Death in the Neighborhood

Before the 526th AAA Missile Battalion installed batteries of Nike-Ajax missiles in northern New Jersey three years ago, the Army carefully explained that the 21-ft. TNT and shrapnel projectiles were virtually accident-proof. A missile battery, said the Army, was no more dangerous a neighbor than a gas station. Last week the gas-station blew up. Installing a trigger modification on one of the 526th B Battery Nikes near Leonardo, N.J., ordnance technicians accidentally detonated the missile. Explosion and flame touched off seven more Nikes squatting on adjacent pads, blew or burned ten men to death, showered a three-mile radius with fragments.

Five civilians, along with a detail from the 100-man battery, had already converted three Nikes that day: so routine was their operation that the no-danger yellow light glowed on the battery control panel. The team started its fourth and final conversion shortly after 1 p.m.--began a familiar process in which it removed a warhead, took off the old trigger and its brackets, replaced them with a new trigger and brackets. Somewhere in that process on the fourth missile there was a mishap. Suddenly the missile blew with a roar and a sky-searing pillow of orange flame from burning kerosene and nitric acid fuels. After the eight missiles had gone up, quick-thinking Lieut. Robert F. Daly, the battery commander, dashed out of his office, ordered the remaining Nikes dropped by elevator to their 20-ft deep concrete storage pits.

Next day the Army hurried in ordnance experts in an attempt to establish the cause of the explosion, halted further modification of the Nikes. Army lawyers began to settle claims for shattered windows and broken bric-a-brac. Meanwhile, the Army had little to say about a development yet to come: along with two dozen other missile installations ringing New York City, B Battery is scheduled to replace its TNT Nike-Ajaxes after this year with the atomic Nike-Hercules. In the wake of Leonardo's explosive afternoon, it was going to be hard to convince the neighbors in New Jersey--or around the Nikes guarding 22 other U.S. industrial complexes--that living alongside atomic warheads was still like living beside a gas station.

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