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

by Eric Schlosser

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. Strontium-90 poses the greatest risk to children and adolescents, whose bones are still growing.

“Duck and cover,” one journalist noted, was being replaced by a new civil defense catchphrase: “Run for the hills.”

The secretary of the Treasury, George M. Humphrey, said that the exercise demonstrated the United States would “be able to take it” and “recover surprisingly rapidly.” Out of a U.S. population of about 165 million, only 8.2 million people would be killed and 6.6 million wounded—and more than half of those casualties would be in New York City.

“You can’t have this kind of war,” Eisenhower said at a national security meeting a couple of years later. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”

After the war, Colonel Jimmy Stewart returned to Hollywood and starred in a series of well-received films—It’s a Wonderful Life, Harvey, Rear Window—while serving in the Air Force Reserve.

Life magazine described him as the “Toughest Cop of the Western World” and repeated an anecdote about his boundless self-confidence. Warned that if he didn’t put out his cigar, the bomber he was sitting in might explode, LeMay replied: “It wouldn’t dare.”

Strategic Air Command was one of the highest-grossing films of 1955. It fit the national mood.

His stance gained support in Congress after the Soviet Union demonstrated its new, long-range jet bomber, the Bison, at Moscow’s “Aviation Day” in 1955. Ten Bisons flew past the reviewing stand, turned around, flew past it again in a new formation—and tricked American observers into thinking that the Soviet Air Force had more than 100 of the planes.

The Soviet Union’s bluff had an unintentional effect: it widened the bomber gap, much to the benefit of the United States. By the end of the decade, the Soviet Union had about 150 long-range bombers—and the Strategic Air Command had almost 2,000.

The Navy obtained radar-bearing “picket ships” and built “Texas towers” to search for Soviet bombers approaching over the ocean. The picket ships lingered about five hundred miles off the coast of the United States; the Texas towers were moored to the seafloor, like oil platforms, closer to shore.

More important, the Air Force started to build a Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line of radar stations two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.

During the Second World War, Army radar operators had tracked enemy planes and used shared information about their flight paths verbally. That sort of human interaction would be impossible if large numbers of high-speed bombers approached the United States from different directions. The Air Force proposed a radical solution: automate the system and transfer most of its command-and-control functions to machines.

Driven by the needs of weapon designers and other military planners, the U.S. Department of Defense was soon responsible for most of the world’s investment in electronic computing.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), researchers concluded that the Whirlwind computer, originally built for the Navy as a flight simulator, could be used to automate air defense and early-warning tasks.

Analog signals from early-warning radar sites were converted into digital bits and sent via AT&T’s telephone lines to SAGE direction centers, where the huge computers decided whether an aircraft was friend or foe.

Although dubious about the usefulness of SAGE, General LeMay thought that SAC’s command-and-control system needed to be improved, as well. He wanted to know where all his planes were, at all times. And he wanted to speak with all his base commanders at once, if war seemed imminent. It took years to develop those capabilities.

One of its most distinctive features was a wall about twenty feet high, stretching for almost fifty yards, that was covered by charts, graphs, and a map of the world. The map showed the flight paths of SAC bombers.

A bunker was later constructed for the Federal Reserve at Mount Pony, in Culpeper, Virginia, where billions of dollars in currency were stored, shrink-wrapped in plastic, to help revive the postwar economy.

Although the original plans were scaled down, the completed bunker had miles of underground roads, accommodations for the prime minister and hundreds of other officials, a BBC studio, a vault where the Bank of England’s gold reserves could be stored, and a pub called the Rose & Crown.

Civilian employees of the Atomic Energy Commission were posted on aircraft carriers, ammunition ships, and air bases where H-bombs were stored. These AEC custodians were supposed to keep the cores securely locked away and hold on to the keys, until the president ordered them to do otherwise.

Legally, the hydrogen bombs were still in civilian custody. But in reality, after nearly a decade of unrelenting effort, the military had gained control of America’s nuclear weapons.

The AEC labs at Livermore and Los Alamos aggressively competed for weapon contracts, giving the armed services even greater influence over the design process. The rivalry between the two labs became so intense that at times their dislike for each other seemed to exceed their animosity toward the Soviet Union.

On at least three different occasions during the 1950s, the bridgewire detonators of nuclear weapons were set off by mistake during tests of their electrical systems. These accidents occurred during training exercises, and none resulted in the loss of life. But they revealed a worrisome design flaw. An error during routine maintenance or hurried preparations for war could detonate an atomic bomb.

The military advantages of boosted weapons were obvious. But the revolutionary new design raised a number of safety concerns. The nuclear core of a boosted weapon wouldn’t be stored separately. It would be sealed inside the weapon, like the pit within a plum.

The Air Force believed that detonating atomic warheads in the skies above the United States and Canada would offer the best hope of success—and that view was endorsed in March 1955 by James R. Killian, the president of MIT, who headed a top secret panel on the threat of surprise attack.

What would a fuel fire, a high-speed collision, or shrapnel from a nearby explosion do to a sealed-pit weapon? The AEC hurriedly began a series of tests to find out.

The risks of plutonium exposure were becoming more apparent in the mid-1950s. Although the alpha particles emitted by plutonium are too weak to penetrate human skin, they can destroy lung tissue when plutonium dust is inhaled.

Once Soviet bombers were within range, air defense weapons like the Genie had to be fired immediately. Any delay in authorizing their use could allow some planes to reach their targets.

To prove the point, a Genie was set off 18,000 feet above the heads of five Air Force officers and a photographer at the Nevada test site. The officers wore summer uniforms and no protective gear. A photograph, taken at the moment of detonation, shows that two of the men instinctively ducked, two shielded their eyes, and one stared upward, looking straight at the blast.

But if compromises had to be made between always and never, he made clear which side would have to bend. “Such safing,” Quarles instructed, “should, of course, cause minimum interference with readiness and reliability.”

The interservice rivalry over missiles was exacerbated by the competition among the defense contractors hoping to build them.

The General Dynamics Corporation lobbied aggressively for Atlas; the Martin Company, for Titan; Boeing, for Minuteman; Douglas Aircraft, for Thor; Chrysler, for Jupiter; and Lockheed, for Polaris.

As plans emerged to put intermediate-range missiles in Great Britain, Italy and Turkey, to store atom bombs and hydrogen bombs and atomic artillery shells at NATO bases throughout Europe, the tricky issue of command and control was resolved with a technical solution. The launch controls of the missiles and the locks on the weapon igloos would require at least two keys—and an American officer would keep one of them.

The fire lasted for two and a half hours. The high explosives in the Mark 36 burned but didn’t detonate. According to an accident report, the hydrogen bomb and parts of the B-47 bomber melted into “a slab of slag material weighing approximately eight thousand pounds, approximately six to eight feet wide and twelve to fifteen feet in length with a thickness of ten to twelve inches.”

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.

The Mark 6 was a large weapon, about eleven feet long and five feet in diameter, and as Kulka tried to peek above it, he inadvertently grabbed the manual bomb release for support. The Mark 6 suddenly dropped onto the bomb bay doors, and Kulka fell on top of it. A moment later, the eight-thousand-pound bomb broke through the doors. Kulka slid off it, got hold of something in the open bomb bay, and held on tight. Amid the gust and roar of the wind, about three miles above the small farms and cotton fields of Mars Bluff, he managed to pull himself back into the plane. Neither the pilot nor the copilot realized the bomb was gone until it hit the ground and exploded.

In fact, a hydrogen bomb had been mistakenly released over Albuquerque the previous year. 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. The weapon broke through the bomb doors, and the navigator held on to the handle for dear life. The H-bomb landed in an unpopulated area, about one third of a mile from Sandia. The high explosives detonated but did not produce a nuclear yield. The weapon lacked a core.

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 risk wasn’t negligible, as the Department of Defense and the Air Force claimed. The risk was impossible to determine, and accidents were likely to become more frequent in the future. During Air Force training exercises in 1957, an atomic bomb or a hydrogen bomb had been inadvertently jettisoned once every 320 flights.

But Iklé thought that none of those things could protect against a threat that seemed like the stuff of pulp fiction: deliberate, unauthorized attempts to detonate a nuclear weapon. The technical safeguards currently in use could be circumvented by “someone who knew the workings of the fuzing and firing mechanism.”

About twenty thousand Air Force personnel worked with nuclear weapons, and in order to do so, they had to obtain a secret or a top secret clearance. But they didn’t have to undergo any psychiatric screening. In fact, “a history of transient psychotic disorders” no longer disqualified a recruit from joining the Air Force.

The same need for immediate gratification that pyromaniacs often exhibited, “the desire to see the tangible result of their own power as it brings about a visual holocaust,” might find expression in detonating an atomic bomb. A number of case histories in the report illustrated the unpredictable, often infantile nature of impulse-driven behavior:

The unauthorized destruction of a city or a military base would be disastrous, and Iklé addressed the question of whether such an event could precipitate something even worse. Nikita Khrushchev had recently claimed that “an accidental atomic bomb explosion may well trigger another world war.”

Indeed, the military and political benefits to the Soviet Union would be so great that it might be tempted to sabotage an American weapon.

The Air Force and the CIA had asserted that the Soviet Union would have five hundred long-range ballistic missiles by 1961, outnumbering the United States by more than seven to one. Eisenhower thought those numbers were grossly inflated; top secret flights over the Soviet Union by U-2 spy planes had failed to detect anywhere near that number of missiles.

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.

Kissinger believed that in a limited war—fought with a decentralized command structure that let local commanders decide how and when to use their nuclear weapons—the United States was bound to triumph, thanks to the superior “daring and leadership” of its officers.

BY THE LATE 1950S, the absence of a clear targeting policy and the size of America’s stockpile had created serious command-and-control problems.

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.

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.