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

by Eric Schlosser

LeMay was involved in almost every detail of the plan, from selecting the mix of bombs—magnesium for high temperatures, napalm for splatter—to choosing a bomb pattern that could start a firestorm.

He seems like the perfect person to be in charge of weapons that can vaporize our enemies.

“I’ll tell you what war is about,” LeMay once said. “You’ve got to kill people and when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”

LeMay recognized the destructive power of nuclear weapons but didn’t feel the least bit intimidated by them. “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo,” he later recalled, “than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

As an exercise, LeMay ordered every SAC crew in the country to stage a mock attack on Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, at night, from high altitude, under heavy cloud cover, conditions similar to those they might encounter over the Soviet Union. Many of the planes didn’t get anywhere near Ohio—and not a single one hit the target.

To be fair, less than 20% of Americans can identify Ohio on a map, and those that can are not the ones who end up in the volunteer military. Those who do volunteer are good, honest, men, who sacrifice for their country, even if they can only identify about half the states on a map.

The bombardiers who did simulate the dropping of an atomic bomb, aiming their radar at reflectors on the ground, missed Wright Field by an average of two miles. LeMay called it “about the darkest night in American military aviation history.”

So, we had a credible nuclear deterrent, and an implementation which would have spared 90% of the civilians if we actually were backed into a corner and activated it, and this asshole improved it to kill more innocent civilians? The man was a fucking monster. Actual effectiveness in dropping nuclear weapons did nothing to keep us safe. The fear that we were effective was enough. Our incompetence was a safety measure.

The Mark 3 implosion bomb was, in Oppenheimer’s words, a “haywire contraption,” difficult and dangerous to assemble. But at least some of the scientists in Los Alamos still knew how to make one. Nobody had bothered to save all the technical drawings necessary for building another Little Boy, the uranium-based, gun-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The exact configuration of the various parts had never been recorded on paper—an oversight that, amid the current shortage of plutonium, created some unease.

This reminds me of most of the services at Amazon -- less lethal, but also completely undocumented.

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.

On the other hand, the B-29s with fully assembled Mark 3 bombs were flown in circles over France, for no strategic reason -- the Air Force was just measuring mean time between failures, accidents and disasters, and needed somewhere to test.

But the Mark 3 bomb had a number of inherent shortcomings. It was a handmade, complicated, delicate thing with a brief shelf life. The electrical system was powered by a car battery, which had to be charged for three days before being put into the bomb. The battery could be recharged twice inside the Mark 3, but had to be replaced within a week—and to change the battery, you had to take apart the whole weapon.

Compare this to the Macintosh Quadra 950, where to add memory you had to remove the entire motherboard, and disconnect about a dozen cables in the process -- most of which would happily plug in elsewhere on the motherboard.

Kennedy put on his uniform, said good-bye to his family, and headed for the command post.

"Bye, I got called into the office for some kind of 'emergency'," he said, putting air quotes around the emergency. "It's probably Jenkins, turning on the alarms to frighten a woodchuck again. The man is an idiot. Listen, I might be late for dinner, so why don't you all climb into the car, get on the interstate and head upwind from here. Maybe try to put as many miles as you can between yourselves and here as you can." His family looked at him, somewhat dumbfounded. "Make a game of it," he suggested. "Drive for three hours, then stop, figure out how far you've gone, and then drive for another three hours and try to beat that by getting even further away. Do it Iike, five or ten times, and figure out your best score." "Is something wrong?" his wife asked. "No, no, nothing wrong," he said, as reassuringly as he could over the sound of the waiting helicopter. "It just a game. Prepare us for any problems in the future." There was an awkward silence as his wife dug into her purse for the car keys, tears silently dripping from her face. "Daddy," his daughter asked, "are we going to die?" "Yes," he said matter-of-factly, "but not for a long, long time. You have a whole lifetime between now and then." It's what he always he told his daughter when she asked about death, but this was the first time he checked his watch while saying it. It was the first time he realized that a lifetime might be measured in hours rather than decades.

like most of the PTS guys, his career in missile maintenance had come as a surprise, not as the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition.

How many people think "I want to maintain doomsday machines, capable of vaporizing millions of people, but I want no say in how or when they are used" when they are young? That's the type of dream that comes later in life. A few idealistic youngsters might dream of doing the job poorly, and through their negligence, slack and ineptitude saving millions of people, but there are processes in place to weed those people out, and enough redundant missiles to ensure it would be ineffective. It takes a man in his mid-forties to say "I want to be a cog in a machine, so that when the planet is destroyed, I will have had some part in it. I know I will have made a difference, but have no moral culpability for the result." It's the thoughts of a man who has seen their greatest dreams crushed -- or even worse, fulfilled.

In 1976 he decided that being a deckhand just didn’t cut it anymore. He had a one-year-old daughter and another child on the way. He needed to earn more money, and his brother suggested joining the military. Kennedy met with recruiters from the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. He chose the Air Force because its basic training was the shortest.

Often, the best decisions in one's life are made for the worst reasons. Most of the worst decisions as well. One might as well give up on good reasons, as they are invariably just a story we tell ourselves so we can think we are better than we obviously are.

Where else could a twenty-five-year-old kid, without a college degree, be put in charge of complicated, hazardous, essential operations at a missile site worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The fact that a nuclear warhead was involved made the work seem even cooler.

I think this job might exist at Amazon now, minus the warhead.

The problem with the missile hadn’t been solved, but the mood was calm. Then Rodney Holder looked up and saw that the helicopter was about to hit some power lines.

The Huttos had come to Arkansas before the Civil War, and the town they settled had originally been called Huttotown—until another set of Sam’s ancestors, the Browns, decided to find a name with a more biblical flavor. “Damascus” sounded like a place that would one day be important, a worthy rival to Jerusalem, Arkansas, about thirty miles to the west.

Had anything ever happened with Jeruselem, Damascus would have been unable to compete. But, over a century later, the two towns were neck-and-neck on just about any metric one could devise.

The Air Force backed the effort to build the Superbomb, as did the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—although its chairman, General Omar Bradley, acknowledged that the weapon’s greatest benefit was most likely “psychological.”

Here's the thing about a Superbomb -- you need your threat to be plausible enough that you need to research how to make one, and how to make it look like you have one, but you don't really need to have one. The threat is enough. Of course, if you do have one, you want to tell the world, so they don't back you into a corner where you actually have to use the damned thing.

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.

So, stop telling people we aren't working on a Superbomb. Tell them we have moved on to the Superduperbomb.

A few days after Truman’s announcement that the United States would develop the Super, the British physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to having spied for the Soviets.

Given that so much of the nuclear deterrence depended on the enemy knowing we were capable of destroying them, one wonders if the spies actually made us safer.

And then they applied for a patent on their H-bomb design.

The patent system was designed to break the Guild system of the late Rennesance by granting a short term monopoly in exchange for eventually making information about inventions free for all. That seem like pretty much the opposite of what we want with nuclear weapons.

The device was housed in a corrugated aluminum building on the island of Elugelab.

Elugelab was not a traditional name. The island was rechristened with this name, as a slurred together version of the pseudo-Spanish "El Huge Lab". While initially the name referred to the island being a huge laboratory for experimenting with nuclear weapons, before long the mascot of the team was a fictional giant Labrador, and then Clifford The Big Red Dog. After Mike destroyed Elugelab, the mascot became Old Yeller.

The Army, however, found ways to adapt. It lobbied hard for atomic artillery shells, atomic antiaircraft missiles, atomic land mines.

I'm not sure which is more ridiculous -- atomic antiaircraft missiles, or atomic land mines. The artillery just seems like a bad idea, but the land mines and antiaircraft missiles seem like a bad joke.

While Teller and Ulam wrestled with the theoretical issues of how to sustain thermonuclear fusion, the engineers at Sandia faced a more practical question: How do you deliver a hydrogen bomb without destroying the aircraft that carried it to the target? The latest calculations suggested that an H-bomb would weigh as much as forty thousand pounds, and the only American bomber large enough to transport one to the Soviet Union, the B-36, was too slow to escape the blast.

One alternative is, of course, to not tell anyone. The pilots would figure it out soon enough.

Inspired by the German designs, Project Caucasian, a collaboration between the Air Force and Sandia, developed a three-parachute system that would slow the descent of a hydrogen bomb and give an American bomber enough time to get away from it.

Was the name Project Aryan already taken?

Mike’s thermonuclear fuel,

Fun Fact: Mike's Hard Lemonade got its name from Mike's Nuclear Fuel.

Fifteen minutes after the blast, O’Keefe and the eight other men in his firing crew tentatively stepped out of the bunker. The island was surrounded by a dull, gray haze. Trees were down, palm branches were scattered everywhere, all the birds were gone—twenty miles from ground zero.

The birds were blown to another island, 30 miles out to sea, which had never had birds.

“Duck and cover,” one journalist noted, was being replaced by a new civil defense catchphrase: “Run for the hills.”

A new word had entered the lexicon of nuclear war planning: megadeath. It was a unit of measurement. One megadeath equaled one million fatalities—and the nation was bound to suffer a great many megadeaths during a thermonuclear war.

“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.”

We need newer, and better bulldozers! Atomic powered bulldozers, capable of clearing streets of dead bodies in record time!

By 1944, Major Jimmy Stewart was flying the lead plane in bombing runs over Germany. While other Hollywood stars like Ronald Reagan and John Wayne managed to avoid combat during the Second World War, Stewart gained a reputation in the Eighth Air Force as a “lucky” commander who always brought his men back from dangerous missions.

So very weird and unexpected. "Mr. Smith goes to Germany."

Air Command was released in 1955. It tells the story of a major league infielder, Dutch Holland, whose baseball career is interrupted when the Air Force returns him to active duty. For most of the film, Holland, played by Jimmy Stewart, is torn between his desire to enjoy civilian life and his duty to protect the United States from a Soviet attack. Strategic Air Command focuses on the hardships endured by SAC crews, the dangers of their job, the sacrifices that overseas assignments imposed on their families.

the Soviet Union demonstrated its new, long-range jet bomber, the Bison, at Moscow’s “Aviation Day” in 1955. Ten Bisons flew past the reviewing stand, turned around, flew past it again in a new formation—and tricked American observers into thinking that the Soviet Air Force had more than 100 of the planes.

Conventional antiaircraft weapons seemed inadequate for destroying hundreds of Soviet bombers during a thermonuclear attack. Failing to shoot down a single plane could mean losing an American city. The Air Force believed that detonating atomic warheads in the skies above the United States and Canada would offer the best hope of success—and

This does make the atomic antiaircraft weapons make a lot more sense. I apologize to whatever sociopath thought of such a thing. Atomic land mines, on the other hand, those just seem stupid.

Conventional antiaircraft weapons seemed inadequate for destroying hundreds of Soviet bombers during a thermonuclear attack. Failing to shoot down a single plane could mean losing an American city. The Air Force believed that detonating atomic warheads in the skies above the United States and Canada would offer the best hope of success—and

There are few ideas more awesome that deploying massive nuclear weapons in defense. It initially seems unthinkable to explode hydrogen bombs above your own soil, but it is a matter of picking the least worse alternative. The engineer in me and the sociopath in me, if they are different things, strongly approves of this. I do wonder if there were areas where we decided we needed the fields for growing things, so we would prefer to have a downwind city vaporized rather than risk our farmland.

had a “lethal envelope” with a radius of about a mile, and the “probability of kill” (PK) within that envelope was likely to be 92 percent. The Soviet aircrew’s death from radiation might take as long as five minutes—a delay that made it even more important to fire the Genie as far as possible from urban areas. Detonated at a high altitude, the weapon produced little fallout and didn’t lift any debris from the ground to form a mushroom cloud.

This really is genius.

Project 56 was the code name for an AEC safety investigation of sealed-pit weapons secretly conducted in a remote valley at the Nevada Test Site. Computers still lacked the processing power to simulate the behavior of a nuclear weapon during an accident, and so actual devices had to be used.

Given the choice between an accident that might cause a nuclear explosion and one that might send a cloud of plutonium over an American city, the Air Force preferred the latter.

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.

The one staring directly into the blast is probably the most frightening one, at least on first impressions. I sort of assume his reaction was a detached "huh."

Navigating solely by radar, Captain Barry steered the plane back toward land and ordered the crew to bail out. One of the copilots, Captain Theodore Schreier, mistakenly put on a life jacket over his parachute. He was never seen again.

I'm sure the family of Captain Schreier does not appreciate my instinctive and immediate laughter, but it is the laughter of someone who knows that they would make the same mistake.

Sergeant Paul Ramoneda, a twenty-eight-year-old baker with the Ninth Food Service Squadron, was one of the first to reach the bomber.

The Ninth Food Service Squadron was filled with heroes. Whether it was pulling men from burning airplanes, or delivering muffins in hostile conditions, their dedication and sacrifice cannot be underestimated. A simple scone can boost the morale of a soldier fighting to hold a small, sweaty hill in some backwater country more than a rousing and meaningful speech from their commanders. And, sometimes they pulled people from burning airplanes. Compare them to the contractors used in the last Gulf War, who would refuse to deliver any food, ammunition, water or gasoline when they might come under enemy fire. Useless, filthy contractors. To the soldiers of the various Food Service Squadrons that have served this country, and this country's fighting men and woman, I offer my utmost thanks and gratitude. Pilots get all the glory, but they couldn't do it without the pastry chefs.

Holsey, the highest-ranking officer on the scene, ran away as fast as he could.

What became of him? Did he ever stop running? Or did he keep running, throwing off his uniform in shame when he realized that he hadn't been vaporized, and then riding the rails for years, stopping off in small towns and solving people's problems, and desperately trying to atone for his cowardice, before running again when someone learned of his past?

The Army’s Office of Special Weapons Developments had addressed the first question in a 1955 report, “Acceptable Military Risks from Accidental Detonation of Atomic Weapons.” It looked at the frequency of natural disasters in the United States during the previous fifty years, quantified their harmful effects according to property damage and loss of life—and then argued that accidental nuclear explosions should be permitted on American soil at the same rate as similarly devastating earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes.

So, at a quick, regular clip then?

The Army had assumed that the American people would regard a nuclear accident no differently from an act of God. An AFSWP study questioned the assumption, warning that the “psychological impact of a nuclear detonation might well be disastrous” and that “there will likely be a tendency to blame the ‘irresponsible’ military and scientists.”

Yeah... I think that people tend to view towns being vaporized as something different than a tornado. To be fair, if the Army was able to create a working Weather Dominator, they could change this, by creating man-made tornados, earthquakes and hurricanes and then terrifying everyone with those too.

And if those weapons were removed from storage and loaded onto airplanes, the AFSWP study proposed some acceptable probabilities that the American public, had it been informed, might not have found so acceptable. The odds of a hydrogen bomb detonating by accident, every decade, would be one in five. And during that same period, the odds of an atomic bomb detonating by accident in the United States would be about 100 percent.

Writing on behalf of Sandia and the other weapon labs, Carlson warned that an overly simplistic electrical system increased the risk of a full-scale detonation during an accident: “a weapon which requires only the receipt of intelligence from the delivery system for arming will accept and respond to such intelligence whether the signals are intentional or not

And that is why we should have hydrogen bombs attached to people rather than machines -- add a human conscience to the mix, someone who can question whether the order to vaporize a city was intentional or not, and even moral or not.

The two men shared a strategic outlook but had different management styles. LeMay expressed disapproval with a stony silence or a few carefully chosen words; Power yelled and swore at subordinates.

They shared an office, and were shopping around the entire scenario as a possible sit-com. Their elevator pitch was "Gomer Pyle meets Laurel and Hardie, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance!", and it didn't get picked up. Years later, LeMay changed the elevator pitch to "M*A*S*H meets The Odd Couple, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance!" and the show was picked up by CBS as a summer replacement in 1980, but fared poorly as the mood of the country turned darker and Ronald Reagan was elected.

if older weapons were used during an airborne alert, their nuclear cores would have to be placed, before takeoff, into an “in-flight insertion” mechanism. It held the core about a foot outside the sphere of explosives, while the plane was en route to the target—and then pushed the core all the way inside the sphere, using a motor-driven screw, when the bomb was about to be dropped. The contraption made the weapon safer to transport, but not much. Once the core was placed into this mechanism, according to a Sandia report, “nuclear safety is not ‘absolute,’ it is nonexistent.” The odds of a nuclear detonation during a crash or a fire would be about one in seven.

Somewhere, someone noted on his self-evaluation that he reduced the likelihood of a nuclear explosion in the event of a crash by over 80%. Besides, it's not like these things crash often, is it? Surely, we wouldn't have crashes on a regular basis right? Oh, wait, that's probably at least once per chapter for the rest of the book.

The typical air base had only seven dummy weapons, SAC claimed, a scarcity that made it necessary to train with real ones.

This reminds me a lot of the way we test GrassService. We cannot set up all the dependencies for a test environment, so we shrug it off and test in production. Our failures are unlikely to vaporize anyone, however.

Near the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union had fiercely competed to recruit Nazi rocket scientists.

The Soviets had better healthcare and benefits package, which made it more attractive to Nazi Rocket Scientists with families, or health conditions. The US offered a higher salary, however, which meant that younger, unmarried Nazi Rocket Scientists flocked here. They had a greater drive and ambition than their older colleagues, and fewer outside commitments to compete for their time, but less experience, which meant that they had yet to make the mistakes their elders had already learned from. And so, the early failures of the American program were inevitable. The rugrats got more done, but much of it had to be redone.

To make the drill feel as realistic as possible, a nuclear core had been placed in the bomb’s in-flight insertion mechanism.

Also, fire drills in the barracks usually required the barracks to be rebuilt from smoldering ruins.

Less than a month later, Walter Gregg and his son, Walter Junior, were in the toolshed outside their home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, when a Mark 6 atomic bomb landed in the yard.

The bomb that landed in the yard didn’t contain a core. But the high explosives went off when the weapon hit the ground, digging a crater about fifty feet wide and thirty-five feet deep. The blast wave and flying debris knocked the doors off the Gregg house, blew out the windows, collapsed the roof, riddled the walls with holes, destroyed the new Chevrolet parked in the driveway, killed half a dozen chickens, and sent the family to the hospital with minor injuries.