Cape Cod and the Nuclear Nightmare

By Evan J. Albright

Cape Cod sits like a square jaw thrust arrogantly out to our neighbors across the Atlantic, daring them to take a swing. Sticking out into the Atlantic as it does made our little peninsula an obvious target for our national enemies. If, during the Cold War, the Soviets had ever sent their long-range bombers this way, Cape Cod would have been one of the first places to be vaporized.

Hence, when the Air Force was going over its short list of locations to install batteries of short range nuclear missiles, the Cape was undoubtedly close to the top.

The Air Force had developed a surface-to-air missile called the BOMARC, an acronym combining the names of the builders of the missile, Boeing Airplane Company and the Michigan Aeronautical Research Center. The 50-foot-long BOMARC would take off using a liquid-fuel engine in it's tail. Once airborne, the missile's twin ramjet engines would kick in, accelerating it to 2,275 miles per hour. It was designed to cruise more than 200 miles off the New England coast toward oncoming Soviet nuclear bombers.

Once in proximity to its quarry, the missile would detonate its 1,000 pounds of explosives and the resulting concussion would knock the bombers from the sky. For those occasions when the military thought the BOMARC needed a little more firepower, it could be fitted with a nuclear warhead.

The BOMARC was a great idea in the early 1950s, but test after test of the missile failed. The guidance system was notoriously unreliable and the missile had a habit of blowing up shortly after take-off.

In spite of the poor test results, the Air Force insisted on rushing the BOMARC into production. They were engaged in an arms race, but not with the Soviets. The Air Force was competing against the U.S. Army and it's short-range nuclear missile, the Nike. At stake was who would get the designation as "America's Last Line of Defense."

The Army had begun deploying batteries of Nikes across the country. In response the Air Force accelerated its construction of BOMARCs and missile bases. "Among the most hastily constructed projects, the BOMARCS were also among the most ephemeral of Cold War installations," wrote Tufts history professor Aubrey Parkman in his book about the New England division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

To house the missiles at Otis Air Force Base, the Corps of Engineers built 28 concrete shelters called "coffins." The coffins were 60 feet long, 24 feet wide. On top were two heavy steel doors which, in an attack, would slide apart. A hydraulic system would raise the nose of the missile into the air.

Like the missiles, the coffins were fraught with problems. The doors frequently failed, and the seam which separated the doors allowed rain and other typical New England weather to get into the shelters.

The Corps of Engineers and its contractors worked at a breakneck pace to construct the BOMARC missile bases up and down the Atlantic seaboard. Up until the end, there had been problems. "On 18 April (1960) a 'puff' type explosion took place in the fire box of one of the two boilers" at the Dow BOMARC missile base under construction in Maine, wrote Brigadier General Alden Sibley, head of New England Corps of Engineers division. The boilers at Dow were identical to the boilers at Otis, so General Sibley ordered that the Otis facility be "watched carefully" for similar problems.

A short time later, the Army Corps of Engineers turned over the 28 BOMARC missile garages and support buildings at Otis to the Air Force. Now that the base was open, the keepers of those missiles would require only minutes' notice to send a battery of more than two dozen missiles streaking over Sandwich and Mashpee, out into Nantucket Sound and from there, the Atlantic. With the BOMARC bases activated, America would once again be free from foreign threat.

Almost.

On June 7, 1960 the unthinkable happened. At McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, a liquid fuel storage tank in one of the BOMARC missile shelters exploded, engulfing a missile in flames. The nuclear warhead on the missile did not explode. The high explosives which surrounded the one kilogram of plutonium did not detonate, but instead burned. A thick smoke, sickly orange in color, blotted the sky and traveled for miles.

It took fire crews 45 minutes to put out the flames. During that time the area was continuously washed down with hoses. The water that did not evaporate into the air from the heat seeped into the ground and from there into New Jersey's sandy soil.

After the fire, the Air Force buried the missile shelter, Chernobyl-style, under a six-inch layer of concrete. The military did not attempt to cover up the mishap. In fact, it was reported on the front page of the New York Times.

Surprisingly, no one in New England appears to have picked up the Times the story. Nothing about the mishap ran in the Boston papers or, more importantly, on Cape Cod where the BOMARC base had just been activated.

The military, however, noticed. The Air Force shut down the Otis BOMARC base, and spent two years rebuilding it for new missiles, this time with less explosive solid fuel engines in the tail.

Today, the BOMARC site is one of the largest sources of pollution on the Massachusetts Military Reservation. Thankfully there has been no radioactive residue detected on the site or in the groundwater beneath it.

At McGuire Air Force Base, N.J., the story is somewhat different and yet, all too familiar to Cape Codders. The military and the world has known that the BOMARC site was contaminated with low level radioactivity. McGuire eventually ended up on the federal Superfund list and in 1991 the Environmental Protection Agency released its record of decision on "Area L," the site of the nuclear missile explosion which reads, "Investigations conducted from 1985 to 1990 in Area L concluded that no significant levels of radiological contamination were present in groundwater, soil or sediment in the area." The recommendation, therefore, was that the site needed no further cleanup.

In 1998 the Department of Defense apparently changed its mind and announced that it had signed a contract with a California firm to "dispose of 8,600 cubic yards of low-level radioactive waste from the BOMARC Missile Site at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey."

© 1999 Mystery Lane Press

rev. 4/17/01