When Dropping a Wrench Almost Caused Armageddon

From the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world lived under the horrifying shadow of nuclear armageddon. Following the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, the Soviet Union, United States, and their allies stockpiled enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons to deter the other side from using theirs first, for doing so would guarantee the annihilation of all mankind. But maintaining this delicate balance of terror created a troubling paradox, encapsulated by the simple words “Always/Never.” Given their enormous destructive power, nuclear weapons cannot, of course, ever be allowed to go off accidentally. At the same time, however, they must always work perfectly when needed or else their effectiveness as a deterrent is lost. In order to square this circle, both sides developed vast, incredibly complex systems of protocols, failsafes, and mechanical and electronic safeguards. But the more complex a system gets, the more unstable and vulnerable it becomes, and on dozens of occasions the world came within a hair’s breadth of total annihilation due to trivial, sometimes comical errors – from the wrong tape being inserted into a defence computer to a bomber crewman accidentally pulling a bomb release handle to an early-warning missile mistaking the rising moon for a swarm of Soviet missiles. But perhaps the most absurd near-miss of the Cold War took place in September 1980 when a dropped socket wrench nearly turned central Arkansas into a radioactive wasteland. This is the forgotten story of the Damascus Titan Missile Incident.

In the early days of the Cold War, there was only one effective means of delivering an atomic bomb to enemy territory: by aircraft. The first decade following the end of the Second World War saw huge advances in aircraft technology, with lumbering propeller-driven bombers like the Boeing B-29 Superfortress giving way to sleek jets like the B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress that could fly higher and faster than anything which came before and cover vast, intercontinental distances without refuelling. But in warfare, the advantage always lies with the defender, and soon even these futuristic aircraft found themselves vulnerable to ever-improving Soviet interceptor and surface-to-air missile technology. In response, the U.S. Air Force developed even more advanced bombers like the Convair B-58 Hustler and North American XB-70 Valkyrie to fly higher and faster than any interceptor or missile. But once again advancing technology quickly closed the gap, and the Air Force was forced to develop even more advanced aircraft like the low-flying, terrain-hugging Rockwell B-1 Lancer and the stealthy, radar evading Northrop B-2 Spirit. Another solution was clearly needed.

That solution was the ballistic missile. In September 1944, the Germans unveiled the groundbreaking V-2 rocket, thousands of which were fired against targets in the UK and Belgium in the closing months of the war. Screaming down at its target from the edge of space at twice the speed of sound, the V-2 gave no warning of its arrival and – unlike manned bomber aircraft and the earlier V-1 flying bomb – was impossible to defend against. Indeed, it was only by misleading German intelligence as to where the bombs were falling and overrunning the launch sites in France and the Netherlands that the Allies were finally able to bring the V-weapons campaign to an end – and for more on this fascinating chapter of WWII history, please check out our previous videos A Wingtip and a Prayer: the Insane Way British Pilots Defeated Germany’s Secret Weapon, That Time Disney Helped Give the World a Weapon of Mass Destruction, and the Great V2 Rocket Heist.

But while the V-2 was a technological marvel, it was a failure as a weapon. Despite its fiendish complexity and exorbitant price tag, it was unreliable, only accurate enough to hit a city-sized target, and delivered only a 1-ton high-explosive warhead – enough to destroy a city block. Indeed, thanks to its relatively moderate destructive power and the Nazis’ extensive use of concentration camp labour in its construction, the V-2 remains the only weapon in history to kill more people in its production than in actual combat. Nonetheless, the sophisticated rocket was a glimpse into the future of warfare, and when paired with the other cutting-edge development of the war – the atomic bomb – promised become the ultimate weapon – utterly unstoppable and capable of obliterating entire cities from half a world away. Consequently, as soon as the Second World War ended and the world entered the decades-long stalemate of the Cold War, both sides began eagerly developing long-range ballistic missile technology, with the United States importing many of the German scientists and engineers who had developed the V-2 under Operation Paperclip. The earliest U.S. nuclear ballistic missiles like the PGM-11 Redstone, the PGM-17 Thor, and PGM-19 Jupiter, were intermediate-range weapons or IRBMs, capable of travelling between 600 and 3000 kilometres. To reach targets within the Soviet Union, they had to be stationed in neighbouring allied countries like Turkey, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Striking from farther away required significantly larger and more complex Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or ICBMs. The Soviet Union was the first to develop this technology, first testing the R-7 Semyorka missile in May 1957. On October 4 of that year, a modified version of the R-7 carried the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit, kicking off the Space Race – and for more on this heady – and often disastrous – early period of spaceflight, please check out our previous video ‘Kaputnik’: America’s Largely Forgotten Disastrous First Attempt to Launch a Satellite.

The United States countered the threat of the R-7 with the Convair SM-65 Atlas, which first flew in June 1957 and officially entered service in August 1959. Featuring an innovative “stage-and-a-half” design and “balloon” tanks which drew their structural strength from the pressure of the propellants inside, the Atlas could carry a 3.75 megaton W-38 thermonuclear warhead over a range of 14,500 kilometres. Modified versions of the Atlas later carried the first American astronauts into orbit and were developed into a family of successful unmanned launch vehicles whose descendants are still in use today. That same year, the Atlas was joined by the Glenn L. Martin Company HGM-25A Titan I, a two-stage ICBM that could carry the same payload over a distance of 11,300 kilometres. However, like the R-7, both the Atlas and the Titan I suffered from a fundamental flaw: they were fuelled by a combination of RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen. Oxygen cannot be kept liquid at regular temperatures and pressures without eventually boiling off, meaning the Atlas and Titan I could not be kept fuelled and ready for launch. Instead, early Atlas D missiles were stored empty in horizontal earth-covered concrete vaults nicknamed “coffins.” Upon receiving an alert, the missiles were raised to the vertical position by hydraulic lifts and filled with propellants before launch. This process could take up to 15 minutes, leaving the missiles extremely vulnerable to a surprise Soviet first strike. Later versions of the Atlas – as well as the Titan I – were designed to be stored and launched vertically from underground concrete missile silos hardened against nuclear attack, greatly improving their survivability. However, fuelling and launch times were still agonizingly slow, making the missiles only marginally useful as quick-response weapons.

Thankfully, less than a year after the Titan I entered service, the Glenn L. Martin Company submitted a proposal for an improved Titan II missile, the contract for which was awarded in June 1960. The largest and most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile ever deployed by the United States, the Titan II measured 31 metres long and 3 metres in diameter, and weighed 155,000 kilograms. It could travel over 16,000 kilometres and deliver a single 9-megaton yield W-53 thermonuclear warhead – 600 times more powerful than the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the largest carried by any American missile. More importantly, unlike previous missiles the Titan II used storable propellants which could be kept in its tanks for long periods, allowing the missile to be kept on constant alert and deployed from its silo within minutes of receiving an attack order. But this quick-firing capability came at a cost: the propellants in question, Unsymmetrical Dimethylhydrazine or UDMH and dinitrogen tetroxide, are extremely toxic, forcing maintenance crews to wear special protective equipment. They are also hypergolic, meaning they ignite on contact with one another. While this made the missile’s LR-87 and LR-91 rocket engines extremely reliable, it also meant that a propellant leak could – and did – lead to a catastrophic explosion.

The Titan II officially entered service in January 1962, and by 1969 sixty-three missiles were deployed across four Strategic Missile Wings stretching across the southern United States: the 308th based out of Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas; the 381st based out of McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas; the 390th based out of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona; and the 1st Strategic Aerospace Division at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which operated three Titan II silos for technical development and testing purposes. Each wing was further divided into two squadrons with nine missiles each, the silos being dispersed over a wide area surrounding the host Air Force Base to prevent a Soviet nuclear strike from destroying all the missiles at once.

For 20 years, Titan II missiles formed an important cornerstone of the American nuclear triad, along with submarine-launched ballistic missiles or SLBMs like the Polaris or Trident and gravity bombs and standoff missiles launched from strategic bombers like the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. Like the earlier Atlas, the Titan II was also modified into a civilian space launch vehicle, launching 12 NASA Gemini missions into orbit between 1965 and 1966 and countless other spacecraft including the Voyager 1 and 2 interplanetary probes until the platform was finally retired in 2003.

But, as always, technology marches on, and in 1962, the same year the Titan II entered service, the U.S. Air Force introduced the even more sophisticated Boeing LGM-30 Minuteman. The Minuteman was the first ICBM to use solid rocket propellant composed of synthetic polybutadeine rubber and ammonium perchlorate oxidizer – the same used in the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle and other space launch vehicles. This propellant allowed the Minuteman to be kept on standby for long periods and launched at a moment’s notice while being considerably safer and less maintenance-intensive than the Titan II’s toxic and explosive liquid propellants. Featuring one of the first digital, transistorized guidance computers, the Minuteman was also more accurate than the Titan II, allowing it to make pinpoint attacks on hardened military targets like Soviet missile silos. Finally, the Minuteman III, first deployed in 1970, featured multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles or MIRVs, which allowed a single missile to attack multiple targets and confuse and overwhelm enemy antiballistic missile or ABM systems. Yet despite its growing obsolescence, nothing could match the Titan II in terms of sheer throw weight and destructive power, so the ageing missiles were kept in service into the early 1980s – and it is here that the story of the 1980 Damascus incident begins.

The incident in question took place at Launch Complex 374-7 in Bradley Township, Van Buren County in central Arkansas, around 5 kilometres northeast of the town of Damascus. The was one of nine Titan II silos belonging to the 274th Strategic Missile Squadron of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing based out of Little Rock Air Force Base. Each launch complex comprised three hardened concrete structures buried just below ground level: a single missile silo, a launch control centre, and a junction structure connecting the two. This structure contained a staircase and elevator to provide access to the complex and a series of heavy blast doors to protect the launch control centre from the blast of a launching missile or an accidental explosion.

At around 6:30 PM on September 18, 1980, two Air Force Propellant Transfer System or PTS technicians, Airmen David F. Powell and Jeffrey L. Plumb, prepared to enter the Launch Complex 374-7 silo in order to perform routine maintenance. A warning light had gone off in the Launch Control Centre indicating low pressure in the missile’s second stage oxidizer tank, and Powell and Plumb were dispatched to check the pressure and top up the tank if necessary. The job of PTS technician has been described as among the most dangerous in the U.S. Air Force, and attracted a particularly foolhardy breed of airman. As author Eric Schlosser writes in his book Command and Control:

“The PTS guys were a different breed. Outside of work they had a reputation for being rowdy and wild. They had one of the most dangerous jobs in the Air Force – and at the end of the day they liked to blow off steam, drinking and partying harder than just about anyone else at the base. They were more likely to ride motorcycles, ignore speed limits, violate curfews, and toss a commanding officer into a shower fully clothed after consuming too much alcohol. They called the missiles “birds,” and they were attached to them and proud of them in the same way that good automobile mechanics care about cars. The danger of the oxidizer and the fuel wasn’t theoretical. It was part of the job. The daily risks often inspired a defiant, cavalier attitude among the PTS guys. Some of them had been known to fill a Ping-Pong ball with oxidizer and toss it into a bucket of fuel. The destruction of the steel bucket, accompanied by flames, was a good reminder of what they were working with. And if you were afraid of the propellants, as most people would be, you needed to find a different line of work.”

Nonetheless, PTS technicians followed strict protocols to ensure security and safety while working. On entering the junction structure, the airmen were locked into a caged area where they had to phone the launch control centre and read out a special access code. If the code checked out, the control centre would electronically open the door to grant them access to the complex. They then donned their Rocket Fuel Handler Clothing Outfits or RFCHOs: space-suit-like protective garments with built-in oxygen supplies that would protect them from corrosive and toxic propellant leaks. For safety reasons, PTS technicians always followed the “buddy system”, while two more RFCHO-suited technicians stood by in the junction structure to render assistance if needed.

Once suited up, Powell and Plumb walked through a set of heavy blast doors into an access tunnel that led to the Level 2 gantry inside the missile silo. Topping up the tank involved removing a large dust cap from the filler valve, a procedure which was supposed to be carried out using a large torque wrench. However, Powell and Plumb had forgotten the tool back in their truck topside. As retrieving it would have required removing their RFCHO suits and climbing back to the surface, Powell opted to use an alternative tool: a large socket wrench with a fist-sized, 3.6 kilogram socket. While this was strictly against protocol, Powell and Plumb were eager to get the job done as quickly as possible and turn in for the evening. The ageing Titan II missiles and their silos required constant maintenance, forcing PTS and other maintenance crews to work up to 18-hour shifts. So both technicians went along with the unauthorized procedure. This was to prove a fateful decision, for the wrench was more dangerous than Powell realized. While the wrench had a 1-inch drive head, the drive receptacle on the socket was three quarters of an inch, requiring the use of an adaptor to join the two. This, in turn, made the heavy socket more likely to slip off – and sure enough, as Powell prepared to remove the dust cap from the missile oxidizer tank, that’s exactly what it did. Normally, dropping a tool shouldn’t have been dangerous; the retractable platform Powell and Plumb were standing on had a rubber seal along its inner edge that was supposed to fit flush against the missile fuselage. But this seal had become deformed with age, leaving a gap between the platform and the missile – a gap just large enough to let the dropped socket through. Stunned, the two airmen watched helplessly as the heavy tool plunged 24 metres down the silo before bouncing off a thrust mount into the missile, punching a hole through the skin into the first-stage fuel tank. Immediately, a dense cloud of white UDMH fuel began streaming out of the breach, quickly filling the silo. After standing paralyzed for nearly a minute, wondering what to do, Powell and Plumb turned around and, faster than you can say whoopsie doodle, scrambled up a ladder to an escape hatch on the surface.

Alarmingly, this was not the first time a serious accident had occurred at a Titan II silo. On August 9,

1965, Launch Complex 373-4 of the 272 Strategic Missile Squadron, located 18 kilometres north of Searcy, Arkansas, was undergoing renovations when a massive uncontrolled fire ripped through the silo. The conflagration quickly burned up all the oxygen in the silo and filled the space with toxic fumes, killing 53 of the 55 civilian contractors working in the launch complex that day. Many of the dead were found piled around an escape ladder, suffocated as they tried to climb to the surface. It was the greatest single loss of life at a U.S. nuclear facility in history. The power in the silo also failed, knocking out the complex’s air conditioning system and pushing the temperature of the missile’s oxidizer tanks past nitrogen tetroxide’s boiling point of 20 degrees Celsius. Thankfully, the temperature was stabilized before the fuel could ignite. The cause of the accident was later traced to a welder working on level three of the silo, who accidentally hit a hydraulic line with his welding torch, rupturing the line and igniting the highly pressurized and flammable fluid inside. However, as the missile’s warhead was not installed at the time, there was no danger of nuclear contamination, and despite the intensity of the blaze the missile and silo were not seriously damaged and returned to service shortly thereafter. By grim coincidence, the missile in question – serial number 62-0006 – was the very same one involved in the 1980 Damascus incident.

A decade and a half later on August 24, 1978, another serious incident took place at Launch Complex 533-7 of the 533rd Strategic Missile Squadron near Rock, Kansas. At around 12 o’clock PM, While PTS technicians Airmen 1st Class Erby Hepstall and Carl Malinger were filling up the missile’s first-stage oxidizer tank, a teflon O-ring became lodged in the fuelling valve, jamming it open and causing nearly 50,000 litres of dinitrogen tetroxide to gush out into the silo. Though both Hepstall and Malinger were wearing RFHCO suits, the thick rust-red oxidizer vapours immediately dropped visibility inside the silo to zero, making it all but impossible to find their way out. Upon hearing Hepstall and Malinger’s cries of distress over the radio and seeing oxidizer fumes rising out of the silo vent, 1st Lieutenant Keith E. Matthews and Staff Sergeant Robert J. Thomas rushed down into the complex and suited up to rescue the PTS team and stop the oxidizer leak. At the same time, Hepstall staggered out of the silo, his helmet badly corroded from the fumes but otherwise alive. After changing his helmet, Hepstall followed Matthews and Thomas back into the silo, but while they managed to rescue Malinger, Hepstall and Thomas suffered leaks in his suit and were pronounced dead soon after. A cloud of dinitrogen tetroxide 1.6 kilometres long, 800 metres wide, and 300 metres tall drifted towards the nearby town of Rock, but the population of 200 was successfully evacuated by 1:45 PM and only one civilian had to be treated for fume inhalation.

Nor was the 1980 incident the first time Launch Complex 374-7 had suffered a serious accident. Just 8 months before the Rock incident on January 27, 1978, an oxidizer tank leak sent a cloud of highly toxic dinitrogen tetroxide 900 metres long, 90 metres wide, and 30 metres high drifting across U.S. Highway 65. While four civilians suffered mild ill effects from the toxic vapours, the rest were successfully evacuated from the path of the cloud and the leak quickly repaired. The next time, however, the Air Force would not be so lucky.

Within seconds of Airmen David Powell and Jeffrey Plumb puncturing the fuel tank of missile 62-0006, klaxons began blaring across Launch Complex 374-7 warning of a propellant leak. In the Launch Control Centre, Lieutenant Allan Childers, deputy commander of the Missile Combat Crew, struggled to find out what was going on. But other than the klaxons and reports that white smoke was rising from a vent shaft, he had little information to go on. Confusion reigned for nearly a half hour until Airmen Powell and Plumb showed up in the control centre. But rather than admit to his mistake, Powell – afraid of getting in trouble – simply played dumb, reporting seeing smoke in the silo but not mentioning the dropped socket. Jeff Plumb simply played along. This omission left Lieutenant Childers and the Combat Crew completely in the dark, scrambling fruitlessly to find out what had happened. It wasn’t until another member of the Combat Crew, Rodney Holder, questioned the PTS team that Powell finally broke down and admitted to his mistake. On hearing this news, Holder’s face turned white – as Childers later recalled.

Childers put Powell on the phone and made him explain the situation to the commander of the 374th Strategic Missile Wing. Then, as he waited for the information to make its way up the Air Force chain of command, Childers pondered his next move. Should he evacuate the missile complex, or keep everyone buttoned up inside the Launch Control Centre? After all, the structure was designed to withstand a direct hit by a Soviet nuclear warhead; surely it would protect its occupants if the Titan missile exploded. Hours passed before the order finally arrived from Colonel John Moser at Little Rock Air Force Base: evacuate the complex. Childers, disagreeing with the order, tried to argue with the Colonel:

“I didn’t think it’d blow up. And if it did blow up, I thought that the door and the complex would contain the explosion. It was underground. It had this cap on it…I had two blast doors protecting me that were the size of bank vault doors. And I was sitting in a facility that was designed to survive a detonation from a Russian nuclear weapon. So I thought we’re safer down here than if we go up above…I felt devastated. Yeah, I was devastated that I had to leave. Even to this day, it bothers me that I had to leave. Never in the history of an active missile complex had you left the missile with a warhead on it, walked away from the site with the site still running.”

In the end, however, Childers was forced to follow his orders, and the launch complex was evacuated. Meanwhile, Mike Hansen, chief of the PTS crews that night, asked for volunteers to descend into the silo to assess the situation and potentially try and fix the leak. But there was a problem: the complex had gone into lockdown, and all the massive steel blast doors were now sealed shut. Even worse, for unknown reasons orders from Little Rock forbade the PTS teams from entering through the escape hatch they had just climbed out of; instead, they were ordered to cut through the fence at the entry gate and force their way through the blast doors to get into the silo. Doubly frustrating was the fact that had the Combat Crew been allowed to remain in the Control Centre as Lieutenant Childers had requested, they could have easily opened those doors at the push of a button. But once again, the men obeyed their orders, and the first to suit up and enter the complex were Airmen Greg Devlin and Rex Hukle. After successfully cutting through the perimeter fence, the pair struggled to force open the blast doors using a crowbar, bolt cutters, and a handheld hydraulic pump, but no matter what they tried the locking bolts refused to retract. After around 35 minutes Sergeant Jeffrey Kennedy, concerned that the pair were running out of oxygen, recalled Devlin and Hukle and, along with Senior Airmen David Livingston, descended into the silo himself. By this time the hydrazine vapours in the silo were so thick that the two men could barely see their hands in front of their faces. When they finally reached the atmospheric monitoring readouts, they confirmed everyone’s worst fears: the vapours were at saturation levels, and could ignite at any second. Livingston and Kennedy were ordered to withdraw, but not before switching on a ventilation fan to help clear out the silo. Livingston volunteered, and descended back into the vapour-filled complex. It was 3:00 on the morning of September 19, around eight and a half hours after the missile fuel tank had been punctured. Just a few seconds later, sparks from the ventilation fan ignited the flammable vapours, and all hell broke loose. Airman Greg Devlin, standing just outside the complex, later described the scene:

“It was just a bang, the loud sound, and the concussion of wind. It was just– it was like bang. It was like … you just got hit by a Mack truck. And all of a sudden, rocks started falling. It was like rain falling. And it was all this gravel from the complex. And metal started falling out of the sky. And everybody started to run.

The chunks of concrete that were landing everywhere were as– I mean everywhere– were as big as coffee tables. The real big ones were as big as pickup trucks and school buses and stuff like that. Those were everywhere. You could hear them hitting the ground around me. Man, it was like boom, boom, boom.

“I slid 60 feet on my back with concrete flames and steel going past me. [When I finally come to a stop] I hear this blood curdling scream to the left of me going ‘Runnnnnn!’ I rolled because it scared me. I was like who is yelling at me. It’s pitch black. It’s 3 in the morning and no one is there and that scared me worse. I get off and take off running and I get five steps away and a chunk of concrete, the size of a school bus, fell right behind me.

The trees were on fire. The grass was on fire. The only light we had was fires. And you could see the shadows of just about everything because there was so much fire around there. It was like being in this forest fire without a forest being around you.

And then for just a second or two, it was this one point in time where there was no sound at all. It was like a total calm peace, kind of like the end of the world, for 10 seconds. And then you heard all the screaming and crying and guys yelling, oh my god, I’m hurt.”

The Titan II had exploded with the force of more than 70,000 metric tons of TNT, completely obliterating the silo and launching its 340 metric tonne steel and concrete door – designed to withstand a nearby nuclear blast – a distance of more than half a kilometre. The blast broke windows and houses for several kilometres around the complex, and was heard at Little Rock Air Force Base more than 100 kilometres away. But while eyewitnesses described the explosion as looking like a nuclear detonation, mercifully the 9-megaton W53 warhead had survived the blast and was found around 30 metres from the entrance gate, its various built-in safeguards having prevented it from going off. If it had, the surrounding area out to a radius of 32 kilometres would have been utterly devastated, while much of Arkansas and the southern United States would have been blanketed in lethal radioactive fallout. Thankfully, this was highly unlikely due to the microsecond ignition timing needed to achieve symmetric implosion of the bomb’s core. However, if the bomb’s conventional explosive lenses has gone off, this would have scattered highly-enriched uranium dust over a wide area, requiring extensive decontamination operations.

Meanwhile, Greg Devlin had suffered second and third degree burns to his face, neck, back, and both hands. Fuel and oxidizer had also gotten onto his skin, inflicting additional chemical burns, but quick action by a fellow PTS teammate who doused him in water limited the damage. But nothing could be done about the propellant fumes he had breathed in, which would cause him respiratory problems for the rest of his life. In addition, the blast had ruptured his right eardrum and shattered his left ankle. But he was alive – as were 21 other members of the missile crew who sustained various injuries. Senior Airman David Livingston, however, was not so lucky. Still inside the complex when the missile exploded, he died of his injuries. For his bravery during the crisis, Livingston was posthumously awarded the Airman’s Medal for Heroism, while the Titan II maintenance structure at Little Rock Air Force Base was renamed in his honour. Five other airmen were similarly decorated: Jeff Kennedy, Greg Devlin, Rex Hukle, Don Green, and Jimmy Roberts.

Cleanup of the shattered launch complex began in October 1980. With the cost of replacing the site estimated at over $225 million compared to $20 million to demolish it, the Air Force chose to fill in the silo with soil, gravel, and concrete debris. An official investigation into the disaster attributed the accident to human error, and concluded that the Titan II was fundamentally safe and reliable. However, the report also recommended a number of changes to official policies and procedures, such as the use of tethers on hand tools and better communication with local civilian authorities in the event of further accidents. But it was too little, too late, for in July 1982 the administration of president Ronald Reagan officially announced the retirement of the Titan II system after 20 years of service. The last operational Titan II, located at Launch Complex 373-8 near Judsonia, Arkansas, was decommissioned on May 5, 1987. Today, the entirety of the United States’ land-based nuclear deterrent comprises 450 Minuteman III missiles distributed between three air force bases in Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana.

While certainly traumatizing to those who lived through it, the 1980 Damascus Titan II explosion is particularly terrifying because it was merely one of dozens of similar incidents throughout the Cold War, all of which brought us terrifying close to total annihilation. Such mishaps serve as a sobering reminder of how unstable and unpredictable our complex technological systems can be and how the end of the world as we know it can be as little as a dropped socket wrench away.

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