"That was enough to cause me to get dressed pretty quickly," Hicks recalled. 5, 1964, he was only 20 years old, and the cryptic statement from his team chief was the only information he was given. When Hicks was sent to the accident on Dec. The report listed the accident as the nation's first involving a Minuteman missile.įifty-three years after he responded to a nuclear-missile accident near Vale, Bob Hicks returned to the site of the former accident and also visited the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site near Wall.įurther details were reported publicly for the first time, drawn from documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the Rapid City Journal and others, and from Hicks himself, who is now 73 years old and living in Cibolo, Texas. The accident was not disclosed to the public until years later, when a government report on accidents with nuclear weapons included seven sentences about it. The courageous actions Hicks took that night and over the next several days were not publicized. The blast popped off the missile's cone -the part containing the thermonuclear warhead -and sent it on a 75-foot fall to the bottom of the 80-foot-deep silo. Hicks eventually learned that a screwdriver used by another airman caused a short circuit that resulted in an explosion. "The warhead," the team chief said, "is no longer on top of the missile." It was the chief of his missile maintenance team, who dispatched Hicks to an incident at an underground silo. (AP) - Bob Hicks was spending a cold December night in his barracks 53 years ago at Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City when the phone rang.
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