Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, David Livingston died at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock. He’d celebrated his twenty-second birthday the previous week. He was planning to marry his girlfriend in the spring, perhaps leave the Air Force and move to California. She was at the hospital when he passed away; his parents were on an airplane, en route from Ohio, to see him. The official cause of death was pulmonary edema.

Jeff Kennedy remained in the intensive care unit, fighting for every breath.

THE CROWD OF JOURNALISTS in front of the access road swelled on September 20, a full day after the blast. Sid King was impressed by the large truck that a new television network had driven to Damascus. The Cable News Network (CNN) had gone on the air a few months earlier. It was the first television network to offer the news twenty-four hours a day, and the Titan II accident in Damascus was its first big, breaking story. The CNN truck, boasting a huge satellite dish, dwarfed the little Live Ear . CNN correspondent Jim Miklaszewski provided nonstop coverage from the missile site — and broadcast the only images of what appeared to be the warhead, lying on the ground, beneath a blue tarp. To get the shot, Miklaszewski and his cameraman borrowed a cherry picker from a local crew installing phone lines, and rode the cab fifty feet into the air. The Air Force tried, without success, to block their view.

The Titan II explosion fit perfectly with the media narrative inspired by the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, the taking of American hostages in Iran, and the Carter administration’s failed attempt to rescue those hostages. The United States seemed to have become weak, timid, incompetent. And the “official” version of events was never to be trusted. Although Pentagon rules allowed the disclosure of information about a nuclear weapon after an accident, “as a means of reducing or preventing widespread public alarm,” the Air Force wouldn’t release any details about the warhead in Damascus. When General Lloyd Leavitt threatened to end a press conference in Little Rock if anyone asked another question about the warhead, whose existence had already been televised on CNN, the whole issue became a joke. A newspaper cartoon depicted three Air Force officers: one covering his eyes, one plugging his ears, and one covering his mouth. “If you’re on the military’s side, you can claim that the system worked because the nuclear warhead didn’t go off,” columnist Art Buchwald wrote. “If you live in the area, you may find it hard to sell your house.”

The Soviet Union claimed that the Titan II explosion could have been mistaken for a surprise attack and precipitated “a nuclear conflict.” Senator Pryor and two Republican senators, Bob Dole and Barry Goldwater, demanded a new investigation of the Titan II missile system. “If it’s not safe and effective, I don’t know why you need it,” Dole said.

THE ACCIDENT RESPONSE GROUP EXAMINED the interior of the warhead with the aid of a “pig” — a highly radioactive block of cobalt-60 in a lead box. A sheet of photographic film was placed on one side of the weapon, the pig was put on the other, and the box was opened briefly with a lanyard. Everyone stayed a respectful distance from the pig until the box was shut. The device offered a simple but effective means of taking an X-ray, and it revealed that the warhead was safe to move. Contrary to protocol, the EOD unit from Little Rock was asked to render safe the weapon. Matthew Arnold’s team from Barksdale had to stand and watch as EOD technicians who didn’t even belong to the Strategic Air Command separated the primary from the secondary at 4–7, hidden from CNN’s cameras by a tent. The two sections of the warhead were loaded into separate jet engine containers filled with sand. The containers were lifted onto a flatbed truck, and the truck left the complex as part of a convoy early in the morning on September 22.

“Hey, Colonel, is that what you won’t confirm or deny?” a reporter shouted at one of the passengers, as the truck turned onto Highway 65.

The officer smiled for the cameras and gave a thumbs-up.

Ronald Reagan didn’t feel despair about the future, suffer from a crisis of confidence, or doubt the greatness of the United States. His optimism had tremendous appeal to a nation that seemed in decline. Reagan soundly defeated Jimmy Carter in the presidential election, winning the popular vote by about 10 percent and receiving almost ten times the number of electoral votes. The Republican Party gained control of the Senate and drove four Democratic governors from office — including Bill Clinton, who lost a close race to his conservative opponent. At the age of thirty-four, Clinton became the youngest ex-governor in the United States. The election of 1980 marked a cultural shift, a rejection of liberalism, big government, and the self-critical, apologetic tone that had dominated American foreign policy since the end of the Vietnam War. The new sense of patriotism and nationalism appeared to have an immediate effect. As President Reagan concluded his inaugural address on January 20, 1981, the fifty-two Americans who’d been held hostage for more than a year were released by the government of Iran.

“Peace through strength” had been one of Reagan’s campaign slogans, and his administration soon began the largest peacetime military buildup in the history of the United States. Over the next five years, America’s defense budget would almost double. And the arms race with the Soviet Union would be deliberately accelerated — out of a belief that the United States could win it. Reagan opposed not only détente, but every arms control agreement that the United States had signed with the Soviet Union. In a 1963 speech, he said that President Kennedy’s foreign policy was “motivated by fear of the bomb” and that “in an all-out race our system is stronger, and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause.” The following year Reagan described the Soviets as “the most evil enemy that has ever faced mankind.” His views on the subject remained largely unchanged for the next two decades. He was the first president since Woodrow Wilson who sincerely believed that American military power could bring an end to communism in the Soviet Union.

Most of Reagan’s foreign policy advisers belonged to the Committee on the Present Danger, and they pushed for bold nuclear policies. The counterforce strategy once proposed by Robert McNamara — long associated with RAND and the youthful self-confidence of the early Kennedy administration — was now embraced by conservative Republicans. But the word “counterforce” had become problematic. It sounded aggressive and implied the willingness to fight a nuclear war. Much the same strategy was now called “damage limitation.” By launching a nuclear attack on Soviet military targets, the United States might “limit the damage” to its own territory and, perhaps, emerge victorious.

The new secretary of defense, Caspar “Cap” Weinberger, was, like McNamara, a businessman who’d served in the Army during the Second World War but knew little about nuclear weapons. As a result, his undersecretary of defense for policy, Fred Iklé, played an important role in the Reagan administration’s strategic decisions. Iklé was still haunted by the possibility that deterrence might fail — through an accident, a miscalculation, the actions of a fanatic in the Kremlin. And if that happened, millions of Americans would die. Iklé considered the all-or-nothing philosophy of “assured destruction” to be profoundly immoral, a misnomer more accurately described as “assured genocide.” Aiming nuclear weapons at civilian populations threatened a “form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages — the mass killing of hostages.” He pushed the Reagan administration to seek a nuclear strategy that would deter the Soviets from attacking or blackmailing the United States, maintain the ability to fight a “protracted nuclear war,” limit American damage if that war occurred, and end the war on terms favorable to the United States. A blind faith in mutual deterrence, Iklé believed, was like a declaration of faith during the Portuguese Inquisition — “an auto-da-fé, an act that ends in a mass burning.”