Command and Control (27 page)

Within weeks of the accident at Mars Bluff, a newly formed organization, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), led thousands of people on a protest march from London's Trafalgar Square to the British nuclear weapon factory at Aldermaston. The CND rejected the whole concept of nuclear deterrence and
argued that nuclear weapons were “morally wrong.” In preparation for the four-day march, the artist Gerald Holtom designed a symbol for the antinuclear movement. “
I drew myself,” Holtom recalled, “the representative of an individual in despair, with palms outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad.” He placed a circle around the self-portrait, an elongated stick figure, and created an image later known as the peace sign.

The Soviet Union worked hard to focus attention on the dangers of SAC's airborne alert and the possibility of an accidental nuclear war. “
Imagine that one of the airmen may, even without any evil intent but through nervous mental derangement or an incorrectly understood order, drop his deadly load on the territory of some country,” Khrushchev said during a speech. “Then according to the logic of war, an immediate counterblow will follow.” Arkady A. Sobolev, the Soviet representative to the United Nations, made a similar argument before the Security Council, warning that
the “world has yet to see a foolproof system” and that “flights of American bombers bring a grave danger of atomic war.” The Soviet concerns may have been sincere. But they also promoted the idea that American bombers were the greatest threat to world peace—not the hundreds of Soviet medium-range missiles aimed at the capitals of Western Europe. Bertrand Russell, among others, had changed his view about whom to blame. Having once called for the United States to launch a preventive war on the Soviet Union with atomic bombs, Russell now argued that the American
air bases in England should be shut down and that Great Britain should unilaterally get rid of its nuclear weapons.

The mental instability of SAC officers became a recurrent theme in Soviet propaganda. According to a Pentagon report obtained by an East German newspaper and discussed at length on Radio Moscow,
67.3 percent of the flight personnel in the United States Air Force were psychoneurotic. The report was a Communist forgery. But its bureaucratic tone, its account of widespread alcoholism, sexual perversion, opium addiction, and marijuana use at SAC, seemed convincing to many Europeans worried about American nuclear strategy. And the notion that a madman could deliberately start a world war became plausible, not long after the forgery appeared, when
an American mechanic stole a B-45 bomber from Alconbury Air Force Base in England and took it for a joyride. The mechanic, who'd never received flight training, crashed the jet not long after takeoff and died.

A former Royal Air Force officer, Peter George, captured the new zeitgeist about nuclear weapons, the widespread fear of an accidental war, in a novel published amid the debate over SAC's airborne alert. Pulp fiction like
One of Our H Bombs Is Missing
had already addressed some of these themes. But
more than 250,000 copies of George's novel
Red Alert
were sold in the United States, and it subsequently inspired a classic Hollywood film.
Writing under the pseudonym “Peter Bryant,” George described how a deranged American general could single-handedly launch a nuclear attack. The madman's views were similar to those expressed by Bertrand Russell a decade earlier: the United States must destroy the Soviet Union before it can destroy the West. “
A few will suffer,” the general believes, “but millions will live.”

Once the scheme is uncovered, the general's air base is assaulted by the U.S. Army. The president of the United States tries without success to recall SAC's bombers, and the Soviets question whether the impending attack really was a mistake. As an act of good faith, SAC discloses the flight paths of its B-52s so that they can be shot down. After negotiations between the leaders of the two nations and revelations about “
the ultimate deterrent”—doomsday weapons capable of eliminating life on earth, to be triggered if the Soviets are facing defeat—all but one of the SAC bombers are shot down or recalled. And so a deal is struck: if the plane destroys a
Soviet city, the president will select an American city for the Soviets to destroy in retaliation. The president chooses Atlantic City, New Jersey. The lone B-52 drops its hydrogen bomb over the Soviet Union—but the weapon misfires and misses its target. Although Atlantic City is saved and doomsday averted,
Red Alert
marked an important cultural shift. The Strategic Air Command would increasingly be portrayed as a refuge for lunatics and warmongers, not as the kind of place where you'd find Jimmy Stewart.

General Power was unfazed by protest marches in Great Britain, apocalyptic fears, criticism in the press, freak accidents, strong opposition at the AEC, President Eisenhower's reluctance, and even
doubts about the idea expressed by LeMay. Power wanted an airborne alert. The decision to authorize one would be made by Eisenhower. The phrase “fail safe” had been removed from Air Force descriptions of the plan. The word “fail” had the wrong connotations, and the new term didn't sound so negative: “
positive control.” With strong backing from members of Congress, SAC proposed a test of the airborne alert. B-52s would take off from bases throughout America, carrying sealed-pit weapons. At a White House briefing in July 1958, Eisenhower was told that “
the probability of any nuclear detonation during a crash is essentially zero.” The following month, he gave tentative approval for the test. But the new chairman of the AEC, John A. McCone, wanted to limit its scale.
McCone thought that the bombers should be permitted to use only Loring Air Force Base in Maine—so that an accident or the jettison of a weapon would be likely to occur over the Atlantic Ocean, not the United States. During the first week of October, President Eisenhower authorized SAC to take off and land at Loring, with fully assembled hydrogen bombs. The flights secretly began, and SAC's airborne alert was no longer a bluff.

•   •   •

F
RED
I
KLÉ
COMPLETED
HIS
RAND
REPORT
, “On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation,” two weeks after Eisenhower's decision.
Iklé's top secret clearance had gained him access to the latest safety studies by Sandia, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and the Air Force Special Weapons Center. He'd read accident reports, met
with bomb designers at Sandia, immersed himself in the technical literature on nuclear weapons. He'd discussed the logistical details of SAC's airborne alert, not only with the officers who would command them but also with the RAND analysts who'd come up with the idea in 1956. Iklé's report was the first thorough, wide-ranging, independent analysis of nuclear weapon safety in the United States—and it did not confirm the optimistic assurances that President Eisenhower had just been given.

“
We cannot derive much confidence from the fact that
no
unauthorized detonation has occurred to date,” Iklé warned: “the past safety record means nothing for the future.” The design of nuclear weapons had a learning curve, and he feared that some knowledge might come at a high price. Technical flaws and malfunctions could be “
eliminated readily once they are discovered . . . but it takes a great deal of ingenuity and intuition to prevent them beforehand.” The risk wasn't negligible, as the Department of Defense and the Air Force claimed. The risk was impossible to determine, and accidents were likely to become more frequent in the future. During Air Force training exercises in 1957, an atomic bomb or a hydrogen bomb had been
inadvertently jettisoned once every 320 flights. And B-52 bombers seemed to
crash at a rate of about once every twenty thousand flying hours. According to Iklé's calculations, that meant SAC's airborne alert would lead to roughly
twelve crashes with nuclear weapons and seven bomb jettisons every year. “
The paramount task,” he argued, “is to learn enough from minor incidents to prevent a catastrophic disaster.”

Even more worrisome than the technical challenges were the risks of human error and sabotage. Iklé noted that the Air Force's shortage of trained weapon handlers “sometimes
makes it necessary to entrust unspecialized personnel with complex tasks on nuclear weapons.” A single mistake—or more likely, a series of mistakes—could cause a nuclear detonation. Safety measures like checklists, seals that must be broken before knobs can be turned, and constant training might reduce the odds of human error. But Iklé thought that none of those things could protect against a threat that seemed like the stuff of pulp fiction: deliberate, unauthorized attempts to detonate a nuclear weapon. The technical safeguards currently in use could be circumvented by “
someone who knew the
workings of the fuzing and firing mechanism.” On at least one occasion, a drunken enlisted man had overpowered a guard at a nuclear storage site and attempted to gain access to the bombs. “
It can hardly be denied that there is a risk of unauthorized acts,” Iklé wrote—and figuring out how to stop them remained “
one of the most baffling problems of nuclear weapon safety.”

With help from the psychiatrist Gerald J. Aronson, Iklé outlined some of the motivations that could prompt someone to disobey orders and set off a nuclear weapon. The risk wasn't hypothetical.
About twenty thousand Air Force personnel worked with nuclear weapons, and in order to do so, they had to obtain a secret or a top secret clearance. But they didn't have to undergo any psychiatric screening. In fact, “
a history of transient psychotic disorders” no longer disqualified a recruit from joining the Air Force.
A few hundred Air Force officers and enlisted men were annually removed from duty because of their psychotic disorders—and
perhaps ten or twenty who worked with nuclear weapons could be expected to have a severe mental breakdown every year.

In an appendix to the report, Aronson offered “
a catalogue of derangement” that seemed relevant to nuclear safety. The most dangerous disorders involved paranoia. Aronson provided a case history of the type of officer who needed to be kept away from atomic bombs:

A 23-year-old pilot, a Lieutenant, had difficulty in maintaining social contacts, fearful of disapproval and anxious to please. A few hours after he had to say “Sir” to someone, he was overwhelmed with fantasies of tearing that person apart. . . . He felt like exploding when in crowded restaurants; this feeling lessened when hostile fantasies of “tearing the place apart” occurred. He suffered anxiety attacks every two weeks or so in connection with hostile or sexual thoughts. To him flying was exciting, rewarding in its expression of hostility and power.

In another case history, Aronson described an Air Force captain who developed full-blown paranoid schizophrenia at the age of thirty-three. His behavior became “
grandiose, inappropriate, and demanding.” He
considered himself the real commander of his unit and gave orders to a superior officer. At the height of these delusions, the captain nevertheless managed to log “eight hours on the B-25 [bomber] with unimpaired proficiency.”

Aronson thought that an unauthorized nuclear detonation would have a unique appeal to people suffering from a variety of paranoid delusions—those who were seeking fame, who believed themselves “
invested with a special mission that sets them apart from society,” who wanted to save the world and thought that “
the authorities . . . covertly wish destruction of the enemy but are uncomfortably constrained by outmoded convention.” In addition to the mentally ill, officers and enlisted men with poor impulse control might be drawn to nuclear weapons. The same need for immediate gratification that pyromaniacs often exhibited, “
the desire to see the tangible result of their own power as it brings about a visual holocaust,” might find expression in detonating an atomic bomb. A number of case histories in the report illustrated the unpredictable, often infantile nature of impulse-driven behavior:

[
An] assistant cook improperly obtained a charge of TNT in order to blast fish. He lighted it with a cigarette. As he was examining it to make sure it was ignited, the explosion took place. The man was blown to pieces. 

“
Private B and I each found a rifle grenade. We carried them back to our tent. Private K told us that we had better not fool with the grenades and to get rid of them. Private B said, ‘What will happen if I pull this pin?' Then the grenade exploded.”

A Marine found a 37-millimeter dud and turned it in to the Quartermaster tent. Later, a sergeant came into the tent and saw the dud. In disregard of orders and safety, he aimed the shell at a hole in the wooden floor of the tent and dropped it. He commented that he would make “a pretty good bombardier.” He dropped the shell at least six times. Finally, inevitably, it exploded. The sergeant was killed and 2 others were injured.

Even relatively harmless motives—such as the urge to defy authority, the desire to show off, and “
the kind of curiosity which does not quite believe the consequences of one's own acts”—could cause a nuclear detonation.

The unauthorized destruction of a city or a military base would be disastrous, and Iklé addressed the question of whether such an event could precipitate something even worse. Nikita Khrushchev had recently claimed that “
an accidental atomic bomb explosion may well trigger another world war.” The scenario seemed far-fetched but couldn't be entirely dismissed. Amid the chaos following an explosion, it might not be clear that the blast had been caused by a technical malfunction, human error, a madman, or saboteurs. The country where the detonation occurred might think that a surprise attack had begun and retaliate. Its adversary, fearing that sort of retaliation, might try to strike first.