James F. Bond Sr. Interview, 26 February 2005
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| my team that was out there—my team would come back to the LCF. They would go out and stay until the site was reset or maintenance came out and fixed whatever it was. | ||
| TT: | How often did you have alarms go off? | |
| JB: | Quite a bit. Each one of the missile sites where the hardened area was, it was inside of a fence, the fence was not electrified—we could not have electrified fences because they were out in the middle of farm field. | |
| TT: | Yeah, you would have a bunch of dead animals around there. | |
| JB: | That would look strange. Inside the fence the only thing you could see were two radar columns on the top and they were kinda shaped like this (gestures). There was one on each corner, say the east corner and the west corner, and they picked up anything that went in front of it. | |
| TT: | So they were sort of facing away from the gate? | |
| JB: | Right. And then there's the door, which covered the missile. It was huge. It was probably about the size of this living room rug right here. | |
| TT: | Did they call it a B-Plug or something like that? | |
| JB: | Well, they had two different areas, now we could get into what they called the "A" area. We could get in and reset, they would give us code, we could go in and reset that. | |
| TT: | Reset what? | |
| JB: | Reset the code. If an alarm went off we could try and reset it. | |
| TT: | Now you're talking about an inner alarm as opposed to a perimeter alarm. | |
| JB: | Yeah either alarm. And perimeter alarm, well my guys, sometimes they'd go out and smack the antenna horn with a shovel or something like that and it would reset. They could be set off by a rabbit running through it. | |
| TT: | But normally that's what you were responding to are perimeter alarms, right? | |
| JB: | Inner and outer. | |
| TT: | Oh you'd get a lot of inner alarms? | |
| JB: | Yeah, we had inner alarms, and a lot of times if they wouldn't reset, that's when we had to go out and we'd stay put until—Inner perimeters involved something on top of— | |
| TT: | Accessing the silo. | |
| JB: | Yeah. | |
| TT: | In the documents they talk about the maintenance guy, when they drove by O-6, saw the door open for the access hatch? So there was a metal cover on it or something? | |
| JB: | Yeah, you can open that door, it has a lock on it keys. | |
| TT: | Has a lock? Like a padlock or something? | |
| JB: | Yeah, It's an access cover, yeah like a hatch it raises up, kind of round shaped it opens like this (gestures). |
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