Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a book about the effort to control nuclear weapons — to ensure that one doesn’t go off by accident, by mistake, or by any other unauthorized means. The emphasis in these pages isn’t on the high-level diplomacy behind arms control treaties. It’s on the operating systems and the mind-set that have guided the management of America’s nuclear arsenal for almost seventy years. The history of similar efforts in the Soviet Union is largely absent here. Although no less important, such a history requires a knowledge of Russian archives and sources that I lack. Command and Control explores the precarious balance between the need for nuclear weapon safety and the need to defend the United States from attack. It looks at the attempts by American scientists, policy makers, and military officers to reconcile those two demands, from the dawn of the nuclear age until the end of the Cold War. And through the story of a long-forgotten accident, it aims to shed light on a larger theme: the mixture of human fallibility and technological complexity that can lead to disaster.

Although most of the events in this book occurred a long time ago, they remain unfortunately relevant. Thousands of nuclear warheads still sit atop missiles belonging to the United States and Russia, ready to be launched at a moment’s notice. Hundreds more are possessed by India, China, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Great Britain, and France. As of this writing, a nuclear weapon has not destroyed a city since August 1945. But there is no guarantee that such good luck will last.

The fall of the Berlin Wall now feels like ancient history. An entire generation has been raised without experiencing the dread and anxiety of the Cold War, a conflict that lasted almost half a century and threatened to annihilate mankind. This book assumes that most of its readers know little about nuclear weapons, their inner workings, or the strategic thinking that justifies their use. I hope readers who are familiar with these subjects will nevertheless learn a new thing or two here. My own ignorance, I now realize, was profound. No great monument has been built to honor those who served during the Cold War, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them in the name of freedom. It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.