Command and Control

by Eric Schlosser

General Orvil Anderson, commander of the Air University, publicly endorsed an attack on the Soviets. “I don’t advocate preventive war,” Anderson told a reporter. “I advocate the shedding of illusions.” He thought that Jesus Christ would approve of dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union: “I think I could explain to Him that I had saved civilization.” Anderson was suspended for the remarks.

Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, “should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs.”

“It will be the cheapest thing we ever did,” Major General Earle E. Partridge said. “Expend the crew, expend the bomb, expend the airplane all at once. Kiss them good-bye and let them go.”

Nevertheless, Harmon saw no realistic alternative to the current war plan. The atomic blitz was “the only means of rapidly inflicting shock and serious damage”

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.” 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.

If one of the B-29s crashed during takeoff, the RAF base, as well as neighboring towns, might be obliterated.

Two weeks after the president’s decision was publicly announced, Albert Einstein read a prepared statement about the hydrogen bomb on national television. He criticized the militarization of American society, the intimidation of anyone who opposed it, the demands for loyalty and secrecy, the “hysterical character” of the nuclear arms race, and the “disastrous illusion” that this new weapon would somehow make America safer. “Every step appears as the unavoidable consequence of the preceding one,” Einstein said. “In the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation.”

When atomic bombs were first transferred to SAC bases in French Morocco, the French government wasn’t told about the weapons

The Army also didn’t like what Sandia engineers called the switch: a “handling safety device” or a “goof-proofer.” Both terms implied that Army personnel were capable of making mistakes.

In response to McNamara’s questions, the Army admitted that its request for thirty-two thousand nuclear weapons might “appear to be unreasonably high.”

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.

The Pentagon wielded largely unchecked power over the management of nuclear weapons, and its Defense Nuclear Agency had a set of priorities that differed from Bob Peurifoy’s. “The safety advantages gained by retrofitting existing stockpile weapons … will be a costly program that in all probability will reduce funds available for future weapons,”

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.

The fear was encouraged by a Soviet propaganda campaign that sought to stop the deployment of America’s new missiles. But the apocalyptic mood in Europe was real, not Communist inspired, and loose talk by members of the Reagan administration helped to strengthen it. Thomas K. Jones, an undersecretary of defense, played down the number of casualties that a nuclear war might cause, arguing that families would survive if they dug a hole, covered it with a couple of doors, and put three feet of dirt on top. “It’s the dirt that does it,” Jones explained. “Everyone’s going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.”

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.”