Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

by Eric Schlosser

Huh!

Far above their heads was a concrete silo door. It was supposed to protect the missile from the wind and the rain and the effects of a nuclear weapon detonating nearby.

nine-pound socket

This nine pound socket Is a little too heavy Buddy for my size Buddy for my size So I'm going on the mountain Just to see my baby And I ain't coming back No I ain't coming back Roll on buddy Don't you roll so slow Well, tell me how can I roll When the wheels won't go Roll on buddy Pull you load of coal Tell me how can I pull When the wheels won't roll It's a long way to Harlan It's a long way to Hazard Just to get a little brew Just to get a little brew And when I'm long gone You can make my tombstone Out of number nine coal Out of number nine coal Roll on buddy Don't you roll so slow Well, tell me how can I roll When the wheels won't go Roll on buddy Pull you load of coal Tell me how can I pull When the wheels won't roll

When Childers enlisted, he filled out a form requesting an assignment with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. He thought the Air Force might provide his training to become a radio announcer. But he filled out the form incorrectly and got assigned to the newspaper at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California.

Through the Airman Scholarship and Commissioning Program, he attended Chaminade College of Honolulu, a good place to study and to surf.

Why am I not living in Hawaii? I mean, really, what the fuck am I doing in Seattle? I'm a colossal fuckup at having any kind of life, so why not be a colossal fuckup in paradise?

If an emergency war order arrived from SAC headquarters, every missile crew officer would face a decision with almost unimaginable consequences. Given the order to launch, Childers would comply without hesitation. He had no desire to commit mass murder. And yet the only thing that prevented the Soviet Union from destroying the United States with nuclear weapons, according to the Cold War theory of deterrence, was the threat of being annihilated, as well. Childers had faith in the logic of nuclear deterrence: his willingness to launch the missile ensured that it would never be launched.

That works well, up to the point of actually launching the missile. I hope hey sit around on their nights off watching "Dr. Strangelove".

Like four members of a firing squad whose rifles were loaded with three bullets and one blank, a missile crew was expected to obey the order to fire, without bearing personal responsibility for the result.

I would have them run launch drills at least once a week, so it becomes routine to take an action that might obliterate a few million souls. I am a monster.

Sometimes the briefings included a slide presentation on intelligence issues and the state of the world.

Why would you do that? You want the human beings to become as programmed to follow instructions as a robot -- adding a briefing on who we might vaporize is a terrible idea.

Televised images of Iranian crowds burning American flags and shouting “Death to the Great Satan!” had become a nightly routine,

That's what I would want the missile silo folks to be like. Burn a flag, shout death threats to the enemies and go home, going though the routine like it was pantomime. And, one day, the pantomime would kill millions. I would want everyone to know just how indifferent to the consequences we had made our men, so no one would doubt or resolve. The real nuclear missiles would be nowhere near these amoral freaks, of course. I mean, fuck, once you have them practicing to kill millions at a moment's notice, going through the motions until it becomes routine... These aren't people you trust with anything. They are an abomination.

The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan nine months earlier, deploying more than 100,000 troops in a campaign that many feared was just the first stage of a wider assault on the oil-producing nations of the Middle East.

Suckers. I would feel superior for them, if we hadn't made the same mistake ourselves a few decades later.

On September 17, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a prominent British think tank, issued a report suggesting that the Soviet Union’s new and more accurate ICBMs had made America’s ICBMs vulnerable to attack. The United States was falling behind not only in nuclear weaponry, the report claimed, but also in planes, tanks, and ground forces.

Would it have killed the Brits to beef up their own defenses, and not force us to carry the weight?

Old-fashioned American optimism had been replaced by a despairing, self-absorbed worship of consumption. “Piling up material goods,” Carter said, “cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no purpose or meaning.”

Listen, I love Jimmy Carter, and think he's a great man, but he's wrong here. My growing collection of Transformers distracts me from the empty, meaningless horror that my life has become. Who needs a sense of community when there are other fans online? Who needs a girlfriend or boyfriend when Masterpiece Wheeljack is really excellent? If I distract myself long enough, I might not notice my life has no purpose or meaning until I am on my deathbed, regretting it all.

The underlying message, however, was that the nation’s most important problems could never be solved by Congress or the president, and Carter urged viewers to assume responsibility for their own fate.

Ah, yes, Carter's famous "screw it, you're on your own" speech.

The Iranian hostage crisis brought more bad news every day, and an official report on the failed rescue attempt—describing how eight American servicemen died and half a dozen U.S. helicopters full of classified documents were abandoned in the desert—raised doubts about the readiness of the military.

Ok, shit happens. But, why were they bringing classified documents with them?

Although Carter was a devout Christian, a newly created evangelical group, the Moral Majority, was attacking his support for legalized abortion and a constitutional amendment to guarantee equal rights for women.

And the gays thank the Moral Majority. If they hadn't gotten there way, equal rights would have been for enumerated groups, rather than everyone. Women were set back 10-20 years. Everyone else was brought along and breathed a sigh of relief.

Perhaps the most influential bestseller of the year was The Third World War: August 1985, a novel written by a retired British officer, General Sir John Hackett. It offered a compelling, realistic account of a full-scale war between NATO and the Soviet bloc.

It's kind of sweet and adorable that this is what he thought of as a full scale war.

After a long series of European tank battles, the British city of Birmingham is incinerated by a Soviet nuclear strike.

...leaving the world no poorer. We created a spare Birmingham in Alabama, just for things like this.

The year 1980, the start of a new decade, was when that change became palpable, in ways both trivial and telling.

Compare that to 2010 -- did anyone notice? The biggest difference was we stopped worrying about what to call the current decade. Did "the naughts" win in the end? No one knows.

During a speech at the Republican convention that summer, Congressman Jack Kemp had noted what others did not yet acknowledge or see: “There is a tidal wave coming, a political tidal wave as powerful as the one that hit in 1932, when an era of Republican dominance gave way to the New Deal.”

I so wish that I did not have Jack Kemp's hair.

The decision to put ICBMs in rural Arkansas had been influenced by political, as well as military, considerations. One of the state’s congressmen, Wilbur D. Mills, happened to be chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee when Titan II sites were being chosen.

Wilbur D. Mills hated his constituents, and wanted them to be vaporized.

The access portal and its metal stairway were not designed to survive a nuclear blast.

I would love to see a metal stairway that was designed to survive a nuclear blast.

The PTS guys were a different breed.

The PTS team was one letter away from PTSD.

neither the launch crew, nor the PTS team, knew that this missile had once been in a silo full of thick smoke and dying men.

It wasn't just a death machine capable of vaporizing millions of people in an instant -- it was a <i>haunted</i> death machine capable of vaporizing millions in an instant! That's like 3% or 4% more terrifying.

He was washing dishes when the Klaxon went off. The sound was excruciatingly loud, like a fire alarm, an electric buzzer inside your head. He didn’t think much of it. Whenever a nitrogen line was connected to an oxidizer tank, a little bit of vapor escaped. The vapor detectors in the silo were extremely sensitive, and they’d set off the Klaxon. It happened almost every time a PTS team did this procedure. The launch crew would reset the alarm, and the Klaxon would stop. It was no big deal. Holder kept doing the dishes, the Klaxon stopped—and then ten or fifteen seconds later it started blaring again.

It's either nothing, or a complete fucking disaster. Who can tell? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The plutonium core spent the night at the house, guarded by security officers. A team of physicists from the Manhattan Project was due at nine o’clock the next morning, Friday the thirteenth.

Fun fact: the folks at Los Alamos were like 95-99% sure the detonation of an atomic bomb wouldn't set the entire atmosphere on fire.

In the early days of the project, Teller was concerned that the intense heat of a nuclear explosion would set fire to the atmosphere and kill every living thing on earth. A year’s worth of calculations suggested that was unlikely, and the physicist Hans Bethe dismissed the idea, arguing that heat from the explosion would rapidly dissipate in the air, not ignite it. But nobody could be sure.

I guess that fun fact was a spoiler.

During the drive down from Los Alamos on Friday the thirteenth, Enrico Fermi, who’d already won a Nobel for his discoveries in physics, suggested that the odds of the atmosphere’s catching fire were about one in ten. Victor Weisskopf couldn’t tell if Fermi was joking.

Best joke ever. Hey, coworker, 10% chance you will kill all life on earth.

The assembled core was about the size of a softball but weighed as much as a bowling ball.

There's something absolutely beautiful about this sentence, and it pains me to mention it, because I know the author was supremely proud of it -- I assume he was, at any rate, since how could he not be?

The general decided that if he had to sign for it, he should get a chance to hold it.

In his 1914 novel The World Set Free, Wells describes the “ultimate explosive,” fueled by radioactivity. It enables a single person to “carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.” These atomic bombs threaten the survival of mankind, as every nation seeks to obtain them—and use them before being attacked. Millions die, the world’s great capitals are destroyed, and civilization nears collapse. But the novel ends on an optimistic note, as fear of a nuclear apocalypse leads to the establishment of world government.

Ok, that goes on my reading list.

“We care about neutrons!”

I care about neutrons too. I think we all care about neutrons.

The Trinity test was scheduled for four in the morning on July 16, but forecasters predicted bad weather. Going ahead with the test could prove disastrous. In addition to the threat of lightning, high winds and rain could carry radioactive fallout as far as Amarillo, Texas, three hundred miles away.

Fuck it, it's only Texas.

Victor Weisskopf saw the flash and felt heat on his face from a distance of ten miles. His heart sank. For a moment, he thought that his calculations were wrong and the atmosphere was on fire. “

During the summers, King was the drummer of the house band at Dogpatch USA, an amusement park in the Ozarks featuring Li’l Abner and other characters created by the cartoonist Al Capp.

It could be worse. It could be an amusement park based on Andy Capp. That would be one of the circles of hell.

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 best targets were “cities of especial sentimental significance.”

This is really not that different from the tactics of the PLO, Hamas, al Qaeda and ISiS. Terrify the surviving population, and use that terror to change their behavior. The terrorists kill far fewer people, but get less compliance with their demands. But, they also don't make their demands very clear to begin with. Has there ever been a small-to-moderate scale terror campaign that worked? Palestinians are still in ghettos. The English are still in North Ireland. Abortion is still available in most of the US. Meanwhile, nuclear terror is 1 for 1 (or 1 for 2, depending on whether you count bombing the Japanese as two events, or one series of events). More effective than conventional bombing of cities too -- London didn't fold under the German assault, and all the firebombing of Dresden accomplished was to wipe away Dresden.

He thought that Jesus Christ would approve of dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union:

To be entirely fair, "turn the other cheek" sounds a lot like "vaporize the fuckers", at least in the original Hebrew. But, this is generally more of the thing that would be favored by the angry, vengeful God of the Old Testament, than the bearded hippie introduced in the sequel.

They now resented the aggressive public relations efforts of the Air Force, the disparaging remarks about sea power, the books and articles claiming that long-range bombers had won the Second World War, the propaganda films like Walt Disney’s Victory Through Air Power, with its jolly animated sequences of cities in flames and its tagline: “There’s a thrill in the air!”

I need to watch that.

But TROJAN wouldn’t prevent the Red Army from conquering Europe and the Middle East. Nor would it lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “For the majority of Soviet people,” the committee noted, “atomic bombing would validate Soviet propaganda against foreign powers, stimulate resentment against the United States, unify these people and increase their will to fight.”

It would definitely piss them off, but would they fight or stand down? The prospect of overwhelming, annihilating force, with no real outlet for vengeance, may well have broken them. I'm not convinced they would continue to fight, knowing that resistance meant the destruction of more of their cities. Too late to test it now, as the anger would lead to retaliatory strikes from the Russians on American cities.

The harshest criticism of the Air Force came from Rear Admiral Ralph A. Ofstie, who’d toured the burned-out cities of Japan after the war. He described the atomic blitz as “random mass slaughter of men, women, and children.” The whole idea was “ruthless and barbaric” and contrary to American values. “We must insure that our military techniques do not strip us of self-respect,” Ofstie said.

The Native Americans might question whether such destruction is truly contrary to American values. They lost almost their entire culture, along with their lands and their people. African-Americans might have different, but similar complaints. The cruelty inflicted upon them for hundreds of years of slavery, and then a century of Jim Crow, and now a less institutionalized racism. America isn't special in the annihilation of its enemies, but we also aren't special in refraining to do so.

“Fancy Dans”

I knew a Dan once. He was fancy.

The nation’s emergency war plans called for a counterattack against the Soviet Union with more than one hundred atomic bombs—but SAC had just twenty-six flight crews available to deliver them. Perhaps half of these crews would be shot down trying to reach their targets, while others would have to ditch their planes after running out of fuel.

Just make the workers put in overtime. Because they are military, they aren't even protected by labor laws -- it's unpaid overtime!

Although SAC’s retaliation might still be devastating, it wouldn’t be quick. An estimated thirty-five to forty-five days of preparation would be necessary before an all-out nuclear attack could be launched.

Honestly, that feels like a good thing. We can vaporize people, but it requires some effort and time, so we really have to be sure we want to vaporize those people. Here's a problem I have with the Civilization games -- no mutually assured destruction. It might not be a fun ending, but it constrains the victory conditions in a more realistic way. There should be a nuclear deterrence wonder -- enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world. Instead, it goes with a tactical nuclear weapons model exclusively.

During the spring of 1948, as tensions with the Soviets increased, Charles A. Lindbergh was asked to provide a secret evaluation of SAC’s readiness for war. Lindbergh found that morale was low, landings were rough, training was poor, equipment was badly maintained, and accidents were frequent. A month after Lindbergh’s findings were submitted, General Kenney was relieved of command.

This makes all sorts of things make more sense to me. I never knew of the Lindbergh military connection. Was their baby's abduction before or after this? That would begin to explain why people cared. Must research.

And his nickname was “Iron Ass” for good reason.

He had a flat ass. As flat as an ironing board. People speculated that if one were to iron his ass, he would enjoy it. Actually, he was one of the first furries, and presented himself as a submissive wolf.

At the age of nine, he got his first paying job: shooting sparrows for a nickel each to feed a neighbor’s cat.

What an amazingly lazy cat the neighbors had.

For the next four years, LeMay attended college during the day, then worked at a steel mill from early evening until two or three in the morning,

It was a gay steel mill. He didn't notice.

After studying to become a civil engineer, LeMay joined the Army Air Corps in 1929. Flying became his favorite thing to do—followed, in order of preference, by hunting, driving sports cars, and fishing. Socializing was far down the list.

There are only so many times you can say "yiiff!" and get no takers before it gets draining..

LeMay’s greatest strength as a commander wasn’t a subtle grasp of the historical, political, or psychological aspects of an enemy.

He was pretty sure he was bombing Hobbits, to be entirely honest. Perhaps not literal Hobbits, but his understanding of the enemy was a few stereotypes each, if that much. Germans were efficient, dull, and didn't feel pain the way we did. Japanese were crafty, devilish, and didn't feel pain the way we did. Italians were amazing lovers (of people, pizza and pasta) and didn't feel pain the way we did. And Russians ate potatoes covered in Russian dressing, and didn't feel pain the way we did.

Curtis LeMay was hardly warm and cuddly. He was gruff, blunt, sarcastic, socially awkward, a man of few words, with a permanent frown left by a case of Bell’s palsy and an unlit cigar perpetually stuck in his mouth.

Sure, palsy created the frown. An excellent story. My poor attitude is Tourette's.

At the age of thirty-six, LeMay became the youngest general in the Army. During the summer of 1944, he was transferred from Europe to help fight Japan. Although incendiaries had been used on a small scale, it was LeMay who ordered the firebombing of Tokyo. “Japan would burn if we could get fire on it,” one of his deputies explained.

"The Japanese are devilish, crafty and flammable," he explained. "Also, they don't feel pain the way we do." -- Life Magazine, September, 1944.