Indiana's 'broken arrow' — that time 5 nuclear bombs caught on fire

Editor's note:This story was originally published in 2018. Some references may be out of date.

BUNKER HILL, Ind. — Shamaine Pleczko grew up not knowing her father, or even much about him. She was just 6 months old when he died.

It happened at the air base here, in a horrific, drawn-out conflagration involving the Cold War's most spectacular weapon, the gigantic B-58 Hustler, and the airplane's extreme payload — five nuclear bombs, four of the 70-kiloton variety, one measuring nine megatons. 

The calamity made news everywhere.  "Plane Burns with H-Bomb" — Daily Oklahoman; "Indiana B-58 N-Bomber Burns" — Louisville Courier-Journal; "AF Probes A-Plane Blast" — Indianapolis News.

But for a baby girl, life goes on. It was a good life, too, in Houston with her mother and brothers and grandparents, and when she was 4, a stepfather who was a good man, a father.

As Shamaine got older she became curious about her father. She knew it was a training accident that claimed her father, but her mother, who now has Alzheimer's, didn't discuss the details and never mentioned anything about nuclear bombs. Shamaine started doing some Internet research, and stumbled on an interesting book, written by an Indiana author who had set out to solve a mystery. 

'It was like God in heaven'

Manuel "Rocky" Cervantes Jr. had grown up in Dallas and graduated from Sunset High School (Class of '53) where he was a cheerleader and in R.O.T.C. He joined the air force right out of school and advanced through the ranks. By the time he died, Dec. 8, 1964, of a ruptured aorta, he'd reached captain. He was 29 years old. 

He was a navigator on a B-58 Hustler, the world's first supersonic bomber.

A needle-nosed, Delta-wing job, 96-feet long, the gleaming, silver Hustler was wondrous to look at. But it was not easy to fly. Hustler crews were highly skilled and highly respected — among Cold War-era aviators, they were the next thing to astronauts. B-58 Hustlers cruised at Mach 2.

Crew and their Hustler bomber, 1964

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Bunker Hill AFB was one of just two air force bases in the country that had them (the other Hustler squadron was based initially in Texas and later in Arkansas).

In the 1960s, when U.S.-Soviet relations were at their worst, Hustler crews were on constant alert. They kept sharp by flying around the country breaking the sound barrier, often carrying nuclear bombs, two on each wing, one slung under the fuselage.

"It was like riding a rocket," said Jerry Anderson, now in his 80s, who served at Bunker Hill with Cervantes. "Once, up over Wisconsin, over top of Lake Michigan, I started down the lake. Over the lake you were allowed to go full afterburner. I level off at 50,000 feet. I'm at 2.3 Mach. Right down the middle of the lake." Mach 2.3 is 1,750 mph.

"It just felt...different," said Jack Strank, another Bunker Hill alum. "Everything, even the sound was different. The speed. The responsiveness. It went like an arrow but it was steady like a brick. It was like God in heaven."

Tragedy on the runway

The planes crashed a lot. Between 1962 and 1970, 17 airmen based at Bunker Hill died in 11 separate Hustler crashes. Only once, the 1964 accident that killed Rocky Cervantes, were nuclear bombs aboard.

Cervantes' death happened during a training exercise. The runway was icy, his plane was sent skidding, likely from a jet blast from the plane in front throttling up. Its landing gear collapsed, its fuel tank ruptured and the plane caught fire. The pilot and the bombardier were quick to react. They opened their canopies, jumped to the ground and escaped with minor injuries.

Remnants of the destroyed airplane that carried five nuclear bombs in northern Indiana. A photo captures the scene on  Dec. 8, 1964, when a A B-58 Hustler, the worlds first supersonic bomber, crash while in line for takeoff at Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana. The jet was carrying 5 nuclear warheads which caught fire, but did not fully detonate.

But the location of the navigator's seat, between the other two seats, made Cervantes' exit more difficult. And the fire spread fast — the plane, on the ready at all times to reach the Soviet Union, carried a full load of fuel, 14,000 gallons of a highly flammable kerosene-gasoline blend.

"Rocky opened his canopy, stood up and looked around," said Strank, who was on the base that day and learned what happened from eye witnesses. "By then the whole thing was engulfed by flame, so he closed the canopy and ejected. He's just thinking, 'Get out of that flame,' and this was the only way out."

It's impossible to know for sure what Cervantes was thinking, but months earlier two of his friends from Bunker Hill suffered fatal burns in a Hustler crash. One lingered in the hospital two days, the other three. "I'm not going to burn up," Cervantes vowed to Anderson, Anderson recalled in a recent interview with the Indy Star.

Cervantes, enclosed in an "escape pod," surrounded by fire, ejected. He was shot into the air 100 feet. The parachute had no time to fill. The pod came down hard on the tarmac. Cervantes died quickly.

Indiana's nuclear bomb incident

Most people know nothing about Indiana's nuclear bomb incident, said Tom Kelley, a retired police officer from nearby Kokomo who volunteers at the Grissom Air Museum. The museum is on the grounds of Bunker Hill Air Force Base, which became Grissom Air Force Base following the death of Indiana-born astronaut Gus Grissom during a 1967 training accident. Today it's an air force reserve base.

Flight crew of doomed Hustler bomber, 1964

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The air force and the press played down the incident. An air force spokesman acknowledged for the first time that there were nuclear bombs in Indiana, but he insisted on the term nuclear "device." He said there was nothing to worry about. Five nuclear bombs engulfed in a roaring, 12-hour fire was a news story for just two days.

During the Cold War, when Americans feared nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Russians and so were poised 24/7 to deliver a death blow in return, accidents involving nuclear bombs happened with a frequency that today may seem alarming. 

Bunker Hill's was one of three such "Broken Arrow" mishaps in 1964 alone, and one of 32 that occurred between 1950 and 1980. (In some cases the bombs were never recovered, like the one that disappeared Sept. 25, 1959, while in the bomb bay of an out-of-control airplane that crashed into the Pacific Ocean about 100 miles west of the Washington-Oregon border.)

But none of the mishaps caused a nuclear detonation, according to the DoD report, because "it was a standard safety procedure during most operations to keep a capsule of nuclear material separate from the weapons" — so the bombs weren't armed, at least not most of the time.

But when involved in a major fire, the bombs did sometimes leak radioactivity. They did at Bunker Hill in December 1964.

The bombs themselves were gathered up and shipped to the Atomic Energy Commission. But what about the plane's radioactive wreckage? 

Radioactive

In the mid-1970s Kelley was in the air force, stationed at Bunker Hill, when he noticed something odd. In a remote section of the base's vast grounds was a wooded area that was absolutely, completely off limits — even to Kelley, and he worked base security. 

The area, about three acres, was surrounded by a high, chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire. Old, rusted signs said: "Controlled Area," and: "No Digging." Kelley wondered about it.

Two decades later came the answer. The base was being downsized, and some of its 2,200 acres were being parceled off for other uses (such as for Miami Correctional Facility, the state's largest prison). Some environmental cleanup was necessary, as it often is on old military bases. That remote wooded area, Kelley's fenced-in three acres, was found to be radioactive.

Workers from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and air force personnel came in to clean up. They started digging. They came upon airplane parts — landing gear, an engine, bits of escape pod, and so on. They called in aircraft historians from Ohio, who identified the parts as having come from a B-58 Hustler, serial number 60-116, Cervantes' plane.

The Pleczkos, Rick (left) and Shamaine, contemplate the B-58 Hustler with Tom Kelley.

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Kelley is fascinated with history and also with mystery. He used to watch "The Rockford Files," the TV show where James Garner plays a private eye who works a lot of cold cases. In 2013 Kelley self-published a who-done-it, "Guardmount," and used the nuclear bomb incident at Bunker Hill to set the stage. He dedicated the book to Capt. Manuel Cervantes.

Several years ago Shamaine Pleczko, who lives in Houston and hadn't been in Indiana since she was six months old, was Googling her father when she stumbled upon Kelley's book. She contacted Kelley, who as a board member of the nonprofit Grissom Air Museum was able to tell her quite a bit about her father's military service and everything about that fateful day. He told her about her father's ride, the extraordinary B-58 Hustler.

Only 116 of the planes were ever built before the concept was mothballed, in 1970. Most were sold for scrap metal. Eight survive, not as fliers but as museum pieces. One of them is at the Grissom Air Museum.  

Shamaine and her husband, Rick Pleczko, traveled to Grissom in 2017. "I'd been thinking more about my father," Shamaine said, "and I wanted to see the place where he'd passed, and where I was born. And I wanted to see the plane."

Grissom's Hustler is an impressive thing to behold, with its swept-back wings and missile-shaped fuselage. It's way bigger than a photo would suggest. It's the crown jewel of the museum's collection.

But it's parked outdoors and has been for three decades. The elements take a toll. The museum recently launched a capital campaign to raise money to build a structure that would enclose the Hustler to better preserve it. The building is expected to cost about $100,000.

The Pleczkos — she's a jewelry designer, he's a software executive — have pledged the first $50,000.