruptured, spraying flammable oil onto electrical equipment. The missile in the silo wasn’t damaged, and the equipment areas were repaired. About one year after the accident, launch crews were back at the complex near Searcy to pull alerts. It looked just like any other complex, except for a few blackened walls in the silo that someone had forgotten to paint.
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    C HILDERS AND HIS CREW PASSED through blast door 8, walked down the short cableway, and entered the launch control center. The room was round and about thirty-five feet in diameter. It was on the second level of a three-story steel structure, suspended on enormous springs, within a buried concrete cylinder. The walls were two feet thick. The ceiling was covered with a maze of ducts and pipes. The color scheme was a mix of pale turquoise, light gray, the dull silver of unpainted steel. The room had the strong, confident vibe of Eisenhower-era science and technology. It was full of intricately wired machinery and electronics—but did not have a computer. To the right stood a series of steel cabinets that displayed the status and housed the controls of the guidance system, the power and electrical systems, the topside alarm. The cabinets were about seven feet tall and covered with all sorts of switches, gauges, dials, and small round lights. In the center of the room was the commander’s