Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

A number of other writers and historians influenced my view of how nuclear weapons affected postwar America. Barton Bernstein, a professor of history at Stanford University, has written complex and persuasive essays about President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb. Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) shows how the euphoria that accompanied the end of the Second World War soon became a deep anxiety about nuclear war that endured for almost half a century. The Wizards of Armageddon, The Untold Story of the Small Group of Men Who Have Devised the Plans and Shaped the Policies on How to Use the Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), by Fred Kaplan, explains how RAND analysts and brilliant theorists rationalized the creation of a nuclear arsenal with thousands of weapons. In Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge & Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), Lynn Eden delves into the mentality of war planners who excluded from their calculations one of the principal effects of nuclear weapons: the capability to ignite things. Lawrence Freedman’s The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) is the finest book on the subject, clear and authoritative — although the gulf between clever strategic theories and the likely reality of nuclear war has always been vast. The best overview of how nuclear weapons have affected American society is Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Insitution Press, 1998), edited by Stephen I. Schwartz. And since 1945, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been publishing timely, informative, and reliable articles about the nuclear threat.

During my research for Command and Control , I spoke to Pentagon officials from every postwar administration, except that of President Harry Truman. But my understanding of the Cold War owes much to the work of historian John Lewis Gaddis, most notably his recent biography, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), and his synthesis of more than thirty years studying the conflict, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Books, 2007). The opening of archives in the former Soviet Union has added a much-needed new perspective to events long narrowly viewed from the American side, and a number of books have supplanted earlier histories or added important new details. I learned much from Vojtech Mastny’s The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and from two excellent books by Alexsandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali: Khruschchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) and “One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

Some of the most compelling books about the Cold War have been written by people who helped to wage it. For the Truman years, I strongly recommend the deeply personal works of James Forrestal and David E. Lilienthal — Walter Millis, ed. The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking Press, 1951) and The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Volume II: The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). One of the most perceptive observers of President Eisenhower’s strategic thinking was McGeorge Bundy. But his epic book — Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988) — is less trustworthy about the Kennedy administration in which Bundy served. I also learned a great deal from books by Kenneth D. Nichols, a strong proponent of nuclear weapons, and by Herbert F. York, a former head of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who came to doubt their usefulness. Nichols’s memoir is The Road to Trinity: A Personal Account of How America’s Nuclear Policies Were Made (New York: William Morrow, 1987), and York wrote two books about his experiences, Race to Oblivion: A Participant’s View of the Arms Race (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970) and Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist’s Odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva (New York: Basic Books, 1987). Thomas C. Reed, a nuclear weapons designer and close adviser to Ronald Reagan, wrote a blunt, fascinating account of the Cold War’s final chapter, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004). The Cold War memoir that I found to be the most interesting and revelatory was written by Robert M. Gates, the former secretary of defense and director of the CIA: From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

Two classic texts offer a good introduction to the origins and explosive power of nuclear weapons: Henry DeWolf Smyth’s Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government 1940–1945 : (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945) and The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), edited by Samuel Glasstone. More than twenty-five years after being published, The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the definitive work on the Manhattan Project. I also learned a great deal about the development of the first nuclear weapons from Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), by Lillian Hoddeson, Paul W. Henriksen, Roger A. Meade, and Catherine Westfall. The weapons themselves are described with unparalleled accuracy in John Coster-Mullen’s book, Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man (Waukesha, WI: John Coster-Mullen, 2009). David Samuels profiles Coster-Mullen and his indefatigable research methods in “Atomic John: A Truck Driver Uncovers Secrets About the First Nuclear Bombs,” The New Yorker , December 15, 2008.

Chuck Hansen’s The Swords of Armageddon , a digital collection released by Chuklea Publications in 2007, is by far the most impressive work on the technical aspects of nuclear weapons. Spanning seven volumes and more than three thousand pages, it is based almost entirely on documents that Hansen obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Many of the documents are included verbatim, and they cover almost every aspect of nuclear weapon design. The only sources that I found to be more reliable than Hansen were people who’d actually designed nuclear weapons.

Sidney Drell introduced me to the issue of nuclear weapon safety, and I’m profoundly grateful for the assistance that he gave me with this book. Drell is a theoretical physicist who for many years headed the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, a founding member of JASON, a former adviser to both the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories, and a former member of the president’s foreign intelligence advisory board. And he served, between 1990 and 1991, as the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety. Drell also introduced me to Bob Peurifoy, a former vice president at the Sandia National Laboratory — and through Peurifoy, I met Bill Stevens, the former head of nuclear safety at Sandia. More than anything else, these three men helped me understand the effort, pursued for decades, to ensure that nuclear weapons would never detonate accidentally or without proper authorization.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, I obtained some fascinating reports about nuclear weapon safety. Among the more useful were: “Acceptable Premature Probabilities for Nuclear Weapons,” Headquarters Field Command, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, FC/10570136, October 1, 1957 (SECRET/RESTRICTRED DATA/declassified); “A Survey of Nuclear Weapon Safety Problems and the Possibilities for Increasing Safety in Bomb and Warhead Design,” prepared by Sandia Corporation with the advice and assistance of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and the University of California Ernest O. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, RS 3466/26889, February 1959 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified); “Accidents and Incidents Involving Nuclear Weapons: Accidents and Incidents During the Period 1 July 1957 Through 31 March 1967,” Technical Letter 20-3, Defense Atomic Support Agency, October 15, 1967 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified); “Accident Environments,” T. D. Brumleve, chairman, Task Group on Accidents Environments Sandia Laboratories, Livermore Laboratory, SCL-DR-69-86, January 1970 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified); and “A Review of the U.S. Nuclear Weapon Safety Program—1945 to 1986,” R. N. Brodie, Sandia National Laboratories, SAND86-2955, February 1987 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified).