I was an MP stationed at Little Rock AFB when that Titan-ll blew up in its silo, "actually in USAF we were called SP's for Security Police". In fact I was on duty at the time when it blew. I can't say I was involved or even knew much at the time as I was "luckily" assigned to MAC "Military Airlift Command" and not SAC "Strategic Air Command" and we had nothing to do with the ICBM's. Instead I did base LE and flight line security. That night I was working the main gate.
We knew something big was happening but didn't know what, just something to do with a missile, and we later found out someone had died. Honestly I didn't even know the exact details until I bought and read the book "Command and Control" many, many years later. SAC threw a blanket over the entire thing and downplayed it. Saying there was no chance the 9 mt warhead could have blown. THAT I remember.
In fact it turned out that bomb going off was a lot more possible then they admitted to and would have wiped out 1/2 of Arkansas had it blown. There had been another accident like it in 1965 when 53 workers were killed. The Titan-l's & ll's were liquid fueled and were very volatile. And the sad fact was that in 1980 when this one happened we were only keeping the 18 ICBM's around in order to trade them off in the SALT talks. By then the Minuteman ICBM's were our main missiles and I think we had MX's some years later. I never worked missiles however.
One tech got into trouble even tho he was a hero. He went down into the missile alone which you can never, ever do. No single man can ever be around one of those weapons. its called "the two man rule". Only two authorized people of equal technical expertise can ever be around a special weapon and they can never be out of sight of each other.
After this accident I ended up getting deployed to the S/W assigned to convoy duty. We were taking the old stuff out of Europe, flying them into a airbase in New Mexico for disassembly, and we put in cruise missiles and Pershing-ll missiles in Europe to replace them. The convoy duty was always serious business because we'd have semi-trailers loaded with the things and very, very tight security along the routes and with the weapons.
You people today wouldn't believe the numbers and status of our nuclear forces, both ours and the Reds, back at the height of the Cold War. We each had about 10,000 strategic weapons alone on high alert. We had fleets of B-52's on hot pads in bases thru the northern tier, the bombers would be cold started and in the air in 15 mins. Of course the ICBM's and SLBM's, both MIRV'ed, and this isn't even counting all the Intermediate and tactical weapons we both had. Its a miracle we never blew up the world.
I know we came close a few times.
