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

by Eric Schlosser

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