Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety Kindle Edition

When Mr. Schlosser initially contacted me several years ago I was skeptical with respect to what his intentions were. Other stories and articles have been written about the incident at Damascus, AR. To many of us who experienced it on site that night it seemed there was no one who "got it right".

To put to rest any concerns I had I contacted Al Childers after learning he had spoken to Mr. Schlosser. I have always had the highest regard for Al and his opinions; hence I participated in the project. After leaving Little Rock AFB we both were transferred to Vandenberg AFB and worked in the same building.

I appreciate the integrity of Eric Schlosser who did what any good writer, or investigator, should do. He collected the facts and reported them, how refreshing is that in this era where so many run off and write, or report, half cocked. This entire book was researched in more detail than I ever imagined. Although I was there that night Mr. Schlosser reported things I didn't know simply because I didn't have the right or need.

I have read several reviews in which the writers refer to the incident at Searcy, AR as being more serious. I would like to take this opportunity to simply say that while the loss of life is never to be taken lightly, the circumstances between these two accidents were as different as night and day. Sometimes it seems those writing the reviews forget that the Titan II at Searcy was not on alert meaning it had no warhead. The Titan II at Damascus was on full alert and armed. Mr. Schlosser got it right and was not swayed by the loss of life vs. the reason for his book!

Several of my fellow airmen who went back on site that night have passed away. I hope we, as a nation, never forget what they did that night while the nation slept, unaware of the risks those men were taking. I hope their families will have an even greater appreciation for what they did to try and save a resource as well as each other's lives. Finally thank you Eric Schlosser for getting it right and Chuck Wilson for the countless hours he spent with me fact checking.

D. Green

Command and Control reads like a techno-thriller. Eric Schlosser takes the most destructive and scary nuclear accident in American history and uses it as a needle to thread a narrative about the sloppiness and inflexibility of America's nuclear weapons program that almost guaranteed that nuclear weapons accidents were fated to occur. That we haven't had a vast, deadly, nuclear weapons incident is due mainly to luck and God - and mostly to God according to some weapons analysts.

The scariest incident occurred in 1980 when a Titan II missile exploded in its silo in Damascus, Arkansas (back when Bill Clinton was governor) and blew a live nuclear warhead over 200 yards into a ditch. He tells this story in detail through eyewitness accounts and good research and interrupts the story throughout the book with sections on nuclear weapons history, other incidents, and a superb explanation of American and Soviet nuclear strategies in the Cold War.

Schlosser shows how ramshackle the atomic weapons program really was and how and why these weapons were eventually removed from civilian control under the Atomic Energy Commission and turned over to the military (and it's not because the military were more competent). He traces this history back from the 1940s right up to the Obama administration's lukewarm proposal to ban all nuclear weapons.

He shows that we have come through some pretty tough stuff in atomic history and we are a little further from the brink - but we should be very afraid when we consider that India, Pakistan, China, and the other members of the nuclear club may have less ability or incentive to try and contain atomic weaponry as we finally learned to do.

He doesn't preach or analyze. He is a brilliant reporter and has written a gripping and fascinating story. And it's all true.

Think America's nuclear arsenal has always been pristinely safe? Thing again. In this riveting and meticulously researched book Eric Schlosser gives us a report card on accidents with nuclear weapons that have been periodically taking place since the weapons were introduced into a warring world in 1945. The book centers its narrative around the Damascus accident of 1980 in which an explosion in a Titan II ICBM housed in Damascus, Arkansas killed one and injured about twenty others. In Schlosser's capable hands, the event becomes a lens through which we can view the inherent frailty and risk in complex engineering endeavors masked by layers of bureaucracy. The volume is a real page turner which kept me awake late into the night. It is superbly researched and is packed with fascinating details about the workings of both nuclear weapons and the very human command and control infrastructure which oversees them. Some of the reviewers here are not too happy about the digressions, but in my opinion the digressions do a great job of recreating the history and the times leading up to the event. In addition all the facts are supported by an extensive bibliography running to more than a hundred pages.

This book is really two books in one, and both parts are equally gripping. The first part describes the Damascus accident in gory technical and human detail, starting from the time that a dropped socket blew a hole in the skin of the Titan II missile, spraying fuel around the missile and creating a dangerous buildup of fuel and oxidizer. What is scary is that the accident resulted from an honest, relatively trivial mistake that anybody could have made; in the parlance of systems engineers it was only a "normal accident". Schlosser goes into great detail describing the cast of characters, from military generals and newspaper reporters to engineers and missile maintenance personnel who were involved in monitoring the event and preventing it from getting out of hand. Many of the younger technicians were straight out of high school, and while they were patriotic, brave and dedicated, one of the points that Schlosser makes is that not all of them were trained sufficiently to appreciate the nuances of maintaining one of America's nuclear linchpins. The accident itself was emblematic of what can easily go wrong with a complex system that may work well 99% of the time but can turn potentially catastrophic even if it suffers a 1% error rate. The exact details of the incident were not disclosed to the public but the account makes it clear that the explosion could have been much worse and led to a dispersal of the nuclear material in the warhead into the countryside. In fact the theme of unnecessary and pervasive secrecy is a constant thread through the book, and it's worth thinking about how the government and private corporations have constructed a potentially calamitous system funded by taxpayer dollars whose failures are concealed and successes are exaggerated.

The Damascus accident however is only one of the two themes running through the book, and the chapters on it alternate with others. The second equally fascinating part takes us on a journey through America's nuclear weapons complex, describing the weapons that were deemed to be so necessary to maintain the peace. It is necessary to understand this history in order to put the Damascus accident into context. Many topics are covered exceedingly well; among them, the safing and arming mechanisms in bombs, the history and progress of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) as the centerpiece of America's nuclear policy, the roles of a few key individuals and laboratories (Sandia National Laboratory is especially singled out) in recognizing and addressing flaws in weapons designs, the development of novel strategic and tactical nukes and their delivery systems, the ever-changing nuclear policies orchestrated by politicians and civilian bureaucrats and - in what's a ubiquitous theme in the book - the constant bickering between the different branches of the military regarding ownership of nuclear weapons. The Air Force especially comes out looking bad, constantly angling for nuclear ownership and opposing safety measures like locks for fear of malfunction.

But the most disturbing part of the book concerns a litany of nuclear accidents going back all the way to the dawn of the atomic age. Some "accidents" simply related to human error that could have led to destruction; there are examples of important messages being entrusted to bike messengers during the Cuban Missile Crisis, rocket launches being mistaken for nuclear missile launches and lower-level officers failing to convey important notifications from rival countries to higher-ups. The stories all underscore how much can go wrong with a complex technical and human system. The Damascus event itself came on the heels of an even worse Titan II fire in 1965 that killed 53 people. The rogues' gallery of nuclear accidents involved everything from scientists dying during tests of criticality of nuclear materials to dozens of incidents involving the accidental detonation of the explosives surrounding a nuclear core, most often when the package was jettisoned from a malfunctioning bomber. Some of the scarier stories include warheads burning in crashed airplane fires for hours and being reduced to melted slag. There are also cases where people lost track of the number and locations of nuclear weapons for various time periods. In addition many bombs and missiles were woefully unsecured during the early parts of the Cold War, especially in NATO countries where they were often guarded by lone guards toting rifles. It took until the 60s when secure locks were finally installed on many of these devices. Thankfully none of these lapses let to the detonation of an actual nuclear core (and this is a record the country should be proud of), but the key message that Schlosser sends is that the gap between what was and what could have been was frighteningly thin. As officials themselves admitted, catastrophic accidents were prevented by dumb luck as much as anything else.

Schlosser ends the book with an account of America's contemporary nuclear arsenal which still includes thousands of bombs and hundreds of missiles on alert. The end of the Cold War has led in some cases to lackluster management of an aging nuclear complex. It is also increasingly hard to find the kind of well-trained technicians and engineers that were a mainstay of the nuclear weapons buildup during the Cold War. But the real question that Schlosser asks is why all this is necessary, if it's worth having so many thousands of nukes when the nature of conflict has radically changed. In researching the book Schlosser has talked to hundreds of technicians, engineers, defense officials and politicians and almost all of them think that the nuclear arsenal should be much smaller than what it is. The real take home message here is that when an exceedingly complicated technical system becomes wrapped in layers of bureaucracy, accidents are just waiting to happen, especially when there is a perfect requirement for safety entrusted to imperfect human beings. President Kennedy really captured the gist of the matter when he talked about a "nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness". In connecting these memorable words to the Damascus accident, Schlosser's book tells us why we should get rid of this sword as soon as we can.