SESSION V
235
west of Cartagena, ina very remote area right on the Mediterranean
shore.
to —~
The incident involved the refueling operation of one of the Strategic
Air Comrnand B-52s as part of Operation Chrome Dome. I imagine
most of you know about Operation Chrome Dome.
FREMONT-SMITH:
LANGHAM:
No.
It's given in great detail in Miss Lewis' book, as
wellas in Mr. Szulc's.
Since about 1962 a certain percentage of the
SAC B-52s have been airtorne at all times carrying weapons, this
being part of the deterring philosophy. This means that if SAC were
entirely wiped out, still a certain percentage of the SAC ferce would
be able to zero in on its prescribed targets.
These flights were being
made constantly, and there were elaborate pains, of course, taken
to see that Dr. Strangelove's philosophy could not predominate, that
some person could not take the war into his own hands by proceeding
to target on his own volition.
The final act of fusing the bomb requires the word of the President
of the United States, so there was no chance of a mishap of that kind.
Flying nuclear weapons of the megaton class over people's heacs
is scrious business, of course, and so these bombs have built into
them safeguards which make the probability of one of them giving a
critical yield in an accidental situation like a plane crash about 10-7,
In other words, there is not one chance in 10 million that a criticality
could actually occur, and this is because of combinations of interlocks,
and so forth, which would have to be thrown inthe right sequence before you would have an armed weapon.
The United States has no agreement which aliows it to land a nuclearcarrying aircraft in any country, These aircraft must take off from
the United States, fly their route and return to the United States without landing. This means refueling operations in the air at various
points along the route. We had a refueling operation agreement with
the Spanish Government.
The 16th Air Force was in charge of the
refueling planes which would take off from Spanish territory, meet
the bomber supposedly out over the Mediterranean and refuel it; the
bomber would then continue on its way. These, of course, were always
called practice flights. They could, of course, be changed froma
practice flight into the real thing by the right combination of messages,
including one from the President, This is Operation Chrome Dome.