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

by Eric Schlosser

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.