Command and Control Quotes

“It was faster that way, the violation seemed trivial, and officers in the control center had no way of knowing what the enlisted men were doing in the silo. The”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Unlike the hot line frequently depicted in Hollywood films, the new system didn’t provide a special telephone for the president to use in an emergency. It relied on Teletype machines that could send text quickly and securely. Written statements were considered easier to translate, more deliberate, and less subject to misinterpretation than verbal ones. Every”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“AT&T’s telephone lines and Western Union’s telegraph lines were the only direct links between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them would be knocked out by a thermonuclear blast, and most radio communications would be, as well. The command-and-control systems of the two countries had no formal, reliable means of interacting. The problem was so serious and so obvious, Schelling thought, everybody must have assumed somebody else had taken care of it. Pauses for negotiation would be a waste of time, if there were no way to negotiate. And”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“Walter Junior, were in the toolshed outside their home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, when a Mark 6 atomic bomb landed in the yard. Mrs.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“Sergeant Paul Ramoneda, a twenty-eight-year-old baker with the Ninth Food Service Squadron, was one of the first to reach the bomber.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. 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. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but “anything is better than submission.” Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed. Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace, crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn’t be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, “should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“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. And the deterrent value of Perimeter was wasted. Like the doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove, the system was kept secret from the United States.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Eager to defend the civilian control of nuclear weapons from military encroachment, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara had fought hard to ensure that only the president could make the ultimate decision. But they hadn’t considered the possibility that the president might be clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily—like Richard Nixon, during his final weeks in office. Amid the deepening Watergate scandal, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger told the head of the Joint Chiefs to seek his approval before acting on “any emergency order coming from the president.” Although Schlesinger’s order raised questions about who was actually in command, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“In 1957 the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project offered a new set of acceptable probabilities. For example, it proposed that the odds of a hydrogen bomb exploding accidentally—from all causes, while in storage, during the entire life of the weapon—should be one in ten million. And the lifespan of a typical weapon was assumed to be ten years. At first glance, those odds made the possibility of a nuclear disaster seem remote. But if the United States kept ten thousand hydrogen bombs in storage for ten years, the odds of an accidental detonation became much higher—one in a thousand. And if those weapons were removed from storage and loaded onto airplanes, the AFSWP study proposed some acceptable probabilities that the American public, had it been informed, might not have found so acceptable. The odds of a hydrogen bomb detonating by accident, every decade, would be one in five. And during that same period, the odds of an atomic bomb detonating by accident in the United States would be about 100 percent.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The Army’s Office of Special Weapons Developments had addressed the first question in a 1955 report, “Acceptable Military Risks from Accidental Detonation of Atomic Weapons.” It looked at the frequency of natural disasters in the United States during the previous fifty years, quantified their harmful effects according to property damage and loss of life—and then argued that accidental nuclear explosions should be permitted on American soil at the same rate as similarly devastating earthquakes, floods, and tornadoes. According to that formula, the Army suggested that the acceptable probability of a hydrogen bomb detonating within the United States should be 1 in 100,000 during the course of a year. The acceptable risk of an atomic bomb going off was set at 1 in 125.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“According to that formula, the Army suggested that the acceptable probability of a hydrogen bomb detonating within the United States should be 1 in 100,000 during the course of a year. The acceptable risk of an atomic bomb going off was set at 1 in 125.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“A new word had entered the lexicon of nuclear war planning: megadeath. It was a unit of measurement. One megadeath equaled one million fatalities—and the nation was bound to suffer a great many megadeaths during a thermonuclear war.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“When Mike detonated, the island disappeared. It became dust and ash, pulled upward to form a mushroom cloud that rose about twenty-seven miles into the sky. The fireball created by the explosion was three and a half miles wide. All that remained of little Elugelab was a circular crater filled with seawater, more than a mile in diameter and fifteen stories deep. The yield of the device was 10.4 megatons, roughly five hundred times more powerful than the Nagasaki bomb.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo,” he later recalled, “than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“I’ll tell you what war is about,” LeMay once said. “You’ve got to kill people and when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The Soviets were a wartime ally, lost more than twenty million people fighting the Nazis,”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“It was risky to melt solder in a room with five thousand pounds of explosives. The two men fixed the cable, connected the plugs, and didn’t tell anyone what they’d done.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The lightest element, hydrogen, has one proton; the heaviest element found in nature, uranium, has ninety-two.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“In the early days of the project, Teller was concerned that the intense heat of a nuclear explosion would set fire to the atmosphere and kill every living thing on earth.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The underlying message, however, was that the nation’s most important problems could never be solved by Congress or the president, and Carter urged viewers to assume responsibility for their own fate. “All the legislation in the world,” he said, “can’t fix what’s wrong with America.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Piling up material goods,” Carter said, “cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no purpose or meaning.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“But a crew was never told where its missile was aimed. That sort of knowledge might inspire doubt. Like four members of a firing squad whose rifles were loaded with three bullets and one blank, a missile crew was expected to obey the order to fire, without bearing personal responsibility for the result.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“There was one way to do everything—and only one way.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Although European protest marches had focused mainly on the United States for the previous six years, it was the leadership of Western Europe who most strongly opposed creating a world without nuclear weapons.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them—if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“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.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“After Secretary of the Air Force Quarles expressed concern about the safety of sealed-pit weapons, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project began its own research on acceptable probabilities. The Army had assumed that the American people would regard a nuclear accident no differently from an act of God. An AFSWP study questioned the assumption, warning that the “psychological impact of a nuclear detonation might well be disastrous” and that “there will likely be a tendency to blame the ‘irresponsible’ military and scientists.” Moreover, the study pointed out that the safety of nuclear weapons already in the American stockpile had been measured solely by the risk of a technical malfunction. Human error had been excluded as a possible cause of accidents; it was thought too complex to quantify. The AFSWP study criticized that omission: “The unpredictable behavior of human beings is a grave problem when dealing with nuclear weapons.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“While visiting the Naval Ordnance Test Station near Cape Canaveral, Florida, he’d watched a bent pin nearly detonate an atomic bomb during a routine test. The accident could have obliterated a large stretch of the Florida coast.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Maintaining a nuclear capability in some state of readiness is fundamentally a matter of playing percentages,”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“An error during routine maintenance or hurried preparations for war could detonate an atomic bomb.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety