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

by Eric Schlosser

BOMARC—a ground-launched antiaircraft missile with an atomic warhead, designed by Boeing (BO) and the Michigan Aerospace Research Center (MARC), that was deployed at sites in the United States and Canada

A RFHCO looked like a space suit from an early-1960s science fiction movie. It had a white detachable bubble helmet with a voice-actuated radio and a transparent Plexiglas face screen. The suit was off white, with a long zipper extending from the top of the left shoulder, across the torso, to the right knee.

Childers hardly fit the stereotype of a warmongering Strategic Air Command (SAC) officer, eager to nuke the Soviets and bring on Armageddon. For about a year before joining the Air Force, he’d been a late-night radio DJ who played mainly acid rock, spent his days surfing, and had hair down to his shoulders. He wasn’t a hippie, but he also wasn’t harboring any lifelong ambition to become a spit-and-polish military officer.

Old-fashioned American optimism had been replaced by a despairing, self-absorbed worship of consumption.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.”

Perhaps the most influential bestseller of the year was The Third World War: August 1985, a novel written by a retired British officer, General Sir John Hackett.

On television, The Waltons, a long-running drama about an ordinary family’s struggles during the Great Depression, was facing cancellation.

Instead of worrying about how the show’s young protagonist, John-Boy, would overcome adversity, American viewers were now far more interested in who’d shot J.R., the wealthy lead character of a new series, Dallas.

Bob Dylan now refused to sing any of his old songs. Born again and on the road, he played only gospel.

At the bottom of the stairs was another locked door, with a television camera above it. Mazzaro picked up the phone on the wall, called the control center again, pulled a code card from his pocket, and read the six-letter code aloud. After being granted permission to enter, he took out some matches and set the code card on fire. Then he dropped the burning card into a red canister mounted on the steel mesh.

Without power, the site lacked air-conditioning, and as the temperature in the silo rose, so did the pressure in the missile’s oxidizer tanks. Nitrogen tetroxide expanded in the heat; its boiling point was only 70 degrees Fahrenheit. By five o’clock that evening, the temperature in the silo was 78 degrees and rising. Opening the silo door would help cool the missile and vent the smoke—but the door couldn’t be opened without electrical power.

If a launch order came over the speakers, the officers were supposed to unlock their locks, open the safe, grab their codes and keys, then return to their consoles. The keys looked unexceptional, like the kind used to unlock millions of American front doors. The codes were hidden inside flat plastic disks called “cookies.” The disks were broken open by hand, like fortune cookies, and the codes were read aloud. And if the codes authenticated the emergency war order from SAC headquarters, the launch checklist went something like this:

Assuming that everything worked as planned, the Titan II would be gone within seconds. Its warhead would strike the target in about half an hour. Once the missile left the silo, the crew’s job was done. They couldn’t destroy a missile midflight or launch another. The complex was designed to be used once.

The Titan II would not launch, however, unless the two keys were turned at the same time; the launch switches were too far apart for one person to activate them both. SAC’s “two-man policy” had been adopted to prevent a deranged or fanatic crew member from starting a nuclear war.

The butterfly valve lock on the stage 1 rocket engine offered some additional control over who could launch the missile. Oxidizer wouldn’t flow into that engine until the correct butterfly valve lock code (BVLC) was used during the launch checklist—and without the oxidizer, the missile would stay in the silo. This code wasn’t kept in the safe ...

The same rule applied in the silo, whenever the missile had a warhead. At entrances to the control center and the silo, a warning stenciled in bold red letters said: “NO LONE ZONE, SAC TWO MAN POLICY MANDATORY.”

THE COMMANDER AND the deputy commander at every Titan II site were issued .38 caliber revolvers, in case an intruder penetrated the underground complex or a crew member disobeyed orders. Transferring the weapons was part of the turnover checklist, when a new crew arrived for duty.

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.

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.

Two materials were soon determined to be fissile—that is, capable of sustaining a rapid chain reaction: uranium-235 and plutonium-239. Both were difficult to obtain. Plutonium is a man-made element, created by bombarding uranium with neutrons. Uranium-235 exists in nature, but in small amounts. A typical sample of uranium is about 0.07 percent uranium-235, and to get that fissile material the Manhattan Project built a processing facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

nanosecond is one billionth of a second, and the fission of a plutonium atom occurs in ten nanoseconds. One problem with the gun-type design was its inefficiency: the two pieces would collide and start a chain reaction, but they’d detonate before most of the material had a chance to fission.

Another problem was that plutonium turned out to be unsuitable for use in such a design. Plutonium emits stray neutrons and, as a result, could start a chain reaction in the gun barrel prematurely, destroying the weapon without creating a large explosion.

The new weapon design was nicknamed, at first, “the Introvert.” A sphere of plutonium would be surrounded by conventional explosives. The shock wave from the detonation of these explosives would compress the sphere—and the denser the sphere became, the more efficiently it would trap neutrons.

Creating a perfectly symmetrical shock wave required not just the right combination of explosives but also the right sizes and shapes. Kistiakowsky and his team at Los Alamos molded explosive charges into three-dimensional lenses, hoping to focus the shock wave, like the lens of a camera focuses light.

The final design was a sphere composed of thirty-two shaped charges—twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons. It looked like a gigantic soccer ball and weighed about five thousand pounds.

The shock wave would travel through the device at a speed of one millimeter per millionth of a second. If a single lens detonated a few ten millionths of a second before the others, it could shatter the plutonium without starting a chain reaction.

The physicist Luis Alvarez and his assistant, Lawrence Johnston, invented a new type of detonator for the job—the exploding-bridgewire detonator. It sent a high-voltage current through a thin silver wire inserted into an explosive. The current vaporized the wire, created a small shock wave, and detonated the explosive.

The next morning, as it was slowly hoisted to the top of the tower, surplus Army mattresses were stacked to a height of fifteen feet directly beneath it, in case the cable broke.

Victor Weisskopf saw the flash and felt heat on his face from a distance of ten miles. His heart sank. For a moment, he thought that his calculations were wrong and the atmosphere was on fire.

Kenneth Bainbridge, the supervisor of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

On the night of March 9, 1945, the Army Air Forces tried a new approach. American planes struck Tokyo with two thousand tons of bombs containing napalm and jellied gasoline. Although a major industrial area was destroyed, the real targets were block after block of Japanese buildings made of wood, paper, and bamboo. Within hours the firestorm consumed one quarter of the city. It killed about one hundred thousand civilians, and left about a million homeless.

The firebombing of Tokyo wasn’t condemned by President Roosevelt. On the contrary, it was soon followed by the firebombing of Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Kawasaki, and Yokohama.

Toyama, a city on the Sea of Japan with chemical plants and a population of about 125,000, was hit the hardest. After a nighttime raid by B-29 bombers, the proportion of Toyama still standing was an estimated 0.5 percent.

The first four choices of the president’s Target Committee were Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. Secretary of War Henry Stimson insisted that Kyoto be removed from the list, arguing that the city had played too central a role in Japanese art, history, and culture to be wiped out. Nagasaki took its place.

The day after the Trinity test, Szilárd and more than sixty-eight other Manhattan Project scientists signed a petition, addressed to the president. It warned that using the atomic bomb against Japan would open the door “to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale” and place American cities in “continuous danger of sudden annihilation.”

Franklin Roosevelt had never told his vice president, Harry Truman, about the Manhattan Project or the unusual weapon that it was developing. When Roosevelt died unexpectedly, on April 12, 1945, Truman had the thankless task of replacing a beloved and charismatic leader during wartime. The new president was unlikely to reverse a nuclear policy set in motion years earlier, at enormous expense, because a group of relatively unknown scientists now considered it a bad idea.

Both bomb types were rigged to detonate about 1,800 feet above the ground. That was the altitude, according to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “appropriate for the maximum demolition of light structures.” Had the bombs been aimed at industrial buildings, instead of homes, the height of the airburst would have been set lower.

The best advice that the committee could give was hardly reassuring to aircrews, whose bombing runs traversed the Pacific Ocean for thousands of miles: try to remove the cordite charges from the bomb midair and make sure to crash the plane on land.

At Los Alamos he’d supervised development of the gun-type bomb, which was to be dropped on the city of Hiroshima. Code-named “Little Boy,” the bomb was ten feet long and weighed about 10,000 pounds. It contained almost all the processed uranium in existence, about 141 pounds.

At three in the morning on August 6, 1945, Parsons and another weaponeer, Morris Jeppson, left the cockpit and climbed into the bomb bay of a B-29 named Enola Gay, after the pilot’s mother.

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.

Fat Man missed its aiming point by more than a mile. Instead of detonating above the central commercial district, the bomb went off above an industrial area on the western outskirts of Nagasaki. About one fifth of the plutonium fissioned, and the force of the explosion was equal to about 21,000 tons of TNT (21 kilotons).

But the damage was less severe in Nagasaki. A series of hills protected much of the city from the blast wave, and a firestorm never erupted, despite winds that reached more than six hundred miles an hour.

But the historical facts remain. Hiroshima was destroyed on August 6. Two days later the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Nagasaki was struck on the ninth, and the following day, General Korechika Anami, the minister of war, still urged the Japanese people to fight, “even though we have to eat grass and chew dirt and lay in the field.” On August 14, Emperor Hirohito overruled his generals and agreed to an unconditional surrender. “The enemy has for the first time used cruel bombs,” he explained, “and the heavy casualties are beyond measure.”

In the spring of 1946, Holt hosted a conference on world government at Rollins. An idea that had long been dismissed as impractical and naive was now widely considered essential.

“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.”

The General Assembly would be authorized to ban weapons of mass destruction, conduct inspections for such weapons, and use military force to enforce international law. “We believe these to be the minimum requirements,” the appeal concluded, “of a world government capable of averting another war in the atomic era.”

To a remarkable degree, even the U.S. military thought that the atomic bomb should be outlawed or placed under some form of international mandate. General Arnold was a contributor to One World or None. He’d been a leading proponent of strategic airpower and supervised the American bombing of both Germany and Japan.

Canada and Great Britain had been invited to join the Manhattan Project, while the Soviets hadn’t even been informed of its existence.