Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

FRED IKLÉ COMPLETED HIS RAND REPORT, “On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation,” two weeks after Eisenhower’s decision. Iklé’s top secret clearance had gained him access to the latest safety studies by Sandia, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and the Air Force Special Weapons Center. He’d read accident reports, met with bomb designers at Sandia, immersed himself in the technical literature on nuclear weapons. He’d discussed the logistical details of SAC’s airborne alert, not only with the officers who would command them but also with the RAND analysts who’d come up with the idea in 1956. Iklé’s report was the first thorough, wide-ranging, independent analysis of nuclear weapon safety in the United States — and it did not confirm the optimistic assurances that President Eisenhower had just been given.

“We cannot derive much confidence from the fact that no unauthorized detonation has occurred to date,” Iklé warned: “the past safety record means nothing for the future.” The design of nuclear weapons had a learning curve, and he feared that some knowledge might come at a high price. Technical flaws and malfunctions could be “eliminated readily once they are discovered… but it takes a great deal of ingenuity and intuition to prevent them beforehand.” The risk wasn’t negligible, as the Department of Defense and the Air Force claimed. The risk was impossible to determine, and accidents were likely to become more frequent in the future. During Air Force training exercises in 1957, an atomic bomb or a hydrogen bomb had been inadvertently jettisoned once every 320 flights. And B-52 bombers seemed to crash at a rate of about once every twenty thousand flying hours. According to Iklé’s calculations, that meant SAC’s airborne alert would lead to roughly twelve crashes with nuclear weapons and seven bomb jettisons every year. “The paramount task,” he argued, “is to learn enough from minor incidents to prevent a catastrophic disaster.”

Even more worrisome than the technical challenges were the risks of human error and sabotage. Iklé noted that the Air Force’s shortage of trained weapon handlers “sometimes makes it necessary to entrust unspecialized personnel with complex tasks on nuclear weapons.” A single mistake — or more likely, a series of mistakes — could cause a nuclear detonation. Safety measures like checklists, seals that must be broken before knobs can be turned, and constant training might reduce the odds of human error. But Iklé thought that none of those things could protect against a threat that seemed like the stuff of pulp fiction: deliberate, unauthorized attempts to detonate a nuclear weapon. The technical safeguards currently in use could be circumvented by “someone who knew the workings of the fuzing and firing mechanism.” On at least one occasion, a drunken enlisted man had overpowered a guard at a nuclear storage site and attempted to gain access to the bombs. “It can hardly be denied that there is a risk of unauthorized acts,” Iklé wrote — and figuring out how to stop them remained “one of the most baffling problems of nuclear weapon safety.”

With help from the psychiatrist Gerald J. Aronson, Iklé outlined some of the motivations that could prompt someone to disobey orders and set off a nuclear weapon. The risk wasn’t hypothetical. About twenty thousand Air Force personnel worked with nuclear weapons, and in order to do so, they had to obtain a secret or a top secret clearance. But they didn’t have to undergo any psychiatric screening. In fact, “a history of transient psychotic disorders” no longer disqualified a recruit from joining the Air Force. A few hundred Air Force officers and enlisted men were annually removed from duty because of their psychotic disorders — and perhaps ten or twenty who worked with nuclear weapons could be expected to have a severe mental breakdown every year.

In an appendix to the report, Aronson offered “a catalogue of derangement” that seemed relevant to nuclear safety. The most dangerous disorders involved paranoia. Aronson provided a case history of the type of officer who needed to be kept away from atomic bombs:

A 23-year-old pilot, a Lieutenant, had difficulty in maintaining social contacts, fearful of disapproval and anxious to please. A few hours after he had to say “Sir” to someone, he was overwhelmed with fantasies of tearing that person apart…. He felt like exploding when in crowded restaurants; this feeling lessened when hostile fantasies of “tearing the place apart” occurred. He suffered anxiety attacks every two weeks or so in connection with hostile or sexual thoughts. To him flying was exciting, rewarding in its expression of hostility and power.

In another case history, Aronson described an Air Force captain who developed full-blown paranoid schizophrenia at the age of thirty-three. His behavior became “grandiose, inappropriate, and demanding.” He considered himself the real commander of his unit and gave orders to a superior officer. At the height of these delusions, the captain nevertheless managed to log “eight hours on the B-25 [bomber] with unimpaired proficiency.”

Aronson thought that an unauthorized nuclear detonation would have a unique appeal to people suffering from a variety of paranoid delusions — those who were seeking fame, who believed themselves “invested with a special mission that sets them apart from society,” who wanted to save the world and thought that “the authorities… covertly wish destruction of the enemy but are uncomfortably constrained by outmoded convention.” In addition to the mentally ill, officers and enlisted men with poor impulse control might be drawn to nuclear weapons. The same need for immediate gratification that pyromaniacs often exhibited, “the desire to see the tangible result of their own power as it brings about a visual holocaust,” might find expression in detonating an atomic bomb. A number of case histories in the report illustrated the unpredictable, often infantile nature of impulse-driven behavior:

[An] assistant cook improperly obtained a charge of TNT in order to blast fish. He lighted it with a cigarette. As he was examining it to make sure it was ignited, the explosion took place. The man was blown to pieces.

“Private B and I each found a rifle grenade. We carried them back to our tent. Private K told us that we had better not fool with the grenades and to get rid of them. Private B said, ‘What will happen if I pull this pin?’ Then the grenade exploded.”

A Marine found a 37-millimeter dud and turned it in to the Quartermaster tent. Later, a sergeant came into the tent and saw the dud. In disregard of orders and safety, he aimed the shell at a hole in the wooden floor of the tent and dropped it. He commented that he would make “a pretty good bombardier.” He dropped the shell at least six times. Finally, inevitably, it exploded. The sergeant was killed and 2 others were injured.

Even relatively harmless motives — such as the urge to defy authority, the desire to show off, and “the kind of curiosity which does not quite believe the consequences of one’s own acts” — could cause a nuclear detonation.

The unauthorized destruction of a city or a military base would be disastrous, and Iklé addressed the question of whether such an event could precipitate something even worse. Nikita Khrushchev had recently claimed that “an accidental atomic bomb explosion may well trigger another world war.” The scenario seemed far-fetched but couldn’t be entirely dismissed. Amid the chaos following an explosion, it might not be clear that the blast had been caused by a technical malfunction, human error, a madman, or saboteurs. The country where the detonation occurred might think that a surprise attack had begun and retaliate. Its adversary, fearing that sort of retaliation, might try to strike first.