Command and Control

by Eric Schlosser

The radio frequency used to announce the final countdown was similar to that of a local station. Thanks to interference, at the moment of detonation, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings cheerfully played in the control bunker.

Kistiakowsky stepped out of the bunker to see the fireball and was knocked to the ground by the blast wave. He was about six miles from where the tower had just stood. This is what the end of the world will look like, he thought—this is the last thing the last man will see.

General Farrell expressed the mixture of fear, awe, pride, and an underlying attraction that this new power inspired: The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described. … It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately. Thirty seconds after, the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against the people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty.

Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb was influenced by many factors, and the desire to save American lives ranked near the top. An invasion of Japan was scheduled for November 1. Former President Herbert Hoover warned Truman that such an invasion would cost between “500,000 and 1,000,000 American lives.”

Unlike most presidents, Truman had firsthand experience of battle. During the First World War, half of the men in his infantry division were killed or wounded during the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Standing amid piles of dead American soldiers, the sergeant of his platoon had yelled at the survivors: “Now … you’ll believe you’re in a war.” Truman took no pleasure in the deaths of Japanese civilians. But he preferred them to the deaths of young American servicemen. Atomic bombs, he decided, would be dropped on Japan as soon as they were ready.

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

Bockscar circled for forty minutes at a rendezvous point over Japan, wasting fuel, waiting for another American plane that never arrived. Sweeney opened the bomb bay doors over Kokura, but the city was shrouded in smoke and haze. He had strict orders to drop the bomb visually, not by radar. Bockscar spent almost an hour over Kokura, made three unsuccessful bombing runs, and drew antiaircraft fire. The city was spared by the poor visibility. Sweeney had enough fuel for one run at the secondary target, Nagasaki. He dropped the bomb there, worried that the plane might have to be ditched in the ocean, and barely made it to the American air base at Okinawa.

The bomb proved more powerful and efficient than the gun-type device used at Hiroshima, which had an explosive force of between 12 and 18 kilotons. But the damage was less severe in Nagasaki. A series of hills protected much of the city from the blast wave, and a firestorm never erupted, despite winds that reached more than six hundred miles an hour. About forty thousand people were killed in Nagasaki, at least twice that number were injured, and more than one third of the homes were destroyed. Ground zero was approximately five hundred feet south of the Mitsubishi Steel Works. According to one report, the plant was left “bent and twisted like jelly.” The bomb also leveled the nearby Mitsubishi Arms Factory, where the torpedoes fired at Pearl Harbor were made.

These counterfactual arguments, though compelling, can never be proved. But the historical facts remain. Hiroshima was destroyed on August 6. Two days later the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Nagasaki was struck on the ninth, and the following day, General Korechika Anami, the minister of war, still urged the Japanese people to fight, “even though we have to eat grass and chew dirt and lay in the field.” On August 14, Emperor Hirohito overruled his generals and agreed to an unconditional surrender. “The enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs,” he explained, “and the heavy casualties are beyond measure.”

“Ships at sea and bodies of troops are, in general, unlikely to be regarded as primary atomic bomb targets,” the report concluded. “The bomb is pre-eminently a weapon for use against human life and activities in large urban and industrial areas.” It was a weapon useful, most of all, for killing and terrorizing civilians. The report suggested that a nuclear attack would stir up “man’s primordial fears” and “break the will of nations.” The military significance of the atomic bomb was clear: it wouldn’t be aimed at the military. Nuclear weapons would be used to destroy an enemy’s morale, and some of the best targets were “cities of especial sentimental significance.”

Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell—the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War—urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but “anything is better than submission.” Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed. Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace, crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn’t be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, “should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs.”

Once the target list was complete and the ground zeros identified, the planners calculated the most efficient way to destroy them. A wide assortment of variables had to be taken into account, including: the accuracy and reliability of different weapon systems, the effectiveness of Soviet air defenses, the impact of darkness or poor weather, and the rate at which low-flying aircraft were likely to crash due to unknown causes, known as the “clobber factor.” The Joint Chiefs specified that the odds of a target being destroyed had to be at least 75 percent, and for some targets, the rate of damage assurance was put even higher. Achieving that level of assurance required cross-targeting—aiming more than one nuclear weapon at a single ground zero. After the numbers were crunched, the SIOP often demanded that a target be hit by multiple weapons, arriving from different directions, at different times. One high-value target in the Soviet Union would be hit by a Jupiter missile, a Titan missile, an Atlas missile, and hydrogen bombs dropped by three B-52s, simply to guarantee its destruction.

Kissinger had once thought that Western Europe could be defended with tactical nuclear weapons, confining the damage to military targets and avoiding civilian casualties. But that idea now seemed inconceivable, and the refusal of America’s NATO allies to build up their conventional forces ensured that a military conflict with the Soviet Union would quickly escalate beyond control. During a meeting in the White House Situation Room, Kissinger complained that NATO nuclear policy “insists on our destruction before the Europeans will agree to defend themselves.”

Gorbachev left Geneva viewing Reagan not as a right-wing caricature, a puppet of the military-industrial complex, but as a human being who seemed eager to avoid a nuclear war.

Despite the failure to reach an agreement on the abolition of nuclear weapons, the Reykjavik summit marked a turning point in the Cold War, the start of a process that soon led to the removal of all intermediate-range missiles from Europe and large cuts in the number of strategic weapons. The all-out nuclear arms race was over. Gorbachev now felt emboldened to pursue reform in the Soviet Union, confident that the United States did not seek to attack his country. And the hard-liners in the Reagan administration breathed a sigh of relief, amazed that their president had come so close to getting rid of America’s nuclear weapons.

Pakistan and India are neighbors, embittered by religious and territorial disputes. Both countries have nuclear weapons. The flight time of a missile from one to the other may be as brief as four or five minutes. And the command-and-control facilities on both sides are not hardened against an attack. During a crisis, the pressure to launch first would be enormous.

The challenges that the United States has faced in the management of its arsenal should give pause to every other nation that seeks to obtain nuclear weapons. This technology was invented and perfected in the United States. I have no doubt that America’s nuclear weapons are among the safest, most advanced, most secure against unauthorized use that have ever been built. And yet the United States has narrowly avoided a long series of nuclear disasters. Other countries, with less hard-earned experience in the field, may not be as fortunate.