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

by Eric Schlosser

Before leaving Los Alamos, two hundred miles to the north, some of the Manhattan Project’s physicists had placed bets on the outcome of the upcoming test, code-named Trinity. Norman F. Ramsey bet the device would be a dud. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the project’s scientific director, predicted a yield equal to 300 tons of TNT; Edward Teller thought the yield would be closer to 45,000 tons. 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. 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. Weisskopf had done some of the calculations with Teller and still worried about the risk.

The idea of an “atomic bomb,” like so many other technological innovations, had first been proposed by the science fiction writer H. G. Wells. 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. “The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities . . . shook them also out of their old established habits of thought,” Wells wrote, full of hope, on the eve of the First World War.

During the 1930s, the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd—who’d met with H. G. Wells in 1929 and tried, without success, to obtain the central European literary rights to his novels—conceived of a nuclear weapon that would explode instantly. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, Szilárd feared that Hitler might launch an atomic bomb program and get the weapon first. Szilárd discussed his concerns with Albert Einstein in the summer of 1939 and helped draft a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The letter warned that “it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium,” leading to the creation of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Einstein signed the letter, which was hand delivered to the president by a mutual friend. After British researchers concluded that such weapons could indeed be made and intelligence reports suggested that German physicists were trying to make them, the Manhattan Project was formed in 1942. Led by Leslie R. Groves, a brigadier general in the U.S. Army, it secretly gathered eminent scientists from Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, with the aim of creating atomic bombs.

From the plane, Hiroshima looked like a roiling, bubbling sea of black smoke and fire. A small amount of fissile material was responsible for the devastation; 98.62 percent of the uranium in Little Boy was blown apart before it could become supercritical. Only 1.38 percent actually fissioned, and most of that uranium was transformed into dozens of lighter elements. 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.

Fat Man was scheduled for delivery on August 11, with the city of Kokura as its target. The prospect of bad weather moved the date forward to the ninth. At around midnight, the night before the bomb was to be loaded onto a Silverplate B-29, a technician named Bernard J. O’Keefe noticed something wrong with the master firing cable that was supposed to connect the Archies to the X-unit. The cable and the X-unit both had female plugs. Somehow the cable had been installed backward. It would take a couple of days to disassemble the layers of spheres and explosives, remove the cable, and reinstall it properly. “I felt a chill and started to sweat in the air-conditioned room,” O’Keefe recalled. He decided to improvise. With help from another technician, he broke one major safety rule after another, propping the door open to bring in extension cords and using a soldering iron to attach the right plugs. It was risky to melt solder in a room with five thousand pounds of explosives. The two men fixed the cable, connected the plugs, and didn’t tell anyone what they’d done.

AT A CABINET MEETING on September 21, 1945, members of the Truman administration had debated what to do with this powerful new weapon. The issue of international control was complicated by another question: Should the secrets of the atomic bomb be given to the Soviet Union? The Soviets were a wartime ally, lost more than twenty million people fighting the Nazis, and now possessed a military stronger than that of any other country except the United States. Canada and Great Britain had been invited to join the Manhattan Project, while the Soviets hadn’t even been informed of its existence. In a memo to President Truman, Henry Stimson, the outgoing secretary of war, worried that excluding the Soviets from the nuclear club would cause “a secret armament race of a rather desperate character.” He proposed a direct approach to the Soviet Union, outside of any international forum, that would share technical information about atomic energy as a first step toward outlawing the atomic bomb. Otherwise, the Soviets were likely to seek nuclear weapons on their own. Stimson thought that a U.S.-Soviet partnership could ensure a lasting peace. “The only way you can make a man trustworthy,” he told the president, “is to trust him.” Stimson’s proposal was strongly opposed by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. “We tried that once with Hitler,” Forrestal said. “There are no returns on appeasement.”

DURING THE SPRING OF 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved HALFMOON, the first emergency war plan directed at the Soviet Union. It assumed that the Soviets would start a war in Europe, prompted by an accident or a misunderstanding. The conflict would begin with the United States losing a series of land battles. Greatly outnumbered and unable to hold western Germany, the U.S. Army would have to stage a fighting retreat to seaports in France and Italy, then await evacuation by the U.S. Navy. The Red Army was expected to overrun Europe, the Middle East, and Korea. Fifteen days after the first shots were fired, the United States would launch a counterattack in the form of an “atomic blitz.” The plan originally called for 50 atomic bombs to be dropped on the Soviet Union. The number was later increased to 133, aimed at seventy Soviet cities. Leningrad was to be hit by 7 atomic bombs, Moscow by 8.

In 1944, three American B-29 bombers were forced to make emergency landings in Siberia after attacking Japanese forces in Manchuria. The planes were confiscated by the Soviets, and one of them, the General H. H. Arnold Special, was carefully disassembled. Each of its roughly 105,000 parts was measured, photographed, and reverse engineered. Within two years the Soviet Union had its first long-range bomber, the Tupolev-4. The plane was almost identical to the captured B-29; it even had a metal patch where the General Arnold had been repaired.

David E. Lilienthal, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, faced unrelenting pressure, from his first day in office, to hand over America’s nuclear arsenal to the military. The Joint Chiefs of Staff repeatedly asserted that the nation’s most powerful weapons should be kept securely in the custody of officers who might one day have to use them. At the height of the Berlin crisis, Secretary of Defense Forrestal asked President Truman to transfer the entire atomic stockpile to the Air Force, warning that a Soviet attack on AEC storage facilities could leave the United States defenseless. James Webb, one of Truman’s advisers, wasn’t persuaded by that argument and told Lilienthal: “The idea of turning over custody of atomic bombs to these competing, jealous, insubordinate Services, fighting for position with each other, is a terrible prospect.” The president denied the military’s request and publicly reaffirmed his support for civilian control of the atomic bomb. Privately, Truman explained that he didn’t want “to have some dashing lieutenant colonel decide when would be the proper time to drop one.”

Civilian leadership used to be afraid of the military

The destruction of Japanese cities, one after another, fit perfectly with his philosophy on the use of military force. “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.”

In 1949 full-scale production of a new implosion bomb had begun at Sandia: the Mark 4. It had a composite core. It could be assembled in a couple of hours, then stored for a couple of weeks. And it was much safer than previous designs. According to the final evaluation report, the Mark 4 had a variety of features to “prevent premature detonation under all predictable circumstances.” The X-unit didn’t charge until the bomb fell from the plane, greatly reducing the risk to the aircrew. More important, the nuclear core was stored in the plane’s cockpit during takeoff and inserted through a trap door into the nose of the bomb, midflight. As long as the core was kept physically separate from the rest of the bomb, it was impossible for a plane crash to cause a nuclear explosion. The days of handmade nuclear weapons were over. At Sandia the Mark 4 was now being manufactured with standardized, interchangeable parts—and so was its replacement, the Mark 6, a lighter, sleeker weapon with a yield as much as ten times larger than that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Cities adapted to the bombing, and their morale wasn’t easily broken. Even in Hiroshima, the desire to fight back survived the blast: when rumors spread that San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles had been destroyed by Japanese atomic bombs, people became lighthearted and cheerful, hoping the war could still be won.

The General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission discussed Teller’s proposal and voted unanimously to oppose it. Headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the committee said that the hydrogen bomb had no real military value and would encourage “the policy of exterminating civilian populations.” Six of the committee members signed a statement warning that the bomb could become “a weapon of genocide.” Two others, the physicists Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi, hoped that the Super could be banned through an international agreement, arguing that such a bomb would be “a danger to humanity . . . an evil thing considered in any light.”

In addition to making preparations for martial law, Eisenhower had secretly given nine prominent citizens the legal authority to run much of American society after a nuclear war. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson had agreed to serve as administrator of the Emergency Food Agency; Harold Boeschenstein, the president of the Owens Corning Fiberglas Company, would lead the Emergency Production Agency; Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, would head the Emergency Communications Agency; and Theodore F. Koop, a vice president at CBS, would direct the Emergency Censorship Agency. High Point had its own television studio, from which the latest updates on the war could be broadcast nationwide. Patriotic messages from Arthur Godfrey and Edward R. Murrow had already been prerecorded to boost the morale of the American people after a nuclear attack.

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. According to that formula, the Army suggested that the acceptable probability of a hydrogen bomb detonating within the United States should be 1 in 100,000 during the course of a year. The acceptable risk of an atomic bomb going off was set at 1 in 125.

The B-52 was carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs, each with a yield of 4 megatons. As the aircraft spun downward, centrifugal forces pulled a lanyard in the cockpit. The lanyard was attached to the bomb release mechanism. When the lanyard was pulled, the locking pins were removed from one of the bombs. The Mark 39 fell from the plane. The arming wires were yanked out, and the bomb responded as though it had been deliberately released by the crew above a target. The pulse generator activated the low-voltage thermal batteries. The drogue parachute opened, and then the main chute. The barometric switches closed. The timer ran out, activating the high-voltage thermal batteries. The bomb hit the ground, and the piezoelectric crystals inside the nose crushed. They sent a firing signal. But the weapon didn’t detonate. Every safety mechanism had failed, except one: the ready/safe switch in the cockpit. The switch was in the SAFE position when the bomb dropped.

The supreme commander of NATO reported directly to the president, not to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Norstad was fiercely protective of his authority. He disliked General Thomas Power, the head of the Strategic Air Command, and wanted to preserve NATO’s ability to destroy the Soviet Union without any help from SAC. The thermonuclear warheads atop NATO’s Jupiter missiles were aimed at Soviet cities. With those missiles, and the hundreds of other nuclear weapons under NATO command, Norstad could conceivably fight his own war against the Soviets, on his own terms.

Every day, six of the bombers would head north and circumnavigate the perimeter of Canada. Four would cross the Atlantic and circle the Mediterranean. And two would fly to the ballistic missile early-warning facility in Thule, Greenland, and orbit it for hours, maintaining visual or radio contact with the base—just to make sure that it was still there. Thule would probably be hit by Soviet missiles during the initial stage of a surprise attack. Known as the “Thule monitor,” the B-52 assured SAC, more reliably than any bomb alarm system, that the United States was not yet at war.

While heading a committee on the risk of war by accident, miscalculation, or surprise, he was amazed to learn that there was no direct, secure form of communications between the White House and the Kremlin. It seemed almost unbelievable. Schelling had read the novel Red Alert a few years earlier, bought forty copies, and sent them to colleagues. The book gave a good sense of what could go wrong—and yet the president’s ability to call his Soviet counterpart on a “hot line” existed only in fiction. As things stood, AT&T’s telephone lines and Western Union’s telegraph lines were the only direct links between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them would be knocked out by a thermonuclear blast, and most radio communications would be, as well. The command-and-control systems of the two countries had no formal, reliable means of interacting. The problem was so serious and so obvious, Schelling thought, everybody must have assumed somebody else had taken care of it.

And on November 24, just before dawn, SAC headquarters in Omaha lost contact with the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar in Thule, Greenland. A SAC controller picked up the phone and called NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs to find out what was wrong. The line was dead. The odds of a communications breakdown simultaneously extending east and west from Omaha seemed low. SAC’s entire alert force was ordered to prepare for takeoff. At air bases worldwide, Klaxons sounded and pilots climbed into hundreds of planes. A few minutes later the order was rescinded. The B-52 circling Thule had made contact with the base. It had not been destroyed by the Soviets. An investigation subsequently found that the failure of a single AT&T switch in Black Forest, Colorado, had shut down all the ballistic missile early warning circuits, voice communications between the SAC and NORAD command posts, and the “hot line” linking SAC’s commander to NORAD headquarters. AT&T had neglected to provide redundant circuits for some of the nation’s most important communications links, despite assurances that it had done so.

The supreme commander of NATO should not be granted any type of predelegation “to fire nuclear weapons,” McNamara argued—and even the president should never order their use without knowing all the details of a nuclear explosion, whether it was deliberate or accidental, “whether or not it was Soviet launched, how large, where it occurred, etc.” Secretary of State Rusk agreed with McNamara. But their views did not prevail. The head of NATO retained the authority to use nuclear weapons, during an emergency, on the condition that “every effort to contact the President must be made.”

The new SIOP divided the “optimum mix” into three separate target groups: Soviet nuclear forces, conventional military forces, and urban-industrial areas. The president could decide to attack only the first group, the first two groups, or all three. Moscow, China, and cities in the Eastern bloc could selectively be spared from destruction. The SIOP could be launched as a first strike or as retaliation. But all the attack options still required that the Soviet Union be hit by thousands of nuclear weapons, far more than were necessary for “assured destruction.” The three target categories of the SIOP—Alpha, Bravo, Charlie—were the same as those in the attack plan proposed by SAC in 1950.

LeMay and McNamara, polar opposites who’d battled over a wide range of national security issues, each convinced that the other was dangerously wrong, now found themselves in much the same place. They ended 1968 in humiliation and disgrace, their views repudiated by the American people.

The Air Force considered the performance of a bomber or a fighter—its speed, maneuverability, capacity, and range—more important than its structural integrity. The B-52 had been designed in the late 1940s, and its designers never anticipated that the bomber would be used for airborne or ground alerts. It wasn’t built to carry fully assembled nuclear weapons during peacetime. When the weapons were attached to the underside of a plane, they were fully exposed to the effects of a crash. And when they were carried inside the bomb bay of a B-52, a Sandia report noted, they were located in “a weak point in the aircraft’s structure, a point at which the aircraft is apt to break open, spewing weapons beyond the protection afforded by the fuselage.”

Great example for the importance of design parameters and goals

On December 5, 1965, a group of sailors were pushing an A-4E Skyhawk fighter plane onto an elevator aboard the USS Ticonderoga, an aircraft carrier about seventy miles off the coast of Japan. The plane’s canopy was open; Lieutenant Douglas M. Webster, its pilot, strapped into his seat. The deck rose as the ship passed over a wave, and one of the sailors blew a whistle, signaling that Webster should apply his brakes. Webster didn’t hear the whistle. The plane started to roll backward. The sailor kept blowing the whistle; other sailors yelled, “Brakes, brakes,” and held on to the plane. They let go as it rolled off the elevator into the sea. In an instant, it was gone. The pilot, his plane, and a Mark 43 hydrogen bomb vanished. No trace of them was ever found; the ocean there was about three miles deep.

“A more accurate appraisal,” a top secret WSEG study concluded in 1971, “would seem to be that our warning assessment, attack assessment, and damage assessment capabilities are so limited that the President may well have to make SIOP execution decisions virtually in the blind, at least so far as real time information is concerned.” A few years later another top secret report said that the American response to a nuclear attack would be imperfect, poorly coordinated, and largely uncontrolled, with “confused and frightened men making decisions where their authority to do so was questionable and the consequences staggeringly large.”

Eight years had passed since Henry Kissinger began to push for more flexibility in the SIOP. Secretary of Defense Schlesinger had announced in 1974 that America’s war plans were being revised, that they would soon include “Limited Nuclear Options” and “Regional Nuclear Options” using fewer weapons. And yet General Odom could find no trace of those changes in the SIOP. Like others before him, nuclear initiates granted a secret knowledge, Odom was stunned by the SIOP: At times I simply could not believe what I was being shown and told, causing me to doubt my own comprehension. It was an unnerving experience for me personally. . . . It was just a huge mechanical war plan aimed at creating maximum damage without regard to the political context. I concluded that the United States had surrendered political control over nuclear weapons to a deterministic theory of war that . . . ensured an unprecedented devastation of both the Soviet Union and the United States. . . . And the president would be left with two or three meaningless choices that he might have to make within 10 minutes after he was awakened after a deep sleep late some night.

As the minutes passed without the arrival of Soviet warheads, it became clear that the United States wasn’t under attack. The cause of the false alarm was soon discovered. A technician had put the wrong tape into one of NORAD’s computers. The tape was part of a training exercise—a war game that simulated a Soviet attack on the United States. The computer had transmitted realistic details of the war game to SAC headquarters, the Pentagon, and Site R.

During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. 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.

Changes were soon made to the storage practices at NATO igloos and to the emergency procedures for destroying weapons. Antiterrorism research at Sandia led to the development of new perimeter control technologies, such as motion detectors, and innovative methods for stopping intruders who somehow managed to get past the door of an igloo. Nozzles on the walls would rapidly fill the place with sticky foam, trapping intruders and preventing the removal of nuclear weapons. The foam looked ridiculous, like a prop from a Three Stooges film, but it worked.

During a closed Senate hearing, Dr. Roger Batzel, the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, subsequently testified that if the B-52 had caught on fire, the nuclear weapons inside it could have scattered plutonium over sixty square miles of North Dakota and Minnesota. The city of Grand Forks, with a population of about sixty thousand, would have been directly in the path of the radioactive plume. Batzel failed to mention that one of the Mark 28 bombs could have detonated. It would have destroyed Grand Forks and deposited lethal fallout on Duluth, Minnesota, or Minneapolis–Saint Paul, depending on the high-altitude winds. An Air Force investigation discovered the cause of the fire in engine number five: someone had forgotten to screw a nut onto the fuel strainer. The missing nut was smaller than a penny. Jeffrey Zink and his crew were taken to the hospital, given drug tests, and kept there until three in the morning. They later resented the obsession, among local newspapers, with the question of whether nuclear weapons had been on the plane. The Air Force would neither confirm nor deny it. The crew focused on a more immediate issue: how easily they could have lost their lives. Some of the bombers on alert that night were parked facing west. Had the nose of their B-52 faced west, the fire would have entered the plane the moment the hatch was opened. They would have been incinerated, and the flames would’ve quickly reached the SRAMs and the Mark 28 bombs. The...

Project ELF, the extremely low frequency radio system for sending an emergency war order message to submarines. Three new ELF antennae would be built in upper Michigan—one of them twenty-eight miles long, the others about fourteen miles long. Project ELF was a scaled-down version of SANGUINE, a plan that had been strongly backed by the Navy. It would have buried six thousand miles of antenna, four to six feet deep, across an area covering almost one third of the state of Wisconsin.

The invasion of Grenada, however, revealed a number of serious problems with the World Wide Military Command and Control System. The Army’s radio equipment proved to be incompatible with that of the Navy and the Marines. According to a Pentagon report, at one point during the fighting, unable to contact the Navy for fire support, “a frustrated Army officer used his AT&T credit card on an ordinary pay telephone to call Ft. Bragg, NC [the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division] to have them relay his request.”

The week after the invasion, NATO staged a command-and-control exercise, Able Archer 83. It included a practice drill for NATO’s defense ministers, simulating the procedures to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. The KGB thought that Able Archer 83 might be a cover for a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. The timing of such an attack—a few weeks before the arrival of the Pershing IIs—seemed illogical. Nevertheless, “the KGB concluded that American forces had been placed on alert,” a Soviet agent later wrote, “and might even have begun the countdown to war.” A number of the Soviet Union’s own war plans called for using military exercises as a cover for a surprise attack on Western Europe. While NATO played its war game, Soviet aircraft in Poland and East Germany prepared to counterattack. Able Archer 83 ended uneventfully on November 11—and NATO’s defense ministers were totally unaware that their command-and-control drill had been mistaken for the start of a third world war.

Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow—dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job working for the Joint Chiefs, Butler had dealt with targeting issues and the damage criteria for nuclear weapons. He was hardly naive. But the days and weeks spent going through the SIOP, page by page, deeply affected him. 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.”

One of the most important secrets of the Cold War was considered so secret that the president of the United States wasn’t allowed to know it. Harry Truman was deliberately never told that Army cryptologists had broken Soviet codes and deciphered thousands of messages about espionage within the United States. But the Soviet Union learned the secret, when one of its spies, the British double agent Kim Philby, was given a tour of the Army’s Signal Intelligence Service headquarters.

weapons. In 1974, little more than a decade after the release of Dr. Strangelove, the Soviet Union began work on the “Perimeter” system—a network of sensors and computers that could order the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles automatically. Completed in 1985, it was known as the “dead hand.” The Soviet general staff planned to activate Perimeter if an American attack seemed imminent. The system would decide when to retaliate, instructing launch crews to fire their missiles if it detected nuclear explosions on Russian soil. Perimeter greatly reduced the pressure to launch on warning at the first sign of an American attack. It gave Soviet leaders more time to investigate the possibility of a false alarm, confident that a real attack would trigger a computer-controlled, devastating response. But it rendered American plans for limited war meaningless; the Soviet computers weren’t programmed to allow pauses for negotiation. And the deterrent value of Perimeter was wasted. Like the doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove, the system was kept secret from the United States.

Wow

The yield-to-weight ratio of America’s nuclear weapons became asymptotic—approached their mathematical upper limit—around 1963. New designs won’t make detonations any more efficient.

The 9/11 Commission Report offers a sobering account of the confusion, miscommunication, and parallel decision making that occurred at the highest levels of the government during an attack on the United States that lasted about seventy-eight minutes. President George W. Bush did not board Air Force One until almost an hour after the first hijacked airliner struck the World Trade Center. His calls to the Pentagon and the White House underground bunker were constantly dropped. Continuity of government measures weren’t implemented until more than an hour after the initial attack. Vice President Cheney ordered Air Force fighter planes to shoot down any hijacked airliners over Washington, D.C., and New York City, but the order was never received. The only fighter planes that got an authorization to fire their weapons belonged to the District of Columbia Air National Guard—and they were ordered into the air by a Secret Service agent, acting outside the chain of command, without Cheney’s knowledge. A command-and-control system designed to operate during a surprise attack that could involve thousands of nuclear weapons—and would require urgent presidential decisions within minutes—proved incapable of handling an attack by four hijacked airplanes.

AS OF THIS WRITING, the United States has approximately 4,650 nuclear weapons. About 300 are assigned to long-range bombers, 500 are deployed atop Minuteman III missiles, and 1,150 are carried by Trident submarines. An additional 200 or so hydrogen bombs are stored in Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands for use by NATO aircraft. About 2,500 nuclear weapons are held in reserve, mainly at the Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex near Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And Iraq’s nuclear weapon program, before it was halted, may have posed a greater threat to Baghdad than to Saddam Hussein’s enemies. “It could go off if a rifle bullet hit it,” one United Nations inspector said about the Iraqi weapon design. “I wouldn’t want to be around if it fell off the edge of this desk.”

The targets of American missiles are no longer preprogrammed. They are transmitted right before launch, and the default setting of the missiles would send their warheads into the nearest ocean.