Victim of Blast Was Defense Expert

In the end, John L. Bower died doing his best to prepare for the worst.

The 85-year-old former national defense expert was killed Sunday when an explosion ripped through an underground bomb shelter behind his Santa Monica home.

Bower, who helped develop this country’s multiple independent reentry vehicle, or MIRV, missile system and later worked as a security consultant with Rand Corp. before the Pentagon Papers controversy ended his career, was doing electrical maintenance work in the 38-year-old, steel-walled shelter at the time of the blast.

Authorities have said the explosion apparently was caused by a leak from a propane tank that fueled the shelter’s electrical generator. Bower’s family, however, suspects that hydrogen gas from batteries in the shelter triggered the explosion.

In any case, his son said, Bower died doing what he loved.

“He was a dedicated engineer,” Sam Bower said Monday. “He went out with a bang--you know, in a real merciful sense.”

Bower, a West Point graduate with a doctorate in electrical engineering from Yale, designed and built his 25-foot-long shelter after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. That 13-day showdown between the Soviet Union and the United States over the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba is considered the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.

His engineering and design work on World War II ship and aircraft weapons-firing systems, as well as his Cold War-era work on U.S. missiles, had convinced Bower of this country’s vulnerability to attack.

Built 15 feet underground in his backyard, Bower’s bomb shelter was equipped with a propane-powered generator housed in a separate underground container. Inside, it had its own miniature sewage-disposal system.

It also was outfitted with radio equipment that would allow outside contact--Bower was an amateur radio operator--and enough food and water for as many as 12 people to survive for six weeks, family members said.

Bower, who apparently was killed instantly, was found in front of the shelter’s electrical circuit box when Santa Monica firefighters entered the underground chamber after the 4 p.m. blast.

The explosion ripped off a quarter-inch-thick steel hatch cover and blew it into a yard three houses away, according to investigators.

“It was an enormous blast. I thought it was a plane crash,” said Sam Bower, who was inside the family’s home at the time.

“I went and searched for him and found that the shelter had exploded. I tried to determine if my father was on the property. I checked and found his bicycle, I looked in his room and called the First Presbyterian Church to see if he was there but couldn’t get through. Then I called 911.”

In the decades after building the shelter, Bower had descended into it several times a week to make certain it was operable. In recent years, he had checked the underground chamber almost daily.

Bower moved to the home in the 500 block of 24th Street in 1960. The two-story dwelling was built in 1912 by a horticulturist who introduced the street’s signature pine trees.

Construction of the shelter in 1963 raised few eyebrows in the neighborhood. A flurry of bomb shelter construction took place throughout the Southland, with Bower sharing his construction blueprints with other homeowners.

“A few people asked if we were building a pool and we said, ‘No, we’re building a bomb shelter,’ ” Sam Bower said. “We got kidded about it at school. It was kind of a plaything for us.”

Bower allowed his three sons to take friends inside the shelter. “But there was no monkey business when we were in there,” Sam Bower said.

As Bower was building his shelter, he was helping design the MIRV missile system.

“He obviously wasn’t a head-for-the-hills, retreat-from-civilization person. For him the shelter was a patriotic statement. He was willing to put energy into his feeling that in the event the unthinkable happened and there was nuclear war that people could survive,” said son David Bower.

Bower worked as an electrical engineer at North American Aviation’s Autonetics division in Downey, which in 1964 began a joint venture with Rocketdyne in Canoga Park on a multiple independent reentry vehicle project. The result was the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile. The so-called MIRV advanced the arms race by equipping a single missile with multiple warheads, capable of hitting different targets.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Bower was a Rand consultant. At the time, the Santa Monica think tank also was involved in MIRV system research.

According to Bower’s family, he quit Rand after fellow Rand worker Daniel Ellsberg released the top-secret Pentagon Papers, which told of top-level U.S. miscalculation and deception over the war in Vietnam.

“My dad thought it was inappropriate that Ellsberg took these documents and published them and nothing was done by Rand to reprimand him,” David Bower, of Fallbrook, said Monday.

“He brought it to the president and board of Rand. They chose to do nothing about it,” Bower said. “He chose to leave and that basically ended his career. That’s one of the memories I have of my dad that made me proud of him.”

Bower taught briefly at UCLA and worked as an independent advisor for a time before turning to an investment career.

In recent years, after the death of his wife, Georgianne, Bower had been a familiar figure as he rode his bicycle to church, and elsewhere.

Along with sons Samuel and David, Bower is survived by his son, John Jr., of Oakland. Plans for Bower’s funeral and a memorial service at the Santa Monica First Presbyterian Church are pending.

But the backyard symbol of the Cold War is finished, David Bowersaid.

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Bomb Shelter Explosion

An 85-year-old man was killed in an explosion of uncertain origin while he was doing electrical maintenance work in a bomb shelter in his Santa Monica backyard.

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The explosion tore the lid off the entrance to the shelter. It landed in a yard three houses away.

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The ladder leading down to the underground shelter was blown into a nearby pine tree.

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Researched by MATT MOODY / Los Angeles Times

Source: Santa Monica Fire Department

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Times staff writer Peter Pae contributed to this story.