High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [88]
The Pentagon was forced to decommission the Titans because, in plain English, the Titans may have presented one of the most stupendous hazards to the U.S. public we’ve ever had visited upon us. In the 1960s a group of civilian physicists at the University of Arizona worked out that an explosion at any one of the silos surrounding Tucson would set up a chain reaction among the other Titans that would instantly cremate the city. I learned about this in the late seventies, through one of the scientists who authored the extremely unpopular Titan report. I had months of bad dreams. It was not the first or last time I was floored by our great American capacity for denying objective reality in favor of defense mythology. When I was a child in grade school we had “duck and cover” drills, fully trusting that leaping into a ditch and throwing an Orion sweater over our heads would save us from nuclear fallout. The Extension Service produced cheerful illustrated pamphlets for our mothers, showing exactly how to stash away in the basement enough canned goods to see the family through the inhospitable aftermath of nuclear war. Now we can pass these pamphlets around at parties, or see the quaint documentary Atomic Café, and laugh at the antique charm of such naïveté. And still we go on living in towns surrounded by nuclear choke chains. It is our persistent willingness to believe in ludicrous safety measures that is probably going to kill us.
I tried to exorcise my nightmares in a poem about the Titans, which began:
When God was a child
and the vampire fled from the sign of the cross,
belief was possible.
Survival was this simple.
But the savior clutched in the pocket
encouraged vampires to prosper
in the forest.
The mistake
was to carry the cross,
the rabbit’s foot,
the spare tire,
St. Christopher who presides
over the wrecks:
steel cauliflowers
proliferating in junkyard gardens.
And finally
to believe in the fallout shelter.
Now we are left in cities ringed with giants.
Our tour finished, we clattered up the metal stairs and stood once again in the reassuring Arizona sun. Mine tailings on one side of the valley, the pine-crowned Santa Rita mountains on the other side, all still there; beneath us, the specter of hell.
Dave opened the floor for questions. Someone asked about the accident at a Titan silo in Little Rock, Arkansas, where some guy dropped a wrench on the missile and it blew up. Dave wished to point out several things. First, it wasn’t a wrench, it was a ratchet. Second, it was a crew of rookies who had been sent in to service the missile. But yes, the unfortunate rookie did drop a tool. It bounced and hit the missile’s sheet-metal skin, which is only a quarter of an inch thick. And which doesn’t house the fuel tank—it is the fuel tank. The Titan silo’s “blast-proof” concrete lid weighs 740 tons. It was blown 300 yards through the air into a Little Rock cornfield.
Dave wanted us to know something else about this accident: the guys in the shock-absorber-suspended control room had been evacuated prior to the ill-fated servicing. One of them had been drinking a Coke. When they returned they were amazed to see how well the suspension system had worked. The Coke didn’t spill.
We crossed the compound to a window where we could look straight down on the missile’s nose from above. A woman near me gasped a little. A man asked where this particular missile had been headed for, back in the days when it was loaded, and Dave explained that it varied, and would depend on how much fuel it contained at any given time. Somewhere in the Soviet Union is all he could say for sure. The sight of these two people calmly discussing the specifics of fuel load and destination suddenly scared the living daylights out of me. Discussing that event like something that could really happen. They almost seemed disappointed that it never had.
For years I have wondered how anyone could willingly compete in a hundred-yard dash toward oblivion, and I believe I caught sight