Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The Air Force’s focus on tactical warfare, however, led to severe neglect of its strategic mission. Nuclear weapons seemed largely irrelevant after the Cold War, and ambitious officers wanted nothing to do with them. The United States Strategic Command not only combined the nuclear arsenals of the Air Force and the Navy, it also assumed control of numerous conventional missions: missile defense, intelligence and reconnaissance, space operations, cyber warfare. After the Strategic Air Command was dismantled, the Air Force no longer had an organization solely devoted to maintaining nuclear weapons and planning for their use. The no-notice inspections and black hat exercises that LeMay thought indispensable were ended. Nuclear weapon units were now given seventy-two hours of warning before an inspection. And instead of a four-star general commanding the Air Force’s strategic assets, a captain or a colonel became the highest-ranking officer in charge of daily nuclear operations. The lack of interest in the subject began to show.

In 2003 half of the Air Force units responsible for nuclear weapons failed their safety inspections — despite the three-day advance warning. In August 2006 the nose-cone fuze assemblies of four Minuteman III missiles were inadvertently shipped from Hill Air Force Base in Utah to Taiwan. Workers at the Defense Logistics Agency thought they were helicopter batteries. The top secret nuclear-weapon fuzes sat in unopened boxes for two years, until Taiwanese officials discovered the error. On August 29, 2007, six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber named Doom 99 at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. The plane sat on the tarmac at Minot overnight without any armed guards, took off the next morning, flew almost fifteen hundred miles to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana — violating the safety rule that prohibits nuclear weapons from being transported by air over the United States — landed at Barksdale, and sat on the tarmac there for nine hours, unguarded, until a maintenance crew noticed the warheads. For a day and a half, nobody in the Air Force realized that half a dozen thermonuclear weapons were missing.

The Defense Science Board later conducted an investigation of the safety and security lapses at Minot. It found a serious breakdown in command and control. Cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads were being stored in the same bunker as those armed with conventional or training warheads. Verification checklists were routinely ignored to save time. On the day of the incident, the breakout crew that initially entered the bunker, the convoy crew that drove the cruise missiles to the B-52, the load crew that placed them on the bomber, and the aircrew that flew the plane were all supposed to check whether the missiles were carrying nuclear warheads. None of the crews did. After interviewing them, the Defense Science Board noted a basic lack of understanding about who had the authority to remove weapons from the bunker — and “significant confusion about delegation of responsibility and authority for movement of nuclear weapons.” Nobody seemed to know who was in charge. And nobody was ever asked to sign a piece of paper recording the movement of nuclear weapons or acknowledging the transfer of custody from one Air Force unit to another. Paper would be necessary for that sort of record keeping — unlike packages shipped by Federal Express, the weapons had serial numbers that had to be written down, not bar codes that could be scanned.

On May 28, 2008, the Air Force discovered another safety problem. A maintenance team arrived at a Minuteman III silo near F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming and found the walls covered with soot. A fire had started in an equipment room, melting a shotgun case, part of a shotgun, and the shotgun shells stored there. Heat from the flames had damaged one of the electrical cables attached to the Minuteman III. The fire had extinguished itself — but hadn’t been detected by the smoke alarm at the site. The launch crew in its control center miles away never received any indication that the missile might be at risk. The fire was most likely caused by a lightning strike or an improperly installed battery charger. And it may have occurred five days before the maintenance team noticed the soot.

The Global Strike Command was created in 2009 to improve the management of the Air Force’s nuclear weapons. The command assumed responsibility for the remaining Minuteman III missiles, as well as the B-2 and B-52 bombers that still have nuclear missions. It is a successor to the Strategic Air Command, though smaller and less influential, with the same narrow focus on maintaining deterrence and fighting a nuclear war. Among other reforms, the new command has recently introduced “unique identifiers” for its nuclear weapons — bar codes that will allow them to be tracked. The Global Strike Command hopes to instill the same sort of dedication, motivation, and attention to detail that SAC long possessed. But the Air Force emphasis on tactical warfare has left the new command with aging and expensive weapon systems. Each of its twenty B-2 bombers costs $2 billion, and no more will be produced. Its Minuteman III missiles were first deployed in 1970. And its B-52 bombers haven’t been manufactured since John F. Kennedy was president. The B-52s are scheduled to remain in service through the year 2040.

The age of these strategic weapons raises doubts about whether the Air Force will have a significant nuclear role in the future. At the moment, funding for new long-range missiles and bombers has not been approved. But the command-and-control mechanisms used by the Air Force, the Global Strike Command, and the other armed services are continually being upgraded. The World Wide Military Command and Control System was deactivated in 1996. Its mainframe computers had become hopelessly out of date. The WWMCCS was replaced by the Global Command and Control System and its various subsets: the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, the Pentagon Global Information Grid, the Army LandWarNet, the Air Force Constellation Net, the Navy FORCENet, the Minimum Essential Communications Network, and the Defense Improved Emergency Message Automatic Transmission System Replacement Command and Control Terminal System. Known by the acronym DIRECT, it sends and receives the war order to use nuclear weapons. A DIRECT terminal looks like a desktop PC, circa 2003, with a round slot on the front for a metal key.

All of these military computer networks are far more technologically advanced than the gold telephone that used to connect General LeMay to the White House. But sometimes they experience a glitch. In October 2010 a computer failure at F. E. Warren Air Force Base knocked fifty Minuteman III missiles offline. For almost an hour, launch crews could not communicate with their missiles. One third of the Minuteman IIIs at the base had been rendered inoperable. The Air Force denied that the system had been hacked and later found the cause of the problem: a circuit card was improperly installed in one of the computers during routine maintenance. But the hacking of America’s nuclear command-and-control system remains a serious threat. In January 2013, a report by the Defense Science Board warned that the system’s vulnerability to a large-scale cyber attack had never been fully assessed. Testifying before Congress, the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, General C. Robert Kehler, expressed confidence that no “significant vulnerability” existed. Nevertheless, he said that an “end-to-end comprehensive review” still needed to be done, that “we don’t know what we don’t know,” and that the age of the command-and-control system might inadvertently offer some protection against the latest hacking techniques. Asked whether Russia and China had the ability to prevent a cyber attack from launching one of their nuclear missiles, Kehler replied, “Senator, I don’t know.”