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 of forgotten history about 10 minutes long. And
if you did enjoy it, please go ahead and click that thumbs up button which is there on your
left. If you have any questions, or comments, feel free to write those in the comment section,
I will be happy to personally respond. And if you'd like more snippets we've forgotten
history, all you need to do is subscribe.
