Eric Schlosser

Presents a minute-by-minute account of an H-bomb accident that nearly caused a nuclear disaster, examining other near misses and America's growing susceptibility to a catastrophic event.

Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

Command and Control

Dana Kraft

This book was fascinating, depressing and chilling. I feel like I should get down on my knees and thank God that no US nuclear weapon has accidentally detonated. I like the way that the book is structured - it weaves a lot of history around the incident in Damascus. The early chapters about the history of strategic bombing in Germany and Japan were difficult to read. Even understanding the justification - and maybe even agreeing with it - it's hard to read about that much death and destruction. 

My favorite quote is from Charles Perrow "Our ability to organize is no match for the inherent hazards of some of our organized activities." I totally believe that, and it applies to many more systems than nuclear weapons.

This is a great nonfiction book.

Lloyd Dalton

"At times I simply could not believe what I was being shown and told, causing me to doubt my own comprehension."

- William Odom, 3-star army General and former director of the NSA, on the details of US nuclear war strategy.

Bryan Alexander

Dropping a nuclear weapon was never a good idea. (168)
Command and Control is a far more interesting book than it may seem. At first glance Schlosser's topic is fairly technical, even rarefied: safety problems for atomic weapons during the Cold War. And yet I* couldn't put the book down without a struggle, and read parts of it out loud to my family.

What makes this book so good? To begin with, Schlosser creates a nice narrative structure, intertwining two timelines, big and small. The macro story concerns atomic bombs and their control mechanisms from 1946 to the end of the Cold War, and a little beyond. Those mechanisms are both technological and social, including ever-advanced devices and nearly continuous political struggles between military and civilian authorities. The micro story focuses on one single event, the 1980 explosion of a Titan II missile in Damascus, Arkansas. Command and Control switches back and forth between these accounts very neatly, using each to inform and balance the other. Every grand history chapter sheds more light on what made the Damascus incident occur. Each Arkansas detail humanizes the big picture.

Another appealing aspect of the book is the way it uses atomic weapon safety to offer a fascinating new look at the Cold War. Certain usually reviled figured appear in a sane, even positive light in this context, like Curtis LeMay and Robert McNamara. Eisenhower emerges as a deeply conflicted steward of humanity's fate, agonizing about the shambling weapons edifice he inherited and grew. This helps set up his famous farewell speech, warning about the military-industrial complex. 

Some of these retelling are shocking, like president Truman's discovery that the United States had at most one (1) functioning atomic bomb - this, after Truman had promulgated a global Cold War strategy predicted on a nuclear deterrent! Kennedy's 1960 missile gap campaign theme gets turned inside out. There wasn't one, after all, but the New Frontier administration eagerly ramped up its nuclear missile capacity, and then gave the world mutually assured destruction (MAD).

Above all, the book is scary as hell. Schlosser manages the neat trick of making the specter of global thermonuclear war even more terrifying by revealing just how risky was the weapon stock. I was fascinated by how the top-secret Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) spooked the politicians and military leaders who learned of it.

The real problems facing America's leadership in trying to actually wage an atomic war loom quite large. Again and again Schlosser finds weapons likely to fail, rockets who keep missing targets, and the titular command and control systems collapsing all over the place. For example, in the early 1970s, A decade after the Kennedy administration recognized the problem, despite the many billions of dollars that they had spent to fix it, the command-and-control system of the United States was still incapable of managing a nuclear war. (356)
Command and Control does many things right as a nonfiction book addressing a difficult subject. It doesn't adopt contemporary classic political postures, but depicts them in the weapons context. For example, Schlosser carefully notes the way 1950s Democrats thumped Eisenhower for being too soft on atomic offensive war (!). And it zeroes in on the many weird, fascinating, and chilly ways atomic war shaped language. "Safe" becomes a verb, as in "safing a bomb." The Air Force comes up with "clobber factor" to describe "the rate at which low-flying aircraft were likely to crash due to unknown causes" (205). A bomb's safety lock becomes a "Permissive Action Link", or PAL (265). One aircraft mission has the acronym TACAMO, which stands for Take Charge And Move Out (273). Another safety mechanism sounds like a party game: weak-link/strong link (331).

Schlosser writes with excellent clarity on a technical subject. He does a fine job of introducing terms gradually, then repeating them at a reasonable amplitude in order to educate the reader. Ever so often his prose elevates just a little, like the memorable closing lines:
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. (485)

Schlosser has a keen eye for primary source material, pulling out terrific quotes. For example, this Langdon Winner koan for our time:
Our ability to organize does not match the inherent hazards of some of our organized activities. (460)

Or this observation from General George Lee Butler, which would make a fine epigraph for the book:
I came to fully appreciate the truth... we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion. (457)

Schlosser also provides tiny but intriguing details, like the US Air Force publishing "a compendium of more than eighty thousand potential targets located throughout the world" entitled with admirable brevity Bombing Encyclopedia (204). Or consider the surrealism of deploying "forty-two pigs dressed in U.S. Army uniforms" - why? Because their "skin would respond to thermal radiation in a manner similar to that of human skin" at a bomb test (326).

What keeps me from awarding it five stars? My major issue was that the book didn't address the Soviet Union nearly enough. Obviously its focus on the United States prevents equal treatment of the USSR, but all too often events appear without the Muscovite context. Crises, for example, *always* occurred with an eye to the Soviet response; this doesn't show up often enough. The Soviet missile development strategy was crucial for driving the US program, but drops out of sight. This kind of context is obviously much easier to offer in the post-Soviet era, despite the recent chill in US-Russian relations.

Consider that a half-star demerit, and a recommendation to all readers. Especially to you younger generation who were fortunate enough to grow up after 1991.

*A book like this is irresistible to a child of the Cold War like myself. Born 1967, I grew up thinking hard about nuclear weapons and the likelihood of atomic devastation. As a teenager I pored over stories of nuclear annihilation. A friend and I spent quality time with a CIA-published list of Soviet missile targets in the US, carefully determining which warheads were likeliest to kill us. I remember panicking at Reagan's election in 1980, believing the odds were great that we'd all be annihilated. I read all the atomic war stories I could, and saw all the movies.

Ivan Shiel

Garrett Jansen

From famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, comes Command and Control a ground-breaking account of the management of nuclear weapons A groundbreaking account of accidents, near-misses, extraordinary heroism and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: how do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? Schlosser reveals that this question has never been resolved, and while other headlines dominate the news, nuclear weapons still pose a grave risk to mankind. At the heart of Command and Control lies the story of an accident at a missile silo in rural Arkansas, where a handful of men struggled to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States. Schlosser interweaves this minute-by-minute account with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policymakers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can't be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Looking at the Cold War from a new perspective, Schlosser offers history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with men who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. It reveals how even the most brilliant of minds can offer us only the illusion of control. Audacious, gripping and unforgettable, Command and Control is a tour de force of investigative journalism. Eric Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness, as well as the co-author of a children's book, Chew on This. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, the Nation, and Vanity Fair. Two of his plays, Americans (2003) and We the People (2007), have been produced in London. 'A work with the multi-layered density of an ambitiously conceived novel' John Lloyd, Financial Times 'Command and Control is how non-fiction should be written ... By a miracle of information management, Schlosser has synthesized a huge archive of material, including government reports, scientific papers, and a substantial historical and polemical literature on nukes, and transformed it into a crisp narrative covering more than fifty years of scientific and political change. And he has interwoven that narrative with a hair-raising, minute-by-minute account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in 1980, which he renders in the manner of a techno-thriller' New Yorker 'The strength of Schlosser's writing derives from his ability to carry a wealth of startling detail on a confident narrative path' Ed Pilkington, Guardian 'Disquieting but riveting ... fascinating ... Schlosser's readers (and he deserves a great many) will be struck by how frequently the people he cites attribute the absence of accidental explosions and nuclear war to divine intervention or sheer luck rather than to human wisdom and skill. Whatever was responsible, we will clearly need many more of it in the years to come' Walter Russell Mead, New York Times

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

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