I haven't seen the documentary but I loved the book, which was as much
about general command and control of nuclear weapons and their
design/safety than the accident at Damascus.
Andrew
On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 5:26 PM, David Spain <david.l.spain@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
This weekend I watched the PBS documentary "Command and Control" based on
the book b*y *Eric Schlosser. Not having read the book,
I was left wondering several questions:
1) Would it have been possible to have sent the PTS team to the lower
level in an attempt to patch shut the leak long enough to have pumped the
fuel out of the missile's first stage? Or would the pressure of the
escaping fuel been too high to patch the rupture by hand?
2) Could the missile's fuel been pumped out even with the leak on-going
had the folks in the LCC been warned at the get go of the leak? Since the
documentary stated that the Titan II was structurally unstable w/o fuel in
the 1st stage (I presume when other tanks are fully loaded) could the other
tanks have been pumped out first? The documentary seemed to imply that
because this type of accident was not covered in any existing crew
checklists, the inability to anticipate this type of failure led to hours
of inaction, indecision and wrong decisions that greatly increased the
likely-hood of a catastrophic failure. Anyone here who can say?
3) After hours of inaction with the fuel all but bled out into the silo,
SAC command overrode the recommendations of Martin Marietta (now Lockheed
Martin) and put the PTS team back on-site. According to the documentary the
last order carried out by Livingston was to activate exhaust fans. I can't
help but wonder if the cause of the explosion was because he was
successful. Sparks from a fan's commutator would have been sufficient I
would think to have set the whole thing off given the concentrations in
place by then. Seems like extremely bad judgement. The documentary led me
to believe that part of the problem was because SAC command was dominated
by former pilots not missile people.
Is there anyone here who can authoritatively comment on any of the lessons
learned from this episode? The documentary had a political point to make
and was more than bereft of technical information that did not contribute
to the dramatic "narrative".
Is the book any better?
Dave
