When Cape Cod was home to 56 poised, live nuclear weapons
Recalling one more example of outrageous military thinking
Cape Cod once was home to an arsenal of nuclear weapons, 56 bombs poised to launch and detonate only a few miles from their pads, located about 600 feet from a residential subdivision.
That our military thought tactical nuclear weapons on Cape Cod, designed to stop enemy bombers by exploding in our own airspace, was a good idea must rank as the dumbest, most dangerous decision ever carried out on this peninsula.
That they never had to be used, never exploded or leaked by accident (so far as we know), must therefore rank as one of our historic pieces of greatest good luck.
With military leaders now insisting that 170 acres of this same military base should be clear cut to create a machine gun range, it’s a good time to revisit one of the many decisions that turned this base into a Superfund site, a multi-generation threat to our environment and communities.
*****
More than 60 years ago, Dec. 7, 1957, the Cold War raging, the following headline appeared in The Falmouth Enterprise:
Air Force will rebuild a $10.7 million missile launching site at Otis
The paper was referring to what we now call Joint Base Cape Cod, the sprawling military base straddling Sandwich, Bourne, Mashpee, and Falmouth.
The name of the Air Force missile was BOMARC, a military acronym that stood for Boeing Michigan Aeronautical Research Center.
BOMARC was a Cold War brainstorm, designed to stop Russian bombers from penetrating American airspace. It was what we might call a defense of last resorts.
A supersonic rocket theoretically could track a bomber 60,000 feet away – 11 miles. Each BOMARC rocket was 47 feet long, more than four tons, housed in a little building with a roof that scissored open like a domed telescope observatory.
Its effectiveness was in its tip: A nuclear warhead. This would be exploded as close to the attacking bomber as possible, in the skies above the Massachusetts coastline.
“Small hydrogen bombs are intended primarily as substitutes for the existing small tactical nuclear bombs,” The Enterprise explained, adding a dubious scientific note: “The H-bombs would presumably produce less radioactivity.”
At first, none of this was secret. The newspaper described a meeting planned for December 13, 1957, between the Air Force and local luminaries:
“First there will be cocktails, then dinner … Suitably relaxed by this hospitality, the guests will then address themselves to the missile.”
The BOMARC was described as “an almost unbelievable engineering feat” that could bring atomic force to a far-flung target. A colonel at the briefing referred to the missile as “a one-shot deal.” The reporter explained:
“When the BOMARC is fired, it will be the real thing and, as one of the panel put it, it will then not matter in quite the same way if a missile misfired and drops its atomic load on Cape Cod.”
In other words, the Russians would be attacking, so one more friendly “atomic load” wouldn’t make all that much difference.
Joseph Sorenti, whose family name loomed over businesses at the old Sagamore rotary for years, announced what apparently was the general conclusion: “I feel a hell of a lot safer tonight than I did last night.”
This candid discussion stopped as soon as the missiles arrived in 1960. The area became super secure. But even casual visitors could see a compound bustling with activity, centered around 28 small buildings in tight lines, with retractable roofs. Each housed two BOMARCs.
The BOMARC area was a self-contained little city with its own power plant, fire station, missile maintenance and testing buildings, fueling and defueling sites. Liquid fuel to power the boosters, volatile and dangerous, was a brew of red fuming nitric acid as oxidizer and aerozine-50 as fuel; contact with air would cause explosions. Solid rocket fuel was introduced later, safer to handle but environmentally even more dangerous because it didn’t volatize and so sank into the groundwater.
Seven underground tanks held several different types of fuel such as hydrazine, JP4, and MOGAS. A leaching well was dug to catch spills, while another pit caught the nitric acid after it was passed through limestone to stop violent reaction; both seeped directly into the ground. One of the many buildings was “used for warhead storage.”
Just as the Cape was going nuclear, one of the other BOMARC sites in the Northeast, McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, found itself on the front page of The New York Times. In June, 1960, one of the missiles caught fire on its launching pad. In understandable panic, someone called state police to say that “an atomic warhead” had exploded. People evacuated.
What actually happened was that the booster part of the missile burned into a molten fireball of such intensity that the housing around the bomb melted. Radioactivity spewed all over the launching area, forcing officials to seal it in thick concrete.
While it was common knowledge in 1960 that BOMAC missiles were nuclear, that knowledge faded away. What did become common knowledge was that the BOMARCs, with serious flaws in design and execution, were obsolete almost as soon as they were built.
By March, 1960, the Air Force cut funding because the Soviet Union was shifting from manned bombers to intercontinental missiles – which BOMARCs couldn’t stop even if they worked properly. Meanwhile, Defense Department engineers were admitting that “serious technical difficulties” made the BOMARC difficult to rely upon. These revelations didn’t save the Cape from deployment; appropriations already were in the pipeline.
Despite this history, the Defense Department resisted efforts to understand the atomic history at Otis. For years, the typical response to inquiries about those 28 hangars was to “neither confirm nor deny” the presence of atomic weapons on Cape Cod.
“The information is classified until and unless it is declassified,” reported a spokeswoman from the Defense Nuclear Agency, which maintained records of nuclear stockpiles.
Pressed harder, the Defense Nuclear Agency issued the following statement:
“We are able to confirm that nuclear weapons were formerly present at Otis AFB, MA. However, we cannot confirm the type or quantity of nuclear weapons present, as that information remains classified.”
Such sketchy information is hardly satisfying, especially because the operation reportedly was dismantled in 1973, half a century ago and more than 10 years after it was deemed superfluous for national security.
As far as we can tell, no radioactive contamination ever leaked out of the silos; people were aware of the dangers of nuclear material so took great care in handling them.
But people took less care with fuels, acids, and solvents needed to keep nuclear bombs ready to fly. These were dumped into pits and leaching fields, allowed to seep into the ground, then the groundwater toward public and private drinking wells.
That legacy, not the radioactive residue of 56 atomic weapons, is in part why Cape Cod’s military base became known years later as New England’s largest military Superfund site.
And that legacy is why Cape Codders have every reason to doubt military judgment as applied here.
Sixty years ago, Joe Sorenti might have felt a whole lot safer than he did the night before to hear that there would be nuclear bombs in his neighborhood.
But today I can’t believe anyone would feel safer if a machine gun range becomes the excuse to clear cut 170 acres of woodland.
NEXT: ONE POT SHOP, ONE VISIT, MANY IMPRESSIONS
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Enjoyed the story on the BOMARC site! Source of CS-10 Plume. Just finished reading Mercury Rising; great tale! Apparently, Sputnik was launched October 5 1957 DOD’s knee jerk response must have been BOMARC. IKE and LBJ reasoned to establish the nascent space program under civilian means.