By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
Published: September 12, 2013
A little over 50 years ago a South Carolina doctor (and the grandfather
of this reviewer) treated a family for injuries sustained when a sudden,
inexplicable explosion tore through their backyard. The injuries were
not serious, and after spending the night at the doctor’s house they
returned home to discover that the object in the 50-foot crater left
behind their house was an atomic bomb that had fallen from a passing Air
Force plane. The bomb had not been “armed” with its nuclear core; the
blast came from the explosives intended to trigger a chain reaction. The
crater can still be seen today.
Don Cravens/Time & Life Pictures — Getty Images
The Gregg family of Mars Bluff, S.C., whose house was
damaged when the Air Force accidentally dropped an atomic bomb in their
backyard.
COMMAND AND CONTROL
Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
By Eric Schlosser
632 pp. The Penguin Press. $36.
That incident, which led to an anti-nuclear movement in Britain, where
the plane was bound, is one of many stories Eric Schlosser, the author
of “Fast Food Nation,” tells in “Command and Control.” During the cold
war, nuclear bombs fell out of the sky, burned up in plane crashes and
were lost at sea. In the incident Schlosser describes in greatest
detail, “the Damascus accident” of Sept. 18, 1980, the warhead from a
Titan II missile was ejected after a series of mishaps that began when a
repairman dropped a socket wrench and pierced a fuel tank. Tactical
nuclear weapons scattered across Europe had minimal security; misplaced
tools and failed repairs triggered serious accidents; inadequate safety
procedures and poor oversight led to dozens of close brushes with
nuclear explosions. People have died in these accidents, sometimes as a
result of their own carelessness or bad luck, but often while doing
their best to protect the rest of us from an accidental nuclear blast.
Schlosser’s disquieting but riveting book looks at every aspect of
nuclear risk, examining problems with the command and control systems
that in theory were supposed to provide presidents with the information
they would need to make the decision on whether the United States should
retaliate against a Soviet strike. Constructing the complex systems
needed for this task — linking radar sites and monitor stations around
the world into a single network for analysis and control — was well
beyond the technological capacity of American engineers for much of the
cold war, but they did the best they could. The system they created,
which led among other things to the technology that gave us the
Internet, was not only subject to glitches and crashes, it was also too
brittle to survive any serious Soviet attack, too inflexible to give
presidents good choices at what would have been the most critical
moments in world history and too subject to error to be relied on. At
various points, flocks of birds, sunshine reflecting off clouds and the
rising moon over Norway set off alarm bells. One false alert went high
enough up the command chain that a general woke the national security
adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in the middle of the night; as he waited
for confirmation before calling President Carter, Brzezinski decided not
to tell his wife that Soviet missiles were on their way.
“Command and Control” is organized a bit like a Caribbean cruise. The
main part of the voyage is Schlosser’s fascinating account of one of the
most serious accidents in the history of the American nuclear program:
the crisis near Damascus, Ark., when a Titan missile exploded in a fiery
blast, sending its warhead into a ditch 200 yards away. From eyewitness
accounts and exhaustive research Schlosser has pieced this story
together in great detail.
But the cruise ship also stops at several ports along the way, where
passengers disembark for tours of various other topics related to the
history of American strategic thinking, the development of war-fighting
systems, and other accidents involving nuclear weapons and missiles
around the world. Almost everything in the book is well reported and
clearly explained, but the events and ideas tend to blur. And gripping
though the Damascus narrative is on its own terms, readers may have
trouble picking up the broken threads of this highly complex
multicharacter tale after so many involved and absorbing excursions —
for example, Schlosser’s detailed treatment of the bitter interservice
rivalries that affected the development of America’s nuclear systems and
doctrine.
For many readers, the most dismaying revelations will not be the ones
about accidents and near accidents. Nuclear bomb scares are fun to read
about, but after all, the bomb that fell on South Carolina was not
armed, and none of the countries making and storing nuclear weapons
since 1945 have had to cope with the consequences of an accidental
nuclear blast. Substantially more troubling is the story Schlosser tells
of the poor strategic thinking at the heart of the nuclear enterprise.
For much of the cold war, the plans for using America’s nuclear weapons
were rigid and inflexible. Compared with them, the mobilization
timetables that locked the general staffs of Europe into an inexorable
march toward disaster in 1914 were models of flexibility and restraint.
As far as Schlosser can tell, the American arsenal is safer than it used
to be (though some troubling weak spots remain), and since the end of
the cold war we have stepped back from the nuclear brink. But in a world
with many other nuclear powers, some much worse at basic safety and
security precautions than we are, the chances of accidental nuclear
explosions or terrorists capturing nuclear weapons are much too high.
Worse, it is very likely that the plans in countries like India and
Pakistan are as rigid as those Americans developed a generation ago, and
that a collection of misunderstandings might launch a nuclear
juggernaut on a course that could not be stopped.
All that said, it is hard to see how the nuclear nightmare can be
brought to an end. Schlosser traces the many disarmament proposals and
efforts from Harry Truman’s effort to vest control over nuclear weapons
with the United Nations up through President Obama’s efforts to outlaw
the weapons through international agreement, but he offers small hope
that they can ever be abolished. (Schlosser does not even mention one
reason countries like Russia and China are dead set against universal
nuclear disarmament: America’s conventional superiority is so
overwhelming that both countries feel they need nuclear arsenals to
offset Washington’s nonnuclear might.)
Over all, Schlosser is a better reporter than policy analyst, and his
discussion of what we should do about the problem he so grippingly
describes is disappointingly thin. Nevertheless, his core recommendation
that the United States explore the possibilities of operating a minimal
deterrent, the smallest number of nuclear weapons needed to prevent
adversaries from contemplating a nuclear attack on us, may be the most
hopeful direction in which we can look. But as technological progress
makes nuclear weapons cheaper and easier to build, and creates new and
ever more dangerous weapons of mass destruction, the intractable
problems of safe storage and nuclear war-fighting doctrine are likely to
remain with us for the long term.
The human race was smart enough to build these bombs. So far we appear
to lack the intelligence needed either to get rid of them or to store
them safely. Schlosser’s readers (and he deserves a great many) will be
struck by how frequently the people he cites attribute the absence of
accidental explosions and nuclear war to divine intervention or sheer
luck rather than to human wisdom and skill. Whatever was responsible, we
will clearly need more of it in the years to come.
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