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

by Eric Schlosser

The two propellants were extremely efficient—and extremely dangerous. The fuel, Aerozine-50, could spontaneously ignite when it came into contact with everyday things like wool, rags, or rust. As a liquid, Aerozine-50 was clear and colorless.

I think at that point one has to start wondering whether this propellant is a tad too efficient?

The missile’s oxidizer, nitrogen tetroxide, was even more hazardous. Under federal law, it was classified as a “Poison A,” the most deadly category of man-made chemicals.

Deadly poisons on top of the nuclear warhead that they push. Brilliant.

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.

It was the kind of poverty that carried little shame, because everyone seemed to be in the same boat.

The daily risks often inspired a defiant, cavalier attitude among the PTS guys. Some of them had been known to fill a Ping-Pong ball with oxidizer and toss it into a bucket of fuel. The destruction of the steel bucket, accompanied by flames, was a good reminder of what they were working with. And if you were afraid of the propellants, as most people would be, you needed to find a different line of work.

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.

At the point of detonation, temperatures reach as high as 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As hot gases expand into the surrounding atmosphere, they create a “shock wave” of compressed air, also known as a “blast wave,” that can carry tremendous destructive force. The air pressure at sea level is 14.7 pounds per square inch. A conventional explosion can produce a blast wave with an air pressure of 1.4 million pounds per square inch. Although the thermal effects of that explosion may cause burns and set fires, it’s the blast wave, radiating from the point of detonation like a solid wall of compressed air, that can knock down a building.

I am both sorry and glad that I have never witnessed this (from afar, of course).

The difference between a chemical reaction and a nuclear reaction is that in the latter, atoms aren’t simply being rearranged; they’re being split apart.

In nuclear fission. This would the opposite in a fusion reaction.

This is what the end of the world will look like, he thought—this is the last thing the last man will see.

A nuclear attack upon Japan, they contended, would harm the reputation of the United States, make it difficult to secure international control of “this new means of indiscriminate destruction,” and start a dangerous arms race.

That's exactly what happened.

At ground zero, directly beneath the airburst, the temperature reached perhaps 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone on the bridge was incinerated, and hundreds of fires were ignited. The blast wave flattened buildings, a firestorm engulfed the city, and a mushroom cloud rose almost ten miles into the sky.

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.

For decades some historians have questioned whether the use of atomic bombs was necessary. They have argued that Japan was already militarily defeated, that the blockade of Japanese ports had strangled the country’s economy, that an American invasion would never have been required, that a conventional bombing campaign alone could have forced a surrender, that the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan had a greater impact than the atomic bombs, that a demonstration of one atomic bomb would have provided a sufficient shock to the Japanese psyche, that a promise the emperor could retain his throne would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

These can never be proven.

“The enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs,” he explained, “and the heavy casualties are beyond measure.”

The Japanese were arseholes at the time, no doubt, but reading this made me sad.

But the United Nations, Holt thought, wasn’t really a world government. It was just another league of sovereign states, doomed to failure.

Within weeks of the conference at Rollins, a collection of essays demanding international control of the atomic bomb became a New York Times bestseller. Its title was One World or None. And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become “a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.”

Atomic bombs were terribly inexpensive, compared to the price of rebuilding cities. The only conceivable defense against such weapons was a strategy of deterrence—a threat to use them promptly against an enemy in retaliation. “A far better protection,” Arnold concluded, “lies in developing controls and safeguards that are strong enough to prevent their use on all sides.”

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.”

A country with fewer atomic bombs than its adversary had an especially strong incentive to launch an attack out of the blue. And for that reason, among others, a number of high-ranking American officers argued that the United States should bomb the Soviet Union before it obtained any nuclear weapons.

Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell—the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War—urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb.

What had begun as a handcrafted laboratory experiment was now the focus of a growing industrial system. And the idea of placing atomic bombs under international control, the idea of outlawing them, the whole notion of world government and world peace, now seemed like an absurd fantasy.

Here is what would happen, if everything worked as planned: an implosion device would detonate inside a thick metal canister lined with lead. The X-rays emitted by that explosion would be channeled down the canister toward hydrogen fuel wrapped around a uranium-235 “spark plug.” The fuel and the spark plug would be encased in a cylindrical layer of uranium-238, like beer inside a keg. The X-rays would compress the uranium casing and the hydrogen fuel. That compression would make the fuel incredibly dense—and then would detonate the uranium spark plug in the middle of it. Trapped between two nuclear explosions, the first one pressing inward, the second one now pushing outward, the hydrogen atoms would fuse. They would suddenly release massive amounts of neutrons, and that flood of neutrons would accelerate the fission of the uranium spark plug. It would also cause the uranium casing to fission. All of that would occur within a few millionths of a second. And then the metal canister holding everything together would blow apart.

Who would've thought a thermonuclear weapon would be this simple huh?

Rocks, dirt, even seawater are transformed into radioactive elements within the fireball, pulled upward, carried by the wind, and eventually fall out of the sky.

Strontium-90 is a soft metal, much like lead, with a radioactive half-life of 29.1 years. It is usually present in the fallout released by thermonuclear explosions. When strontium-90 enters the soil, it’s absorbed by plants grown in that soil—and by the animals that eat those plants. Once inside the human body, strontium-90 mimics calcium, accumulates in bone, and continues to emit radiation, often causing leukemia or bone cancer.

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.

Knocked off balance by air turbulence while standing in the bomb bay of a B-36, the plane’s navigator had steadied himself by grabbing the nearest handle—the manual bomb release.

Force. A few hundred Air Force officers and enlisted men were annually removed from duty because of their psychotic disorders—and perhaps ten or twenty who worked with nuclear weapons could be expected to have a severe mental breakdown every year.

After the accidental detonation of an atomic bomb, the president might have a strong incentive to tell the Soviet Union the truth—and lie to the American people.

Yeah, that makes total sense. Kinda. Sorta.

to share its target list with the other armed services. When the services finally met to compare war plans, hundreds of “time over target” conflicts were discovered—cases in which, for example, the Air Force and the Navy unwittingly planned to bomb the same target at the same time. These conflicts promised to cause unnecessary “overkill” and threaten the lives of American aircrews.

Sixty feet high, topped by a 1.4-megaton warhead, and deployed in the countryside, the missiles were especially vulnerable to lightning strikes.

The principles that determined the trajectory of a warhead were the same as those that guided a rock thrown at a window. Accuracy depended on the shape of the projectile, the distance to the target, the aim and strength of the toss.

The Air Force’s demand for self-contained, inertial guidance systems played a leading role in the miniaturization of computers and the development of integrated circuits, the building blocks of the modern electronics industry.

The nose cone not only protected the warhead from heat, it also contained the weapon’s arming and fuzing system. On the way up, a barometric switch closed when it reached a specific altitude, allowing electricity to flow from the thermal batteries to the warhead. On the way down, an accelerometer ignited the thermal batteries and armed the warhead. If the warhead had been set for an airburst, it exploded at an altitude of fourteen thousand feet when a barometric switch closed. If the warhead had been set for a groundburst—or if, for some reason, the barometric switch malfunctioned—it exploded when the piezoelectric crystals in the nose cone were crushed upon impact with the target. Instead of being vaporized by reentry, the warhead was kept cool and intact long enough to vaporize everything for miles around it.

A subsequent investigation found the cause of the computer glitch. The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.

Mistaking the moon for intercontinental missiles and readying themselves for nuclear war. You can't fake this kind of genius.

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us. . . . The events and decisions of the next ten months may well decide the fate of man for the next ten thousand years. There will be no avoiding those events. There will be no appeal from those decisions. And we in this hall shall be remembered either as part of the generation that turned this planet into a flaming funeral pyre or the generation that met its vow “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

Powerful words that has unfortunately failed to turn into actions.

Within weeks of President Kennedy’s assassination, McNamara formally endorsed a strategy of “Assured Destruction.” The idealism and optimism that had accompanied Kennedy’s inauguration were long gone. The new strategy was grounded in a sense of futility. It planned to deter a Soviet attack by threatening to wipe out at least “30% of their population, 50% of their industrial capacity, and 150 of their cities.” McNamara’s staff had calculated that the equivalent of 400 megatons, detonated above the Soviet Union, would be enough for the task. Anything more would be overkill. Informed by a reporter that the Soviets were hardening their silos to protect the missiles from an American attack, McNamara said, “Thank God.” The move would improve “crisis stability.” Once the Soviets felt confident that they could retaliate after being attacked, they’d feel much less pressure to strike first. Leaving the cities of the United States and the Soviet Union vulnerable to annihilation, McNamara now thought, would keep them safe. The strategy was soon known as MAD: “mutually assured destruction.”

As a liquid it could prevent an electrical connection—or flow back into its original place, reconnect wires, and allow current to travel between them. The unpredictable behavior of materials and electrical circuits during an accident was compounded by the design of most nuclear weapons.

Although nuclear weapons and marijuana had recently become controversial subjects in American society, inspiring angry debates between liberals and conservatives, nobody argued that the two were a good combination.

Considering what's at stake here, I wouldn't either.

“No weight of nuclear attack which is at all probable could induce gross changes in the balance of nature that approach in type or degree the ones that human civilization has already inflicted on the environment,” it said. “These include cutting most of the original forests, tilling the prairies, irrigating the deserts, damming and polluting the streams, eliminating certain species and introducing others, overgrazing hillsides, flooding valleys, and even preventing forest fires.” The implication was that nature might find nuclear warfare a relief.

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.

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.

“Screw you,” Sandaker said. “I’m not leaving until I have my friends or their bodies.”

Now that's either tremendously brave or foolhardy.

Perrow explored the workings of high-risk systems in his book Normal Accidents, focusing on the nuclear power industry, the chemical industry, shipping, air transportation, and other industrial activities that could harm a large number of people if something went wrong.

The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.

The RRW would also be the first “green” nuclear weapon—designed to avoid the use of beryllium, a toxic environmental contaminant.

One measure of a nation’s technological proficiency is the rate of industrial accidents. That rate is about two times higher in India, three times higher in Iran, and four times higher in Pakistan than it is in the United States. High-risk technologies are easily transferred across borders; but the organizational skills and safety culture necessary to manage them are more difficult to share.

This, I suppose, is an easy way to gauge a nation's capability of safely managing their nuclear arsenal. After all, industrial accident data is not classified.

The idealistic rhetoric at the U.N. has not yet been followed, however, by the difficult steps that might lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons: passage of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty by the U.S. Senate; major reductions in the Russian and American arsenals; arms control talks that include China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel; strict rules on the production and distribution of fissile materials; and harsh punishments for countries that violate the new international norms.

Right now thousands of missiles are hidden away, literally out of sight, topped with warheads and ready to go, awaiting the right electrical signal. They are a collective death wish, barely suppressed. Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder. They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial—and they work.