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

by Eric Schlosser

The wing’s motto was Non sibi sed aliis—“Not for self but for others.”

During a speech broadcast by the three major television networks in prime time, the president warned that the United States faced an invisible threat: “a crisis in confidence.” Old-fashioned American optimism had been replaced by a despairing, self-absorbed worship of consumption. “Piling up material goods,” Carter said, “cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no purpose or meaning.”

“All the legislation in the world,” he said, “can’t fix what’s wrong with America.”

Kenneth Bainbridge, the supervisor of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Within minutes the mushroom cloud reached eight miles into the sky.

“The immediate aim is, therefore, twofold,” an RAF memo explained, “namely, to produce (i) destruction, and (ii) the fear of death.”

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.

“Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear,” CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow noted, “with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”

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.”

Anderson told a reporter. “I advocate the shedding of illusions.” He thought that Jesus Christ would approve of dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union: “I think I could explain to Him that I had saved civilization.” Anderson was suspended for the remarks.

“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.”

Polonium initiators would be made by the Monsanto Chemical Company, in Miamisburg,

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.

“The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past,” President Truman said, a couple of months later, during his farewell address. Then he added, somewhat hopefully, “Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men.”

The University of California managed the labs at Livermore and Los Alamos, but Sandia was a nonprofit corporation operated by AT&T.

The “early fallout” of a nuclear blast is usually the most dangerous. The larger particles of radioactive material drop from the mushroom cloud within the first twenty-four hours, landing wherever wind or rain carries them. On the ground, radiation levels steadily increase as the fallout accumulates. Unlike the initial burst of gamma rays from a nuclear explosion, the residual radiation can remain hazardous for days, months, or even years. A dose of about 700 roentgens is almost always fatal to human beings—and that dose need not be received all at once. Radiation poisoning, like a sunburn, can occur gradually. Gamma rays are invisible, and radioactive dust looks like any other dust. By the time a person feels the effects of the radiation damage, nothing can be done to reverse it.

At the Atomic Energy Commission, the fallout pattern from the Bravo test was superimposed on a map of the northeastern United States, with Washington, D.C., as ground zero. According to the map, if a similar 15-megaton groundburst hit the nation’s capital, everyone in Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia could receive a fatal dose of radioactivity. Residents of New York City might be exposed to 500 roentgens, enough to kill more than half of them. People as far north as Boston or even the Canadian border might suffer from radiation poisoning.

YOUR CHANCES OF SURVIVING AN ATOMIC ATTACK ARE BETTER THAN YOU MAY HAVE THOUGHT. . . . EVEN A LITTLE MATERIAL GIVES PROTECTION FROM FLASH BURNS, SO BE SURE TO DRESS PROPERLY. . . . WE KNOW MORE ABOUT RADIOACTIVITY THAN WE DO ABOUT COLDS. . . . KEEP A FLASHLIGHT HANDY. . . . AVOID GETTING WET AFTER UNDERWATER BURSTS. . . . BE CAREFUL NOT TO TRACK RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS INTO THE HOUSE. . . .

“The computerization of society,” the technology writer Frank Rose later observed, was essentially a “side effect of the computerization of 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.

Oskar Morgenstern—an eminent Princeton economist, military strategist, and Pentagon adviser—noted the futility of seeking that goal. “Some day there will be an accidental explosion of a nuclear weapon,” Morgenstern wrote. “The human mind cannot construct something that is infallible . . . the laws of probability virtually guarantee such an accident.”

General Power had inflamed public opinion by telling a British journalist, who’d asked whether American aircraft routinely flew with nuclear weapons above England, “Well, we did not build these bombers to carry crushed rose petals.”

preparation for the four-day march, the artist Gerald Holtom designed a symbol for the antinuclear movement. “I drew myself,” Holtom recalled, “the representative of an individual in despair, with palms outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad.” He placed a circle around the self-portrait, an elongated stick figure, and created an image later known as the peace sign.

And the notion that a madman could deliberately start a world war became plausible, not long after the forgery appeared, when an American mechanic stole a B-45 bomber from Alconbury Air Force Base in England and took it for a joyride. The mechanic, who’d never received flight training, crashed the jet not long after takeoff and died.

The phrase “fail safe” had been removed from Air Force descriptions of the plan. The word “fail” had the wrong connotations, and the new term didn’t sound so negative: “positive control.”

On at least one occasion, a drunken enlisted man had overpowered a guard at a nuclear storage site and attempted to gain access to the bombs.

[An] assistant cook improperly obtained a charge of TNT in order to blast fish. He lighted it with a cigarette. As he was examining it to make sure it was ignited, the explosion took place. The man was blown to pieces. “Private B and I each found a rifle grenade. We carried them back to our tent. Private K told us that we had better not fool with the grenades and to get rid of them. Private B said, ‘What will happen if I pull this pin?’ Then the grenade exploded.” A Marine found a 37-millimeter dud and turned it in to the Quartermaster tent. Later, a sergeant came into the tent and saw the dud. In disregard of orders and safety, he aimed the shell at a hole in the wooden floor of the tent and dropped it. He commented that he would make “a pretty good bombardier.” He dropped the shell at least six times. Finally, inevitably, it exploded. The sergeant was killed and 2 others were injured.

The harsh criticism of his policies—not just by Democrats but also by defense contractors—led Eisenhower to believe in the existence of a “military-industrial complex,” a set of powerful interest groups that threatened American democracy and sought new weapons regardless of the actual need.

A wide assortment of variables had to be taken into account, including: the accuracy and reliability of different weapon systems, the effectiveness of Soviet air defenses, the impact of darkness or poor weather, and the rate at which low-flying aircraft were likely to crash due to unknown causes, known as the “clobber factor.”

The SIOP would take effect the following April. It featured 3,729 targets, grouped into more than 1,000 ground zeros, that would be struck by 3,423 nuclear weapons. The targets were located in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Eastern Europe. About 80 percent were military targets, and the rest were civilian. Of the “urban-industrial complexes” scheduled for destruction, 295 were in the Soviet Union and 78 in China.

Once the officers showed him how to do it, Green requested permission to stage a black hat operation at 4-7—an unannounced demonstration of how someone could sneak into the launch control center undetected. SAC had a long history of black hatting to test the security at its facilities. Black hat teams would plant phony explosives on bombers, place metal spikes on runways, infiltrate a command post and then hand a letter to the base commander that said, “You’re dead.” General LeMay liked to run these tests and to punish officers who failed them. After Green received the go-ahead to stage a black hat at 4-7, his men secretly practiced the break-in.

penetrated more than seventy feet into the soggy ground. A recovery team never found it, despite weeks of digging.

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.

the Davy Crockett, a recoilless rifle, carried like a bazooka by an infantryman, that fired small nuclear projectiles.

When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn’t. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn’t unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security.

Security theater, cold war edition

Even if the locking and unlocking mechanisms worked flawlessly, use of the weapons would depend on effective code management. If only a few people were allowed to know the code, then the death of those few or an inability to reach them in an emergency could prevent the weapons from being unlocked. But if the code was too widely shared, the locks would offer little protection against unauthorized use.

Echoes of cert and password management nightmares, eh?

The Davy Crockett recoilless rifle was especially problematic. Its atomic projectiles weighed about fifty pounds and would be easy to steal.

The maximum range of the Davy Crockett was so short—about a mile and a half—that the soldiers who fired it stood a good chance of being killed by it.

recent presidential campaign now seemed baseless. Although General Power still insisted that the Soviets were hiding their long-range missiles beneath camouflage, the United States clearly had not fallen behind in the nuclear arms race. Public knowledge of that fact would be inconvenient—and so the public wasn’t told. When McNamara admitted that the missile gap was a myth, during an off-the-record briefing with reporters, President Kennedy was displeased.

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.

In order to use a nuclear weapon, both the ready/safe switch and the new “war/peace switch” had to be activated by two different crew members.

And the gears in the Category A PALs were too loud. During a black hat exercise at Sandia, an engineer listened carefully to the sounds of a PAL, deciphered its code, and picked the lock.

According to the DNA report, the masks offered no protection against radiation hazards and served mainly as a placebo—“a psychological barrier to plutonium inhalation.”

Those odds were usually said to be one in a million during storage, transportation, and handling. But the dimensions of that probability were rarely defined. Was the risk one in a million for a single weapon—or for an entire weapon system? Was it one in a million per year—or throughout the operational life of a weapon? How the risk was defined made a big difference, at a time when the United States had about thirty thousand nuclear weapons. The permissible risk of an American nuclear weapon detonating inadvertently could range from one in a million to one in twenty thousand, depending on when the statistical parameters were set.

They demanded a high level of certainty that an accidental detonation could never occur. But they offered no guidelines on how these strict criteria could be met. And in the memo announcing the new policy, Walske expressed confidence that “the adoption of the attached standards will not result in any increase in weapon development times or costs.”

The atomic shell would fly directly over the heads of Stevens and the other soldiers. They were told to crouch in their trenches until the weapon detonated, then rise in time to brace against the blast wave and watch the explosion. At eight thirty in the morning, a great fireball lit up the desert, about ninety miles from Las Vegas.

Nike Hercules base in San Rafael, California,

One of the submarine tenders that docked at the base, the USS Canopus, often carried nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles. The widespread marijuana use among its crew earned the ship a local nickname: the USS Cannabis.

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob,” Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.” The secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought it was a bad idea. But Nixon and Kissinger thought the plan might work.

Great leaders sometimes need to appear unbalanced, he thought: “What seems ‘balanced’ and ‘safe’ in a crisis is often the most risky.”

now played a diminished role in nuclear strategy. “It is not to our disadvantage,” Scowcroft said, “if we appear irrational to the Soviets in this regard.”