Command and Control by Eric Schlosser Page B

head. He didn’t think much of it. Whenever a nitrogen line was connected to an oxidizer tank, a little bit of vapor escaped. The vapor detectors in the silo were extremely sensitive, and they’d set off the Klaxon. It happened almost every time a PTS team did this procedure. The launch crew would reset the alarm, and the Klaxon would stop. It was no big deal. Holder kept doing the dishes, the Klaxon stopped—and then ten or fifteen seconds later it started blaring again.
    â€œDang,” Holder thought, “why’d that go off again?” He heard people scurrying on the level below and wondered what was going on. He went halfway down the stairs, looked at the commander’s console, and saw all sorts of lights flashing. He thought the PTS team must have spiked the MSA—the vapor detector manufactured by the Mine Safety Appliances Company. If the MSA became saturated with too much vapor, it spiked,going haywire and setting off numerous alarms. That didn’t mean anything was wrong. But it did mean one more hassle. Now the crew would have to conduct a formal investigation with portable vapor detectors.
    Holder went back upstairs and grabbed his boots. When he came down again, Captain Mazzaro was standing and talking on the phone to the command post in Little Rock. Childers was giving orders to the PTS team topside. Something wasn’t right. Holder sat at the commander’s console and looked down at rows of red warning lights. OXI VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT was lit. FUEL VAPOR LAUNCH DUCT was lit. VAPOR SILO EQUIP AREA, VAPOR OXI PUMP ROOM, and VAPOR FUEL PUMP ROOM were lit. He’d seen those before, when an MSA spiked. But he’d never seen two other lights flashing red: FIRE FUEL PUMP ROOM and FIRE LAUNCH DUCT . Those were serious. There’s a problem, Holder thought. And it could be a big one.

Spheres Within Spheres
    I n the old black-and-white photograph, a young man stands at the bedroom door of a modest home. He wears khakis and a white T-shirt, carries a small metal box, and doesn’t smile for the camera. He could be a carpenter arriving for work, with his lunch or his tools in the box. A cowboy hat hangs on the wall, and a message has been scrawled on the door in white chalk: “ PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR—KEEP THIS ROOM CLEAN. ” The photo was taken on the evening of July 12, 1945, at the McDonald Ranch House near Carrizozo, New Mexico.Sergeant Herbert M. Lehr had just arrived with the unassembled plutonium core of the world’s first nuclear device. The house belonged to a local rancher, George McDonald, until the Army obtained it in 1942, along with about fifty thousand acres of land, and created the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. The plutonium core spent the night at the house, guarded by security officers. A team of physicists from the Manhattan Project was due at nine o’clock the next morning, Friday the thirteenth. After billions of federal dollars spent on this top secret project, after the recruitment of Nobel laureates and many of the world’s greatest scientific minds, after revolutionary discoveries in particle physics, chemistry, and metallurgy, after the construction of laboratories and reactors and processing facilities, employing tens of thousands of workers, and all of that accomplished within three years, the mostimportant part ofthe most expensive weapon ever built was going to be put together in the master bedroom of a little adobe ranch house. The core of the first nuclear device would be not only home made but hand made. The day before, Sergeant Lehr had sealed the windows with plastic sheets and masking tape to keep out the dust.
    Although the question of how to control an atomic bomb had inspired a good deal of thought, a different issue now seemed more urgent: Would the thing work? Before leaving Los Alamos, two hundred miles to the north, some of the Manhattan Project’s physicists had placed bets on the outcome of the