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I have worked​ in an atomic weapons depot, a Veterans’ psychiatric hospital and a perfectly awful mental hospital for juveniles, and in all of these places I did what I was told to do, and gave my notice when I had had it with the life they offered. The fact that I was able to follow almost any order, I owe to my navy training. I am useful. I keep my mouth shut. Sometimes.

I got my ‘Q’ clearance, giving me access to atomic weapon secrets, in July 1958 and was sent to a depot in Nevada where atomic weapons were stored. We were still using the first generation of air-droppable bombs and warheads, though they were being phased out. They were the direct descendants of Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Real monsters. You saw the Mark 5 and Mark 7 bombs and you knew they weren’t fire-crackers. The Mark 7 was about two and a half feet in diameter, about 15 feet long and weighed 1700 pounds. We didn’t have to assemble the TNT sphere, but the detonators that triggered the implosion wave had to be put in one by one, and attached to the cables that came off the high-voltage capacitor bank. The detonators were sensitive: if you dropped them more than six inches they’d go off. A couple of times they took us out to the firing range and blew a couple up while we watched from twenty feet away. There was no question, it could blow a hole in you, and if you were in final preflight assembly and the shockwave hit the TNT sphere, you’d lose the assembly bay and everyone in it. Two hands at all times when you handled dets. Kohler, who liked to have his fun with people, sneaked a couple of dummy detonators into a case of live ones, and one day in the middle of the arming sequence, took what he knew was a dummy and tossed it to poor Horpstead, who bobbled it, dropped it and dived for cover, thinking this was it. Kohler just laughed, hah hah. Big joke.

We had special pliers to secure the electrical connectors. You torqued up the connectors tight but not too tight, matched up the holes on the connector to the holes on the receptacle, threaded a wire seal through the holes, and then used these pliers to spin the two ends of the wire together and make neat little seals. This was Standard Operating Procedure to prevent the connectors vibrating loose in the bomb bay. Today all these connections are sealed at the factory. No chance of the kind of mischief I spent too much time thinking about. It was brutally hot up there on the surface, but we had air-conditioning and the twin ordnance igloos we worked in were mostly underground; just their ends showed above the surface. Ten ton motor-driven doors sealed the entrances used to take weapons in and out. The whole area was heavily fortified. At night jack-rabbits electrocuted themselves against the security fences: distant pops and small blossoms of flame.

Inside, pretty much everything was green. Pea green for the walls with dark green trim and cement floors. Bulletins about security, sermons on the dangers of high voltage. A workbench with test equipment ran along the south wall. Two names came back to me this morning: Karlsven and Katchke. God knows how Katchke was really spelled. He wore glasses and I remember him as shy, the classic nerd. He didn’t understand my jokes. He tested the radars, the twin black cans we strapped into the fusing assemblies. In the old days when gunners and bosun mates were working in the programme, men going on leave used to stand in front of the radar transmitters. The legend was that five minutes in front of them made you sterile for 12 hours. I assume all those clowns died unpleasant deaths, or maybe it was just another sea story told to new guys.

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