Eric Schlosser has written an excellent book about the safety (or not) of nuclear weapons. It is a frightening ride through the past and into the future. A full review follows.
Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, has written a new book—Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, The Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. The book is remarkable in two ways, only one of them intended. For me, the unintended sub-text for this work is the that the book’s content are a strong argument that a relatively benevolent supreme being must be watching over Earthlings. She will allow Bosnia, Rwanda, and so much more. But, she seems to have decided that she can only take so much, or that the show is too enthralling to end, so she has used her powers to save us from blowing ourselves up and making large segments of the Earth uninhabitable for the next few millennia.
“Pshaw!” You may say. Okay, maybe you are more sophisticated and say “Really?” in that snobbish tone that shows a speaker that a person is not really asking a question. Instead, they are attempting to ascertain for how many generations your family has been inter-breeding in the backwoods hollow that bears the family name. Nonetheless, Schlosser’s book is the most convincing religious treatise I have read since … Okay, this is the only tract I have read that serves as the basis for a convincing argument for the existence of a supreme being.
That remarkable subtext is not discussed and solely derivative of what the author tells us is the book’s primary focus—how absolutely, undeniably, and truly insane we have been in our approach to handling our own weapons of mass destruction and how we have barely escaped small, or large, scale Armageddon’s an almost uncountable number of time by the oh-so thin hairs of our “chiny-chin-chins.” Being complacent after a time about the dangers of one’s occupation is not unusual; treating a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon with the same respect you show a ham sandwich (on white with Miracle Whip, lettuce and tomato) is, it seems to me, an entirely different enterprise.
Schlosser moves the reader through a number of different, but related topics. All of them are shocking and frightening, and (since we aren’t all dead) a few are somewhat humorous. One part of the work is a discussion of the history of nuclear technology. This is not grand theoretical physics; this is hardcore engineering. Sure, matter converts to energy, but how do we translate that into making these things go boom when and where we want them to go boom—and nowhere else at no other time? The first nuclear weapons were hand-crafted—as in crafted with what was at hand. For example, as investigators tried to re-construct how the first bombs were made (nobody really took notes) they discovered that at one point a worker used a Coca-Cola bottle to shape some of the metal parts needed for the bombs. We have no idea what would have happened if he were an RC Cola fan. Our first nuclear bombs are to today’s nuclear weapons what a garage band practice session is to a Rolling Stones stadium concert.
Another strand of fascinating information that Schlosser rolls out for us is use of nukes as an element in foreign policy. In one of the most bizarre instances of this process, a funny thing happened on the way to rattling our nukes in the post-WWII era, we didn’t have any nukes. You think you are surprised? How do you think Truman felt?
Part of this ongoing debate over how and when nukes could be used is the issue of who controls the use of nuclear weapons. At one point, we gave some field commanders the right to use nukes, if they couldn’t reach the President and felt that use was justified. We also put nukes in the hands of our allies or helped them build their own. During the coup attempt by French troops based in Algeria, French scientists engineered an impromptu “test” that destroyed the only nuclear weapon in the country. This occurred, of course, after one of the generals involved in the coup told the geeks that he thought he find some use for it and wanted them to preserve it for him.
At points, US commander received orders to incapacitate nuclear weapons on foreign soil if it was necessary to keep them out of the hands of local factions that might use them. I was going to write—use them in an inappropriate way—but that is nonsensical. What is an appropriate use for weapons that would turn much of the planet into radioactive cinders?
At a more global level, each of the armed services lusted after controls of our nukes and tried to wrestle that control from the arms of the civilians in the Atomic Energy Commission. The Air Force thought that the Strategic Air Command, the brain-child of General Curtis LeMay, gave them first call on nuclear command and control. Schlosser provides a wonderfully detailed description of the rise and fall of SAC and the Air Force as “the” answer to the Soviet’s nuclear threat. At the same time, the long timeline on a SAC strike was the basis for the Navy’s argument that their Polaris submarines gave them primacy in the world of nuclear holocausts. The Army wanted field commanders to have the ability to make independent decisions concerning the use of landmines, artillery shells, or Davy Crockett recoilless rifles armed with nuclear warheads. It is, somehow, not terribly heartening to know that our military leaders were courageous enough to engage in serious bureaucratic in-fighting to obtain the primary role in the destruction of the world as we know it.
Schlosser gives us a short course in nuclear technology and the strategic uses of nuclear weapons. Some of that material can be relatively dry, but he spruces it up by interleaving chapters about the nuclear “incident” in Damascus, Arkansas. A Titan II missile armed with our most powerful nuclear warhead exploded in its silo. The nuclear warhead did not detonate, but it was a horrific accident. In part, it was horrific because absolutely no one knew what was happening in the silo and what they might do to stop it. Also, it exposed how utterly unprepared the Air Force was for such an incident. The tale is spell-binding.
This excellent work has far too many lines of interesting information for a reviewer to fully consider. The discussion of LeMay and SAC is fascinating. The movement from one strategy of nuclear warfare to another over the years (e.g., graduated response, first-strike, minimal deterrence, mutually assured destruction) is incredibly interesting and totally frightening. Discovering that our first nuclear crisis was Berlin, not Cuba, is surprising. To learn that military leaders regularly supported a first strike strategy and were taken seriously by civilian policy makers is, to say the least, disturbing.
But, Schlosser main thesis is that we do not develop, produce, store, or handle our weapons of mass destruction in such a way that we insure against accidental or “inappropriate” detonations. This is the meat of the book, and it is bloody red. Below I list a few of the near-misses we experienced, most of which are discussed in much greater detail in the book. This list might make you consider the possibility of an at least marginally benevolent higher power:
•US Air Force reported 87 nuclear weapon accidents between 1950 and 957,
•In Morocco in 1958, a B-47 carrying an atomic weapon crashed while doing runway maneuvers,
•A few months after the Morocco incident, a B-47 dropped an atomic bomb into a family’s backyard in South Carolina,
•The Air Force reported that in training exercises in 1957, atomic weapons were inadvertently jettisoned once every 320 flights and that B-52s crashed about once every 20,000 miles of flight time,
•A fire in a Titan II silo killed 53 workers,
•In 1961, a B-52 dropped two nuclear weapons as it crashed in North Carolina,
•A B-47 carrying an atomic weapon caught fire on the runway at a base in Louisiana,
•A B-52 carrying two nuclear weapons was involved in a mid-air collided with a tanker and crashed,
•In New Jersey, a helium tank caught fire near a nuclear missile housed in a concrete shelter near 55 other missiles,
•During the Berlin crisis, SAC bombers were alerted to prepare for take-off because of the failure of a communication switch,
•A B-52 carrying two hydrogen bombs crashed in Maryland,
•In 1964, a B-58 carrying five hydrogen bombs slid off a runway and burst into flames, and
•on and on…..
However, you will note that almost all of Schlosser’s examples of errors are decades old and that all these accidents occurred without setting off a nuclear explosion. That seems heartening. But, the more recent events he catalogs in the book’s Epilogue are no less stunning than those earlier incidents. Also, nuclear accidents are like coin flips—the outcome of the last flip does not affect subsequent coin flips. But, over time, heads and tails will even out. What that means to us is that if there is an underlying likelihood of an accidental nuclear detonation, then that likelihood will eventually be realized.
Nuclear safety in the US has obviously improved over time. Unfortunately, our confidence in the US missile command has taken a few knocks this year. The two senior military officers in charge of our nuclear missile force have just been relieved of their duties because of a “lack of confidence” in their judgment and leadership. This comes with recent news that units in the missile command suffer from serious morale problems, and that some nuclear missile units have recently failed safety and security inspections.
Finally, even though we have behaved badly, we have escaped tragedy for over half a century. Will we be able to say the same for other nuclear powers? The list of countries with nuclear weapons gets longer far too frequently. It now includes the US, Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. What kind of command and control do you think we would find in Pakistan or North Korea? If we screw up so badly, do you really think any of these other nations will do better? Schlosser’s work has made me a firm believer that accidents involving nuclear WMDs, to twist an old aphorism, are just like busses. You miss one, just wait a bit, and another will come along.
This is a carefully researched, well-written book. It is also enormously frightening. You should read it and remember what the author tells us. Although we frequently forget our current reality, in the final lines of his work, Eric Schlosser paints a chilling picture of the WMD world in which we now live:
“…Right now thousands of missiles are hidden away, literally out of sight, topped with warheads and ready to go, awaiting the right electrical signal. They are a collective death wish, barely suppressed. Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder. They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial—and they work.”