The Fifth Risk(10)
The list of things that might go wrong inside the DOE was endless. The driver of a heavily armed unit assigned to move plutonium around the country was pulled over, on the job, for drunk driving. An eighty-two-year-old nun cut through the perimeter fence of a facility in Tennessee that housed weapons-grade nuclear material. A medical facility ordered a speck of plutonium for research, and a weapons-lab clerk misplaced a decimal point and FedExed the researchers a chunk of the stuff so big it should have been under armed guard—whereupon horrified medical researchers tried to FedEx it back. “At DOE even the regular scheduled meetings started with” You’re not going to believe this,’” says former chief of staff Kevin Knob-loch.
In his four years on the job MacWilliams had come to understand the DOE’s biggest risks, the way a corporate risk officer might understand the risks inside a company, and had catalogued them for the next administration. “My team prepared its own books. They were never given to anybody. I never had a chance to sit with the Trump people and tell them what we’re doing, even for a day. And I’d have done it for weeks. I think this was a sad thing. There are things you want to know that would keep you up at night. And I never talked to anyone about them.”
It’s been five months since he left government service, and I’m the first person to ask him what he knows. Still, I think it is important, as I pull my chair in to his kitchen table, to conduct the briefing in the spirit the Trump people might have approached it—just to see how he could have helped even those who thought they didn’t need his help. I assume the tone and manner befitting a self-important, mistrustful person newly arrived from some right-wing think tank. And so I wave my hand over his thick briefing books and say, “Just give me the top five risks I need to worry about right away. Start at the top.”
And right away we have a problem. An accident with nuclear weapons is at the top of his list, and it is difficult to discuss that topic with someone who doesn’t have security clearance. But the Trump people didn’t have it either, I point out, so he’ll just need to work around my handicap. “I have to be careful here,” he says. He wants to make a big point: the DOE has the job of ensuring that nuclear weapons are not lost or stolen, or at the slightest risk of exploding when they should not. “It’s a thing Rick Perry should worry about every day,” he says.
“Are you telling me that there have been scares?”
He thinks a moment. “They’ve never had a weapon that has been lost,” he says carefully. “Weapons have fallen off planes.” He pauses again. “I would encourage you to spend an hour reading about Broken Arrows.”
“Broken Arrow” is a military term of art for a nuclear accident that doesn’t lead to a nuclear war. MacWilliams has had to learn all about these. Now he tells me about an incident that occurred back in 1961, and was largely declassified in 2013, just as he began his stint at DOE. A pair of 4-megaton hydrogen bombs, each more than 250 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, broke off a damaged B-52 over North Carolina. One of the bombs disintegrated upon impact, but the other floated down beneath its parachute and armed itself. It was later found in a field outside Goldsboro, North Carolina, with three of its four safety mechanisms tripped or rendered ineffective by the plane’s breakup. Had the fourth switch flipped, a vast section of eastern North Carolina would have been destroyed, and nuclear fallout might have descended on Washington, DC, and New York City.
“The reason it’s worth thinking about this,” says MacWilliams, “is the reason that bomb didn’t go off was because of all the safety devices on the bombs, designed by what is now DOE.”
The Department of Energy, he continues, spends a lot of time and money trying to make bombs less likely to explode when they are not meant to explode. A lot of the work happens in a drab building with thick concrete walls at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, in Northern California—one of the three nuclear-weapons research sites funded and supervised by the DOE. There a nice mild-mannered man will hand you a softball-size chunk of what seems to be a building material and ask you to guess what it is. About $10 worth of ersatz marble from Home Depot, you might guess. Whereupon he explains that what appears to be Home Depot marble becomes, under certain conditions, an explosive powerful enough to trigger a chain reaction in a pile of plutonium. The secret that the mild-mannered man would get thrown in jail for sharing is exactly what those conditions are.
That was another thing that surprised MacWilliams when he went to work at the DOE: the sheer amount of classified information. You couldn’t really function without being cleared to hear it. There were places in the building where you could share national secrets, and places where you could not. The people from the FBI who had vetted him for his security clearance had made it very clear to him that they would excuse many foibles—affairs, petty crimes, drug use—but they could not excuse even the most trivial deception. They asked a battery of questions on the order of “Have you ever known anyone who has advocated the violent overthrow of the United States government?” They’d asked him to list every contact with foreigners he had had in the past seven years, which was absurd, as he had spent a career in global finance and lived in both London and Paris. But the people who handed out security clearances failed to see the humor in it. They wanted to know everything. There was no way anyone who obtained a security clearance would find it not worth mentioning that, say, he’d recently dined with the Russian ambassador.*