Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Despite the failure to reach an agreement on the abolition of nuclear weapons, the Reykjavik summit marked a turning point in the Cold War, the start of a process that soon led to the removal of all intermediate-range missiles from Europe and large cuts in the number of strategic weapons. The all-out nuclear arms race was over. Gorbachev now felt emboldened to pursue reform in the Soviet Union, confident that the United States did not seek to attack his country. And the hard-liners in the Reagan administration breathed a sigh of relief, amazed that their president had come so close to getting rid of America’s nuclear weapons. Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister of Great Britain, and François Mitterrand, the socialist president of France, were furious that Reagan had questioned the value of nuclear deterrence, a strategy that had kept the peace since the Second World War. 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.

BOB PEURIFOY HAD BECOME a vice president at Sandia, and his new status enabled him to lobby more effectively for nuclear weapon safety. By 1988 almost half of the weapons in the American stockpile were fitted with weak link/strong link devices, and the safety retrofit of Mark 28 bombs had finally resumed. But SAC was still loading about one thousand Short-Range Attack Missiles onto its bombers on alert. Those planes were parked on runways nationwide, ready to take off from bases in California, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington State. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union eased, the Air Force’s willingness to risk an accident with a SRAM became harder to justify.

On February 26, 1988, Peurifoy wrote to the assistant secretary for defense programs at the Department of Energy and invited him to Sandia for a briefing on the dangers of the SRAM. The assistant secretary never replied to the letter. The following month, the president of Sandia raised the issue with another official at the DOE, who suggested that the secretary of energy and the secretary of defense should be briefed on the matter. But nothing was done. A few months later an independent panel was commissioned to look at management practices at the Department of Energy, and Peurifoy was asked to serve as a technical adviser. Headed by Gordon Moe, a former member of Henry Kissinger’s national security staff, the panel wound up using the SRAM’s safety problems as a case study in mismanagement. Moe was shocked by the lack of attention to nuclear weapon safety and its implications. Almost fifteen years had passed since concerns about the SRAM were first expressed — and yet no remedial action had been taken. “The potential for a nuclear weapon accident will remain unacceptably high until the issues that have been raised are resolved,” the Moe panel said in a classified report. “It would be hard to overstate the consequences that a serious accident could have for national security.”

John H. Glenn, a former astronaut and a Democratic senator from Ohio, visited Sandia on April 26, 1989. Peurifoy took the opportunity to give Glenn a briefing on nuclear weapon safety — and handed him a copy of the Moe panel’s report. Glenn wanted to know more about the subject and asked whom he should contact at the Department of Energy to discuss it.

Peurifoy suggested that he skip the midlevel bureaucrats and raise the issue with the secretary of energy, James D. Watkins.

Glenn said that he’d be seeing Watkins the following week.

The bureaucratic logjam was broken. A well-respected senator — a national hero — planned to raise the issue of nuclear weapon safety with someone who could actually do something about it.

Secretary Watkins and his staff met with Senator Glenn, read the Moe panel report, got worried about the safety of older weapons in the stockpile, and contacted the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, about the issue. Instead of taking the weapons off alert, the Pentagon commissioned two more studies of the SRAM. One would be conducted by the Air Force, the other by Gordon Moe — who was rehired by the Department of Energy to repeat his earlier work.

Almost another year passed. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Mikhail Gorbachev had visited the White House; signed major arms agreements; removed hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe; allowed Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to leave the Soviet bloc. By any rational measure, the Cold War was over. But every day, across the United States, Short-Range Attack Missiles continued to be loaded into B-52s on ground alerts.

During the spring of 1990, R. Jeffrey Smith, a reporter at the Washington Post , learned about the safety problems with some American nuclear weapons. The Post ran a series of his articles, bringing public attention to the SRAM’s flaws and to the W-79 atomic artillery shells’ lack of one-point safety. Smith didn’t divulge any classified information, but he did suggest that bureaucratic rivalries and inertia were creating unnecessary risks. A Pentagon spokesman defended the SRAM, claiming that the “weapon meets all our current safety standards.” Secretary of Defense Cheney met with Air Force officials, Secretary of Energy Watkins, the heads of the three weapons laboratories, and General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss the SRAM. On June 8, 1990, Cheney said that the SRAMs posed “no safety hazards to the public” — but that they would immediately be removed from bombers on alert, until another safety study was completed.

The House Armed Services Committee had already appointed a panel of three eminent physicists to investigate the safety of America’s nuclear weapons. Charles H. Townes was a Nobel laureate who had advised the Department of Defense for many years. John S. Foster, Jr., was a former director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who’d served in high-level posts at the Pentagon during the Johnson and Nixon administrations — an expert not only on nuclear weapon technology but also on targeting strategies. Sidney Drell, the chairman of the panel, was a theoretical physicist, long associated with the Stanford Linear Accelerator, who for many years had served as a JASON — a civilian granted a high-level security clearance to help with sensitive defense matters. Drell, Foster, and Townes didn’t always agree on nuclear weapon policies. Drell had opposed the MX missile; Foster had supported it. But they shared a mutual respect, and their expertise in the field was unsurpassed. Peurifoy was asked to serve as a technical adviser.

The Drell Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety submitted its report to the House Armed Services Committee in December 1990. The report confirmed what Bill Stevens and Bob Peurifoy had been saying for almost twenty years: America’s nuclear arsenal was not as safe as it should be. Recent improvements in computing power, the report noted, had led to “a realization that unintended nuclear detonations present a greater risk than previously estimated (and believed) for some of the warheads in the stockpile.” The Drell panel recommended that every nuclear weapon should be equipped with weak link/strong link devices, that every weapon carried by an airplane should contain insensitive high explosives and fire-resistant nuclear cores — and that the Pentagon should “affirm enhanced safety as the top priority of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.”

A separate study on nuclear weapon safety was requested by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The study was conducted by Ray E. Kidder, a Lawrence Livermore physicist, and released in 1991. It gave a safety “grade” to each nuclear weapon in the American stockpile. The grades were based on their potential risk of accidental detonation or plutonium scattering. Three weapons received an A. Seven received a B. Two received a C plus. Four received a C. Two received a C minus. And twelve received a D, the lowest grade.