Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

they were ordered into the air by a Secret Service agent: “The President and the Vice President indicated to us,” the report notes, “they had not been aware that fighters had been scrambled out of Andrews, at the request of the Secret Service and outside the military chain of command.” Ibid., p. 44.

the United States has approximately 4,650 nuclear weapons: These numbers come from Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. Kristensen has for many years been a reliable source and an indefatigable researcher on nuclear matters. See Hans M. Kristensen, “Trimming Nuclear Excess: Options for Further Reductions of U.S. and Russian Nuclear Forces,” Federation of American Scientists, Special Report No. 5, December 2012, p. 15.

About 300 are assigned to long-range bombers: Cited in Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2013,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March/April 2013), p. 77.

500 are deployed atop Minuteman III missiles: Cited in ibid.

1,150 are carried by Trident submarines: Cited in ibid.

An additional 200 or so hydrogen bombs: Cited in ibid.

About 2,500 nuclear weapons are held in reserve: Cited in ibid.

now known as the Operations Plan (OPLAN) 8010: For the most detailed investigation of the current OPLAN, see Hans M. Kristensen, “Obama and the Nuclear War Plan,” Federation of the American Scientists Issue Brief, February 2010.

“Strategic Deterrence and Global Strike”: Quoted in ibid, p. 7.

Russia, China, North Korea, Syria, and Iran: Ibid., p. 3.

“Adaptive planning”: Ibid., p. 5.

The United States now plans to spend as much as $180 billion: See Walter Pincus, “Nuclear Complex Upgrades Related to START Treaty to Cost $180 Billion,” Washington Post , May 14, 2010.

Russia has about 1,740 deployed strategic weapons and perhaps 2,000 tactical weapons: Cited in Kristensen, “Trimming Nuclear Excess,” p. 10.

France is adding new aircraft and submarines: For an overview of the world’s nuclear powers, the size of their arsenals, and their modernization schemes, see Ian Kearns, “Beyond the United Kingdom: Trends in the Other Nuclear Armed States,” Discussion Paper 1 of the BASIC Trident Commission, November 2011. The French weapons program is discussed on page 20.

The United Kingdom… approximately 160 warheads: An additional sixty-five warheads are kept in storage, for a total of 225. Cited in Richard Norton-Taylor, “Britain’s Nuclear Arsenal is 225 Warheads, Reveals William Hague,” Guardian (UK), May 26, 2010.

China is thought to have about 240 nuclear weapons: Cited in Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2011,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , November 1, 2011, p. 81. At the moment, there is general agreement that China is increasing the size of its arsenal. But assertions that China has three thousand warheads hidden underground seem unlikely. For China’s traditional policy of minimum deterrence, see M. Taylor Fravel and Evan S. Medeiros, “China’s Search for Assured Retaliation: The Evolution of Chinese Nuclear Strategy and Force Structure,” International Security , vol. 35, no. 2 (Fall 2010), pp. 7–44. For a much different interpretation of its nuclear policies, see Bret Stephens, “How Many Nukes Does China Have?” Wall Street Journal , October 24, 2011.

an “underground Great Wall”: See Stephens, “How Many Nukes,” and William Wan, “Georgetown Students Shed Light on China’s Tunnel System for Nuclear Weapons,” Washington Post , November 29, 2011.

North Korea may already have half a dozen nuclear weapons: See Mary Beth Nikitin, “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons: Technical Issues,” CRS Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, April 3, 2013, p. 4.

The yield of North Korea’s first weapon test: Cited in ibid., p. 15.

“It could go off if a rifle bullet hit it”: Quoted in Sagan, Limits of Safety , p. 266. The quote originally appeared in Gary Milhollin, “Building Saddam Hussein’s Bomb,” New York Times , March 8, 1992.

The ballistic-missile submarines in the Russian fleet: For the deterioration of Russian strategic forces and the potentially destabilizing effects, see David E. Mosher, Lowell H. Schwartz, David R. Howell, and Lynn E. Davis, Beyond the Nuclear Shadow: A Phased Approach for Improving Nuclear Safety and U.S. — Russian Relations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2003).

the launch of a small research rocket by Norway: For the story of this false alarm, which occurred years after the end of the Cold War, see David Hoffman, “Cold War Doctrines Refuse to Die,” Washington Post , March 15, 1998.

The greatest risk of nuclear war now lies in South Asia: That is my personal view, and unfortunately, a great deal has been written that supports it. Inside Nuclear South Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), edited by Scott D. Sagan, contains two particularly good essays: “Revisionist Ambitions, Conventional Capabilities, and Nuclear Instability: Why Nuclear South Asia Is Not Like Cold War Europe,” by S. Paul Kapur, and “The Evolution of Pakistani and Indian Doctrine,” by Sagan. Another fine book is Feroz Hassan Khan’s Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb (Stanford: Stanford Security Series, 2012). Paul Bracken’s The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics (New York: Times Books, 2012) has a provocative chapter on the risk of nuclear war in South Asia. Bracken has been studying the importance of command and control for more than thirty years. The work of a British academic, Shaun Gregory, seems especially relevant at the moment. Before investigating Pakistan’s efforts to maintain its nuclear weapons securely, Gregory wrote a book about nuclear weapons accidents and one about the command and control of NATO forces. I learned much during my conversation with Gregory and from his writing, especially “The Security of Nuclear Weapons in Pakistan,” Pakistan Security Research Unit, Brief Number 22, November 18, 2007; “The Terrorist Threat to Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons,” CTC Sentinel, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, July 2009, pp. 1–4; and “Terrorist Tactics in Pakistan Threaten Nuclear Weapons Safety,” CTC Sentinel, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, June 2011, pp. 4–7.

Pakistan has doubled the size of its arsenal since 2006: Cited in Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age, p. 162.

It now has about 100 nuclear weapons: Estimates range from 90 to 110. Cited in Paul K. Kerr and Mary Beth Nikitin, “Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation and Security Issues,” CRS Report for Congress, Congressional Research Service, March 19, 2013, p. 5.

a bold attack on the headquarters of the Pakistan army: See Gregory, “Terrorist Tactics in Pakistan,” pp. 5–6.

Another attack penetrated a naval aviation base: Ibid., pp. 6–7.

the roughly seventy thousand nuclear weapons built by the United States: Cited in Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Insitution, 1998), p. 102.

a success rate of 99.99857 percent: Or to put it another way, if a single nuclear weapon had been stolen or detonated, it would have represented a little more than one thousandth of 1 percent of the entire stockpile.

the rate of industrial accidents: Due to variations in record keeping among different countries, any comparison between their accident rates will be imprecise. Nevertheless, the figures that have been compiled do give a sense of relative technological mastery. As the authors of this study found, the “difference in accident rates between developed and developing countries is remarkable.” The workplaces in the developed world are much safer; perhaps 350,000 people die on the job every year, mainly in developing nations. See Päivi Hämäläinen, Jukka Takala, and Kaija Leena Saarela, “Global Estimates of Occupational Accidents,” Safety Science , no. 44 (2006), pp. 137–56.