Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

The best and most thorough history of nuclear weapons safety was written by Bill Stevens: “The Origins and Evolution of S2C at Sandia National Laboratories, 1949–1996,” Sandia National Laboratories, SAND99-1308, September 2001 (OFFICAL USE ONLY). It has never been released to the public, but I managed to obtain a copy — and I did not get it from Stevens. In 2011 Sandia produced an informative two-hour documentary, ALWAYS/Never: The Quest for Safety, Survivability, and Survivability that has also been classified OFFICIAL USE ONLY and never released to the public. Through an anonymous source, I got a copy of that, as well. It is absurd that these two historical works are not freely available. Neither contains classified information. And both illuminate subjects of enormous national importance.

I feel fortunate to have spent time with the late Fred Charles Iklé. Although our political views were in many ways quite different, I found him to be an eloquent, deeply patriotic opponent of nuclear war. And he spoke to me at length about his two pioneering studies on nuclear weapons safety and use control: one of them written with Gerald J. Aronson and Albert Madansky, “On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation,” research memorandum, Project RAND, USAF, Santa Monica, California, October 15, 1958, RM-2251 (CONFIDENTIAL/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), and the other written with J. E. Hill, “The Aftermath of a Single Nuclear Detonation by Accident or Sabotage: Some Problems Affecting U.S. Policy, Military Reactions, and Public Information,” Research Memorandum, Project RAND, US Air Force, Santa Monica, California, May 8, 1959, RM-2364 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified). I am also grateful to Harold Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, for describing his work to assure the one-point safety of nuclear weapons, to place locks inside warheads and bombs, and to provide adequate security to American weapons deployed overseas. And I spoke to the late Robert McNamara about his determination, as secretary of defense, to make nuclear weapons safer and less vulnerable to unauthorized use.

Remarkably little has been published about nuclear weapon accidents, and I was glad to find two good books that addressed the potential dangers: Nuclear Weapons Safety and the Common Defense , by Joel Larus (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1967), and Shaun R. Gregory’s The Hidden Cost of Deterrence: Nuclear Weapon Accidents (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1990). Both were written, however, without access to the accident reports that have been released through the Freedom of Information Act since the end of the Cold War. Two retired Air Force nuclear technicians, Michael H. Maggelet and James C. Oskins, have done a superlative job of obtaining information about weapon accidents from their former employer. And they’ve made documents on the subject available, largely unedited, in a couple of books that I found extremely useful: Broken Arrow: The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents (Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2007), and Broken Arrow, Volume II: A Disclosure of Significant U.S., Soviet, and British Nuclear Weapon Incidents and Accidents, 1945–2008 (Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2010). Maggelet and Oskins don’t exaggerate the danger of the many bomber crashes and fires that involved nuclear weapons. In fact, they tend to understate the actual risk of an accidental detonation. But what they’ve uncovered is remarkable.

One of the most eye-opening documents that I read for this book was a study prepared for Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger: “The Evolution of U.S. Strategic Command and Control and Warning 1945–1972,” written by L. Wainstein, C. D. Cremeans, J. K. Moriarity, and J. Ponturo, Study S-467, International and Social Studies Division, Institute for Defense Analyses, June 1975 (TOP SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified). It gave me the unmistakable feeling that, during the Cold War, things were never fully under control. Another fine study commissioned at about the same time — “History of the Strategic Arms Competition, 1945–1972,” written by Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner, and Thomas W. Wolfe, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Historical Office, March 1981 (TOP SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified) — strongly reinforced that sense.

A number of articles and books on command and control, written before those two studies were declassified, conveyed how hard it would be to fight a limited nuclear war or pause one to negotiate with the enemy. Desmond Ball was one of the first scholars who publicly challenged the reigning strategic orthodoxy. His article — “Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?” Adelphi Paper #169, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981 — raised some fundamental questions that have never adequately been answered. A series of fine books on the subject soon appeared: Paul Bracken’s The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); Daniel Ford’s The Button: The Pentagon’s Strategic Command and Control System (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); Bruce Blair’s Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985); and the most extensive study of the subject that has been published to date, Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution, 1987), edited by Ashton Carter, John D. Steinbruner, and Charles A. Zraket. Blair is a former Minuteman launch officer who earned a graduate degree at Yale, later joined the Brookings Institution, and now heads Global Zero, an organization devoted to the abolition of nuclear weapons. He has continued to write about command-and-control issues, and I learned a great deal from his work, especially The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1993). A more recent book on command and control during the Cold War largely confirms what the others found: The World Wide Military Command and Control System: Evolution and Effectiveness , by David Pearson (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2000).

The Australian scholar Desmond Ball was also responsible for groundbreaking research on American nuclear strategy and targeting. His study of how the alleged missile gap affected subsequent defense spending — Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) — shows how domestic concerns, not military necessity, established the number of ICBMs that the United States would deploy for the next thirty years. A book that Ball edited with Jeffrey Richelson, Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), explains the thinking behind where those missiles were aimed. The work of another influential scholar, David Alan Rosenberg, reveals how the American nuclear arsenal became so much larger than it needed to be. Two of Rosenberg’s essays — “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy 1945–1960,” International Security , vol. 7, no. 4 (1983), pp. 3–71, and “‘A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours’: Documents on American Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954–55,” written with W. B. Morse, International Security , vol. 6, no. 3 (1981), pp. 3–38 — show how little would have been left after an attack by the Strategic Air Command.

The ongoing dispute about the merits of civilian or military control of nuclear weapons is addressed throughout the official history of the Atomic Energy Commission: The New World, 1939/1946: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission , Volume I written by Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962); Atomic Shield, 1947/1952: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission , Volume II, by Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969); and Atoms for Peace and War, 1953/1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission, a History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission , Volume III, by Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). A fascinating declassified report traces how the military gained the upper hand — “History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 through September 1977,” Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Atomic Energy), February 1978 (TOP SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/FORMERLY RESTRICTED DATA/declassified). The best academic studies of the issue have been written, wholly or in part, by Peter D. Feaver, now a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University. In Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), Feaver explores not only the tension between civilian and military control, but also the always/never dilemma governing how that control would be exercised. And in an earlier work written with Peter Stein, Feaver gave the first detailed account of why the Kennedy administration took such a strong interest in coded, electromechanical locks: Assuring Control of Nuclear Weapons: The Evolution of Permissive Action Links (Cambridge, MA: Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and University Press of America, 1987).