Are We on the Verge of a Nuclear Breakdown?
Nina Burleigh
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Rolling Stone
For two and a half years, Air Force Capt. Blake Sellers donned a green
U.S. Air Force flight suit, and motored across barren Wyoming grassland in sun,
rain, sleet or blizzard, for 24-hour shifts, 60 feet below ground, in a
fluorescent-lit buried capsule. Sellers was one of the roughly 600 officers,
known as missileers, who are responsible for launching America's 450
nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each ICBM in the arsenal is
capable of rocketing to the other side of the planet in 30 minutes or less and
incinerating 65 square miles. Missileers are the human beings who have agreed
to render whole cities — like Moscow, Tehran or Pyongyang, but really anywhere
there is civilization— into, in the jargon of the base, smokin' holes.
Air Force Academy graduates like Sellers tend to dream of flying jets. In a
corps full of eagles, he and his compatriots are the moles.
The route down America's underground WMD silos begins with five months
of training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. There, the first
requirement is signing a document committing to end the world if so ordered by
the president. But what if, somewhere along the way, a missileer has a
change of heart and decides he or she is not OK incinerating millions of
civilians? "They say, 'Well that's OK, but we are going to separate you
from the Air Force and you will pay back everything we paid for your
education,'" Sellers recalls. "In the Air Force Academy, that's
$300,000. So you will be unemployed and owe $300,000."
During training at Vandenberg, pairs of missileers enter a simulated
launch capsule, with swivel chairs facing a console — four black-and-green
screens, and two keyboards — that resembles Matthew Broderick's workstation in
the 1983 movie, WarGames. The pairs open a small metal box with two
coded padlocks, and the senior member of the crew removes The Key. A grid on
one of the screens displays the status of 50 nuclear missiles, 10 of
which are under his or her control. The senior commander and the deputy read
and repeat a series of steps and codes from various manuals. When the word
"critical" flashes in small red letters on a screen, the senior
missileer inserts The Key.
Together they turn three switches at once. A missile grid on the
screen blinks and in each box the green letters "EN" for
"enabled," changes to "LIP," for "Launch in
Progress." Minutes later, the weapons enter the upper atmosphere.
There is no turning back.
After a few months of key launch exercises, the nation's missileers have
participated in so many theoretical Armageddons, they know the drill by heart.
"Of course you become utterly desensitized to tending nuclear
weapons," one former missileer says. "The first time it's like,
'Whoa!' After about ten alerts? 'Eh.'" That's when they are ready to be
shipped off to the launch sites.
There are three ICBM bases. In May 2006, Sellers reported to F.E. Warren
Air Force Base in Wyoming, which is jokingly referred to as "the
Caribbean" because of its relatively balmy temperatures compared to the
other two: Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana and Minot Air Force Base in
North Dakota. When he got to Warren, Sellers was still abiding by the ethics
drilled into him by the Air Force Academy, where the first commandment
forbids cheating. That was the first principle that missileer duty drilled
out of him.
An
MX or "Peacekeeper" missile (left) and two versions of the Minuteman
at the entrance of F.E. Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne, Wyoming. Michael
Smith/Getty
The particulars of ICBM work are outlined in thick manuals — 50 to 400
pages long — in detailed, step-by-step protocols for dealing with everything
from a maintenance issue to a simulated war order. For each event, and each
fake event — because the missileers are constantly being readiness-tested
inside the capsules — a corpsman or woman is expected to follow checklists
of instructions, while moving between different manuals and the buttons on
their consoles.
"In missiles, there is a checklist for everything," Sellers says.
"That's the job, figuring out which checklist I need for this situation.
So those who are good at that kind of thinking become leaders. They drink the
Kool-Aid. And it is very difficult to impress on folks outside of this what
that looks like. Any problem that arises, anything that happens: 'Let's put a
checklist on that!'"
Monthly proficiency tests are meant to ensure missileers are familiar
enough with their manuals to follow the right checklist during hypothetical
alarms. (Separately, they are tested on the Emergency War Orders, a
top-secret document that is so sensitive its exam is administered in a
classified room reportedly called “the vault.”) During Sellers' first
examination, a proctor pointed out five wrong answers on his test, and
corrected a few of them on the page. Sellers was horrified. He glanced around,
worrying that other test takers had noticed, and saw that senior missileers
throughout the room were comparing answers. "I felt terrible," he
says. "Everyone else is cheating."
That incident was the first of many, and before long, Sellers was a full
participant. But maybe because his Marine Corps father had drilled a
"don't cheat" philosophy into him as a boy, he never got over the
guilt. "I did not talk to anyone about it," he recalls. "I
should have, but I was too ashamed of it. And also, no one else is saying
anything, no one else has said anything, and as far as I know all the people
four or five years ahead of me are all going to get in trouble if I do say anything.
And you want them to like you. Your career depends on them."
The cheating was only the most obvious problem. Sellers quickly saw
that morale at Warren had bottomed out. Eventually, the adrenaline rush is long
gone, and the prospect of another three years of sleepless nights following
checklists out on the American tundra feels like a prison term. That might
explain why a disproportionate number of nuclear commanders and missileers
have recently been charged with criminal acts.
The end of the Cold War and the advent of the hot War on Terror has meant
less attention and less prestige on the job at ICBM bases. The
fallout has been unusually high rates of criminality, domestic violence
and security lapses. Currently, four court-martials — for drug use, rape,
assault, sexual assault on an unconscious person and larceny — are
underway at Minot. At Malmstrom, two missileers are being court-martialed for
using and selling bath salts — a synthetic substance that can render users
psychotic. And at Warren, three airmen have recently been or are due to be
court-martialed for drunk driving, using and selling pot
and "indecent filming of the private area of another person without
consent."
Top brass is not immune either. In October 2013, Michael Carey, a two-star
general overseeing the entire nuclear command, was ousted for
"misconduct" on an official trip to Moscow. He reportedly started
getting drunk on the flight over and didn't slow down for the next
three days in Russia. He slammed at least half a dozen shots at one
official lunch, was "rude" to his hosts, arrived late
for appointments, and took up with two young women who, he later
admitted, seemed "suspect" given that they kept showing up wherever
he was. That same month, another nuclear force brass, the deputy head of
U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Vice Adm. Tim Giardina, was removed from his
command for gambling with counterfeit poker chips at a casino in
Iowa.
Maj.
Gen. Michael Carey oversaw the nuclear arsenal until he was demoted for drunken
misconduct on an official trip to Russia. USAF
Then, a few months later, an Air Force investigation into drug use
uncovered a massive cheating scandal. Two lieutenants at Malmstrom AFB in
Montana sparked the inquiry after they were caught sending phone messages to 11
other officers about "specific, illegal drug use that included synthetic
drugs, Ecstasy, and amphetamines." That prompted the Air Force to inspect
more missileers' phones, where they found dozens of people sharing not drugs
but proficiency exam answers. After an investigation, nine
members of the chain of command at Malmstrom were removed.
The Air Force has ordered countless studies trying to figure out what's wrong
with its post-9/11 missileers. Most of these blame burnout on what
researchers call the culture of "micro-perfection" and the general
"inability to accept small errors" at nuclear launch
centers. But interviews with current and former missileers suggest
that the monotony and perceived irrelevance of the job also led to ethical
breakdowns, like cheating and criminal behavior. In 2013 researchers with the
defense contractor RAND linked severe burnout to fears over job security in the
post-Cold War era. They found that with a realignment of the nuclear world,
there was a pervasive fear among missileers that one wrong move could end in
discharge. But that fails to explain another finding from an unpublished
RAND study: court-martial rates in the nuclear-missile force are more than
twice as high as in the overall Air Force.
Sellers says he found the cheating excusable because it was the only way to
survive the grinding minutiae of a job that is arguably obsolete. "I don't
know if it was ever prestigious," he says. "The leaders, they try to rah-rah
you every day — a little at Vandenberg and then more when you get to the bases.
They kind of know how shitty and awful it is. So it's 'Hey, guys, this is so
important, we are saving the world every day from nuclear annihilation.'"
The missileers corps — under the 20th Air Force, Air Force Global
Strike Command — was born in the coldest days of the Cold War, in the
late 1950s. Scientists in New Mexico and California were still perfecting
the first rocket-launched, nuclear-tipped weapon of mass destruction (later
models were named "Peacekeeper") when the Air Force began planting
them in holes across 45,000 square miles of American backlands as fast as
they came off the assembly line. In the half century since, about 30,000 men
and women have held the job of missileer, signing on for tours of four years or
longer.
Today, fresh recruits just out of ROTC or the Air Force Academy undergo
almost the same training as when President Kennedy presided over the Cuban
missile crisis. The principle drilled into them from Day One is a mission
called "deterrence." Like the swivel chairs and the 1980s consoles,
deterrence — mutually assured destruction — as a defensive strategy has gone
the way of the Soviet Union, atomic bunkers and schoolhouse duck-and-cover
exercises, but the same mighty missiles are ready to eliminate the same
targets over Russia. When I met with a group of Sellers' former missileer
colleagues who still work at F.E. Warren, each repeated, like a mantra, "Our
mission is deterrence."
A
missileer adjusts the launch knob in a capsule near F.E. Warren AFB. Jim
Sugar/Corbis
Deterrence means that any nuclear strike on America is guaranteed to
provoke a devastating response, whether or not the nation is reduced to
smoldering ash first. In an era when the perceived threat is far more diffuse —
stateless terrorists or rogue nuke states like North Korea that might act
irrationally — having ICBMs aimed at Russia is no longer the defense it once
was. "People often fail to realize that in a crisis leaders put nuclear
forces on higher alert and run higher risks of triggering a nuclear war by
accident," says Bruce Blair, a former missileer who co-founded the
anti-nuke advocacy group Global Zero. "North Korea is believed to be prone
to risk-taking and provocations that could escalate and override
deterrence."
Meanwhile, the nuclear family has grown to include not just North Korea,
which conducted its first nuclear weapon test in 2006, but sworn enemies
Pakistan and India, whose mutual nuclear war, which has been a
threat for decades, we could do little to deter. There are now nine
nuclear nations, and at current rates, another nation goes nuclear about every
decade. (The current nuclear negotiations with Iran aim to
buck this trend.)
No one in the U.S. government seems to know how to respond to this new
existential question, besides throwing more money at the program. The Obama
administration, unable to fend off entrenched political and military-industrial
interests — tens of thousands of people work in production facilities and
in the government apparatus — has ordered up billions of dollars worth of new
weapons and upgrades, despite the fact that the president is on record
admitting their reduced strategic need. Last year, the Congressional
Budget Office estimated that the modernization program would cost $355 billion
over the next eight years.
All of which amounts to a game of brinksmanship that Eric Schlosser, author
of Command and Control, a history of America's nuclear weapons, has
described as humanity's collective death wish. Over the years, safeguards have
failed so spectacularly that even an atheist might suspect divine
intervention. A hydrogen bomb fell out of a plane in 1958 and leveled a
South Carolina home without detonating. Another bomb
accidentally parachuted towards Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961, but
failed to activate. A warhead shot into the air in Arkansas in 1980, after
its silo exploded; it traveled 100 feet but didn't detonate. As recently as
2007, workers at Minot AFB in North Dakota accidentally loaded six
nuclear-tipped missiles on a plane that crossed the continent to a base in
Louisiana — the error was discovered only after the plane landed. On October
23rd, 2010, 50 missiles in the fields around Warren went
"offline" for nearly an hour. The Air Force blamed the incident on a
circuit glitch.
Most experts say America's nuclear bombs will not accidentally detonate.
The fact that they have fallen from the sky and landed in people's backyards
over the years without detonating seems to confirm that notion. But the human
element will always be a hazard. Even the presidential part of the nuclear
equation is subject to error. Carter and Clinton both reportedly lost the
launch code cards that presidents are expected to have on them
at all times — Clinton for months, according to a former chairman of the
joint chiefs of staff. Carter allegedly sent his out with a suit to the
cleaners.
A
hydrogen bomb accidentally parachuted into a North Carolina meadow in 1961.
USAF
Sellers is now a 32-year-old telecoms employee and MBA student in
Denver. Last summer, he drove me around his old stomping grounds, the grassland
around the Colorado-Wyoming border where the WMD are planted east of F.E.
Warren. He knows these back roads in his sleep, having driven them twice a
day for over two years, and steers his battered Volvo easily over the
bumpy gravel. Some of the launch-control capsules are a three-hour drive from
base, past cows, tractors, fields and the occasional agricultural hamlet.
Residents here are accustomed to Humvees and armed men in camo passing through,
or having their roads closed when WMD are being moved.
Sellers, a burly, dark-haired and affable video-game nut, is
third-generation military, on both sides of his family. One grandfather can be
seen in an iconic photograph of Eisenhower in Europe during the Second World
War. His mother's father was a chaplain in Korea. His father served in Vietnam.
Sellers grew up in Florida, near the Navy Seal Museum, watching Cape
Canaveral rocket launches in real time from his backyard and binge-watching Top
Gun. Like most missileers, he did not feel called to the job of pulling
crew duty in an underground capsule, babysitting 50 ICBMs for 24 hours at a
time. The Air Force chose that duty for him, just months before he graduated
from the Academy, because a shellfish allergy disqualified him from a career as
a pilot. He sucked it up. "The Air Force perspective is you should be so
jazzed about serving your country you should not care where we put you,"
he says. "If I complained, they would have thought I was a spoiled
baby."
The Missile Alert Facilities aboveground look like any other prefab family
home, with the exception of the barbed wire and radio towers outside. But
inside, they are not exactly homey [1]. They have kitchens and lounges, but they also have
shelves of grenades and assault rifles, and each one houses an elevator shaft
leading to the capsule. Over the course of a four-year tour, officers pull
about 225 alerts down below— night and day, winter and summer, and always at
the edge of the End of the World.
After two years at F.E. Warren, Sellers could complete a launch exercise in
less than a minute, between scenes of Mad Men or bites of a burger. Once
missileers learn their checklists by rote, many of them have hours of idle time
on their hands. Some binge-watch TV, or read; a few study for advanced degrees.
Inside the capsules, little has changed since the Cold War, from the constant
vibration and foot odor to the eight-inch floppy disks in the consoles.
"It's absolutely all the same whether it's Christmas Day or the
Fourth of July," Sellers says. "You are in a constant state of jet
lag. You are up at 1 a.m. under fluorescent lights. After a year and
a half I was never fully awake or fully asleep. You reach this zombie
state."
Sleep deprivation is known to induce hallucinations and impair
judgment. The CO2 levels in the silos don't always meet OSHA standards either.
The combined effect may make missileers groggy and even impulsive and
aggressive. The Air Force has revealed that two missileers once stayed in a
malfunctioning capsule breathing noxious fumes for hours, rather than ask their
leadership for help, and were hospitalized. Crew partners are paired for at
least eight months at a stretch. Privacy is obviously limited in a
170-square-foot capsule behind four-foot-thick walls, so teams get to know
one another extremely well. And what happens in the capsule stays in the
capsule. "The trust between members of a good crew is
near-unbreakable," one missileer says. "Eating, sleeping and working
in such intimate quarters for months together builds an incredibly strong relationship."
Missileers
in a launch control capsule at Minot AFB in North Dakota consult their manuals.
Master Sgt. Lance Cheung/USAF
According to Sellers and others, missileers stash all manner of personal
contraband in what one called "weird cubbyholes" whose original Cold
War purpose in the silos, Sellers says, has been forgotten. The cubbyholes hide
porno, DVDs, and often a banned group journal filled with black humor and
complaints about commanders, written under pen names, called a "log
book." Sellers says he once filled out a page with the five stages of
grief that Air Force officers suffer when they are assigned to ICBM duty. The
little books are unique to the missileer corps, and disapproving commanders
occasionally descend, seize and confiscate. Six months later, someone starts
one anew.
Condoms have also turned up in capsule cleanups. Women have served as
missileers since the Eighties, and heterosexual missileers have more
opportunities to hook up underground. But conditions for romance are hardly
ideal in capsules that smell like locker rooms. One missileer said the cootie
factor alone would have made capsule sex impossible for him. Germophobes are on
high alert for other things besides the Russians. One crew member wrote on a
missileer chatroom recently: "After change-over the first thing I did was
break out the Clorox wipes and clean every surface I knew I would touch."
At Malmstrom, the plumbing system in some of the capsules was so degraded
that the recycled air was "90 percent rotting sewage," one
ex-Malmstrom missileer says. The two-man crews went down with instructions to
defecate in buckets and urinate in jugs, and bring it all back up at the end of
24 hours. "You're thinking, 'They're not going to tell us how
important we are up here,'" he says, "while we're literally
sitting over rotting shit!" When he complained about having to work
"over this two-foot pool of sewage," his commander told him to
"suck it up," and reminded him that American troops in Third World
countries were dealing with far worse. He couldn't argue with that.
From the antique black phones in their bunkers, missileers also
command enlisted men and women upstairs — "cops," in the lingo —
who patrol cow pastures with automatic weapons, grenades, even a
camouflage chain saw. Whenever sensors detect movement in the fenced
perimeters where the missiles are buried, the missileers must decide whether to
dispatch security teams to investigate. In the grasslands around Warren, the
sensors have almost never been activated by anything human — with the exception
of some anti-nuke nuns who snuck onto the missile field and banged on the
concrete caps with hammers in 2003. The security officers' main duty is to
scare off rabbits, cats and antelope. And since Air Force regulations prohibit
shooting them, airmen grow adept at gently shooing small mammals away from the
nuke sites, no matter if it's a fine summer day or a Great Plains blizzard.
Projecting authority from 60 feet underground by antique telephone is one
of the main challenges of the job, according to Lt. Kathryn Congdon, a
30-year-old missileer currently stationed at Warren. Tensions arise
over who has it worse — the officers down below in their chairs or the
armed grunts dispatched into blizzards to chase rabbits. "A lot of times,
it's tough for me to know, how severe is this?" Congdon says. "I
can't get that vibe from them over the phone and when I first got here that was
like, 'Hey, wake-up call.' You gotta be able to tell if they're telling you the
truth or what's going on. We lead through the phone."
A diagram of a Mission Alert Facility at F.E. Warren AFB. Library of
Congress
The man at the helm of the nation's missileer command is Maj. Gen. Jack
Weinstein, a former missileer himself, who lives and works at F.E. Warren in
Wyoming. Since taking the job in 2013 (after his predecessor, Maj. Gen.
Carey, was removed for that drunken binge in Moscow), Weinstein
implemented some changes, including making the tests pass-fail and getting
money to upgrade the decaying capsules. Weinstein acknowledges that a culture
of "micromanagement and perfection" damaged morale among missileers.
But he also insists that deterrence remains as relevant as ever. "The only
existential threat to the United States of America is a nuclear weapon,"
Weinstein says. "That's the only thing that can fundamentally change who
we are. The only force that is out there 24 hours a day protecting this nation
is the ICBM force."
Bruce Blair, the anti-nuke activist, says Weinstein's fixes have meant
"the trappings of missileer life are definitely being improved." But
he says fixing clogged sewers is not enough. "Nothing is being done that
will alter the basic problems that missileer duty is painfully tedious, so
mind-numbing that you can just feel yourself become almost comatose during
alert duty."
Sellers had lots of time to think in his subterranean hole. He still
had to "pucker up" for inspections or when nukes were being moved
around, but the edge was off. Fake attacks came in at all hours with flashing
lights and buzzing sounds — practice nuclear-war alerts often designed by
commanders at the base or STRATCOM in Nebraska — requiring him
to flip through his manuals and perform a series of button-pushings and
nozzle-switchings on the console to reset the system. In practice, though,
he typically just deactivated the alarm using a button called the
"plunger."
One time, sitting in one of the swivel chairs, his crew partner dozing,
Sellers let his mind wander. What if, he thought, this is all an experiment or
an elaborate ruse? Maybe there aren't even real nukes planted in the fields out
there. Or maybe, just maybe, the control capsule does not control them at all.
He now compares the "deterrence" mission that every missileer
learns is his or her duty to a fantasy plot point. "It reminds me of
the wall in Game of Thrones," he says. "There was this
threat long ago and they built the wall and it's long been forgotten, and all
of the dirtbags get sent to the wall. It's allegedly this super-prestigious
thing, but it's really not. That reminds me so much of missiles."
At Malmstrom in northern Montana, where temps often fall below zero in
the winter, missileers similarly joked that they might be subjects in a grand
Pavlovian experiment. "We were always looking for the secret camera in the
capsule, like somebody was studying us," one officer recalls. The alarms
always seemed eerily timed to go off just as they were slacking off. Like,
nothing going on, and then, just as the crew stares up at the capsule's 17-inch
TV for the Super Bowl kickoff, "out of the blue, 15 things would
break and alarms are going off in the capsule and you're just pushing buttons
not sure what's going on."
One
crew at Malmstrom AFB in Montana temporarily made do without indoor plumbing.
USAF
The Air Force is aware that life on remote bases is hard to endure.
Commanders organize what Sellers calls "mandatory fun" — like luau
parties in the dead of winter — funded by car washes and bake sales because
taxpayer money can't be wasted on goofing off. At Warren, mandatory fun
included a requirement that missileers participate in the annual Cheyenne
Frontier Days festival, a two-week jamboree replete with live country music,
bull-riding and calf-roping contests. Off-duty missileers man the Air Force's
beer-selling booth. And during one of these festival weeks, in July 2009,
Sellers inadvertently ended his career.
After a 24-hour shift, he showed up for his Frontier Days booth duty, but
didn't feel like attending the next day's mandatory administrative
Commander's Call, an all-hands-on-deck rundown of official updates and
announcements. So, after two years of obeying orders, he went home to his
apartment and slept through it instead. Sellers later sent a letter to his
commander, Lt. Col. Mark Schuler, explaining why he had missed the
meeting. "I decided the best course of action would be to simply not
attend," Sellers wrote, "and with any luck move on so that I could
continue to stave off mental disaster and keep pulling alerts."
The Air Force has a self-reporting scheme called the Personnel
Reliability Program, or PRP, that requires missileers to monitor their
peers' and their own fitness for duty. New missileers are required to pass a
mental health evaluation to become "PRP certified," and the list of
reasons to be decertified, or to "go down on PRP," is long and
specific. Seeing a specialist for a sprained ankle; getting a wisdom tooth
removed; taking any medication stronger than Tylenol; dumped by girlfriend;
cheating on wife; dog hit by a car; or a sick parent are all acceptable
excuses for missing a shift or two. "PRP is intended to work so
that only the most reliable people work with nuclear weapons," says
Schuler. "If a commander ultimately deems you reliable, and if you win
back his trust, you can go back on duty." And like the silos and
the checklists, the program has been around since the beginning of the
nuclear age.
Sellers says he was first "PRP certified" — that is, deemed
reliable to work around nukes — by an officer whose training to assess his
mental health and fitness seemed to consist of a series of PowerPoint
slides. "It is so cursory!" Sellers says. "It was basically,
'Are you a problem child? Do you have any relationship issues?'"
Depression, anxiety and alcoholism are probably the chief mental-health
bugaboos on the bases, but it's a rare missileer who self-reports any of those
categories. "Hanging over all this," Sellers says, "is, you
know, that if you want to get decertified, you can say, 'Yes, my dog died.' 'My
girlfriend broke up with me.'"
Of course, "going down" means someone else, someone equally
dog-tired and sick of being in the capsule, must pull double-duty in the
interim. "You can say that you don't have the right mind, but if you do
that, then your boss will look at you like you're a coward or you can't handle
it," one former Malmstrom missileer says. "You feel terrible doing it
because there is a special place in hell for those who burn the backup."
Another missileer recalls being on shift when his relief unexpectedly went
down on PRP. "I was down there once, underground for 72 hours
—straight," he says. "I couldn't take the vibration anymore. I had to
go stand in the concrete entryway where the restroom was, just so I could feel
not vibration anymore. It was making me nauseous and antsy."
Sellers had broken an unwritten code mentioning "mental disaster"
in his letter. Schuler had temporarily decertified Sellers after he missed
the Commander's Call, and now he called him in for a meeting. Sellers told
Schuler everything — from his frustration with the endless tedium to
his guilt over the rampant cheating. According to Sellers, Schuler, who
holds five master's degrees in subjects that include business, organizational
management and military operational art, was famous around the base
for his devotion to protocol. He sent Sellers to a base psychologist
for what Sellers describes as a "whistleblower rundown." "Your
behavior and expressions do not appear grounded in reality," Schuler wrote
in his report of the meeting.
Air Force clinical psychologist Capt. Sheri Fluellen wrote that Sellers was
not a "safety risk to himself or others." She also found that
"member has shown significant frustration when placed in situations when
his abilities are not maximized and when his logic is not acknowledged."
She diagnosed him with "adjustment disorder" and recommended that
base commanders "encourage" Sellers to "seek psychotherapy to
expand his coping skills and to improve his communications skills with
leadership."
In response, Lt. Col. Schuler permanently stripped Sellers of his missileer
certification and kept him in menial jobs on the base, including one in which
he literally polished the knobs on commanders' doors. "All the
disciplinary issues with Sellers was about reliability," Schuler says.
"First, this was a temporary concern, then it became permanent."
Schuler notes that Sellers had a previous infraction as well, for
riding in a government vehicle that was damaged on an unauthorized road.
"My duty as a commander was to not allow any
individual to be around nuclear weapons if he's not reliable,"
Schuler says. "The actions I took with Capt. Sellers were based
on a series of observations and evaluations by myself and
others based on his overall reliabililty."
Sellers still has a handwritten note listing one day of duties toward the
end of his career at F.E. Warren.
It reads:
Blake – 1 Please take trash out that is by the back handicap ramp door – 2
Dismantle candy canes for fliers – Toss fliers – Put candy canes out in bowl
for customers – 3 Finish gym floor – 4 Sweep/mop lobby café.
In March 2014, two years after Sellers was discharged, the missileer
scandals, including the mass cheating revelations, made the news. Lt. Col.
Schuler was eventually removed from his command.
Sellers
believes he was punished after a "whistleblower rundown." Photograph
by Chip Kalback
Sellers remains angry that the Air Force treated his genuine job concerns
as a mental-health issue. He is also paranoid that the NSA will track him and
his fellow former missileers now that they have spoken out. He
says he's having a hard time adjusting to civilian life and is finding that the
very specific skills he developed in the capsule are not transferrable to
the real world. He does value certain aspects of his experience at F.E. Warren,
though. Working around America's WMD program, he says, gave him a "higher
tolerance for stress and working with assholes."
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
