Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

ON JANUARY 25, 1991, General George Lee Butler became the head of the Strategic Air Command. During his first week on the job, Butler asked the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff to give him a copy of the SIOP. General Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had made clear that the United States needed to change its targeting policy, now that the Cold War was over. As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow — dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job working for the Joint Chiefs, Butler had dealt with targeting issues and the damage criteria for nuclear weapons. He was hardly naive. But the days and weeks spent going through the SIOP, page by page, deeply affected him.

For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth… we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”

Butler eliminated about 75 percent of the targets in the SIOP, introduced a targeting philosophy that was truly flexible, and decided to get rid of the name SIOP. The United States no longer had a single, integrated war plan. Butler preferred a new title for the diverse range of nuclear options: National Strategic Response Plans.

MIKHAIL GORBACHEV WAS ON VACATION in the Crimea on August 18, 1991, when a group calling itself the “State Committee for the State of Emergency” entered his house and insisted that he declare martial law or resign. After refusing to do either, Gorbachev was held hostage, and the communications lines to his dacha were shut down by the KGB. His military aides, carrying the nuclear codes and the Soviet equivalent of a “football,” were staying at a guesthouse nearby. Their equipment stopped functioning — and the civilian leadership of the Soviet Union lost control of its nuclear weapons.

Two other Soviet officials possessed nuclear codes and footballs: the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff. Both of them supported the coup d’état. It has never been conclusively established who controlled the thousands of nuclear weapons in the Soviet arsenal during the next few days. The head of the air force later claimed that he, the head of the navy, and the head of the Strategic Rocket Forces took over the command-and-control system, preventing anyone else from launching missiles at the United States. After the coup failed on August 21, communications were restored to Gorbachev’s dacha, and the football carried by his military aides became operable once again.

Eager to reduce the risk of an accidental war and encourage deeper cuts in the Soviet arsenal, President George H. W. Bush announced a month later that the United States would unilaterally make large reductions in its nuclear deployments. It would remove all of the Army’s tactical weapons from Europe, destroy half of the Navy’s tactical weapons and place the rest in storage, take 450 Minuteman II missiles off alert — and end the Strategic Air Command’s ground alert. For the first time since 1957, SAC’s bombers wouldn’t be parked near runways, loaded with fuel and hydrogen bombs, as their crews waited for the sound of Klaxons.

The Soviet Union ceased to exist on Christmas Day, 1991. The following June, the Strategic Air Command disappeared, as well. General Powell and General Butler thought that SAC had outlived its original purpose. The recent war against Iraq had demonstrated the importance of close collaboration between the armed services — and future wars were likely to be fought with conventional, not nuclear, weapons. The Strategic Air Command and its institutional culture no longer seemed relevant. SAC’s aircraft were divided among various Air Force units. America’s land-based missiles and ballistic-missile submarines were assigned to a single, unified command — to be headed, alternately, by an officer from the Air Force or the Navy. The fierce interservice rivalry to control America’s nuclear weapons largely vanished, as those weapons played an increasingly minor role in the Pentagon’s war plans. But many SAC veterans were outraged that what had once been the most powerful organization in the American military was being disbanded. They thought it was a mistake, regarded General Butler as a turncoat, and felt that the legacy of Curtis LeMay was being dishonored.

President Bush told members of his administration not to brag or gloat about the downfall of the Soviet Union, an event with myriad causes that Mikhail Gorbachev had unintentionally but peacefully overseen. General Colin Powell ignored those instructions at the ceremony in Omaha marking the end of the Strategic Air Command. “The long bitter years of the Cold War are over,” Powell said. “America and her allies have won — totally, decisively, overwhelmingly.”

The sociologist Charles B. Perrow began his research on dangerous technologies in August 1979, after the partial meltdown of the core at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. In the early minutes of the accident, workers didn’t realize that the valves on the emergency coolant pipes had mistakenly been shut — one of the indicator lights on the control panel was hidden by a repair tag. Perrow soon learned that similar mistakes had occurred during the operation of other nuclear power plants. At a reactor in Virginia, a worker cleaning the floor got his shirt caught on the handle of a circuit breaker on the wall. He pulled the shirt off it, tripped the circuit breaker, and shut down the reactor for four days. A lightbulb slipped out of the hand of a worker at a reactor in California. The bulb hit the control panel, caused a short circuit, turned off sensors, and made the temperature of the core change so rapidly that a meltdown could have occurred. After studying a wide range of “trivial events in nontrivial systems,” Perrow concluded that human error wasn’t responsible for these accidents. The real problem lay deeply embedded within the technological systems, and it was impossible to solve: “Our ability to organize does not match the inherent hazards of some of our organized activities.” What appeared to be the rare exception, an anomaly, a one-in-a-million accident, was actually to be expected. It was normal.

Perrow explored the workings of high-risk systems in his book Normal Accidents , focusing on the nuclear power industry, the chemical industry, shipping, air transportation, and other industrial activities that could harm a large number of people if something went wrong. Certain patterns and faults seemed common to all of them. The most dangerous systems had elements that were “tightly coupled” and interactive. They didn’t function in a simple, linear way, like an assembly line. When a problem arose on an assembly line, you could stop the line until a solution was found. But in a tightly coupled system, many things occurred simultaneously — and they could prove difficult to stop. If those things also interacted with each other, it might be hard to know exactly what was happening when a problem arose, let alone know what to do about it. The complexity of such a system was bound to bring surprises. “No one dreamed that when X failed, Y would also be out of order,” Perrow gave as an example, “and the two failures would interact so as to both start a fire and silence the fire alarm.”