Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

An official “board of inquiry”… an “important device for temporizing”: Ibid., p. 62.

“During this delaying period the public information”: Ibid., p. 63.

“avoid public self-implication and delay the release”: Ibid., p. 88.

the electrical system of the W-49 warhead: Bob Peurifoy and William L. Stevens, who both worked on the electrical system, told me the story of how it became the first warhead with an environmental sensing device. Stevens writes about the Army’s resistance to the idea in “Origins and Evolution of S2C at Sandia,” pp. 32–34.

“This warhead, like all other warheads investigated”: Quoted in “A Summary of the Program to Use Environmental Sensing Devices to Improve Handling Safety Protection for Nuclear Weapons,” W. L. Stevens and C. H. Mauney, Sandia Corporation, July 1961 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), p. 6. Another study made clear how it could be done: “A saboteur, with knowledge of the warhead can, through warhead connectors, operate any arm/safe switch with improvised equipment.” See “Evaluation of Warhead Safing Devices,” p. 26.

a “handling safety device” or a “goof-proofer”: Stevens interview.

“to hell with it”: Peurifoy interview.

“environmental sensing device”: Ibid.

A young physicist, Robert K. Osborne, began to worry: My account of how the one-point safety standard developed is based on interviews with Harold Agnew and Bob Peurifoy, as well as the following documents: “Minutes of the 133rd Meeting of the Fission Weapon Committee,” Los Alamos National Laboratory, December 30, 1957; “One-Point Safety,” letter, from J. F. Ney to R. L. Peurifoy, Jr., Sandia National Laboratories, May 24, 1993; and “Origin of One-Point Safety Definition,” letter, from D. M. Olson, to Glen Otey, Sandia National Laboratories, January 6, 1993.

it could incapacitate the crew: The goal was to avoid exposing the engine crew to an “immediate incapacitation dose” of radiation. See “Origin of One-Point Safety Definition,” p. 1.

Los Alamos proposed that the odds… should be one in one hundred thousand: Agnew interview.

odds of one in a million: Ibid.

“Testing is essential for weapons development”: Quoted in May, et al., “History of Strategic Arms Competition, Part 1,” p. 235.

five hundred long-range ballistic missiles by 1961: See “Soviet Capabilities in Guided Missiles and Space Vehicles,” NIE 11-5-58 (TOP SECRET/declassified), p. 1, in Intentions and Capabilities, p. 65.

outnumbering the United States by more than seven to one: Although estimates varied, amid the controversy over the missile gap, the New York Times said that the United States would have about seventy long-range missiles by 1961. Cited in Richard Witkin, “U.S. Raising Missile Goals as Critics Foresee a ‘Gap,’” New York Times , January 12, 1959.

“entirely preoccupied by the horror of nuclear war”: Quoted in Benjamin P. Greene, Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1945–1963 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 209.

also by defense contractors: By early 1960, the corporate attacks on Eisenhower were blunt and well publicized. An executive at the General Dynamics Corporation, manufacturer of the Atlas missile, accused Eisenhower of taking “a dangerous gamble with the survival of our people.” Among other sins, Eisenhower had not ordered enough Atlas missiles. See Bill Becker, “’Gamble’ Charged in Defense Policy,” New York Times , February 5, 1960.

“military-industrial complex”: See “Transcript of President Eisenhower’s Farewell Message to Nation,” Washington Post and Times Herald , January 18, 1961.

“hydronuclear experiments”: My account of these tests is based on my interview with Harold Agnew as well as this report: “Hydronuclear Experiments,” Robert N. Thorn, Donald R. Westervelt, Los Alamos National Laboratories, LA-10902-MS, February 1987.

He authorized the detonations: George B. Kistiakowsky, the president’s chief science adviser, was not convinced, at first, that these experiments were necessary. He thought that “no reasonable amount of safety testing could prove a weapon to be absolutely safe” and that the military should just “accept the responsibility for operational use of devices that had a finite, even though exceedingly small, probability of nuclear explosion.” Kistiakowsky later agreed that the one-point safety tests should be done. See George B. Kistiakowsky, A Scientist at the White House: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 33, 79.

“not a nuclear weapon test”: Quoted in Thorn and Westerveldt, “Hydronuclear Experiments,” p. 5.

“Are we becoming prisoners of our strategic concept?”: Quoted in “Memorandum of Conversation,” April 7, 1958 (TOP SECRET/declassified), NSA, p. 4.

a “bitter choice”: Quoted in ibid., p. 9.

a strategy of “flexible response”: My description of Kissinger’s strategic views in the late 1950s is based on his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), and his journal article that preceded it, “Force and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 34, no. 3 (April 1956), pp. 349–66. For an interesting contemporary critique of limited war theory, see P.M.S. Blackett, “Nuclear Weapons and Defence: Comments on Kissinger, Kennan, and King-Hall,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs), vol. 34, no. 4 (October 1958), pp. 421–34.

Rules of engagement could be tacitly established: For the proposed limits on nuclear war, see Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy , pp. 227–33.

a strategy of “graduated deterrence”: Kissinger’s phrase for such a doctrine was “the graduated employment of force.” See Kissinger, “Force and Diplomacy,” p. 359.

“pause for calculation”: Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy , p. 226.

“daring and leadership”: Ibid., p. 400.

a retaliatory, second-strike weapon: The vulnerability of Strategic Air Command bases to a Soviet missile attack gave the Navy an opportunity to expand its nuclear role. And the Army eagerly sought to do so as well. In 1959, the Army came up with a plan, “Project Iceworm,” that would hide six hundred missiles under the Greenland ice cap. The missiles would be deployed on trains, and the trains would be constantly moved along thousands of miles of railroad track hidden in tunnels almost thirty feet beneath the ice. Hiding the missiles would protect them from a Soviet surprise attack and facilitate their use as retaliatory weapons, like the Navy’s Polaris submarines. Despite the Army’s enthusiasm for deploying these “Iceman” missiles, none were ever built. See Erik D. Weiss, “Cold War Under the Ice: The Army’s Bid for a Long-Range Nuclear Role,” Journal of Cold War Studies , vol. 3, no. 3 (Fall 2001), pp. 31–58.

“finite deterrence”: For the historical and intellectual framework of the dispute between the Air Force and the Navy over nuclear targeting, see David Alan Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear War Planning, 1945–1960,” in Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 35–56. Admiral Burke’s opinion on the subject is succinctly conveyed in his memo “Views on Adequacy of U.S. Deterrent/Retaliatory Forces as Related to General and Limited War Capabilities,” Memorandum for All Flag Officers, March 4, 1959 (CONFIDENTIAL/declassified), NSA.