Nuclear Missile Malfunction: Into the Silo…

On September 18, 1980, in Damascus, Arkansas, two Air Force technicians dropped a three-inch socket wrench into a Titan II nuclear missile silo. The socket bounced off a metal thrust mount, punctured the missile's fuel tank, and began spraying volatile rocket fuel into the air. Within hours, the silo was filling with toxic, highly flammable vapor. If it ignited, the resulting explosion could detonate the W-53 thermonuclear warhead—600 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb—potentially killing millions and poisoning the American heartland with radioactive fallout.

The Accident and the Immediate Response

The mishap began as routine maintenance. Technicians Dave Powell and Jeff Plum, exhausted after an 11-hour shift, decided not to retrieve a torque wrench from topside and instead used a ratchet and socket. When the socket slipped off the wrench, it fell 66 feet, ricocheted off a thrust mount, and punched a hole in the missile's fuel tank. Pressurized hydrazine fuel (unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine, or UDMH) immediately began spraying out, vaporizing on contact with air. The vapor detector gauge in the silo's control room soon read 24,000 parts per million—far past the 18,000 ppm explosion threshold. "That's explosion level," recalled fuel technician Greg Devlin. "The missile will explode."