Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Eric Schlosser - Command and Control» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Город: New York, Год выпуска: 2013, ISBN: 2013, Издательство: Penguin Press, Жанр: История, military_history, military_weapon, Политика, Публицистика, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Command and Control: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The New Yorker “Excellent… hair-raising
is how nonfiction should be written.” (Louis Menand)
Time
“A devastatingly lucid and detailed new history of nuclear weapons in the U.S…. fascinating.” (Lev Grossman)
Financial Times
“So incontrovertibly right and so damnably readable… a work with the multilayered density of an ambitiously conceived novel… Schlosser has done what journalism does at its best."
Los Angeles Times
“Deeply reported, deeply frightening… a techno-thriller of the first order.” Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal. A ground-breaking account of accidents, near-misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs,
explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: how do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved — and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind.
Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller,
interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policymakers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can’t be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States.
Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with men who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons,
takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. Through the details of a single accident, Schlosser illustrates how an unlikely event can become unavoidable, how small risks can have terrible consequences, and how the most brilliant minds in the nation can only provide us with an illusion of control. Audacious, gripping, and unforgettable,
is a tour de force of investigative journalism, an eye-opening look at the dangers of America’s nuclear age.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=h_ZvrSePzZY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2wR11pGsYk

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Foreign personnel weren’t supposed to enter the nuclear weapon igloos at NATO bases. But little had been done to stop them. A lone American soldier manned the entrance to the igloos, serving as a custodian of the weapons, not as an armed guard. Once again, security was provided by troops from the host nation, who also moved weapons in and out of the storage facilities. Senator Albert A. Gore, Sr., could hardly believe the arrangement: “Non-Americans with non-American vehicles are transporting nuclear weapons from place to place in foreign countries.” It was one thing to entrust these weapons to the Strategic Air Command, with its strict operating procedures and rigorous devotion to checklists. But the competence of NATO troops varied considerably. And their level of professionalism wasn’t the most important consideration, when it came to guarding America’s nuclear weapons. “The prime loyalty of the guards, of course, is to their own nation, and not to the U.S.,” the joint committee said.

A nuclear weapon might be stolen by a deranged or psychotic NATO soldier; by a group of officers seeking political power; or by the government of a host nation, for use against an enemy other than the Soviet Union. These scenarios were, unfortunately, plausible. A pair of NATO countries, Greece and Turkey, despised each other and would soon go to war over the island of Cyprus. Right-wing officers had staged two coups d’état in Turkey during the previous year, and Jupiter missiles were scheduled for deployment there in the fall of 1961. Covertly funded by the Soviet Union, the Italian Communist Party had strong support in the region where Jupiter missiles were based. Members of the party might seek to sabotage or steal a nuclear weapon. Concerns about theft weren’t absurd or far-fetched. A few months after the joint committee’s visit to NATO bases, a group of dissident French officers sought to gain control of a nuclear device in Algeria, as part of a coup. At the time, Algeria was the site of French nuclear tests — and a French colony fighting for independence. A nuclear test code-named “Gerboise verte” was promptly conducted in the Sahara desert so that the officers attempting to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle couldn’t get hold of a nuclear device. “Refrain from detonating your little bomb,” General Maurice Challe, one of the coup leaders, had urged the head of the special weapons command. “Keep it for us, it will always be useful.”

In addition to being loosely controlled by the United States, the nuclear weapons in the NATO stockpile were often old and poorly maintained. According to the joint committee’s report, NATO had been turned into “the dumping ground for obsolete warheads and weapon systems” that were, nevertheless, placed “in an ‘alert’ position of 15 minutes readiness without adequate safety precautions.” Congressman Holifield estimated that about half of the Jupiters wouldn’t take off, if the order to launch was ever given. The missiles were complicated, liquid fueled, and leaky. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitted that, from a military standpoint, the Jupiters were useful mainly for increasing the number of targets that the Soviet Union would have to hit during a first strike. “It would have been better to dump them in the ocean,” Eisenhower later said of the missiles, “instead of trying to dump them on our allies.”

The Mark 7 atomic bombs carried by NATO fighters had been rushed into production during the Korean War, almost a decade earlier. The nickel cadmium batteries of a Mark 7 constantly had to be recharged, and its nuclear core had to be carefully placed into an in-flight insertion mechanism before takeoff. The bombs were not designed for use during an alert. Once the core was inserted, a Mark 7 wasn’t one-point safe. And the bomb had to undergo at least twenty different diagnostic tests, increasing the odds of a mistake during assembly and disassembly. It was plagued by mechanical problems and seemed to invite human error.

Harold Agnew was amazed to see a group of NATO weapon handlers pull the arming wires out of a Mark 7 while unloading it from a plane. When the wires were pulled, the arming sequence began — and if the X-unit charged, a Mark 7 could be detonated by its radar, by its barometric switches, by its timer, or by falling just a few feet from a plane and landing on a runway. A stray cosmic ray could, theoretically, detonate it. The weapon seemed to invite mistakes. A rocket-propelled version of the Mark 7 was unloaded, fully armed, with its X-unit charged, from a U.S. Navy plane in the spring of 1960. The ground crew had inadvertently yanked out the arming wires. An incident report noted defects in another Mark 7:

During initial inspection after receipt of a War Reserve Mk 7 Mod 5 bomb, it was observed that the safing and arming wires were in reversed locations in the Arm/Safe Retainer assembly, i.e., the arming wires were in the safing wire location and the safing wires were in the arming wire location. Four screws were missing from the assembly.

And a Mark 7 sometimes contained things it shouldn’t. A screwdriver was found inside one of the bombs; an Allen wrench was somehow left inside another. In both bombs, the loose tools could have caused a short circuit.

The risk of a nuclear accident at a European base was increased by the fact that the training and operating manuals for the Mark 7 — indeed, for all the weapons in the NATO atomic stockpile — were written in English. But many of the NATO personnel who handled the weapons could not read or speak English. And few of them knew what to do if something went wrong. “In many areas we visited,” the joint committee found, “little or no Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) capability was available in the event of accidental radioactive contamination resulting from fire, carelessness, or accident, or in the event of threat to custody and security of the weapon requiring emergency disposal.” Western Europe was more densely populated than the United States, and a cloud of plutonium, released by a nuclear weapon, could threaten a large number of people. The possibility of such an accident was “far from remote,” according to the joint committee. It cited a mishap on January 16, 1961, just a few days before Kennedy’s inauguration. The underwing fuel tanks of a U.S. Air Force F-100D fighter were mistakenly jettisoned when the pilot started the engines. The plane was on alert at the Lakenheath air base in Suffolk, England. The fuel tanks hit the runway and ruptured, some fuel ignited, and a Mark 28 hydrogen bomb mounted beneath the plane was engulfed in flames. Firefighters managed to extinguish the blaze before the weapon’s high explosives could detonate or ignite. Because the accident occurred at a military base, away from the scrutiny of the press and the public, neither the American government nor the British would acknowledge that it happened.

• • •

THE JOINT COMMITTEE on Atomic Energy unanimously agreed that the Jupiter missiles should be removed from Italy — and should never be deployed in Turkey. The missiles seemed to pose more of a threat to NATO, one way or another, than to the Soviets. And placing missiles with thermonuclear warheads in Turkey, a politically unstable country that bordered the Soviet Union, might be viewed as a provocation at the Kremlin. The joint committee also recommended that the Mark 7 bomb either be removed from the NATO stockpile or fitted with a trajectory-sensing switch, so that a mistake by a ground crew would be less likely to cause an accidental detonation. Moreover, the current “fictional” custody arrangements had to be replaced with measures that gave the United States “real” possession and control of its nuclear weapons in Europe. A lone American sentry, ordered to stand on a runway for eight hours at a time, was bound to start “goofing off.” The committee wanted at least two American solders keeping an eye on the igloos, the missiles, the fighter planes on alert. It wanted American vehicles and troops, at every major NATO base, capable of evacuating or destroying nuclear weapons that an enemy or an ally might want to seize. And most of all, the committee wanted some kind of mechanical device added to NATO’s weapons so that unauthorized personnel couldn’t detonate them.

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