Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

THE PERSHING II MISSILES ARRIVED in West Germany, and the Soviet Union’s response was purely diplomatic. Its negotiators walked out of arms control talks and didn’t return. The relationship between the two superpowers had reached its lowest point since the dangerous events of 1962. And while billions of dollars were being spent on new strategic weapons in the United States, the safety problems with older ones continued to go unaddressed. Earlier in the year, another B-52 had caught on fire on a runway at Grand Forks Air Force Base. It was undergoing a routine maintenance check, at 9:30 in the morning, when fuel suddenly ignited, created a large fireball, destroyed the plane, and killed five young maintenance workers. No nuclear weapons were involved in the accident. But similar B-52s were being loaded with Mark 28 bombs and Short-Range Attack Missiles every day.

A program to add new safety devices to the Mark 28 — weak links and strong links and a unique signal switch — was begun in 1984. But the retrofits were halted a year later, because the program ran out of money. Thousands of the bombs remained unmodified. And the safety problems with the Short-Range Attack Missile were worse than originally thought. The high explosives used in the primary of the SRAM were found to be vulnerable to fire. As the missiles aged, they also became more hazardous. The propellant used by their rocket motors had to be surrounded at all times by a blanket of nitrogen gas. When the gas leaked, the propellant became a “contact-sensitive explosive” that could easily be set off by flames, static electricity, or physical shock. If the SRAMs were poorly maintained, simply dropping them on the ground from a height of five or six feet could make them explode — or take off. “The worst probable consequence of continuous degradation… is spontaneous ignition of the propellant in a way similar to a normally initiated burn,” an Air Force nuclear safety journal warned. “Naturally, this would be a catastrophe.” The journal advised its readers to “follow procedures and give the weapons a little extra care and respect.”

Bill Stevens retired from Sandia in 1985. His job had been redefined during a management shake-up, and he lacked enthusiasm for bureaucratic infighting. He was disappointed that most of the weapons in the stockpile still didn’t possess the safety devices his team had pioneered. But Stevens felt proud of his recent contribution to the safety of the Pershing II. Hoping to eliminate human error during launch exercises with the missile, the Army had decided to computerize the procedure. At Pershing II bases in West Germany, crews would install the warhead, erect the missile, remove the pin that locked the missile onto its launcher, run the countdown until one second before launch — and then stop the exercise. The countdown would be controlled by a computer. Stevens felt uncomfortable with the idea; in fact, he thought it was crazy. A software glitch could launch a Pershing II missile. And the Army’s software, written in 1980, was unlikely to be bug free.

Stevens refused to sign off on the nuclear weapon system study of the Pershing II missile, citing the risk of a DUL — a deliberate, unauthorized launch. In response to his criticisms, a safety device was added to the first-stage rocket motor. It required a separate code, entered manually, before the missile could take off. The warhead atop the Pershing II contained a permissive action link and wouldn’t have detonated after an accidental launch. But the Soviet Union wouldn’t have known that fact, as the missile on their radar screens headed toward Moscow.

RONALD REAGAN, despite all his tough rhetoric, had long harbored a fear of nuclear war. His first years in the White House increased that fear. During a command-and-control exercise in March 1982, Reagan watched red dots spreading across a map of the United States on the wall of the Situation Room. Each dot represented the impact of a Soviet warhead. Within an hour the map was covered in red. Reagan was shaken by the drill and by how little could be done to protect America. Although some members of the administration viewed the Strategic Defense Initiative as a clever response to the growing antinuclear movement, an attempt to show America’s aims were peaceful and defensive, Reagan’s belief in the plan was sincere. He thought that a missile defense system might work, that it could save lives, promote world peace, render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” Reagan had a sunny, cheerful disposition, but watching The Day After left even him feeling depressed. With strong encouragement from his wife, Nancy, he publicly called for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Reagan’s criticism of the Soviet Union became less severe, and his speeches soon included this heartfelt sentiment: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

The deaths of Yuri Andropov and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, brought Mikhail Gorbachev to power. Gorbachev represented a dramatic break from the past. He was youthful and dynamic, the first Soviet leader since Vladimir Lenin who’d attended a university. Although Gorbachev’s attempts to change the Soviet Union were tentative at first, he was committed to reforming its stagnant economy, allowing freedom of speech and religion, ending the war in Afghanistan, rejecting the use of force against other nations, linking the Soviet bloc more closely to the rest of Europe, and abandoning the pursuit of nuclear superiority. Although many of his views were radical, compared to those of his predecessors, Gorbachev did not seek to betray the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. He hoped to fulfill them.

In age, temperament, background, education, political orientation, Gorbachev and Reagan could hardly have been more different. And yet they were both self-confident, transformational leaders, willing to defy expectations and challenge the status quo. During their first meeting, at a Geneva summit conference in November 1985, the two men established a personal rapport and discussed how to reduce the nuclear arsenals of both nations. Gorbachev left Geneva viewing Reagan not as a right-wing caricature, a puppet of the military-industrial complex, but as a human being who seemed eager to avoid a nuclear war.

A year later, at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, the discussion strayed onto a topic that alarmed many of Reagan’s close advisers: huge reductions in the number of nuclear weapons. Secretary of State George P. Shultz was elated by the possibility. The recent accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had deposited radioactive fallout across much of Europe and the Soviet Union, reminding the world of the far greater danger that nuclear weapons posed. Reagan and Gorbachev seemed on the verge of reaching an extraordinary agreement, as a transcript of their meeting shows:

The President agreed this could be sorted out… cruise missiles, battlefield weapons, sub-launched and the like. It would be fine with him if we eliminated all nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev said we can do that. We can eliminate them.

The Secretary [of State] said, “Let’s do it.”

The euphoria that Reagan and Shultz felt didn’t last long. Moments later Gorbachev insisted, as part of the deal, that all Star Wars testing must be confined to the laboratory. Reagan couldn’t comprehend why a missile-defense system intended to spare lives — one that didn’t even exist yet, that might never exist — could stand in the way of eliminating nuclear weapons forever. He refused to place limits on the Strategic Defense Initiative and promised to share its technology. The Soviet Union was conducting exactly the same research, he pointed out, and an antiballistic missile system had already been built to defend Moscow. Neither Gorbachev nor Reagan would budge from his position, and the meeting ended.