Eric Schlosser’s ‘Command and Control’

Yet nuclear weapons have never gone away.

True, the threat of a thermonuclear World War III has sharply diminished. But the U.S. still holds more than 4,500 nukes and Russia nearly that many, with several hundred more divided among the remainder of the world’s nuclear club. Many of those weapons, especially in the U.S. and Russia, are still on hair-trigger alert, ready to launch almost instantaneously.

True, we made it through the Cold War without a nuclear attack. But as Eric Schlosser points out in Command and Control, we may have been worrying about the wrong thing all along. Ultimately, the decision to take that step would be a conscious, deliberate act by the person whose finger is on the proverbial button, and (so far) human decency and morality have stayed that choice. What's not conscious or deliberate but instead wholly inevitable are the accidents, mishaps, and malfunctions that plague every complex human endeavor.

One dropped socket

The "Damascus Accident" mentioned in Schlosser’s subtitle refers to a 1980 incident at a Strategic Air Command missile base near Damascus, Arkansas, when a worker performing routine maintenance accidentally dropped a socket that fell 70 feet to puncture the thin skin of the Titan missile and start a fuel leak that threatened to cause a massive explosion— and possibly detonate a nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead. Throughout his book, Schlosser weaves a gripping account of the desperate attempt to contain that accident with a history of America's nuclear weapons establishment, from Los Alamos to the present.

It's a saga of lost hydrogen bombs, technical glitches, crossed signals, misguided policies, political infighting, and plain old human incompetence. Schlosser relates tales of Murphy's Law writ large, errors and random events that — but for timely intervention, great ingenuity and courage, and a generous amount of pure luck — might have detonated a nuclear weapon or even launched a nuclear war.

As its title implies, Schlosser’s book also examines the policies and philosophies of the military concept of "command and control" — who decides if, when, and how nuclear weapons are to be unleashed, and how do we prevent their unauthorized or accidental use? Throughout the Cold War, military brass struggled with the U.S. civilian leadership over those questions. Schlosser reveals that the issues were never really resolved, even with the introduction of "permissive action links" — devices that rendered nuclear warheads useless and inert unless a special code was entered. While these links were installed in most weapons based outside the U.S., such as in Western Europe, the Strategic Air Command and the rest of the military successfully resisted their adoption for most of the Cold War years. As a result, Schlosser notes, "There was nothing to stop the crew of a B-52 from dropping its hydrogen bombs on Moscow— except, perhaps, Soviet air defenses." And while America’s missile complexes were supposedly designed to render unauthorized launches impossible, missile crews could have easily circumvented the safety mechanisms and protocols at their whim.

Fortunately, much of what Schlosser so skillfully relates in Command and Control is now relegated to history.

False alarm, but…

But not all. In January 1995, a Norwegian research rocket placed Russian nuclear forces on full alert, with President Boris Yeltsin minutes away from ordering a retaliatory strike against the U.S. before a false alarm was declared. In August 2007, despite long-standing regulations against transporting nuclear weapons by air across the U.S., six nuclear-armed cruise missiles were mistakenly loaded aboard a B-52 bomber in North Dakota and flown to a Louisiana airbase, then sat unguarded on the tarmac for nine hours before anybody realized they were there.

Schlosser concedes that, despite all his accounts of accidents and near-disasters, "None of the roughly 70,000 nuclear weapons built by the United States since 1945 has ever detonated inadvertently or without proper authorization. The technological and administrative controls on those weapons have worked, however imperfectly.” On the other hand, he reminds us, "Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder."

This is the uneasy truth we must accept in order to live in a world with nuclear weapons. We can take steps to avoid disaster. But first, we must abandon our warm illusions of safety and learn from the mistakes of the past that Schlosser has so thoroughly chronicled.