Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

“rescue those able and intelligent Jerries”: LeMay, Mission with LeMay , p. 398.

“Oh yes,” Knacke replied: Agnew interview.

Bob Peurifoy led the team at Sandia: Peurifoy interview.

a temperature of about -423 degrees Fahrenheit: Cited in Hansen, Swords of Armageddon , Volume 3, p. 56.

he’d climbed two hundred feet to the top: Bernard O’Keefe and a friend flipped a coin to see who’d have to disarm the nuclear device. O’Keefe lost, got into a Jeep, and headed to the tower. See O’Keefe, Nuclear Hostages, pp. 154–6.

“Is this building moving or am I getting dizzy?”: Quoted in ibid., p. 178.

“My God, it is”: Ibid.

“like it was resting on a bowl of jelly”: Ibid., p. 179.

Shrimp’s yield was 15 megatons: Cited in Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace p. 174.

almost three times larger than… predicted: Cited in ibid.

about two hundred billion pounds of coral reef and the seafloor: The crater dug by the blast was roughly two thousand yards wide, with a maximum depth of eighty yards. As Bob Peurifoy and his son, Steve, a fellow engineer, explained to me, the crater was “an inverted, very-high-aspect ratio, right circular cone.” The volume of such a cone is one third of the base area multiplied by the height. According to their calculations, the volume of the Bravo crater was about eighty million cubic yards — and a cubic yard of sandy topsoil weighs about twenty-five hundred pounds. That means the amount of material displaced by the explosion weighed about two hundred billion pounds. To get a visual sense of that amount, imagine a pile of sand and coral the size of a football field that extends about seven miles into the sky. I am grateful to the Peurifoys for these figures. For the dimensions of the crater formed by the Bravo test, see “Operation Castle, Crater Survey,” p. 24.

cloud that soon stretched for more than sixty miles: The mushroom cloud reached a maximum height of about 310,000 feet and a width of about 350,000 feet. See Vincent J. Jodoin, “Nuclear Cloud Rise and Growth” (dissertation, Graduate School of Engineering, Air Force Institute of Technology, Air University, June 1994), p. 89.

The dangers of radioactive fallout: For a good explanation of how residual radiation is created, how long it can last, and what it can do to human beings, see Glasstone, Effects of Nuclear Weapons , pp. 414–501, 577–663.

The “early fallout” of a nuclear blast: See ibid., pp. 416–42.

A dose of about 700 roentgens is almost always fatal: See ibid., p. 461.

“Delayed fallout” poses a different kind of risk: See ibid., pp. 473–88.

an amount of fallout that surprised everyone: See ibid., pp. 460–61; and Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace, pp. 171–82, 271–79.

The villagers had seen the brilliant explosion: See Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace, p. 174.

a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon : The story of the unfortunate crew can be found in ibid., pp. 175–77; and Ralph E. Lapp, The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958).

the fallout pattern from the Bravo test was superimposed: The map can be found in Hewlett and Holl, Atoms for Peace , p. 181.

if a similar 15-megaton groundburst hit: Ibid., p. 182. Within an area of roughly 6,000 square miles — about 135 miles long and 35 miles wide — the fatality rate among people who did not evacuate or find shelter would be close to 100 percent. See Glasstone, Effects of Nuclear Weapons , p. 461.

its first atomic bomb, the “Blue Danube”: Instead of numerical signifiers, the British came up with all sorts of evocative names for their nuclear weapons, including: “Blue Peacock,” an atomic land mine; “Blue Steel,” an air-launched missile with a thermonuclear warhead; “Green Cheese,” a proposed antiship missile with an atomic warhead; “Indigo Hammer,” a small atomic warhead for use with antiaircraft missiles; “Red Beard,” a tactical bomb; “Tony,” an atomic warhead used in antiaircraft missiles; and “Winkle,” an atomic warhead developed for the Royal Navy. A thorough list of them can be found in Richard Moore, “The Real Meaning of the Words: A Pedantic Glossary of British Nuclear Weapons,” UK Nuclear History Working Paper , no. 1, Mountbatten Centre for International Studies (March 2004).

a yield of about 16 kilotons: Cited in ibid, p. 3.

“With all its horrors, the atomic bomb”: Quoted in “Debate in House of Commons, April 5, 1954” Hansard, vol. 526, p. 48.

Strath submitted his report in the spring of 1955: For details of the report, see Jeff Hughes, “The Strath Report: Britain Confronts the H-Bomb, 1954–1955,” History and Technology, vol. 19, no. 3 (2003), pp. 257–75; Robin Woolven, “UK Civil Defence and Nuclear Weapons, 1953–1959,” UK Nuclear History Working Paper , no. 2, Mountbatten Centre for International Studies, (n.d.); and Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (New York: Penguin, 2003), pp. 132–46.

“render the UK useless”: The quote is from an intelligence report submitted to Strath. See Hennessy, Secret State , p. 133.

“The heat flash from one hydrogen bomb”: Quoted in Hughes, “The Strath Report,” p. 268.

If the Soviets detonated ten hydrogen bombs: See Hennessy, Secret State , p. 121.

Almost one third of the British population would be killed: See Hughes, “The Strath Report,” p. 270.

the most productive land might “be lost for a long time”: Quoted in ibid., p. 269.

“Machinery of Control”: For the workings of the proposed martial law, see Hennessy, Secret State , p. 139; and Hughes, “The Strath Report,” p. 270.

“drastic emergency powers,” and… “rough and ready methods”: Quoted in Hughes, “The Strath Report,” p. 270.

Churchill ordered the BBC not to broadcast news: Ibid., pp. 272–73.

“Influence depended on possession of force”: Quoted in Hennessy, Secret State, p. 54.

“We must do it”: Quoted in ibid., p. 44.

build an underground shelter “right now”: Quoted in Allen Drury, “U.S. Stress on Speed,” New York Times , March 12, 1955.

“we had all better dig and pray”: Quoted in ibid.

“YOUR CHANCES OF SURVIVING AN ATOMIC ATTACK”: “Survival Under Atomic Attack,” The Official U.S. Government Booklet, Distributed by Office of Civil Defense, State of California, Reprint by California State Printing Division, October 1950, p. 4.

“EVEN A LITTLE MATERIAL GIVES PROTECTION”: Ibid., p. 8.

“WE KNOW MORE ABOUT RADIOACTIVITY”: Ibid., p. 8.

“KEEP A FLASHLIGHT HANDY”: Ibid., p. 19.

“AVOID GETTING WET AFTER UNDERWATER BURSTS”: Ibid., p. 23.

“BE CAREFUL NOT TO TRACK RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS”: Ibid., p. 27.

Val Peterson called for concrete pipelines to be laid: See Anthony Levieros, “Big Bomb Blast Jolted Civil Defense Leaders; But Program Still Lags,” New York Times , June 10, 1955.

“Duck and cover,” one journalist noted: See Bernard Stengren, “Major Cities Lag in Planning Defense Against Bomb Attack,” New York Times , June 12, 1955.

Hoping to boost morale: The historians Guy Oakes and Andrew Grossman have argued that the underlying goal of Operation Alert and other civil defense exercises was “emotion management” — reassuring the public in order to maintain support for nuclear deterrence. The propaganda value of such drills was considered far more important than their potential usefulness during a Soviet attack. See Guy Oakes and Andrew Grossman, “Managing Nuclear Terror: The Genesis of American Civil Defense Strategy,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society , vol. 5, no. 3 (1992), pp. 361–403; and Guy Oakes, “The Cold War Conception of Nuclear Reality: Mobilizing the American Imagination for Nuclear War in the 1950’s,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society , vol. 6, no. 3 (1993), pp. 339–63. For an overview of official efforts to protect the nation’s capital, literally and symbolically, see David F. Krugler, This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).