Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Secrecy is essential to the command and control of nuclear weapons. Their technology is the opposite of open-source software. The latest warhead designs can’t be freely shared on the Internet, improved through anonymous collaboration, and productively used without legal constraints. In the years since Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, the design specifications of American nuclear weapons have been “born secret.” They are not classified by government officials; they’re classified as soon as they exist. And intense secrecy has long surrounded the proposed uses and deployments of nuclear weapons. It is intended to keep valuable information away from America’s enemies. But an absence of public scrutiny has often made nuclear weapons more dangerous and more likely to cause a disaster.

Again and again, safety problems were hidden not only from the public but also from the officers and enlisted personnel who handled nuclear weapons every day. The strict, compartmentalized secrecy hid safety problems from the scientists and engineers responsible for weapon safety. Through the Freedom of Information Act, I obtained a document that listed the “Accidents and Incidents Involving Nuclear Weapons” from the summer of 1957 until the spring of 1967. It was 245 pages long. It gave brief accounts of the major Broken Arrows during that period. It also described hundreds of minor accidents, technical glitches, and seemingly trivial events: a Genie antiaircraft missile released from a fighter plane by mistake and dropped onto a weapon trailer; a Boar missile crushed by the elevator of an aircraft carrier; a Mark 49 warhead blown off a Jupiter missile when explosive bolts detonated due to corrosion; smoke pouring from a W-31 warhead atop a Nike missile after a short circuit; the retrorockets of a Thor missile suddenly firing at a launch site in Great Britain and startling the crew; a Mark 28 bomb emitting strange sounds, for reasons that were never discovered. I shared the document with Bob Peurifoy and Bill Stevens — who’d never seen it. Both were upset after reading it. The Defense Atomic Support Agency had never told them about hundreds of accidents.

The United States was often more successful at keeping secrets from its own weapon designers than at keeping them from the Soviet Union. Beginning with the Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project, through the John Walker spy ring — which from the late 1960s until 1985 provided about a million documents on the Pentagon’s war plans, codes, and submarine technology to the Soviets — the leadership in the Kremlin knew a lot more about the nuclear capabilities of the United States than the American people were ever allowed to know. One of the most important secrets of the Cold War was considered so secret that the president of the United States wasn’t allowed to know it. Harry Truman was deliberately never told that Army cryptologists had broken Soviet codes and deciphered thousands of messages about espionage within the United States. But the Soviet Union learned the secret, when one of its spies, the British double agent Kim Philby, was given a tour of the Army’s Signal Intelligence Service headquarters.

The need to protect national security has long been used as a justification for hiding things to avoid embarrassment. “Secrecy is a form of government regulation,” a Senate commission, headed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said in 1997. “What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation.” To this day, the classification decisions at the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy have an arbitrary, often Kafkaesque quality. Cold War documents that were declassified in the 1990s were later reclassified — making it illegal to possess them, even though the federal government once released them.

In many of the documents that I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the redactions by government censors made little sense. Exactly the same information would be supplied in one document, yet blacked out in another. The government still won’t reveal the yield of the Titan II’s warhead — even though the weapon hasn’t been in the American arsenal for almost a quarter of a century, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and Soviet espionage discovered everything remotely interesting about the missile.

The operational details of nuclear weapons might seem like the kind of information that should always be kept secret. And yet throughout the Cold War, news reports about Broken Arrows and other nuclear weapon problems forced the Pentagon to adopt new safety measures. Bad publicity influenced the decision to lock hydrogen bombs securely inside bombers during takeoffs and landings, to end SAC’s airborne alert, retire the Titan II missile, remove Short-Range Attack Missiles from aircraft on ground alert. Too much secrecy often threatened the national security far more than revelations about America’s nuclear arsenal.

A detailed account of the nuclear weapon accidents in the Soviet Union has never been published. The absence of a free press no doubt contributed to the many large-scale industrial accidents and widespread environmental devastation that occurred in the Soviet bloc. Chelyabinsk-65, the site of a nuclear weapon facility in central Russia, has been called “arguably the most polluted spot on the planet.” A massive explosion there in 1957 contaminated hundreds of square miles with highly radioactive fallout. Countless accidents occurred at the plant, and tens of thousands of people were exposed to harmful levels of radiation. Soviet nuclear technology was, for the most part, inferior to that of the West. But the authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union was especially well suited to the demands of nuclear command and control. Unlike the president of the United States — who predelegated the authority to use nuclear weapons not only to SAC generals and Air Force fighter pilots but also to NATO officers in Europe — the leadership of the Communist Party and the Soviet general staff strictly retained that sort of power. Locks of various kinds were placed on Soviet weapons, and the permission to unlock them came only from the top. According to Bruce Blair, a leading command-and-control expert, Soviet safeguards against unauthorized use were “more stringent than those of any other nuclear power, including the United States.”

The rigidly centralized command structure, however, made the Soviet Union quite vulnerable to a decapitation attack. Despite all the underground bunkers and secret railways built in and around Moscow, Soviet leaders constantly worried about their ability to retaliate after an American first strike. Instead of loosening their control of nuclear weapons and shifting authority further down the chain of command, they automated the decision to use nuclear weapons. In 1974, little more than a decade after the release of Dr. Strangelove , the Soviet Union began work on the “Perimeter” system — a network of sensors and computers that could launch intercontinental ballistic missiles without any human oversight. Completed in 1985, it was known as the “dead hand.” The Soviet general staff planned to activate Perimeter if an American attack seemed imminent. The system would retaliate automatically, firing long-range missiles if it detected nuclear explosions on Russian soil. Perimeter greatly reduced the pressure to launch on warning at the first sign of an American attack. It gave Soviet leaders more time to investigate the possibility of a false alarm, confident that a real attack would trigger a computer-controlled, devastating response. But it rendered American plans for limited war meaningless; the Soviet computers weren’t programmed to allow pauses for negotiation. And the deterrent value of Perimeter was wasted. Like the doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove , the system was kept secret from the United States.