Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Al Childers and Greg Devlin similarly spent untold hours helping me to understand the events at Launch Complex 374-7. Rodney Holder, Jim Sandaker, and Don Green talked to me at length as well. I am grateful for all the time these men devoted to my research. Colonel John T. Moser was extremely gracious in answering questions about perhaps the worst experience of his long Air Force career. And I’m grateful to General Chris Adams — a prolific author as well as a former chief of staff at the Strategic Air Command — for his many insights about the role of the Air Force in the Cold War. Although our political views differ, I have great respect for the way General Adams has served his country.

David and Barbara Pryor, Phil and Annette Herrington, Sid King, Sam Hutto, and Skip Rutherford made my time in Arkansas a real pleasure. I’m grateful to Cindy English for telling me about her late father, Richard English; to David Rossborough, Jeffrey Zink, David Powell, and Jeffrey Plumb; to Colonel Ben Scallorn, Colonel Jimmie Gray, Major Vincent Maes, Colonel Ron Bishop; and to Mary Ann Dennis, whose memories of her late brother, David Livingston, served as a poignant reminder of how meaningless statistics can be — and how the loss of a single life is one too many.

Ann Godoff proved to be exactly what a great editor should be: blunt, fiercely intelligent, and seemingly afraid of nothing. Those are rare qualities in a literary world that’s increasingly timid and homogenized.

Stefan McGrath, Helen Conford, and Rosie Glaisher could not have been more supportive, from the first to the last. And I am profoundly grateful.

Tina Bennett made this book happen. She urged me to write it, discussed it with me for almost ten years, and through thick and thin never wavered in her enthusiasm for it. Her advice was reliably on the mark. Every writer should have such a brilliant, forceful advocate.

A number of other people at William Morris Endeavor must be thanked: Tracy Fisher, Raffaela De Angelis, Annemarie Blumenhagen, Alicia Gordon. And Svetlana Katz is simply the best.

Ellis Levine proved himself, as always, to be a fine critic as well as a formidable legal mind. I am very lucky to have him on my side, not the other one.

I’m grateful to Sarah Hutson and Ryan Davies for their efforts to bring attention to my work.

Benjamin Platt deserves some sort of prize for how he handled the production of this book. I hope he gets it. Meighan Cavanaugh gave the book a clear, beautiful design. Deborah Weiss Geline’s copyediting made me seem more eloquent; she’s a wonderful practitioner of an unfortunately vanishing art. Lindsay Whalen, Michael McConnell, Nina Hnatov, Christina Caruccio, Melanie Belkin, and Denise Boyd all helped turn my manuscript into a book. And I’m grateful to Eamon Dolan for bringing me to The Penguin Press in the first place.

Jennifer Jerde and Scott Hesselink at Elixir Design came up with a memorable, original jacket. Gideon Kendall worked hard to capture every little detail in his very cool illustration of a Titan II missile complex. And I’m honored that the first words in this book were written by Leonard Cohen.

I did not employ researchers while writing Command and Control . But I later received invaluable help from a small team of people who did their best to ensure the book’s accuracy. Bea Marr did a terrific job transcribing interview tapes, wading through all sorts of jargon — and immediately forgetting everything she heard. Jane Cavolina carefully scrutinized my quotations and assertions of fact. I am grateful for every single error that she found, from the trivial to the deeply embarrassing. Once again, Charles Wilson helped me get things right, reinterviewing many of the subjects in this book with sensitivity and skill. Ariel Towber helped to compile the bibliographic citations and made sure that my calculations actually had some basis in mathematics. Stephanie Simon, Jessica Bufford, and Aaron Labaree also worked on the citations — and I even recruited my poor children, Mica and Conor Schlosser, to help with the task. They no doubt hope my next book will be a novel. And I’m grateful to David Schmalz, Elizabeth Limbach, and Hilary McClellen for their fact-checking efforts. One of the central themes of Command and Control is the fallibility of all human endeavors. Sadly, that inescapable law applies to me as well. Any mistakes in this book are my fault. I hope that readers will kindly point them out to me.

A number of dear friends read the manuscript in full or in part, gave me good suggestions, and helped me to get through it: Michael Clurman, Dominic Dromgoole, Robby Kenner, Corby Kummer, Cullen Murphy, John Seabrook. The fact that I ignored some of those suggestions reflects poorly on me, not them. And Katrina vanden Heuvel has been a true friend throughout, a fellow student of the Cold War who helped me navigate the national security bureaucracy.

My greatest thanks go to my family: Mica, Conor, Dylan, Lena, Andrew, Austin, and Hillary; Lynn and Craig; James and Kyle; Matt and Amy; Bob and Bylle; Lola and George; my parents. I can’t imagine what they’ve put up with these past six years. While writing this book, I have not been the life of the party.

Most of all, I feel love and gratitude and great compassion for Red, who’s had to live beside this darkness. Without her, it would have been impossible.

Although I did a great deal of research for this book, I also benefited enormously from the writing, expertise, and firsthand experience of others. I’ve tried in these notes to acknowledge my debt to the many people whose work influenced mine. For the past six decades, the intense official secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons has presented an unusual challenge to journalists and scholars who write about the subject. Sometimes the only thing more difficult than obtaining accurate information is demonstrating to readers that it’s true. I have done my best here not to cite or rely solely upon anonymous sources. Nevertheless, over the years, I’ve spoken to countless people who formulated or carried out America’s nuclear weapon policies, including three former secretaries of defense, presidential advisers, heads of the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories, physicists and engineers once employed at those labs, Pentagon officials, Strategic Air Command generals, bomber pilots and navigators, missile crew commanders, missile repairmen and bomb squad technicians trained to handle weapons of mass destruction. Most of their names never appear in this book. And yet what they told me helped to ensure its accuracy. Any factual errors in these pages are entirely my own.

One of the primary sources for my narrative of the Damascus accident was a three-volume report prepared by the Air Force: “Report of Missile Accident Investigation: Major Missile Accident, 18–19 September 1980, Titan II Complex 374-7, Assigned to 308th Strategic Missile Wing, Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas,” conducted at Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas, and Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, December 14–19, 1980, Eighth Air Force Missile Investigation Board, December 1980. When I contacted the Air Force for a copy of this report, I was told that the Air Force no longer possessed one. I later found a copy among the congressional papers of Dan Glickman at Wichita State University. I am very grateful to Mary Nelson, a program consultant in the department of special collections there, who arranged for the report to be photocopied for me. Other copies, I subsequently learned, are held at the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona, and at the Jacksonville Museum of Military History in Jacksonville, Arkansas.

The accident report contains more than a thousand pages of maps, charts, photographs, analysis, and testimony from ninety-two witnesses. The material was invaluable for reconstructing what happened that night in Damascus. Two other official reports on the Titan II were much less reliable but still worth reading, if only for what they failed to say about the missile: “Assessment Report: Titan II LGM 25 C, Weapon Condition and Safety,” prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee and House Armed Services Committee, May 1980; and “Titan II Weapon System: Review Group Report,” December 1980.