The American writer Eric Schlosser's new book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, The Damascus Accident, and the Illusions of Safety, is a beautifully written and utterly terrifying account of the frequency with which those administering the United States' nuclear weapons programme flirted with disaster during the Cold War. This is a book, Schlosser says, about "the effort to control nuclear weapons" written from the bottom-up: his interest is less in nuclear diplomacy and the terrible game-theoretic refinements of "mutually assured destruction" than in the management of the operating systems of America's nuclear arsenal over the past 70 years. I met Schlosser in London earlier this week to talk to him about Command and Control.
JD: This is not just a book about nuclear weapons is it? It's also about the unpredictability of complex systems.
ES: That’s right. It’s a book about many things. It is about complex technological systems. It’s about postwar America. It’s about humanity! Doing the research did not leave me apocalyptic or feeling that we’re doomed, but there were several times doing the research and during the writing when I really had to think about mankind and what we’re capable of doing. Even more disturbingly, what we’re capable of doing with the best of intentions. It would be easier if some of the people who were involved were wicked and malevolent, but far more often they were well-intentioned, patriotic, family men who would be calculating the precise burst height for killing the maximum number of civilians and then would leave work and coach Little League. What was interesting for me was how these people defied the stereotypes that were promoted by critics of nuclear weapons. Now, I love Dr Strangelove—it’s one of my favourite films—but this notion of the right-wing Neanderthal bombing the Soviets into oblivion didn’t fit most of the people I met.
You said this is partly a book about postwar America. Are you saying that nuclear weapons shaped that history in decisive ways?
There’s no question that nuclear weapons helped shaped the culture of postwar America. The creation of the national security state can be traced back to the Manhattan Project and the intense secrecy that was thought necessary when the first nuclear weapons were being conceived. I write about how the Atomic Energy Act considered nuclear weapons to be “born secret”—everything about them was secret from the very beginning. There’s something inherently authoritarian about this technology, because it has to be under centralised control, it has to be surrounded by a certain amount of secrecy. But there was always a concern about how these weapons would be used, who’d control them—one of the themes of the book is the constant struggle between military and civilian authorities to have control over them. It’s often forgotten that there was a pretty strong consensus in the United States after the Second World War that these weapons should be abolished. It’s remarkable, in retrospect, to see Air Force officials believing they should be abolished. That belief came out of the massive slaughter of the war—50 or 60 million people killed, great cities of the world in ruins. So cataclysmic destruction wasn’t an abstract idea; these people had seen it and participated in it. It’s tragic that that feeling was so fleeting. We went from a consensus that these weapons were too awful to contemplate using to a nuclear arms that would end up with tens of thousands of them being made.
How did that moral consensus unravel so quickly?
I think that what happened in the Eastern Bloc played a large role. Now we can get into a debate about what were the actual causes of the Cold War. But in re-reading a lot of the history, I was confirmed in my belief that the Soviet Union carried the greater responsibility for the Cold War. The Soviet belief that the US had expansionist, imperialist ambitions encounters the problem that the United States demobilised its military after the Second World War in an unprecedented manner. So much so that by 1947 there was no way to defend Western Europe without nuclear weapons. If we had not demobilised our forces, we’d have had a vastly superior army to the Red Army, we wouldn’t have needed nuclear weapons. But we cut defence spending by 90 per cent. And look who was running the Soviet Union: Josef Stalin, one of the most murderous figures in history.
You’re very interested in what happens once the Cold War is under way. The book is fascinating on the logic of nuclear escalation. You show how escalation had a logic of its own that was more or less independent of the decisions taken by political leaders and military strategists.
Inherent in the fighting of a nuclear war is the fact that whoever shoots first is more likely to win. Now the definition of “win” can be up for debate. But there was always enormous pressure to be the first one to launch, particularly if you were the nation with fewer nuclear weapons than your adversary. Then you’d have even greater incentive to shoot first because your only hope of survival would be to annihilate your adversary who has superior weapons and prevent their use thereby. I think the Soviets would have struck first and struck hard. Some war plans were discovered in the former East Germany that showed, contrary to most expectations, that the Soviet Union planned to introduce nuclear weapons as they were overrunning West Germany. What you had were these mechanistic war plans that, once they were set in motion were impossible to alter or to stop.
You show in the book how Soviet war plans mirrored those of the US. This interesting mirroring effect was the motor of escalation wasn't it? The Soviets regularly mimicked American command and control structures.
Yes, though one of the things that probably was not mimicked was the growing realisation in the US that the Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) was this mechanistic, incredibly apocalyptic war plan. The Americans saw that efforts were needed to modify SIOP and replace it with plans for limited nuclear war that would involve only striking at Soviet military targets and then negotiating with the Soviets short of all-out nuclear war. It now appears that the Soviets didn’t believe in any of this. They were most likely going to have an all-out nuclear war. Certainly, the creation of the “Perimeter” system suggested they weren’t planning on limited nuclear war. Perimeter was this automated computer system that, once it was switched on, would launch Soviet missiles automatically after the USSR detected detonation of American weapons on their soil. The America war plan left room for negotiation. But if the Perimeter system had been turned on, retaliation would have been automatic. The limitations of our own command and control system, and the fear that we would lose the ability to communicate with our forces in the field, would have probably led the United States to launch an all-out strike against the Soviet Union. And the Soviets probably would have done the same to us.
This is not just a book about strategy. It’s also a book about accidents. The biggest danger we faced during the Cold War, you seem to be suggesting, was from things going wrong by accident.
Right. There was a real danger at certain points during the Cold War of nuclear war occurring—during the Berlin crisis, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in the early 1980s after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But most of the book is a history from the bottom up of the day-to-day management of our arsenal. There were continual risks of accidental detonations, there was the continual risk of American cities being destroyed by American weapons.
At the end of the book, you talk about some of the still existing risks. You think there's a particular problem with the Trident weapons system don't you?
One of the main narratives in the book concerns the effort to make nuclear weapons safer. I think that was done pretty well to the arsenal. Unfortunately, one of the weapons systems that didn’t get the most modern safety mechanisms was the Trident II missile and the warhead that went with it. It’s important to remember that Trident II was developed at the height of the re-intensification of the Cold War in the 1980s. We feared that our land-based missiles would be at risk from a surprise attack by the Soviet Union. So for the first time the United States sought to deploy on its submarines missiles that would have the same accuracy and the same destructive force as the land-based missiles had traditionally had. So the Trident II missile was designed to be a first-strike weapon if need be, with many warheads on each missile. So certain design decisions were made to put as many warheads as possible on a single missile. They wanted that missile to fly as far as possible to deliver those warheads. So certain short cuts were made. On most missiles, the warhead sits on top of the missile. In the Trident II, the warheads surround the third-stage rocket engine. And the fuel that was used for that rocket engine was a high-energy propellant that would allow these warheads to fly as far as possible. The problem is that this high-energy propellant can detonate accidentally. And it’s surrounded by nuclear weapons. So if that third-stage rocket explodes there will be an explosion involving those warheads. These problems with the Trident II were addressed by the panel on nuclear safety appointed by the US Congress in the early 1990s. But they have never been solved. What that means is that the US Navy and the Royal Navy need to be extremely careful when loading the warheads and the missiles onto Trident submarines.
One of the heroes of the book is a man named Bob Peurifoy, who worked on the US nuclear weapons programme for nearly 40 years and argued consistently for better safety measures.
I consider him a personal hero. He saw that there were problems in the system and devoted his career to trying to solve them and to get safety devices installed in our nuclear weapons. Now you’d think that’d be a no-brainer, but the military resisted anything that might in any way reduce the reliability of their weapons. Peurifoy, at great expense to his career, fought this bureaucratic battle to have modern safety devices installed. It is unfortunate that the Trident II and its warheads don’t have those devices. But you’d never build a nuclear weapon today that did not include those safety devices that he championed. The report of the Congressional panel on nuclear weapons safety completely vindicated his crusade and validated his arguments.
Have those arguments had much traction with the other nuclear powers?
That’s a very good question. I think there’s been an attempt by the US government to share information about safety. But there’s not much clarity about what safety mechanisms there are on, for example, the Indian and Pakistani weapons, and this is a matter of great concern.
There are other heroes in this book, some arguably more surprising. I wondered, for instance, if you surprised yourself by your attitude towards Curtis LeMay, the US Air Force general who oversaw the Strategic Air Command (SAC) during the Cold War.
I wouldn’t class Curtis LeMay as a hero in the way I believe Bob Peurifoy to have been a hero. But I came away from my research with a great deal of respect for him. I think he was a person of integrity and one of the most important military leaders of 20th-century America. The caricature of him in Dr Strangelove (the character of Buck Turgidson, played by George C Scott, was based on him) led historians to depict him in quite simplistic terms. What I respect about LeMay is that he was obsessed with efficiency, obsessed with not having any mistakes whatsoever in the management of nuclear weapons. He had no tolerance for error. And that’s the sort of mentality you need in the commander in charge of nuclear weapons. He also created in the SAC a great esprit de corps. During the Second World War, he flew the lead bomber in some of the most dangerous bombing missions of the war. And that was a way of showing the men under his command that he was willing to jeopardise his own life. I don’t agree with his politics and his nuclear strategy led to the United States having thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons. But I don’t believe he was a war-mongering baby-killer who deliberately wanted to precipitate a war with the Soviet Union, as some historians have suggested. If Curtis LeMay had wanted to start a war with the USSR we would have had one, because there was nothing to prevent his planes or his missiles from being launched without the President’s approval.
Eric Schlosser's "Command and Control" is published by Allen Lane (£25)
