Command and Control Quotes

“For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “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.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“Even if the locking and unlocking mechanisms worked flawlessly, use of the weapons would depend on effective code management. If only a few people were allowed to know the code, then the death of those few or an inability to reach them in an emergency could prevent the weapons from being unlocked. But if the code was too widely shared, the locks would offer little protection against unauthorized use. The”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

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

“Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) planes would quickly get off the ground, climb steeply, and send an emergency war order on a very-low-frequency radio, using an antenna five miles long. SAC began to develop a Post Attack Command and Control System. It would rely on airborne command posts, a command post on a train, a command post at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and a command post, known as The Notch, inside Bare Mountain, near Amherst, Massachusetts. The”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. The”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“one crucial fact must be kept in mind: none of the roughly seventy thousand 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 at times—and countless people, military and civilian, deserve credit for that remarkable achievement. Had a single weapon been stolen or detonated, America’s command-and-control system would still have attained a success rate of 99.99857 percent. But nuclear weapons are the most dangerous technology ever invented. Anything less than 100 percent control of them, anything less than perfect safety and security, would be unacceptable. And if this book has any message to preach, it is that human beings are imperfect.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Nuclear weapons may well have made deliberate war less likely,” Sagan now thought, “but the complex and tightly coupled nuclear arsenal we have constructed has simultaneously made accidental war more likely.” Researching The Limits of Safety left him feeling pessimistic about our ability to control high-risk technologies. The fact that a catastrophic accident with a nuclear weapon has never occurred, Sagan wrote, can be explained less by “good design than good fortune.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Dangerous systems usually required standardized procedures and some form of centralized control to prevent mistakes. That sort of management was likely to work well during routine operations. But during an accident, Perrow argued, “those closest to the system, the operators, have to be able to take independent and sometimes quite creative action.” Few bureaucracies were flexible enough to allow both centralized and decentralized decision making, especially in a crisis that could threaten hundreds or thousands of lives. And the large bureaucracies necessary to run high-risk systems usually resented criticism, feeling threatened by any challenge to their authority. “Time and time again, warnings are ignored, unnecessary risks taken, sloppy work done, deception and downright lying practiced,” Perrow found. The instinct to blame the people at the bottom not only protected those at the top, it also obscured an underlying truth. The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The Redstone often carried a 4-megaton warhead but couldn’t fly more than 175 miles. The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The SIOP’s damage and casualty estimates were conservative. They were based solely on blast effects. They excluded the harm that might be caused by thermal radiation, fires, or fallout, which were difficult to calculate with precision. Within three days of the initial attack, the full force of the SIOP would kill about 54 percent of the Soviet Union’s population and about 16 percent of China’s population—roughly 220 million people. Millions more would subsequently die from burns, radiation poisoning, exposure. The SIOP was designed for a national emergency, when the survival of the United States was at stake, and the decision to launch the SIOP would carry an almost unbearable weight. Once the SIOP was set in motion, it could not be altered, slowed, or stopped.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“But Project 56 revealed that a nuclear detonation wasn’t the only danger that a weapon accident might pose. The core of the Genie contained plutonium—and when it blew apart, plutonium dust spread through the air. The risks of plutonium exposure were becoming more apparent in the mid-1950s. Although the alpha particles emitted by plutonium are too weak to penetrate human skin, they can destroy lung tissue when plutonium dust is inhaled. Anyone within a few hundred feet of a weapon accident spreading plutonium can inhale a swiftly lethal dose. Cancers of the lung, liver, lymph nodes, and bone can be caused by the inhalation of minute amounts. And the fallout from such an accident may contaminate a large area for a long time. Plutonium has a half-life of about twenty-four thousand years. It remains hazardous throughout that period, and plutonium dust is hard to clean up. “The problem of decontaminating the site of [an] accident may be insurmountable,” a classified Los Alamos report noted a month after the Genie’s one-point safety test, “and it may have to be ‘written off’ permanently.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Stan Spray, a Sandia engineer who burned, crushed, and routinely tortured nuclear weapon components to discover their flaws”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The Snark eventually ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the Amazonian rain forests of Brazil.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“You can’t have this kind of war,” Eisenhower said at a national security meeting a couple of years later. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“A country with fewer atomic bombs than its adversary had an especially strong incentive to launch an attack out of the blue. And for that reason, among others, a number of high-ranking American officers argued that the United States should bomb the Soviet Union before it obtained any nuclear weapons. General”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“What deters is not the capabilities and intentions we have, but the capabilities and intentions the enemy thinks we have. The central objective of a deterrent weapons system is, thus, psychological. The mission is persuasion.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Secrecy is essential to the command and control of nuclear weapons. Their technology is the opposite of open-source software. The latest warhead designs can’t be freely shared on the Internet, improved through anonymous collaboration, and productively used without legal constraints.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Kennedy thought that his commanders at SAC had made a series of mistakes—the decision to evacuate the control center, the refusal to open the silo door and vent the fuel vapor, the endless wait to reenter the complex, the insistence upon using the access portal instead of the escape hatch, the order to turn on the fan. Worst of all was the feeling that he and Livingston had risked their lives for nothing—and then been abandoned. Livingston had lain on the ground for more than an hour, without his helmet, inhaling oxidizer, before anyone came to help. And the delay in sending a helicopter was incomprehensible.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The drug use at Homestead was suspected after a fully armed Russian MiG-17 fighter plane, flown by a Cuban defector, landed there unchallenged, while Air Force One was parked on a nearby runway.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The Army, however, found ways to adapt. It lobbied hard for atomic artillery shells, atomic antiaircraft missiles, atomic land mines.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Plutonium has a half-life of about twenty-four thousand years. It remains hazardous throughout that period, and plutonium dust is hard to clean up.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Strontium-90 is a soft metal, much like lead, with a radioactive half-life of 29.1 years. It is usually present in the fallout released by thermonuclear explosions. When strontium-90 enters the soil, it’s absorbed by plants grown in that soil—and by the animals that eat those plants. Once inside the human body, strontium-90 mimics calcium, accumulates in bone, and continues to emit radiation, often causing leukemia or bone cancer. Strontium-90 poses the greatest risk to children and adolescents, whose bones are still growing. Along with cesium-137, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 30 years, it may contaminate agricultural land for generations.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“THE COMMANDER AND the deputy commander at every Titan II site were issued .38 caliber revolvers, in case an intruder penetrated the underground complex or a crew member disobeyed orders.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The possibility of any nuclear explosion occurring as a result of an accident involving either impact or fire is virtually non-existent,” Secretary of Defense Wilson assured the public. His press release about the Genie didn’t mention the risk of plutonium contamination. It did note, however, that someone standing on the ground directly beneath the high-altitude detonation of a Genie would be exposed to less radiation than “a hundredth of a dose received in a standard (medical) X-ray.” To prove the point, a Genie was set off 18,000 feet above the heads of five Air Force officers and a photographer at the Nevada test site. The officers wore summer uniforms and no protective gear. A photograph, taken at the moment of detonation, shows that two of the men instinctively ducked, two shielded their eyes, and one stared upward, looking straight at the blast. “It glowed for an instant like a newborn sun,” Time magazine reported, “then faded into a rosy, doughnut-shaped cloud.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. And as a final act of defiance, SAC demonstrated the importance of code management to the usefulness of any coded switch. The combination necessary to launch the missiles was the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000. Peurifoy”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Although the original plans were scaled down, the completed bunker had miles of underground roads, accommodations for the prime minister and hundreds of other officials, a BBC studio, a vault where the Bank of England’s gold reserves could be stored, and a pub called the Rose & Crown. •”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Andropov’s concerns were heightened by the Reagan administration’s top secret psychological warfare program, designed to spook and confuse the Kremlin. American naval exercises were staged without warning near important military bases along the Soviet coastline; SAC bombers entered Soviet airspace and then left it, testing the air defenses. The”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“McMahon predicted that “total power in the hands of total evil will equal destruction.” The”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety