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“It would not. Those types of weapons cannot go off by accident. There is a specific chain of events that have to occur, and they cannot occur, even if the bomb hits concrete from 50,000 feet.”

You’re right. While I was in Checkmate I served as the XO to the AF Contingency Support Staff (an O-6) in the basement of the Pentagon for 8 years. We only met when there was an emergency. One of the times was the ICBM that exploded near Little Rock. Blew the warhead completely out of the silo. Nothing happened to the warhead other than going for a very short flight.

One of the times was the ICBM that exploded near Little Rock. Blew the warhead completely out of the silo. Nothing happened to the warhead other than going for a very short flight.

I was a teenager in Little Rock when this happened. We were completely freaked the F**K out. 9MT warhead 40 miles from our house, downwind.

Warhead ended up under this debris and wasn't found for QUITE SOME TIME. Lots of head scratching. Anyways...interesting times. Warhead was sent to Pantex and made into several W88 warheads I believe.

One Airman was killed when he inhaled the flames and suffocated and died half a day after the explosion. Another was wounded

RIP Sr Airman David Livingston

LOCAL AR Story on the TITAN MISSILE Explosion HERE

Thank you for your service.

When I was in the USN back in the Seventies, I was assigned to be on a load team. I wasn’t an ordinanceman, I was a jet mechanic but apparently, for nuclear weapons, they had mixed teams of non-ordinance personnel to load the bombs. I am pretty sure they were dummy bombs we practiced with, but it was extremely rigid and structured, with a the guy in charge reading from a checklist, and at each step, it had to be read:
“Insert the Gerblotz pin”, then the person who did it would verify by voice “Gerblotz pin inserted”, and someone other than the person inserting it would visually verify it and say something like “Gerblotz pin insertion verified”, and so on.

The thing that always struck me was the Marines they had stationed around the site (i can’t remember how many, but I seem to think there were four Marines for each bomb, and they were in full gear with M-16, helmet, flak jacket, etc. standing rigidly at port arms the whole time facing outward. They said that nobody was allowed to enter the area while the loading was going on, and that they were authorized to use deadly force. I heard an apocryphal story about a young sailor who unthinkingly ran through the area, and got decked by a Marine who bashed him in the face with his M-16. They took their jobs very seriously.

I do remember thinking “Why do they need them there? We’re on a ship...who is going to interfere with the loading?” I have since wondered what they do now that they apparently don’t have Marine detachments aboard carriers anymore. (I heard they did away with that during the 1990’s)

Besides Portcall, I think the others were Paddy, Peacock, Paris and Panama. Did I miss any? The only place that I did NOT know people working there, were Portcall and Peacock. I was taking a handoff from Paris one day, and the dude told me the aircraft was popeye. I told him I wouldn’t take the aircraft until the aircraft was in VFR conditions. He was stunned. Later, when I was at Laughlin, I worked with a guy, and I told him his voice sounded familiar, and I asked him if he had worked at Paris. He said he did indeed. Small world, wouldn’t you say?