← Atomic Hobo - Nuclear War Podcast
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- [02:04]
Atomic Hobo Narrator
Welcome to Atomic Hobo. To get ad free listening plus bonus episodes, visit Patreon.com Atomichobo. Today we're telling the story of the Sculthorpe Nuclear weapons incident and thanks goes to the Twitter and YouTube conelrad account for making me aware of this. Back in 1958, an American serviceman based at the Sculthorpe Air Base in Norfolk threatened to commit suicide by firing a gun into an atomic bomb. And the scary truth about this incident wasn't revealed until 1988, 30 years later. We know from our recent series on Harold Macmillan, specifically the episode on the Thor missiles that Norfolk on the east coast of England was host to lots of air bases and therefore saw lots of Cold War drama. We heard that when the Thor missiles arrived in 58, they sparked lots of violent anti nuclear protest. And we heard of activists being dragged around and thrown into mud and wet concrete which then solidified in their eyes and hair. Well, as we will see in this episode, drama was not confined to the Thors and neither was drama confined to the protesters. No, if we zoom in on the scale Skullthorpe Base, we'll see that a lot of drama was caused by the American servicemen based there. And no, not just the guy who was threatening suicide by nuke. RAF Skulthorpe was a bomber base in the Second World War and was then refurbished in the early Cold War for the American Air Force who used it from 1949. And Sculthorpe did seem to make the newspapers quite often back in the 50s and 60s for various troubles and scandals. Forget the cliche of Norfolk being a quiet backwater. No sir, it was all kicking off at Sculthorpe. Consider this headline from the local paper, the Eastern Daily Press, from 9th of February 1959. Man held at gunpoint collapses after 35 minutes with hands up. Sculthorpe base promises inquiry. What happened here was a janitor who worked at the base, A local chap, 60 years old, called James Twight, was apprehended on the base by a gun toting American sergeant who was who ordered hands up. The armed American forced the poor janitor to stand for 35 minutes in fear with his hands up and threatened to kill him if he dared move. After 35 minutes, frozen in place, poor Mr. Twight collapsed. QUOTE from the newspaper. When a reporter called to see him on Saturday night, Mr. Twite burst into tears. He was shaking and nervous. Now for our American listeners, we of course don't have guns in this country. Well, we have branches of the police who are armed. But your local bobby in Norfolk and certainly your local janisser in Norfolk certainly wouldn't have been armed. So unless Mr. Twite had served in the war, this may have been the first time he'd ever seen a gun. And now he was an American soldier threatening to shoot him. You may be a Russian spy for all I know, he told the trembling janitor. When one of Mr. Twites colleagues, a Mr. Charles Frederick Waterson, was summoned to identify Mr. Twites and vouch for him, he Too was subject to the same treatment from this sergeant. He says he was not even allowed to to retrieve his handkerchief from his pocket. And here's a twist to the story. The two janitors, Mr. Twight and Mr. Waterson, had been recent witnesses at a murder trial. The suspect being another American serviceman from the Sculthorpe base. Master Sergeant Marcus M. Merriment was on trial accused of poisoning his wife, Mary Helen. She had been found in a critical condition in June 1958 and was rushed to the hospital on the Sculthorpe base. She died and her husband was found guilty of poisoning her with arsenic so that he could be with his lover, 23 year old Cynthia Taylor, whom he met in a Berkshire nightclub. He was taken back to Kansas to serve his sentence, but was freed in 1967 and went on to become a DJ. So we couldn't be surprised if the two air base janitors had had it with those Americans. But they weren't the only workers to be held at gunpoint on Skulthorpe base. It happened in January 1958 also when two post office engineers arrived at Sculthorpe for maintenance work. As they checked for a faulty cable, they were stopped and interrogated by an American armed guard who ordered them to march. When they refused and showed their security passes, the guard pointed his rifle and said, get moving with your hands on your heads or. Or I'll put one through you. The Americans did eventually issue an apology for this treatment, but an air base spokesman told the Daily Herald, I can't understand why anyone is sore. They should be glad our security is so strict. Okay, so before we move on to the nuclear weapons incident on the base, let's have one more. In October 1960, two American Air Force men based at Sculthorpe were on trial in London for armed robbery. Ronald Bingner and Charles Leroy Teeters broke into a bank manager's bungalow and tied up the manager and his wife, clubbing the man about the head and demanding money, keys and the combination to the safe. They had stolen the guns that they used, plus 100 pistols and four submachine guns from the gun room at the base. They were eventually found guilty of robbery by the British courts and desertion by the US Air Force court martial, where they were sentenced to seven years, although this was later reduced to five years because the robbers had been so, quote, courteous when they broke into the bungalow. Newspapers tell me that when they tied up Mrs. Moores, the bank manager's wife, they carefully placed a pillow beneath her head and at her request, kindly left the Light on. So that's just some of the hijinks that were going on at Skulthorpe Air Base. Now let's get to the nuclear weapons incident. That's what we're here for. And I think we've established that the Skulthorpe base had more than its usual share of, shall we say, unpredictable airmen. So meet Master Sergeant Leander Cunningham. He was working at Sculthorpe in 1958 as a senior nuclear weapons technician. At the time, Sculthorpe was hosting atomic bombs which, had the terrible moment come, would have been loaded onto Medium Range B66 Tactical Bombers. The bombs in question were the Mark V atomic bomb, and the technicians were responsible for maintaining the bombs and making sure their circuits and firing mechanisms were in flawless condition. Added to this practice, alerts could ring out across the base at any time. The sirens would blare and the crew had three minutes to be in their planes and ready for takeoff. Under this high pressure work, Leander Cunningham's mental health began to suffer. He explains why in a documentary recently uploaded to YouTube by the CONELRAD channel. Here he is.
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Leander Cunningham
It's the tension that goes with meeting all of the schedules, with meeting all these fine tolerances, with being absolutely sure that this is perfect and that is perfect and this is perfect, and when you live with that over a long period of time, I know eventually that it kind of made you nervous. And I think that the longer you were with it, it's sort of an insidious thing. I know it was for me, because of course, with all these other things involved, plus this, that when I got to the point where it was really affecting me, I couldn't function properly.
- [12:04]
Atomic Hobo Narrator
After the stress of a high level inspection at the base, which was prompted by the Suez crisis, plus his young daughter's illness, he suffered a bout of depression and it was so severe that he was taken into a mental health facility for US servicemen in Wiltshire. It was called Birdrop Hospital, and here he suffered three weeks of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment which is now considered controversial, where the patient is strapped to a table and electric shocks jolted into their brain to induce seizures. According to the documentary, Cunningham was sent back to the air base, still a deeply disturbed and troubled man. His superiors at the base recognised his troubles, so they gave him a slightly reduced workload. But it was still one that most of us would consider high pressured and risky. He was still working with the atomic bombs in a building located right next to the Runway on which sat four B66 bombers who were on permanent ground alert. The building where Cunningham was working was of supreme importance to the base because this was where the bombs were matched with their nuclear component before being loaded onto the waiting bombers. And on one terrible day in October 1958, to quote the documentary, Co Cunningham snapped. He stole a gun, which was sitting unattended in a nearby car. Again, remember the incident earlier that year where the two post office engineers had been held at gunpoint on the base and a spokesman had huffed, what are they so sore about? They should be glad our security's so tight. Well, it wasn't tight. On this day, Cunningham took the gun, loaded it with bullets and entered the atomic bomb hangar. He had decided to commit suicide and he was going to do it by firing the gun into an atomic bomb. Here he is explaining his feelings at that moment.
- [14:24]
Leander Cunningham
I was angry. I'm not sure exactly who I was angry at. I guess everybody and everything, including the Air Force, the British, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Pentagon, my father, who had no business dying when I was 14.
- [14:50]
Atomic Hobo Narrator
Inside the hangar, Cunningham had climbed a ladder into a loft space overlooking the work area where the bombs sat. He was up there pointing his gun directly at the nukes, while a small gathering of air base bigwigs who had been ordered to stand directly next to the bombs. They tried to reason with him, but of course, you know that it all ended peacefully. After all, Leander Cunningham sat down with a Thames TV documentary crew in 1988 to discuss it all. So there was no suicide by atomic bomb. No one was hurt. After eight hours, Leander Cunningham surrendered and was taken straight to hospital for the mental health treatment he obviously needed. But that's not the end of the story. When news got out that an American had, according to some headlines of the day, gone berserk amongst the nuclear bombs, the first thing people wanted to know was, could he have prompted a nuclear explosion? If he had fired that gun, would he have taken East Anglia with him?
- [16:02]
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- [17:04]
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- [17:27]
Atomic Hobo Narrator
This question was asked in the House of Commons by the Labour MP Harold Davies about the quote, berserk American airman. And Davies asked the Secretary of State for Air quote, would not the Right Honourable Gentleman agree that that this sad and tragic incident demonstrates the accuracy of the point made by the opposition about grounding planes carrying hydrogen bombs over this country? Could not this incident have occurred in an aircraft during a flight which would make it a matter of concern to the British people? The Minister replied with some exasperation. I assume that it was impossible for an individual to set off a nuclear explosion either in the air or on the ground, and that he has made this clear to the House on more than one occasion. But this sounds like a Labour MP just trying to needle and aggravate and embarrass the government because we know that a nuclear explosion wasn't the threat that day. We discussed this in a recent bonus podcast about the Tula bomber crash up in Greenland in 1968, where a US bomber carrying four hydrogen bombs crashed onto the ice. But there was no nuclear explosion because the bombs weren't armed. Sure, there was a conventional explosion, a mighty one, and an ugly spread of radioactive material, but no nuclear explosion. The Mark V bombs, which Leander Cunningham had been threatening to shoot, were not armed with the nuclear components, and so they couldn't have created a nuclear explosion. One of the developments of the Mark V atomic bomb, apart from it being significantly lighter than previous generation bombs, was that the nuclear component was added separately to the main body of the bomb. Picture the bomb like an apple with a hollow at its core. At the center lies the nuclear material, but for safety reasons you don't place this scary component into the bomb's core until you're in flight approaching your target. But the cool thing about the Mark V bomb was that this insertion could now Be done automatically when you're in the air. No longer does a guy have to clamber through to the bomb bay and manually insert it. With the Mark V, the pilot can pull a lever and thanks to the technology of in flight insertion, the nuclear component gets added mechanically and the bomb is then armed. At this point, you're at risk of a nuclear explosion if anything went wrong. But not before. But it took a while before the politicians would deal with the subject. Indeed, it wasn't until 1962, a whole four years later, that our old friend Prime Minister Harold Macmillan addressed the issue in Parliament. And disappointingly, he told two, shall we call it a lie, two lies about the incident. Perhaps he hadn't been properly informed, in which case, two misleading statements about the incident. Macmillan, with his reputation for being unflappable. After all, this was the man who lay hideously injured on the battlefield in the First World War and thought, may as well get some reading done and pulled some Ancient Greek out of his pocket to pass the time. So Macmillan tried to downplay the incident, saying in the House of Commons, quote, the anxiety was not that he might explode an atomic bomb, there were none there, but that he might do something foolish with a pistol. He went on to say, it's true, there was some explosive in the building and it is just conceivable that he might have caused it to explode had he carried out his threat. But he went on, there was no fissionable material in the building. Well, these two statements, they simply weren't true. One, we know that there were indeed atomic weapons in there. Cunningham was pointing his gun at one of them. And two, the US Air Force admitted that, yes, there was also nuclear material in there, it just hadn't been added to the bomb. The bombs weren't armed. But the nuclear material and the atomic bomb, although at this point physically separate, were, as the US Air Force later admitted, CO located in the building. And so if Cunningham had fired and it had sparked conventional explosion, we could maybe have seen a smaller example of the Chula disaster where we had a conventional explosion plus a spill of nuclear material, because the atomic bomb wasn't properly armed. The nuclear component was simply CO located with the bomb the way that Jack the Ripper was co located with Mary Kelly in Miller's Court collocated. Sounds very neutral, very bland. But as you will see in this case, they were worryingly close to one another. If you watch the documentary on YouTube, you'll see the US Air Force saying very carefully that the atomic bomb and the nuclear material were separate but they were co located. We are then shown a diagram which demonstrates exactly what collocated means. We see that the nuclear material was actually inside the bomb. It had been placed there in a procedure known as pre arming. It was tucked into the nose of the bomb and then in flight, if ordered to proceed to target, the pilot could then have pulled a lever which would have inserted the nuclear material into the core. So, yes, the material was separate, but still uncomfortably close. So don't imagine it was tucked in a box far across the room. No, it was inside the bomb, just not directly inside at the core. They were merely co located. So no, you wouldn't have got a nuclear explosion if Cunningham had fired, but you could have got a conventional explosion and a spill of radioactive material over Norfolk. One of the experts in the documentary imagines what might have happened. A conventional explosion which could have blown the roof off the building and the subsequent fire would have lofted plutonium particles up into the air and spread them out across East Anglia. But to hear Harold Macmillan in the Commons, it was all just silly nonsense. It was all just a man doing something foolish with a pistol. Well, no, it was a lot more than that. And the truth didn't come out until 1988 when this documentary was made. The producer Steven Scott told the Eastern Daily Press on its release in February 88 that a huge cover up had existed. It was probably the most serious atomic incident to happen and it was completely hushed up. In our recent bonus episode about the Tula disaster available for patrons, we talked of the pressure that Strategic Air Command kept exerting on the Pentagon to have its bombers constantly ready. They must be on ground alert, as those bombers at Skulthorpe were. That is, they must be sitting there ready to be loaded with nukes, ready to take off in just a few minutes. But then they decided that wasn't good enough and so they pushed for airborne alert, which is what the plane over Greenland was doing when it crashed, flying with its hydrogen bombs. Forget being poised ready for takeoff, Airborne alert bombers were already in the air, in the air with a bunch of H bombs. Airborne alert was finally halted after the Tula disaster, just as extra checks were brought in to ensure an airman's mental health and suitability after the Sculthorpe incident. It's reassuring, of course, that these changes were made and that the system is flexible enough to make them. But at the same time, it's worrying that we need an incident, whether it's someone threatening suicide by atomic bomb or four hydrogen bombs crashing onto the ice for those changes to be made. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please check out the documentary on the Conel Rad YouTube channel. It's called Something Foolish With a Pistol, which is of course Harold Macmillan's dismissive summary of the incident. And thanks to Conal Rad for finding this documentary, uploading it, and making me aware of it, because I had never heard of this incident. And before we go, let me thank my newest patrons, Madeline Paulson, Mary Hope and Jake Hughes. And you can get the bonus episode on the Chula Disaster, plus all other bonus episodes and every single episode ad free if you join my patreon@patreon.com Atomichobo thank you for listening.
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