Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. 8:30 PM. A B-52 is taking off with its nuclear weapons load during a routine training exercise. After a few seconds, the pilot shouts into his headset: “Terminate! Terminate! Terminate!” The navigator, under these circumstances, should open the door to evacuate the rest of the crew, but in this case the gunner had already done so and was already running like hell across the runway. One wing of the plane is engulfed in flames. The B-52 is carrying eight 200-kton SRAMs and four Mark-28 thermonuclear bombs. The crew escapes. Engine number 5 is on fire. Luckily, the wind blows the flames toward the tail of the plane, away from the fuel-filled wing and, above all, away from the bomb bay containing tens of millions of tons of nuclear explosive. Tim Griffis, one of the firefighters with extensive B-52 experience, arrives on the scene and offers to go into the cockpit to try to close the fuel valve and activate the auxiliary battery to put out the fire, even in the midst of the smoke. The attempt succeeds.
