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

by Eric Schlosser

profound. No great monument has been built to honor those who served during the Cold War, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them in the name of freedom. It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.

And so Donald Hornig was instructed to “babysit the bomb.” At 9:00 P.M., Hornig climbed to the top of the hundred-foot tower as rain began to fall. He brought a collection of humorous essays, Desert Island Decameron.

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.

What deters is not the capabilities and intentions we have, but the capabilities and intentions the enemy thinks we have. The central objective of a deterrent weapons system is, thus, psychological. The mission is persuasion.

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