Hi, I’m the History Guy. I love history, and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
1980 was an interesting time in American history. Jimmy Carter was president, although
it was a presidential election year. Inflation was a national concern, over 13%. Changes in
miniaturization technology meant that a number of consumer items were available for the first time,
for example VHS recorders, personal camcorders and fax machines. Pac-man was first introduced
in arcades in 1980 and post-it notes went on sale for the first time in 1980. In 1980
Mount St. Helens erupted, and in 1980, Iran and Iraq went to war. And on September 19,
1980, near the tiny town of Damascus Arkansas, a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile
topped with the largest thermonuclear warhead in the US strategic nuclear arsenal...exploded.
Yeah you heard me right, the missile exploded, but the warhead did not. And to understand what
happened in the 1980 Damascus Titan II explosion, first we have to understand what was in the silo.
The Titan rocket family is a family of expendable rockets, built by the Glenn L. Martin company,
and first introduced with the Titan I in 1959. The Titan I was the first multistage
intercontinental ballistic missile in the US inventory. In use from 1959 to 1965,
the primary limitation of the Titan I is that the fuel could not be stored at
room temperature, and thus could not be stored in the rocket. To launch,
the rocket had to be moved up from the silo and fuelled, and that made it slow to launch.
The Titan 1 was replaced by the Titan II which used storable propellants,
allowing it to be stored fuelled, and making it much faster to launch. It
could actually be launched from its silo in less than 60 seconds. It was larger,
50% larger than a Titan I, but carried more than double the payload a greater distance,
with more accuracy. Although designed as an intercontinental ballistic missile,
a dozen of the Titan II rockets were used as part of the Gemini manned space program in the 1960s.
As an intercontinental ballistic missile the Titan II carried the W53 thermonuclear warhead. The W53
weighed about eighty one hundred pounds and had a yield of about 9 megatons. Now to put that in
perspective, a nine Megaton explosion would be the equivalent of about three times the
energy...of all the explosives...used throughout the entirety of the Second World War, including
the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fireball alone from a nine Megaton explosion,
would have been enough to cause fatal burns to any unprotected human within 20 miles...of the blast.
Although we briefly fielded a larger air-dropped thermonuclear bomb, the twenty five Megaton B41,
the W53 was in 1980, the largest thermonuclear device still in the American arsenal,
and the largest ever mounted by the United States on a missile. A total of 63 Titan II
intercontinental ballistic missiles with W53 warheads were in service with the US
Strategic Air Command between 1963 and 1987. With missiles on continuous alert during that
period in silos in Arizona, Kansas, and with the 308th Strategic Missile Wing in
Arkansas. The fuel that allows you to store a Titan II missile fully fueled is a mix of
hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide; it's called a hypergolic propellant.
These types of fuels use two components, a fuel and an oxidizer, which ignite when they
come into contact. Now the advantage of hypergolic propellants is that they can be stored in liquid
form at room temperature, and they can be easily and reliably ignited. The Titan II is a two-stage
rocket which means it's got two different pieces, each with its own supply of fuel and oxidizer. The
downside of hypergolic propellants is that the chemicals used are corrosive and extremely toxic
to humans. In fact a propellant leak in August of 1978, in the silo outside of Rock Kansas,
killed two Air Force personnel due to the toxicity of the chemicals. And the dangers of
the poisonous, and explosive chemicals became quite clear the night of September 18th 1980,
in the Titan 2 launch complex 374-7 in northern Arkansas, approximately 50 miles from Little Rock.
At 6:30 p.m., an airman who was part of a team doing a routine pressure check on the second
stage of the missile, accidentally dropped the socket from a 3-foot long ratchet. The
approximately 8 pound socket head dropped some 80 feet, bounced off a thrust mount,
and struck the rocket's first stage, piercing its skin, and causing it to leak aerozine 50 fuel.
This is not good. Not only is aerozine 50 highly toxic, creating this brown acidic smoke,
but if it comes in contact with its oxidizer it will explode! And as fuel was leaking from the
lower stage of the rocket, that meant that the weight of the rocket could have caused
it to collapse in on itself, causing both stages to explode inside the silo. And that
raises an interesting question, could that have caused the thermonuclear warhead to detonate?
A nuclear warhead does include conventional explosives, combined in what is called an
explosive lens, as part of the process of detonation, and heat may cause those
to explode by accident. And while the explosives used on the older W53 warhead were somewhat more
vulnerable to heat than those used today, the missile was what was called, One Point Safe,
meaning that the explosion of only one of the explosive components could not cause detonation.
The missile design required extremely precise timing for the explosion of its high explosive
components in order to produce a nuclear yield, and that's practically impossible for that to
happen by accident. But while a fire could not really cause the missile to explode like
a thermonuclear bomb, it could cause the warhead to explode, and spread its radioactive material
all over northern Arkansas. And in fact that was a greater risk with the older W53 warhead, because
it lacked a modern safety component called a fire resistant pit, that all missiles today would have,
and that is specifically designed to reduce plutonium dispersal in the case of a fire.
A second risk comes from the electronic opponents that are designed to detonate the missile. Modern
safety measures include something called Enhanced Nuclear Detonation Safety, or ENDS. This involves
the enclosure of detonation critical components in a barrier to prevent unintended energy sources
from powering or operating the weapons functions. Since 1993, Congress has required that every
American missile design include not one, but two barriers in order to prevent accidental
detonation. But the W53 predated that rule, and did not include an END barrier. In 1993,
Department of Energy Deputy Assistant Secretary for Military Application Winfred Ellis noted of
the stockpiled B53 warheads which operate the same way as the W53 missile warhead, “That the weapon
has no assured level of nuclear safety in a broad range of multiple abnormal environments.” And the
Titan 2, in launch complex 374-7, was about to be subject to extreme abnormal environments.
While an accidental thermonuclear detonation was an extremely remote
possibility, understand that this was a very old missile design that
lacked all three of the critical safety components that Congress, since 1993,
has required of American nuclear missiles. An ENDS system, insensitive high explosives,
and a fire resistant pit. And the crews responding to the crisis in the silo, had to be operating
under the assumption that there was at least a possibility of a thermonuclear detonation.
An emergency response team was dispatched, but just as two members of that team had been sent
in to vent the gas from the silo, the missile exploded. It is possible that the missile had
simply collapsed, but some experts argue that a fan that was activated to try to vent the
fuel sparked the explosion. That initial explosion was so powerful, that it blew
the 740 ton missile silo door at the top 200 feet in the air, and ejected the second stage,
with the thermonuclear warhead still attached! At which point the second stage proceeded to explode!
At this point we need to pause for a moment to bring up an interesting interlude. At the time
United States Air Force policy did not allow the Air Force to either confirm, nor deny,
whether there was a nuclear warhead at an accident site. To the point where the United
States Air Force initially refused to tell the sitting vice president of the United States,
Walter Mondale, who was in Little Rock Arkansas for the Arkansas
Democratic convention with then, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton,
whether the missile that looked like it was about to explode just 50 miles away in Damascus,
had a nuclear warhead. In fact the county sheriff who was in charge of the evacuation,
only found out that there was a thermonuclear warhead involved, because he searched with his
radio until he found the air force frequency, and eavesdropped on their conversation.
The explosion threw the warhead some hundred feet outside the complex's front gate,
but the warhead released no radiation. The two critical response team members who were
closest to the silo when the missile exploded took terrible injuries in the explosion,
and sadly one of them, Senior Airman David Livingstone, died of his injuries. He died a hero,
trying to prevent a disaster. 21 other people who were nearby when the missile exploded,
also were injured in that explosion. The explosion pretty much destroyed the facility,
but the demolition and cleanup still cost the airforce about another 20 million dollars. And the
site where that silo once was is now private land and on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Titan missile program was already towards the end of its lifespan in 1980, and it was
discontinued and the last of the Titan missiles was decommissioned in 1987, but there's still one
Titan missile silo, complete with a deactivated Titan II missile that the public can go view at
the Titan missile museum in Arizona. It's kind of funny that from 1980 that we remember Pac-Man
and Post-It notes more than an intercontinental ballistic missile blowing up, but I guess the
Damascus Titan II silo missile explosion is about as well remembered as top loading VCRs.
Which leaves a final question, could this accident happen again today? The short answer is no,
we have much safer designs today, and the United States no longer uses
liquid-fueled intercontinental ballistic missiles. But the more complex answer is
that what really happened in Damascus in 1980 was an unexpected series of events
for which the Air Force was unprepared, and yes, unexpected things still happen today.
I'm the History Guy, and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series of short snippets
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