Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser. 

3/5 rating. 485 pages.

Book #29 of 2019. Read July 23, 2023.

This book presents an array of near-misses in the history of nuclear weapons.

I just sat reading this for large sections literally with my mouth agape at the sheer luck that we haven’t blown ourselves to smithereens yet.

One of the luckiest misses was 2 hydrogen bombs that fell out of a plane in a crash that were each 4 megatons – each 250 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb! One was completely armed, though saved by a simple switch that miraculously stayed in the “safe” position. While the other bomb somehow did not explode even with the impact caused by its parachute not opening. As Eric says: “With strong northerly winds, the groundburst of that 4-megaton bomb in Goldsboro [NC] would have deposited lethal fallout over Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.”

In another instance, the US’s missile system “had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.” This was legitimately viewed as an all-out attack on the US and was only not followed up by a swift and overpowering response of hundreds of nuclear weapons sent at Russia because someone had the foresight to ask where the USSR’s First Secretary Khrushchev was, and he happened to be visiting the US.

This book scared the bejesus out of me in how simply we could have been wiped off of the earth by either accident, a mis-calculated attack, or a misunderstanding with the Soviets. I think the overarching theme of the book reflects General George Butler upon his thorough review of accidents and close-calls:

“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.”

This book was interesting in the idea of all of the incidents that have happened and learning about them, but it is really dense and not exactly easy-reading, which kept its rating from being higher.

Quotes:

“The nose cone on top of the Titan II was deep black, and inside it sat a W-53 thermonuclear warhead, the most powerful weapon ever carried by an American missile. The warhead had a yield of 9 megatons—about three times the explosive force of all the bombs dropped during the Second World War, including both atomic bombs.”

“In the Pacific War a different set of rules applied. The Japanese were considered racially inferior, often depicted as monkeys or vermin in American propaganda. The Japanese had attacked the United States without warning. They had treated Allied prisoners of war with brutality, employed slave labor, and launched suicide attacks instead of surrending. They had forced as many as two hundred thousand Korean women to serve as prostitutes in military brothels. They had killed almost one million Chinese civilians with chemical and biological weapons. They had killed millions of other civilians in China, Burma, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, war crimes driven by the Japanese belief in their own racial superiority.”

“About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 grams of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.”

“And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become ‘a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.’”

“The president was given the sole authority to decide how many atomic bombs the United States should have, when they should be handed over to the military, and whether they should be used against an enemy. One person now had the power to end the lives of millions, with a single command.”

“The ‘Baruch Plan’ called for the creation of a new agency, affiliated with the U.N., that would own or control ‘all atomic-energy activities potentially dangerous to world security.’ The agency would have the power to inspect nuclear facilities throughout the world, so that any attempt to make nuclear weapons could be discovered and severely punished. The new system of international control would be imposed in stages – and would eventually outlaw the manufacture, possession, or use of atomic bombs. The United States was willing to hand over its ‘winning weapons,’ Baruch said, but would require ‘a guarantee of safety’ stronger than mere words.”

“During the summer of 1946, some form of international agreement to outlaw the atomic bomb still seemed within reach. Although the Soviets complained that the United States was trying to prolong its nuclear monopoly, America’s defense policies were hardly those of an imperialist power seeking world domination. In fact, the United States was quickly dismantling its armed forces. The number of soldiers in the U.S. Army soon dropped from about 8 million to fewer than 1 million; the number of airplanes in the Army Air Forces fell from almost 80,000 to fewer than 25,000 and only one fifth of those planes were thought ready for action. Ships and tanks were permanently scrapped, and the defense budget was cut by almost 90 percent.”

“Nobody had bothered to save all the technical drawings necessary for building another Little Boy, the uranium-based, gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The exact configuration of the various parts had never been recorded on paper—an oversight that, amid the current shortage of plutonium, created some unease. As files and storerooms at Los Alamos were searched for information about Little Boy’s design, a machinist offered to demonstrate how one of the bomb’s aluminum tubes had been forged. He’d wrapped the metal around a Coke bottle.”

“In 1947 the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project decided that the final assembly of Mark 3 bombs must always occur outside the United States. The reliability of the weapon’s electronic, mechanical, and explosive components was unknown, and Bradbury thought that a crash during takeoff would pose ‘a very serious potential hazard to a large area in the vicinity.’”

“In 1952, [the Hydrogen-bomb] Mike’s thermonuclear explosion had deposited high levels of fallout in the ocean near the test site. The following year, New York milk tainted with Strontium-90 was linked to the detonation of fission devices at the Nevada test site.”

“Warned that if he didn’t put out his cigar, the bomber he was sitting in might explode, [General Curtis] Lemay replied: ‘It wouldn’t dare.’”

“According to that formula, the Army suggested that the acceptable probability of [an accident with] a hydrogen bomb detonating within the United States should be 1 in 100,000 during the course of a year. The acceptable risk of an atomic bomb going off was set at 1 in 25.”

“And if those weapons were removed from storage and loaded onto airplanes, the AFSWP study proposed some acceptable probabilities that the American public, had it been informed, might not have found so acceptable. The odds of a hydrogen bomb detonating by accident, every decade, would be one in five. And during that same period, the odds of an atomic bomb detonating by accident in the United States would be about 100 percent.”

“Two weeks after an accident that could have detonated a hydrogen bomb in Morocco, the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission issued a joint statement on weapon safety. ‘In reply to inquiries about hazards which may be involved in the movement of nuclear weapons,’ they said, ‘it can be stated with assurance that the possibility of an accidental nuclear explosion…is so remote as to be negligible.’”

“In preparation for the four-day [Campaign for Nuclear Armament] march, the artist Gerald Holtom designed a symbol for the antinuclear movement. ‘I drew myself,’ Holtom recalled, ‘the representative of an individual in despair, with palms outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad.’ He placed a circle around the self-portrait, an elongated stick figure, and created an image later known as the peace sign.”

“According to Iklé’s calculations, that meant SAC’s airborne alert would lead to roughly twelve crashes with nuclear weapons and seven bomb jettisons every year.”

“The Air Force’s demand for self-contained, inertial guidance systems played a leading role in the miniaturization of computers and the development of integrated circuits, the building blocks of the modern electronics industry. By 1962 all of the integrated circuits in the United States were being purchased by the Department of Defense, mainly for use in missile guidance systems.”

“The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.”

“‘War is never “cost-effective,”‘ Lemay argued. ‘People are killed. To them the war is total.’ At the press conference he stressed that the United States should always try to avoid armed conflict, ‘but when you get in it, get in it with both feet and get it over with as soon as you can.’”

“And a study of abnormal environments commissioned by Sandia soon found that at least 1,200 nuclear weapons had been involved in ‘significant’ incidents and accidents between 1950 and March 1968.”

“Eager to defend the civilian control of nuclear weapons from military encroachment, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara had fought hard to ensure that only the president could make the ultimate decision. But they hadn’t considered the possibility that the president might be clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily – like Richard Nixon, during his final weeks in office.”

“Over the next five years, America’s defense budget would almost double. And the arms race with the Soviet Union would be deliberately accelerated—out of a belief that the United States could win it. Reagan opposed not only détente, but every arms control agreement that the United States had signed with the Soviet Union.”

#military #book #nuclearweapons #ericschlosser #damascus #nuclearaccidents #themoreyouknow #reading

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