Review

Almost Armageddon: 'Command and Control' recounts nuclear accident that came close to obliterating Arkansas

The opening night movie at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, Robert Kenner’s Command and Control, explores how close we Arkansans came to blowing ourselves up during the Cold War — and the implications of thousands of nuclear weapons in the world.
The opening night movie at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, Robert Kenner’s Command and Control, explores how close we Arkansans came to blowing ourselves up during the Cold War — and the implications of thousands of nuclear weapons in the world.

I went to elementary school in Goldsboro, N.C., because my father was stationed at the nearby Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. One of the things I remember about moving there in 1964 is overhearing my dad talk about "how we had dropped a couple of nukes" on the area a few years earlier. He had been part of a team sent down to try and recover the unexploded bombs, each of which was more than 100 times more powerful than the ordnance the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima.

photo

Director Robert Kenner seamlessly blends archival footage with dramatic reconstructions to tell the story of a missile silo accident that very nearly turned Arkansas into an uninhabitable wasteland in the documentary Command and Control.

What happened was that in 1961, four days after President John F. Kennedy took the oath of office, a B-52 Stratofortress on a training run had cracked up in midair. This accident caused it to lose the two MK39 bombs -- each weighing about 10,000 pounds -- it was carrying. One of them floated to the ground via parachute (they were deployed this way to allow the bomber to get clear of the blast zone before detonation). Its chute became tangled in a tree and it was found standing vertically, its nose pressed 18 inches into the dirt.

Command and Control

88 Cast: Documentary, with Harold Brown, Allan Childers, Eric Schlosser, Bob Peurifoy, Bill Stevens, Dave Powell, Jeffrey Plumb, Rodney Holder, David Pryor, Skip Rutherford, Col. John Moser, Col. Ben Scallorn, Sid King, Mona Harper, Sam Hutto, James Sandaker, Greg Devlin

Director: Robert Kenner

Rating: Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

The chute failed to open on the second bomb and it fell straight down, landing in a swampy field near the Neuse River. It was going about 700 miles an hour when it struck the earth. It buried deep in the ground. While recovery crews found the tail section 20 feet below the surface, when they got about 40 feet down they had to abandon the effort, leaving most of the bomb's radioactive material -- its plutonium and uranium -- in the ground. Water from the river was flooding in too fast.

The official word was that both these weapons were "unarmed," and that's correct, at least in the technical sense that they didn't explode. But the Pentagon's assertion that there was "no chance" that the bombs could have exploded wasn't the entire truth either -- in 2014 it was revealed that the "fuzing sequence" -- an important step in arming the weapons -- had begun on both bombs. They both came close to exploding.

Looking back, it seems odd that my father didn't make more of this, but in those "duck and cover" Cold War days we lived under the shadow of imminent nuclear threat -- and some of us figured an Armageddon-inducing attack was inevitable. I grew older and never thought much about the Goldsboro incident, and sometimes I wondered if I had the story right. Did we really almost blow away a large part of the North Carolina Piedmont?

Turns out we did, and that the Goldsboro "Broken Arrow" wasn't the only incident involving nuclear weapons. There were more than 30 (perhaps many more) mishaps involving nuclear weapons from the mid-1950s until the end of 1980. Looking back at them, it's probably fair to say it's a miracle we haven't accidentally annihilated a populated area with a weapon of mass destruction.

Command and Control, Robert Kenner's documentary based on the 2013 book by Eric Schlosser, focuses on an incident that will be familiar to many Arkansans. On Sept. 18, 1980, at 6:25 p.m., at the Titan II Launch Complex 374-7 near the community of Southside just north of Damascus, an airman conducting routine maintenance on the Titan II missile silo there dropped a wrench socket which fell some 70 feet, glancing off the thrust mount before striking and piercing the rocket's first-stage fuel tank, causing it to leak. Base personnel and later civilians in the surrounding area were evacuated, and a haz-mat team was sent in to assess the situation. About 3 a.m., the fuel exploded, killing 22-year-old Airman David Livingston and injuring dozens. The Titan II's 9-megaton warhead -- more than twice as large as the combined payloads in the Goldsboro incident -- was thrown 100 feet clear of the facility.

It goes without saying that it didn't explode -- if it had, history would have been altered in inexplicable ways. A 9-megaton blast would have had an impact on most of the state; the fireball would have consumed Little Rock and Hot Springs, where the state Democratic convention was going on with Gov. Bill Clinton, Sen. David Pryor and Vice President Walter Mondale in attendance. Much of Arkansas would have been rendered uninhabitable. And all because a guy dropped a wrench.

The film uses a minute-by-minute account to the Damascus incident as the backbone of a story about what can happen when human beings are expected to perform even simple tasks perfectly 100 percent of the time. It touches on the Goldsboro incident and other near-catastrophes around the world, indicting not only the moral absurdity of nuclear weapons -- Allan Childers, who was part of the Titan's missile crew, admits he was "prepared to destroy an entire civilization" with the flick of a switch -- but the economic and inertial forces that kept the Titan IIs in silos even after they were considered obsolete.

Despite the seriousness of the subject (and some unnerving revelations that come near its end), Kenner has managed to craft an immensely entertaining and sometimes even funny movie. Through its judicious use of talking heads -- who include former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, Schlosser, Pryor, dean of the Clinton School of Public Service Skip Rutherford (Pryor's aide at the time of the explosion), and several eyewitnesses -- and a remarkable mix of archival footage and seamless reconstructions, a thriller-tense parable of human vanity unspools.

Command and Control will be tonight's opening film at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. (Tickets are required, see hsdfi.org for details.) There will be a free showing of the film at 6 p.m. Saturday at the South Side Bee Branch Fine Arts Center, 334 South Side Road, Bee Branch. And at 5 p.m. Sunday the Clinton School of Public Service will screen the film at Little Rock's Ron Robinson Theater, 100 River Market Ave. Admission is free to the Little Rock screening; an RSVP is required for admission. See clintonschool.uasys.edu for details.

The film will be broadcast as part of PBS' American Experience series in early 2017.

MovieStyle on 10/07/2016

Upcoming Events