War Story #1

Don't Touch the Nuclear Weapons!

A war story told by Mr. Achs of his experiences during the Cold War (1982-1985) while stationed in West Germany with a nuclear capable artillery unit, 2-75FA, 41st FA Bde, V Corps Artillery, Fliegerhorst Kaserne, which is located outside Hanau, 20km NE of Frankfurt.

There I was, it was at the height of the cold war October 1982, and I was a brand new Second Lieutenant just out of Officer Basic Training at Fort Sill Oklahoma and Airborne School at Fort Benning Georgia. I was the Executive Officer (XO) for Service Battery, which had the primary responsibility for Special Weapons, the Army’s name for nuclear weapons. We had 17 nukes with W-48 warheads that were rated at .72kt. These were tactical nuclear weapons intended to counter the Warsaw Pact’s 10-1 ratio they had in tanks compared to NATO. The plan was to hold back the Soviets until reinforcements arrived from the United States. If the Soviets reached the Rhine River the war plans called for tactical nuclear weapons to stop them.

Our Special Weapons were stored in a NATO bunker guarded by regular Army MPs, complete with guard towers, trip wires, double barbed wire fences, and kill zones covered by machine guns. You could tell something “special” was there. As a comparison, our normal wartime ammunition was in a compound, with a single fence, guarded by poorly trained Turkish immigrants that carried a pistol that probably didn’t work.

My first experience first-hand with real nukes was the annual change to the Permissive Action Links (PAL) which prevents the unauthorized arming or detonation of nuclear weapons. All U.S. nuclear weapons have a PAL which requires two authorized people to agree that the order to use nuclear weapons is valid. With the W-48 warhead, the fuse could be set to air or ground burst, and that’s it, there was no other arming mechanism or codes to enter like you see in the movies. This round was always ready to fire. Therefore, the PAL for this nuke was a physical lock placed over the top of the fuse to stop anyone from using it. The PAL had a safe-like combination lock that you dial in to take it off. It looked like a big donut on top of the artillery round.

Once a year, the spooks from NSA would visit our NATO site to change the codes on the PALs. This required my highly trained team of five soldiers to prep the nukes. But before we went inside the NATO bunker we were issued something we never used before in training, clip-on radiation meters (dosimeters). I was told that I would rotate my team in the bunker and to limit each person to 20 minutes. Wow, this is now getting serious, the real deal. We would have to stand each round up, in its sealed container so that the NSA team could complete their mission. Since I knew I was going to a nuclear capable unit in West Germany, I took special classes at Fort Sill on how to arm and detonate both 155mm and 8in howitzer nuclear rounds. But training with dummy green rounds is different from actually working with a real nuclear weapon. First, with a dummy round, it is painted Army green. In fact, everything in the Army is painted green. However, this was not the case with the 155mm nuclear round I was working with. I was shocked to see, and this was not in the Army manual, the 155mm nuclear weapon was completely silver! I wondered if this is where the famous saying of “Siler Bullet” came from.

After we got all the nuclear rounds standing up in their containers, the NSA team could then quickly go through and change the codes. But before they started, the lead NSA technician warned us, which I will remember for the rest of my life, “Don’t touch the Nuclear Weapons!” So what does a young 23 year-old Army Second Lieutenant do in that situation? Yup, you are right; once the lead NSA technician turned away I touched the nuclear weapon closest to me. Immediately me heart sank, I was overwhelmed with fear. Holy cow, this is real. The nuclear weapon felt warm, like a person. It should be cold, this is a 155mm steel artillery round sitting in a cold bunker, but it wasn’t. At that moment I knew that this was not a game, it was not a training simulation. This was a real live nuclear weapon and I was but a small cog in this giant wheel turning in the defense of Western Europe. I aged twenty years that day; I was stuck in the adult world now with a real mission and real consequences.