Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, Eric Schlosser, Penguin Press, 2013. $36.00 (632 pp.). ISBN 978-1-59420-227-8
Because journalists often make poor historians, I had my suspicions when I heard that investigative journalist Eric Schlosser was writing a book, aimed at a popular audience, about the history of nuclear weapons and their accidents. The ethos of journalism is about jumping into a topic, extracting information—usually from interviews—that is most relevant to the present day, publishing fast, and moving on. We historians try to understand historical issues according to what mattered at the time, and we generally believe that the written document trumps the spoken word. And we have never been accused of moving too fast.
Schlosser is justifiably famous for his exposés on fast food, marijuana regulation, and prisons. I enjoyed his book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). But I was uncertain when I heard he was wading into territory I knew a lot about, and whose history popular authors and journalists often get wrong.
I am pleased to report that Schlosser’s Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety is an impressively researched, beautifully written, and carefully considered work of history. Though written for a popular audience, Command and Control is a serious piece of nonfiction and the best book on nuclear weapons to have been published in several years.
Nuclear weapons history can make for sensational reading, and accounts of the hundreds of nuclear weapons accidents that occurred over the course of the Cold War can be especially problematic to write about. Such accidents can vary dramatically, from the truly close calls that could result in substantial accidental nuclear yield, to the much more minor incidents that reveal possible flaws in the system but pose little risk to human life. Much that has been written on nuclear accidents is either dryly technical or hyperbolically alarmist. Schlosser finds a middle ground. He lets the documents and the experts do the talking; and he is careful not to overstate dangers. His sober, careful discussion of the technical matters is all the more alarming.
Command and Control is not the kind of history a historian would write. It tacks back and forth between two different threads. The first is a close, detailed, interview-based account of a 1980 accident at a Titan II missile base near Damascus, Arkansas, in which the dropping of one apparently innocuous socket set in motion a chaotic series of events that ended up destroying a silo and taking a life. The second is a broader history of nuclear weapons in the Cold War period, focused on the difficult problem of simultaneously trying to keep the weapons ready for use at any time while avoiding accidental or unauthorized nuclear war. The second narrative contextualizes the specifics of the first; the first shows the “low-level” consequences of the decisions made in the second.
The combination is brilliant. The Damascus accident allows Schlosser to be at his best as a journalist, and it is entirely gripping. The broader history proves that his background research was extensive and that he deeply understands the topic. He integrates complex scholarly interpretations of Cold War strategy, up-to-date knowledge about the differences between publicly stated policies and actual secret deployments, and a deeply humane appreciation for the broader implications of the vast systems created under the auspices of national security.
Schlosser’s book is eye-opening and fresh even for those readers who feel they already have some idea about the history of nuclear weapons and have heard of several of the accidents that took place during the Cold War. It shows exactly how counterproductive some of the US Cold War policies were at creating security and how many of the choices about weapons deployments were driven by domestic politics and interservice rivalries, as opposed to any kind of master plan regarding nuclear strategy. Schlosser’s book is a particularly damning portrait of the steady degradation of civilian control over nuclear weapons.
Schlosser relies on interviews with nuclear weapons engineers to summarize the dangers of the weapons themselves. And he persuasively argues that a culture of denial regarding nuclear safety hazards led to a level of negligence and ignorance about the weapons that extended deep into the organizations meant to handle them. The account of how that culture was created and maintained helps to explain some of the contradictions that one sometimes finds in the official histories of those nuclear accidents: Behind their bureaucratic silos and walls of secrecy, the US Air Force and the nuclear engineers were not always even looking at the same evidence. Schlosser manages to make his case without resorting to emotional appeals, without distorting subtleties of fact, and without accusing anyone of being a maniac. The only fault anyone has in his book is being human.
As with all ambitious works of history, and especially technical history, there are some minor errors dispersed throughout the text. I noticed a few outright mistakes in the section on the Manhattan Project, and there were a few interpretations I considered dubious. But none of the errors I noticed significantly altered the narrative or Schlosser’s key findings. He did his homework. Furthermore, he includes more than 120 pages of discursive end notes, an essay on sources, and an ordered bibliography—a remarkable inclusion for a book aimed at a popular audience. For an expert, or even just a curious reader, that material will help cement the status of this eminently readable book as an important and reliable resource for the future and as an important historical contribution.
Alex Wellerstein is an associate historian in the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland. His book on the history of nuclear secrecy in the US will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2014, and he runs Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog (http://nuclearsecrecy.com).
