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

by Eric Schlosser

The U-2 ran out of fuel, and American fighters took off to escort Maultsby back to Alaska. Under the DEFCON 3 rules of engagement, the American fighter pilots had the authority to fire their atomic antiaircraft missiles and shoot down the Soviet planes. A dogfight between the two air forces was somehow avoided, the U-2 landed safely—and McNamara immediately halted the air sampling program. Nobody at the Pentagon had considered the possibility that these routine U-2 flights could lead to the use of nuclear weapons.

“Nuclear weapons may well have made deliberate war less likely,” Sagan now thought, “but the complex and tightly coupled nuclear arsenal we have constructed has simultaneously made accidental war more likely.”

The missile might have exploded no matter what was done after its stage 1 fuel tank began to leak. But to blame the socket, or the person who dropped it, for that explosion is to misunderstand how the Titan II missile system really worked. Oxidizer leaks and other close calls plagued the Titan II until the last one was removed from a silo, northwest of Judsonia, Arkansas, in June 1987. None of those leaks and accidents led to a nuclear disaster. But if one had, the disaster wouldn’t have been inexplicable or hard to comprehend. It would have made perfect sense.

“Do Artifacts Have Politics?” According to its author, Langdon Winner, the answer is yes—the things that we produce are not only shaped by social forces, they also help to mold the political life of a society. Some technologies are flexible and can thrive equally well in democratic or totalitarian countries. But Winner pointed to one invention that could never be managed with a completely open, democratic spirit: the atomic bomb.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, I obtained a document that listed the “Accidents and Incidents Involving Nuclear Weapons” from the summer of 1957 until the spring of 1967. It was 245 pages long.

Mark 28 bomb emitting strange sounds, for reasons that were never discovered.

The government still won’t reveal the yield of the Titan II’s warhead—even though the weapon hasn’t been in the American arsenal for almost a quarter of a century, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and Soviet espionage discovered everything remotely interesting about the missile.

Locks of various kinds were placed on Soviet weapons, and the permission to unlock them came only from the top. According to Bruce Blair, a leading command-and-control expert, Soviet safeguards against unauthorized use were “more stringent than those of any other nuclear power, including the United States.”

Perimeter greatly reduced the pressure to launch on warning at the first sign of an American attack. It gave Soviet leaders more time to investigate the possibility of a false alarm, confident that a real attack would trigger a computer-controlled, devastating response. But it rendered American plans for limited war meaningless; the Soviet computers weren’t programmed to allow pauses for negotiation.

“Why is testing of nuclear weapons so important?” asked one senator, a close ally of the Pentagon and the weapons laboratories. “It is so important because nuclear weapons, even today’s nuclear weapons, represent a great danger to the American public and to the world because of the lack of safety of their devices.” He then put a list of Broken Arrows into the Congressional Record.

Bob Peurifoy has been bemused by the newfound passion for nuclear weapon safety and security among his former critics. He sees no need for more weapon tests, supports the test ban treaty, and thinks it would be highly irresponsible to add a new weapon like the RRW to the stockpile without having detonated it first. The plans to develop new warheads and bombs, Peurifoy says, are just “a money grab” by the Pentagon and the weapons laboratories.

The only weapons in today’s stockpile that trouble Peurifoy are the W-76 and W-88 warheads carried by submarine-launched Trident II missiles. The Drell panel expressed concern about these warheads more than twenty years ago. Both of them rely on conventional high explosives, instead of insensitive high explosives. The Navy had insisted upon use of the more dangerous explosive to reduce the weight of the warheads, increase their range, and slightly increase their yield.

But the hacking of America’s nuclear command-and-control system remains a serious threat. In January 2013, a report by the Defense Science Board warned that the system’s vulnerability to a large-scale cyber attack had never been fully assessed.

A command-and-control system designed to operate during a surprise attack that could involve thousands of nuclear weapons—and would require urgent presidential decisions within minutes—proved incapable of handling an attack by four hijacked airplanes.

And like almost every single Air Force officer, weapon designer, Pentagon official, airman, and missile maintenance crew member whom I interviewed about the Cold War, he was amazed that nuclear weapons were never used, that no major city was destroyed, that the tiger never got loose.

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.

In 2010 a group of high-ranking Air Force officials, including its chief of strategic planning, argued that the United States needed only 311 nuclear weapons to deter an attack. Any more would be overkill. The arsenal proposed by these Air Force strategists would contain almost 200 fewer weapons than the one recommended by the National Resources Defense Council and the Federation of American Scientists, a pair of liberal groups that also support minimum deterrence.

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.