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Book: Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
Quotes of Book: Command and Control: Nuclear
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  1. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    Stan Spray, a Sandia engineer who burned, crushed, and routinely tortured nuclear weapon components to discover their flaws
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  2. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    A few weeks later alarms went off in an air defense bunker south of Moscow. A Soviet early-warning satellite had detected five Minuteman missiles approaching from the United States. The commanding officer on duty, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, tried to make sense of the warning. An American first strike would surely involve more than five missiles-but perhaps this was merely the first wave. The Soviet general staff was alerted, and it was Petrov's job to advise them whether the missile attack was real. Any retaliation would have to be ordered soon. Petrov decided it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that the missile launches spotted by the Soviet satellite were actually rays of sunlight reflected off clouds.
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  3. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    Thomas K. Jones, an undersecretary of defense, played down the number of casualties that a nuclear war might cause, arguing that families would survive if they dug a hole, covered it with a couple of doors, and put three feet of dirt on top. "It's the dirt that does it," Jones explained. "Everyone's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.
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  4. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    And the secrets of the Titan II had recently been compromised. Christopher M. Cooke, a young deputy commander at a Titan II complex in Kansas, had been arrested after making three unauthorized visits and multiple phone calls to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Inexplicably, Cooke had been allowed to serve as a Titan II officer on alerts for five months after his first contact with the Soviet embassy was detected. An Air Force memo later said the information that Cooke gave the Soviets-about launch codes, attack options, and the missile's vulnerabilities-was "a major security breach . . . the worst perhaps in the history of the Air Force.
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  5. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    A poor grasp of dead reckoning may have led Christopher Columbus to North America instead of India, a navigational error of about eight thousand miles.
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  6. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    Nineteen members of an Army detachment were arrested on pot charges at a Nike Hercules base on Mount Gleason, overlooking Los Angeles. One of them had been caught drying a large amount of marijuana on land belonging to the U.S. Forest Service. Three enlisted men at a Nike Hercules base in San Rafael, California, were removed from guard duty for psychiatric reasons. One of them had been charged with pointing a loaded rifle at the head of a sergeant. Although illegal drugs were not involved in the case, the three men were allowed to guard the missiles, despite a history of psychiatric problems. The squadron was understaffed, and its commander feared that hippies-"people from the Haight-Ashbury"-were trying to steal nuclear weapons.
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  7. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    Moser was a great believer in checklists.
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  8. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    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.
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  9. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.
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  10. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a "horror strategy.
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  11. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    Kennedy thought that his commanders at SAC had made a series of mistakes-the decision to evacuate the control center, the refusal to open the silo door and vent the fuel vapor, the endless wait to reenter the complex, the insistence upon using the access portal instead of the escape hatch, the order to turn on the fan. Worst of all was the feeling that he and Livingston had risked their lives for nothing-and then been abandoned. Livingston had lain on the ground for more than an hour, without his helmet, inhaling oxidizer, before anyone came to help. And the delay in sending a helicopter was incomprehensible.
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  12. Eric Schlosser _ Command and Control: Nuclear

    The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.
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