Command and Control

by Eric Schlosser

Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. Leonard Cohen

The Devil’s Alternative, by Frederick Forsyth,

“We tried that once with Hitler,” Forrestal said. “There are no returns on appeasement.”

The Mark 3 was considered too dangerous to be flown, fully assembled, over American soil. But no safety restrictions were imposed on flights of the bomb over Great Britain.

During the same week that Kennedy appealed for an end to the arms race at the United Nations, he met with a handful of military advisers at the White House to discuss launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union.

American tanks were sent to Checkpoint Charlie as a show of strength. Soviet tanks appeared there at about five in the evening on the twenty-seventh. The British soon deployed two antitank guns to support the Americans, while all the French troops in West Berlin remained safely in their barracks.