The Chief of the General Staff, General Mikhail Kolesnikov, had a football, too, and he was monitoring the flight of the missile. Radar showed that stages of the rocket were falling away as it ascended, which suggested that it was an intermediate-range missile similar to the Pershing II, the missile deployed by nato across Western Europe. The launch site was also in the most likely corridor for an attack on Moscow by American submarines. Kolesnikov was put on a hot line with Yeltsin, whose prerogative it was to launch a nuclear response. Yeltsin had less than six minutes to make a decision.
The Cold War had been over for four years. Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned on December 25, 1991, and had handed over the football and the launch codes to Yeltsin. The next day, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. By 1995, though, Yeltsin’s popularity in the West was in decline; there was tension over plans to expandnato; and Russia was bogged down in a war in Chechnya. In the context of nuclear war, these were minor troubles, but there was also the fact, very much alive in Russian memory, that seven and a half years earlier, in May, 1987, a slightly kooky eighteen-year-old German named Mathias Rust had flown a rented Cessna, an airplane about the size of a Piper Cub, from Helsinki to Moscow and landed it a hundred yards from Red Square. The humiliation had led to a mini-purge of the air-defense leadership. Those people did not want to get burned twice. (...)
But most of the danger that human beings faced from nuclear weapons after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to do with inadvertence—with bombs dropped by mistake, bombers catching on fire or crashing, missiles exploding, and computers miscalculating and people jumping to the wrong conclusion. On most days, the probability of a nuclear explosion happening by accident was far greater than the probability that someone would deliberately start a war. (...)
A study run by Sandia National Laboratories, which oversees the production and security of American nuclear-weapons systems, discovered that between 1950 and 1968 at least twelve hundred nuclear weapons had been involved in “significant” accidents. Even bombs that worked didn’t work quite as planned. In Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, only 1.38 per cent of the nuclear core, less than a kilogram* of uranium, fissioned (although the bomb killed eighty thousand people). The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, three days later, was a mile off target (and killed forty thousand people). A test of the hydrogen bomb in the Bikini atoll, in 1954, produced a yield of fifteen megatons, three times as great as scientists had predicted, and spread lethal radioactive fallout over hundreds of square miles in the Pacific, some of it affecting American observers miles away from the blast site.
These stories, and many more, can be found in Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control” (Penguin), an excellent journalistic investigation of the efforts made since the first atomic bomb was exploded, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, to put some kind of harness on nuclear weaponry. By a miracle of information management, Schlosser has synthesized a huge archive of material, including government reports, scientific papers, and a substantial historical and polemical literature on nukes, and transformed it into a crisp narrative covering more than fifty years of scientific and political change. And he has interwoven that narrative with a hair-raising, minute-by-minute account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in 1980, which he renders in the manner of a techno-thriller:
Plumb watched the nine-pound socket slip through the narrow gap between the platform and the missile, fall about seventy feet, hit the thrust mount, and then ricochet off the Titan II. It seemed to happen in slow motion. A moment later, fuel sprayed from a hole in the missile like water from a garden hose.
“Oh man,” Plumb thought. “This is not good.”“Command and Control” is how nonfiction should be written.
Schlosser is known for two popular books, “Fast Food Nation,” published in 2001, and “Reefer Madness,” an investigative report on black markets in marijuana, pornography, and illegal immigrants that came out in 2003. Readers of those books, and of Schlosser’s occasional writings in The Nation, are likely to associate him with progressive politics. They may be surprised to learn that, insofar as “Command and Control” has any heroes, those heroes are Curtis LeMay, Robert McNamara, and Ronald Reagan (plus an Air Force sergeant named Jeff Kennedy, who was involved in responding to the wounded missile in the Arkansas silo). Those men understood the risks of just having these things on the planet, and they tried to keep them from blowing up in our faces.
by Louis Menard, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Shout
