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

by Eric Schlosser

Stimson thought that a U.S.-Soviet partnership could ensure a lasting peace. “The only way you can make a man trustworthy,” he told the president, “is to trust him.”

A few weeks later, George F. Kennan, one of the State Department’s Soviet experts, gave his opinion in a telegram from Moscow, where he was posted at the U.S. embassy. “There is nothing—I repeat nothing,” Kennan wrote, “in the history of the Soviet regime which could justify us in assuming that the men who are now in power in Russia, or even those who have chances of assuming power within the foreseeable future, would hesitate for a moment to apply this [atomic] power against us if by doing so they thought that they might materially improve their own power position in the world.”

The War Department favored the May-Johnson bill, which would give the military a prominent role in atomic matters.

But the legislation was vehemently opposed by most of the young scientists who’d worked on the Manhattan Project.

At the heart of the debate were fundamentally different views of who should control the atomic bomb: civilians or the military.

President Truman backed the Army’s insistence that details of the atomic stockpile should remain top secret, for the sake of national security. But he sided with the young scientists on the issue of civilian control and threw his support to legislation sponsored by Senator McMahon.

Members of the military could serve on a liaison committee that advised the AEC, but they could not determine the agency’s policies.

The president was given the sole authority to decide how many atomic bombs the United States should have, when they should be handed over to the military, and whether they should be used against an enemy. One person now had the power to end the lives of millions, with a single command.

The “Baruch plan” called for the creation of a new agency, affiliated with the U.N., that would own or control “all atomic-energy activities potentially dangerous to world security.” The agency would have the power to inspect nuclear facilities throughout the world, so that any attempt to make nuclear weapons could be discovered and severely punished.

Oppenheimer, among others, for not being bold enough—for emphasizing inspections and punishments instead of cooperation with the Soviets. Oppenheimer favored a scheme that would share technical information about atomic energy and promote goodwill.

During the summer of 1946, some form of international agreement to outlaw the atomic bomb still seemed within reach.

At the very moment when hopes for world government, world peace, and international control of the atomic bomb reached their peak, the Cold War began. Without the common enemy of Nazi Germany, the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States started to unravel. The Soviet Union’s looting of Manchuria, its delay in removing troops from Iran, and its demand for Turkish territory along the Mediterranean coast unsettled the Truman administration.

But the roots of the Cold War lay in Germany and Eastern Europe, where the Soviets hoped to create a buffer zone against future invasion. Ignoring promises of free elections and self-determination, the Soviet Union imposed a Communist puppet government in Poland.

In February 1948 the Communist overthrow of Czechoslovakia’s freely elected government shocked the American public. The Soviet-backed coup revived memories of the Nazi assault on the Czechs in 1938, the timidity of the European response, and the world war that soon followed.

And the rapid demobilization of the American military seemed to have given the Soviets a tremendous advantage on the ground.

Instead of being outlawed by the U.N., the atomic bomb soon became integral to American war plans for the defense of Europe.

The destructive power of these weapons was so great that the logic of waging a preventive war, of launching a surprise attack upon an enemy, might prove hard to resist.

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.

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.”

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.

Amid the Berlin crisis, work on ERASER was halted, Truman issued a series of directives outlining how nuclear weapons should be used—and the atomic blitz became the most likely American response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

On August 29, 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic device, RDS-1, at a test range in eastern Kazakhstan. The yield was about 20 kilotons, roughly the same as that of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki—and for good reason. RDS-1 was a copy of the Mark 3 implosion bomb.

Within two years the Soviet Union had its first long-range bomber, the Tupolev-4. The plane was almost identical to the captured B-29; it even had a metal patch where the General Arnold had been repaired.

Overwhelmed by stress, lack of sleep, and fears of international communism, Secretary of Defense Forrestal had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and leaped to his death from a sixteenth floor window at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Privately, Truman explained that he didn’t want “to have some dashing lieutenant colonel decide when would be the proper time to drop one.”

Officers lost their jobs because of accidents and honest mistakes. “I can’t afford to differentiate between the incompetent and the unfortunate,” LeMay explained.

Command and control had always been a crucial element in warfare. But in a nuclear war, where decisions might have to be made within minutes and weapons could destroy cities in an instant, the reliability of these administrative systems could be the difference between victory and annihilation.

The core looked like an enormous gray pearl resting inside a shiny beryllium shell. Slotin used a screwdriver to lower the top half of that shell—and then, at about 3:20 in the afternoon on May 21, 1946, the screwdriver slipped, the shell shut, the core went supercritical, and a blue flash filled the room. Slotin immediately threw the top half of the tamper onto the floor, halting the chain reaction. But it was too late: he’d absorbed a lethal dose of radiation. And he, more than anyone else in the room, knew it.

Admirals and generals were fighting over the atomic stockpile, completely unaware that there wasn’t one.

The Mark 3 was considered too dangerous to be flown, fully assembled, over American soil. But no safety restrictions were imposed on flights of the bomb over Great Britain. Atomic bomb–making facilities were secretly constructed at two Royal Air Force bases, in Sculthorpe and Lakenheath.

More important, the nuclear core was stored in the plane’s cockpit during takeoff and inserted through a trap door into the nose of the bomb, midflight. As long as the core was kept physically separate from the rest of the bomb, it was impossible for a plane crash to cause a nuclear explosion.

The fuel reading unnerved Kennedy. The negative pressure meant a vacuum was forming inside the tank that supported the rest of the missile. The stage 1 fuel tank was like a tin can with the air getting sucked out of it—and

Governor Clinton began his two-year term in office with an ambitious agenda for one of America’s most impoverished states. He gained passage of the largest spending increase for public education in Arkansas history. He created a Department of Energy to subsidize research on conservation, alternative fuels, and solar power. He proposed a rural health policy that would bring physicians and medical care to low-income communities. And he set out to fix the state’s badly deteriorated highway system, promising infrastructure investments to create jobs and improve the lives of ordinary Arkansans.

Iklé was impressed by the amount of urban hardship and overcrowding that people could endure. But there were limits. The tipping point seemed to be reached when about 70 percent of a city’s homes were destroyed. That’s when people began to leave en masse and seek shelter in the countryside.

The General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission discussed Teller’s proposal and voted unanimously to oppose it. Headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the committee said that the hydrogen bomb had no real military value and would encourage “the policy of exterminating civilian populations.”

David Lilienthal, the head of the AEC, opposed developing a hydrogen bomb, as did a majority of the AEC’s commissioners. But one of them, Lewis L. Strauss, soon emerged as an influential champion of the weapon. Strauss wasn’t a physicist or a former Manhattan Project scientist. He was a retired Wall Street financier with a high school education, a passion for science, and a deep mistrust of the Soviet Union.

Two weeks after the president’s decision was publicly announced, Albert Einstein read a prepared statement about the hydrogen bomb on national television. He criticized the militarization of American society, the intimidation of anyone who opposed it, the demands for loyalty and secrecy, the “hysterical character” of the nuclear arms race, and the “disastrous illusion” that this new weapon would somehow make America safer.

The usefulness of the Super wasn’t the issue; the willingness to build it was. And that sort of logic would guide the nuclear arms race for the next forty years.

According to the physicist Andrei Sakharov, considered the father of the Soviet H-bomb, Joseph Stalin was determined to have such a weapon—regardless of what the United States did.

Ulam had called his initial proposal “a bomb in a box.” The Teller-Ulam design that emerged from it essentially placed two fission bombs in a box, along with hydrogen isotopes like deuterium and tritium to serve as thermonuclear fuel.

Using X-rays to implode the secondary was a brilliant idea: the X-rays would move at the speed of light, traveling much faster than the blast wave from the primary. The difference in speed would prolong the fusion process—if the interaction of the various materials could be properly understood.

The detonation of “Item” a few days later had a much lower yield, but enormous significance. It confirmed Teller’s belief that fission bombs could be “boosted”—that their explosive force could be greatly magnified by putting a small amount of tritium and deuterium gas into their cores, right before the moment of detonation.

When a boosted core imploded, the hydrogen isotopes fused and then flooded it with neutrons, making the subsequent fission explosion anywhere from ten to a hundred times more powerful.

“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.”

Ridgway had demonstrated great leadership and integrity while commanding ground forces during the Second World War and in Korea. He thought that the United States still needed a strong Army to fight conventional wars, that an overreliance on nuclear weapons was dangerous and immoral, that Eisenhower’s policy would needlessly threaten civilians, and that “national fiscal bankruptcy would be far preferable to national spiritual bankruptcy.”

While Teller and Ulam wrestled with the theoretical issues of how to sustain thermonuclear fusion, the engineers at Sandia faced a more practical question: How do you deliver a hydrogen bomb without destroying the aircraft that carried it to the target?

The Air Force investigated the possibility of turning the new, medium-range B-47 jet bomber into a pilotless drone. The B-47 would be fitted with a hydrogen bomb and carried to the Soviet Union by a B-36 mothership. Code-named Project Brass Ring, the plan was hampered by the cost and complexity of devising a guidance system for the drone.

Inspired by the German designs, Project Caucasian, a collaboration between the Air Force and Sandia, developed a three-parachute system that would slow the descent of a hydrogen bomb and give an American bomber enough time to get away from it.

A barometric switch or a mechanical timer seemed a more reliable way to trigger the X-unit, fire the detonators, and set off a thermonuclear explosion. Each of those fuzes, however, had potential disadvantages. If a mechanical timer was used and the main parachute failed, the bomb would plummet to the ground and smash to pieces before the timer ran out. But if a barometric switch was used and the main parachute failed, the bomb would fall to the designated altitude too fast and explode prematurely, destroying the B-36 before it had a chance to escape.

But when manganese is bombarded by high-energy neutrons, it becomes manganese-56, an isotope that emits gamma rays and has a half-life of two and a half hours. Manganese is commonly found in soil, and that’s one of the reasons that the groundburst of a nuclear weapon can create a large amount of deadly fallout.