I wish I had something secure, but right now, it's laying in the ditch beside. You know, it's not even up close. It blew it out and it's laying in the ditch. It's all exposed. And so all I need to do is go and get it.
Kyle Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large with me in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio. Randy Dixon with the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History.
Randy Dixon: Kyle, it's great to be here. Great to have Mondays.
Yeah, if that sounded scary-
Kellams: And it did.
Dixon: That was actually radio traffic on the Air Force frequency. This month marks the 45th anniversary of the Titan II missile disaster in Damascus, Arkansas.
Started on the evening of Sept. 18, 1980, and then spilled over into the next day, the 19th, when there was a near nuclear disaster right here in Arkansas.
It started as a fuel leak. Oxidizer leak. An airman had dropped a wrench down into the silo. They were doing maintenance on the silo. And he dropped this wrench. It ricocheted off the sides and pierced the casing of the missile and caused a leak.
I was actually there that night. I was a photographer, KATV. I had just started at KATV. I'd been there about a year, and reporter-anchor Frank Thomas and I were sent up there about 9 o'clock in the evening. I talked to Frank the other day and wanted to get his recollection of what happened that night.
You and I were sent up there with the first, among the first wave to go up there. Of course, the police had it blockaded. It was dark. You couldn't see anything. Our news director, Jim Pitcock, wanted a live shot. We couldn't get in from Damascus, so we drove back to Conway, where we could get in a live shot, which we did, and then fed them the video and narrated what we knew.
When we got back to the station, Jim had told us that Good Morning America wanted a piece for the next day, and wanted us to take our video and put it together into a packaged story that I was going to narrate. And then you and I were supposed to — back then, we would feed the network at a predetermined time. And this one I want to say was like 4 o'clock in the morning. We didn't finish editing until about 1.
In the meantime, a second crew had been sent up there to kind of do the stakeout over the night, and as I recall, it was Randy Weber, Jim Casey and Dale Carpenter.
So anyway, you and I were sitting in the newsroom waiting to feed ABC in New York, just kind of listening to music or goofing off or whatever you do. We thought it was pretty much over.
Dixon: Yeah, we thought it was just another leak because it used to happen occasionally.
Yeah, they had had two other leaks of what we were told was oxidizer, which we were told was a non-lethal leak, that it was just something they needed to fix. Anyway, we were just sitting there waiting to feed the net when the two-way radio, which the base station was there in the newsroom at KATV, all of a sudden it went off and Randy Weber said, "Q700, this is 6115. It just exploded.”
Dixon: So once we got that word, we knew immediately the story had changed drastically. So we immediately called our boss, Jim Pitcock, at home, and he told us to start interrupting programming with special reports. And Frank was the first one on the air. There were very few people in the station at the time because it was about 4 in the morning. But here are a couple of his special reports that first went on the air right about dawn.
Frank Thomas (special report): The Titan II missile silo this morning exploded at approximately 3 a.m. Now, it developed a fuel leak last night at about 9. The fuel leak undetermined origin. Exactly what went wrong or why it happened. The maintenance crew there was evacuated. There were some injuries. There were some injuries. At least 10 people were injured and they were taken to the Conway Hospital. And the extent of the injuries is not yet clear. We will be back with more after this.
I have just been advised that a high Pentagon official has confirmed that there indeed was a nuclear warhead on board the Titan II missile, which exploded one mile north of Damascus early this morning. However, that same official also advises that there is no immediate danger, that the area where the radioactive device is located is built to withstand an explosion, and that there was one on board.
And as Governor Clinton had inferred earlier in the day in a live interview here with us, that there was a nuclear warhead on board. And their concern at this point is the jarring of that nuclear warhead and the possibility of any seepage or radioactive leakage.
Once again, early this morning, in case you had not heard, at 3 o'clock, a Titan II missile exploded one mile north of Damascus, injuring several members of the United States Air Force. They were taken to Conway Memorial Hospital, and residents in Van Buren and Faulkner counties were evacuated for at least five miles. The displaced persons, they estimated the number there is at least 1,000, perhaps even more. There is no word on when the people will return home, nor the extent of the injuries of the Air Force personnel.
Also, as you might guess, the schools in that area — I believe it's, I had a note earlier, the Greenbrier and Damascus schools will be closed and also the Morrilton and Plumerville schools today in Conway will be closed to house the evacuees who have been sent from their homes early this morning.
Kellams: What are we talking about when we talk about the silo and we talk about this missile/bomb?
Dixon: Okay, well, the silos — you know, there were 18 of them scattered around Arkansas in rural areas, and you never really knew exactly where they were. They were usually in the middle of a field right off of a highway. And there were fences up, but it was very nondescript because they were underground.
Kellams: Deep underground,
Dixon: Nine stories underground. And they had walls that were eight feet thick of concrete and steel. The door on the silo that was right at ground level was three tons. It was airtight and could withstand a blast from the outside, right?
Kellams: This is Cold War era. And so the idea here is this is, if used, launched in an aggressive manner.
Dixon: Well, they were ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and they carried a nine-megaton nuclear warhead. And just to kind of put that in perspective, this warhead, the blast was three times more powerful than every bomb dropped during World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Yes, three times. So we're talking it would have — had it detonated —
Kellams: It would have been the largest explosion in recorded history.
Dixon: Yes. And it would have devastated all of Arkansas and the surrounding states. And not to mention the fallout, depending on which way the wind was blowing, could affect all the way to the East Coast or all the way to the West Coast, or north into Canada, or south into Mexico.
So on the night of the 19th, so we're talking less than 24 hours after the incident, KATV broadcast a news program after the 10 o'clock news. And this sort of wraps up what we knew at that time and puts into perspective what a serious event this was.
KATV News Report (Sept. 19, 1980): Dusk had barely settled over South Van Buren County when the first signals came that something was wrong at silo 374-7. At 6:43, Air Force officials telephoned the State Office of Emergency Services to report that a crewman servicing the silo's huge Titan II missile had dropped a tool, a three-pound socket wrench, about 70 feet, puncturing the skin of the ICBM.
When workmen descended, they spotted fuel escaping and evacuated. Still, the Air Force seemed confident the leak could be repaired without significant damage or disruption. Still, about 1,000 people were moved from their homes surrounding the silo.
Water was pumped into the seven-story subterranean compound, an effort to dilute and diffuse the highly volatile fuel. It didn't work. At about 3 o'clock, a quick series of explosions, red flames soaring into the night sky to heights that some observers said exceeded 300 feet. ABC News reported tonight that the explosion blew the missile's warhead from the tip of the rocket and onto the ground outside the silo.
The Pentagon has not officially confirmed that the silo contained a warhead, although Defense Department sources were quoted by the Associated Press as saying it had not been damaged. Federal and state scientists have scoured the surface surrounding the mouth of the silo for signs of escaping radiation, and report tonight that they have found nothing.
The Titan II has become a controversial weapon. Although still considered essential to American defense, it is the last of a generation of rockets which use liquid rather than solid fuel. There are 54 silos in the United States. Eighteen were built in the early ’60s in Arkansas, the remainder in Arizona and Kansas. The Titan II was designed to deliver a nuclear payload to any target on the globe. Its warhead was designed to detonate only when intended, to be immune from calamities like the explosion at Damascus.
One of the men who helped shape the system briefed reporters today at the Pentagon.
Pentagon Official: I spent many years working on the design of nuclear explosives, and I can guarantee you, the one thing that we spend most time on is to make sure that they can't go off under any conceivable accidental circumstances. And that's as much as I want to say.
Dixon: We did have a crew replace us. And as Frank mentioned, one of those crew members was Dale Carpenter. Right. Who you and I both know as a recently retired professor of journalism up here. Right. But he and I worked together back in the early days at KATV. I talked to Dale the other night. You know, he and I had not talked about that in decades. And it was interesting to kind of bring it up with him again. And I just wanted him to relive it. And he's going to set the stage for what happened after we left and they arrived.
Dale Carpenter: We got there, and there was some activity going on. We started shooting pretty much as we got there, and they were testing the air for, I guess, some kind of the fuel, the poison of the fuel. And they had the front gate kind of gated off, and the Air Force had trucks there, and they were kind of a presence there. And then you could see down the road to the silo, and they had some lights set up down there, and it was steam coming up and we shot some of that.
And then around, I think it must have been 2:30, 3 o'clock in the morning, photographer Jim Casey shows up and he's our relief, and they need our tape back in Little Rock, because this is a national news story and they want to put it on Good Morning America. And so Randy wanted to do a standup, where the reporter talks to the camera. And so Jim and I got set up for that, and I put Randy in front of the road there where you could kind of see the road leading back into the silo. And we started recording the standup, and Randy was delivering it.
And then all of a sudden, click — my recorder shut off, the battery was dead, and then I didn't have any batteries left. So Jim went back to the truck, got a battery, came back, and as I was kneeling down to put that battery in the recorder, holy hell broke loose. I mean, it was the loudest explosion that I'll ever hear, and I looked up to see this fireball just streaming 180 degrees across the horizon with just debris, burning debris, and it had to be tossing at least a mile. It was huge, and we were all just stunned. And everybody else, I think it just kind of woke everybody else up.
We started hauling buns because the Air Force was saying, "Evacuate immediately, evacuate immediately." And there were people streaming out that gate. And so we got in our car and we left.
I just think back on if just a few seconds difference in the timing of it, it would have been Randy Weber doing his standup and Armageddon would have happened over his shoulder.
Dixon: I wanted Dale to really tell me how he felt personally when the thing actually blew.
Carpenter: Well, it was kind of a mixture. I was kind of, at first, just stunned. I mean, I think all of us were. There was one quote in the paper where a photographer said he was mesmerized. And the reporter who was writing the article in the paper said, "I now know what mesmerized means" — not taking pictures.
So no one got the actual explosion. Nobody. One photographer got a little bit of the aftermath, and it kind of looked like a matchstick with a flame on it. You know, I also was starting to gain my consciousness after a few seconds, and I went ahead and put the battery in the recorder and hit record and was shooting as I was running back to the car. I don't think anything ended up on that tape, because Jim checked it for me later, and he said there was nothing on the tape. So I may have just ripped the cable out.
It was just mass chaos, and we had no idea that some of that debris was actually falling around us. I mean, we went back the next day and there was a huge piece of concrete on top of a pickup truck that had just been thrown real close to where we were standing. And so we didn't know all of that. It was dark out there, and it just happened so fast. And when they told us to leave, then, yeah, it began to hit us that, you know, that is a nuclear warhead down there. And we don't know what's going to happen.
But Casey and I just continued to do our job. We just started shooting people being evacuated out of their houses. And then Randy and I had to get back to Little Rock.
Dixon: Were you concerned for your safety?
Carpenter: You know, not… think about how close this whole state came to blowing up. It was kind of one of those things where afterwards I thought about the danger and what actually, what could have happened. And it's almost like when you have a car wreck and then afterwards you realize — you got to get the shakes afterwards because you realize how close you were to being killed. But at the moment, you're not really… you're just dealing with it.
Kellams: That's Dale Carpenter talking about what it was like that night 45 years ago, that night and that morning. So we've talked about the immediacy, right? The 36 hours or so.
Dixon: Well, there's a strange twist.
Kellams: This story continues.
Dixon: Yes, this happened during the week. And by the weekend, things had slowed down a little bit. It had been confirmed that there was a nuclear warhead on it that had been blown out into a ditch, that they had dealt with. It had not leaked or detonated, thank goodness.
I was sitting on the assignment desk on a Saturday morning and the phone rang, and it was from a viewer who sounded very nervous and said he had an audiotape, an audio cassette, that we would be interested in. And he said that he had an audiotape of the Air Force radio frequency
Kellams: Because he was a hobbyist who listened to shortwave and different frequencies. It was his entertainment.
Dixon: And I think he lived in South Arkansas. He wouldn't tell me where he lived, but he wanted to meet in Fordyce, at the Fordyce Café. And so we set a time. And that day I drove down to Fordyce and met him. Never knew his name. All he did was slide a cassette tape across the table to me. Very cloak-and-dagger. And he was very nervous about having it and didn't want his name known.
So we took it back and listened to it, and it was the real thing. We went with it and broadcast some big portions of this radio traffic that really shows the seriousness of the incident.
Kellams: And when you're listening, I want you to think about the people who are talking here, who know far more about what's going on than almost anybody else in the world, because they're having to deal with it. These guys have an idea how serious it could be.
Air Force Radio Traffic: Command post. This is Command One. If we can't get in touch with the chopper, we're going to move out with these guys. Any positive for oxidizer?
Where?
Okay. Just in any of the areas except in the immediate complex area along the roads, or anyone that you've had reported any PBDs going off of the oxidizer?
Negative. And I doubt if anyone has looked at one, to tell you the truth.
Lieutenant, since the explosion, I know I breathed a hell of a lot of it because I could smell it and breathe it, and it was burning my lungs. So I know we got a lot on the initial explosion.
Roger, on-scene commander. The team went to the unit. They are now — they're on their way out to give a full report to command or command post.
What unit are you talking about, sir?
Let's don't talk about that feature traffic.
Please say, "Let's don't talk about that."
That's Roger, sir.
I wish I had something secure, but right now, our people tell us that a forklift can go in and do its job and return without any difficulty. And that's the EOD people talking. And it's laying in the ditch beside — you know, it's not even up close. It blew it out and it's laying in the ditch. It's all exposed. And so all they need to do is go and get it.
Okay. I'd recommend we wait for those people that are going to arrive in about an hour.
Fine with me.
Do you have any further status reports on that five-man team, sir?
They're back here. They've debriefed us, and we're just now standing by, and they've located what they want to locate. And right now, where it's laying out there, we're just concerned about the airplane flying over, taking pictures. Should we go cover it with a tarp?
Dixon: So at least one result of that incident was the early retirement of the Titan II system. It began in 1982. And here's a report from KATV's Bob Steele on the dismantling of the entire system at its beginning.
Bob Steele, KATV Report: The Air Force announced today that the Titan II Missile Wing at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona will be the first to go. The date for dismantling the Titans there isn't clear. The Air Force would only say it would be late this calendar year. A congressional source said today the best available guess is that the Titans in Arizona would be deactivated beginning in October or November. The Air Force says the Titans would be removed at the rate of one per month once the dismantling begins. So that means it would be at least 18 months from the date the first Titan is pulled out of a silo in Arizona before any are removed from Arkansas. Congressional sources say Arkansas is second in line for deactivation, with the missiles in Kansas to be removed last. Informed sources say it would be late 1983 before any Titans are removed from the state, and 1984 would be more likely. So even though the Titan system is now officially on the way out later this year, it will be several years before it's out of Arkansas. Bob Steele, News Scene Seven.
Kellams: Forty-five years ago.
Dixon: Man, I'm old.
Kellams: How do you top this next week, Randy Dixon?
Dixon: I don't know. That's a very good question. But you know, I'm kidding. You don't top it. Just come back.
Kellams: Okay. That's a deal. Randy Dixon is with the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History.
Dixon: Thank you, sir. See you next week.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
