William E. Smith Interview, 25 August 2001(b)

‹‹ Interview Index
1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21 / 22 / 23 / 24

WS:	Oh, yeah and those things were put in, and I guess the locals were briefed on what was happening, and there would be no danger. But and most of the local people didn't care one way or the other. We've had occasions where farmers would call us and say, "Look, there's somebody out there nosing around" we'd go out and usually warn people to stay away, that kind of thing. I saw just the other day, yesterday as a matter of fact, where they blew up one of the sites.
JK:	The last one at Grand Forks.
WS:	I guess they're going to keep a couple for history's sake but it was really interesting how impenetrable they were. From what I understand, most of them could take almost a direct hit and still be able to launch, and the doors, the access we had to the site, were in the Maintenance Bay predominately, that supported the missile and all of its electrical things the cooling systems and the monitoring systems. And then of course we had an "A" and a "B" hatch. The "A" could be opened by officers, our police officers could open that hatch to let the "B" people inside to open the next vault that then they'd have access to the machinery that would open the actual door, so...
JK:	That's for the combination?
WS:	The two combinations, yes. We'd open the outer hatch, once they were identified, and then they would open the "B" hatch, "A" and "B" we could not have the same codes. We were always "A" side and they were always "B" side.
TT:	Were there always four people out there to go into the facility?
WS:	There had to be at least four people, minimum because once they opened the "B" side, you had access to the actual missile itself, so you had to have someone who was qualified to know what was going on. So we would be able to open our side, which was in many cases, was a Camper Crew member, and they'd have to have at least two people, so minimum three people to enter a site at any given time.
JK:	You were saying at your dispatch desk you had an annunciator that showed the security status of the sites.
WS:	Yes.
JK:	I was just under the impression that the Capsule Crew got those and alerted you rather than you having that directly.
WS:	You know my memory's a little bit blurred there. I'm sure the impression that had we had the outer alarms so when it went off we were able to reset I remember. So yeah, we had a panel there so it probably was redundant.
JK:	OK, I wanted you to talk about Camper crews and say a Targeting Team coming on to on the site.

‹‹ Previous Page — Next Page ››