Command and Control (67 page)

Watching that launch, the imaginary became tangible and concrete for me. It rattled me. It pierced a false sense of comfort. Right now thousands of missiles are hidden away, literally out of sight, topped with warheads and ready to go, awaiting the right electrical signal. They are a collective death wish, barely suppressed. Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder. They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial—and they work.

Jeff Kennedy was the first person whom I interviewed for this book. More than a decade ago, I visited him in Maine, listened with amazement to his stories about the Titan II, and learned the extraordinary details of what happened in Damascus, Arkansas. Over the years, Kennedy was helpful, encouraging—and never shy about telling me how or why I was completely wrong. I admired his honesty. And I admired the bravery he showed not only in trying to save the missile that night but also in sacrificing his Air Force career to speak out about the Titan II. Kennedy passed away in the fall of 2011, at the age of fifty-six. I regret not having finished this book in time for him to read it.

Bob Peurifoy spent countless hours speaking to me about nuclear weapons, explaining fine points of physics and engineering, hoping that I'd use the knowledge well. I am grateful to him and Barbara Peurifoy for all their hospitality and their friendship. Sidney Drell played a crucial role in opening my eyes to this hidden world. And Bill Stevens patiently answered the same technical questions of mine again and again. Peurifoy, Drell, and Stevens truly are public servants.

Al Childers and Greg Devlin similarly spent untold hours helping me to understand the events at Launch Complex 374-7. Rodney Holder, Jim Sandaker, and Don Green talked to me at length as well. I am grateful for all the time these men devoted to my research. Colonel John T. Moser was extremely gracious in answering questions about perhaps the worst experience of his long Air Force career. And I'm grateful to General Chris Adams—a prolific author as well as a former chief
of staff at the Strategic Air Command—for his many insights about the role of the Air Force in the Cold War. Although our political views differ, I have great respect for the way General Adams has served his country.

David and Barbara Pryor, Phil and Annette Herrington, Sid King, Sam Hutto, and Skip Rutherford made my time in Arkansas a real pleasure. I'm grateful to Cindy English for telling me about her late father, Richard English; to David Rossborough, Jeffrey Zink, David Powell, and Jeffrey Plumb; to Colonel Ben Scallorn, Colonel Jimmie Gray, Major Vincent Maes, Colonel Ron Bishop; and to Mary Ann Dennis, whose memories of her late brother, David Livingston, served as a poignant reminder of how meaningless statistics can be—and how the loss of a single life is one too many.

Ann Godoff proved to be exactly what a great editor should be: blunt, fiercely intelligent, and seemingly afraid of nothing. Those are rare qualities in a literary world that's increasingly timid and homogenized.

Stefan McGrath, Helen Conford, and Rosie Glaisher could not have been more supportive, from the first to the last. And I am profoundly grateful.

Tina Bennett made this book happen. She urged me to write it, discussed it with me for almost ten years, and through thick and thin never wavered in her enthusiasm for it. Her advice was reliably on the mark. Every writer should have such a brilliant, forceful advocate.

A number of other people at William Morris Endeavor must be thanked: Tracy Fisher, Raffaela De Angelis, Annemarie Blumenhagen, Alicia Gordon. And Svetlana Katz is simply the best.

Ellis Levine proved himself, as always, to be a fine critic as well as a formidable legal mind. I am very lucky to have him on my side, not the other one.

I'm grateful to Sarah Hutson and Ryan Davies for their efforts to bring attention to my work.

Benjamin Platt deserves some sort of prize for how he handled the production of this book. I hope he gets it. Meighan Cavanaugh gave the book a clear, beautiful design. Deborah Weiss Geline's copyediting made me seem more eloquent; she's a wonderful practitioner of an unfortunately vanishing art. Lindsay Whalen, Michael McConnell, Nina Hnatov, Christina Caruccio, Melanie Belkin, and Denise Boyd all helped turn my manuscript into a book. And I'm grateful to Eamon Dolan for bringing me to The Penguin Press in the first place.

Jennifer Jerde and Scott Hesselink at Elixir Design came up with a
memorable, original jacket. Gideon Kendall worked hard to capture every little detail in his very cool illustration of a Titan II missile complex. And I'm honored that the first words in this book were written by Leonard Cohen.

I did not employ researchers while writing
Command and Control
. But I later received invaluable help from a small team of people who did their best to ensure the book's accuracy. Bea Marr did a terrific job transcribing interview tapes, wading through all sorts of jargon—and immediately forgetting everything she heard. Jane Cavolina carefully scrutinized my quotations and assertions of fact. I am grateful for every single error that she found, from the trivial to the deeply embarrassing. Once again, Charles Wilson helped me get things right, reinterviewing many of the subjects in this book with sensitivity and skill. Ariel Towber helped to compile the bibliographic citations and made sure that my calculations actually had some basis in mathematics. Stephanie Simon, Jessica Bufford, and Aaron Labaree also worked on the citations—and I even recruited my poor children, Mica and Conor Schlosser, to help with the task. They no doubt hope my next book will be a novel. And I'm grateful to David Schmalz, Elizabeth Limbach, and Hilary McClellen for their fact-checking efforts. One of the central themes of
Command and Control
is the fallibility of all human endeavors. Sadly, that inescapable law applies to me as well. Any mistakes in this book are my fault. I hope that readers will kindly point them out to me.

A number of dear friends read the manuscript in full or in part, gave me good suggestions, and helped me to get through it: Michael Clurman, Dominic Dromgoole, Robby Kenner, Corby Kummer, Cullen Murphy, John Seabrook. The fact that I ignored some of those suggestions reflects poorly on me, not them. And Katrina vanden Heuvel has been a true friend throughout, a fellow student of the Cold War who helped me navigate the national security bureaucracy.

My greatest thanks go to my family: Mica, Conor, Dylan, Lena, Andrew, Austin, and Hillary; Lynn and Craig; James and Kyle; Matt and Amy; Bob and Bylle; Lola and George; my parents. I can't imagine what they've put up with these past six years. While writing this book, I have not been the life of the party.

Most of all, I feel love and gratitude and great compassion for Red, who's had to live beside this darkness. Without her, it would have been impossible.

A N
OTE
ON
S
OURCES

Although I did a great deal of research for this book, I also benefited enormously from the writing, expertise, and firsthand experience of others. I've tried in these notes to acknowledge my debt to the many people whose work influenced mine. For the past six decades, the intense official secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons has presented an unusual challenge to journalists and scholars who write about the subject. Sometimes the only thing more difficult than obtaining accurate information is demonstrating to readers that it's true. I have done my best here not to cite or rely solely upon anonymous sources. Nevertheless, over the years, I've spoken to countless people who formulated or carried out America's nuclear weapon policies, including three former secretaries of defense, presidential advisers, heads of the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories, physicists and engineers once employed at those labs, Pentagon officials, Strategic Air Command generals, bomber pilots and navigators, missile crew commanders, missile repairmen and bomb squad technicians trained to handle weapons of mass destruction. Most of their names never appear in this book. And yet what they told me helped to ensure its accuracy. Any factual errors in these pages are entirely my own.

One of the primary sources for my narrative of the Damascus accident was a three-volume report prepared by the Air Force: “Report of Missile Accident Investigation: Major Missile Accident, 18–19 September 1980, Titan II Complex 374-7, Assigned to 308th Strategic Missile Wing, Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas,” conducted at Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas, and Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, December
14–19, 1980, Eighth Air Force Missile Investigation Board, December 1980. When I contacted the Air Force for a copy of this report, I was told that the Air Force no longer possessed one. I later found a copy among the congressional papers of Dan Glickman at Wichita State University. I am very grateful to Mary Nelson, a program consultant in the department of special collections there, who arranged for the report to be photocopied for me. Other copies, I subsequently learned, are held at the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona, and at the Jacksonville Museum of Military History in Jacksonville, Arkansas.

The accident report contains more than a thousand pages of maps, charts, photographs, analysis, and testimony from ninety-two witnesses. The material was invaluable for reconstructing what happened that night in Damascus. Two other official reports on the Titan II were much less reliable but still worth reading, if only for what they failed to say about the missile: “Assessment Report: Titan II LGM 25 C, Weapon Condition and Safety,” prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee and House Armed Services Committee, May 1980; and “Titan II Weapon System: Review Group Report,” December 1980.

David H. Pryor, who was a U.S. senator from Arkansas in 1980, helped me to understand the state's political culture at the time and shared his long-standing concerns about the Titan II. One of his former aides, James L. “Skip” Rutherford III, described his own investigation of the missile's safety and his secret meetings with airmen from Little Rock Air Force Base. I tracked down one of those airmen, who spoke to me, off the record, and confirmed Rutherford's account. At the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, I found many useful memos and documents about the Titan II in the David H. Pryor Papers, especially in Group II, Boxes 244–84.

Most important, perhaps, I spoke to people who played leading roles in the Damascus accident and its aftermath. I am grateful to all those who shared their recollection of the events at Launch Complex 374-7, at Little Rock Air Force Base, at the underground command post of the Strategic Air Command in Omaha, the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force in Louisiana, and elsewhere. Some of the most useful details were provided by Jeffrey L. Plumb and David F. Powell, who were in the missile silo when the socket fell; Allan D. Childers and Rodney Holder, who were in the launch control center; Colonel John T. Moser, the head of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing, who was at the Little Rock command post; Major Vincent O. Maes, the maintenance supervisor at the 308th, who advised Moser that night; Colonel Jimmie D. Gray, the commander of the 308th Missile Inspection and Maintenance Squadron, who was at both the Little Rock command post and the accident site; Colonel Ben Scallorn, the deputy chief of staff for Missiles and Space Systems Support at headquarters, Eighth Air Force, a Titan II expert who spent hours on the Missile Potential Hazard Net; General Lloyd R. Leavitt, the vice commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, who made many of the crucial decisions about what should be done; Colonel Ronald Bishop, who took over the 308th Strategic
Missile Wing a few months after the accident; David Rossborough and Jerrell M. Babb, who served on the Disaster Response Force; Jeff Kennedy and Greg Devlin, two of the airmen who reentered the launch complex in the early morning hours to save the missile; Donald V. Green, a security police officer, and James R. Sandaker, a member of PTS Team B, who tried to rescue Kennedy; Bob Peurifoy and William H. Chambers, who were part of the Accident Response Group sent to Damascus by the Department of Energy; and members of the Explosive Ordnance Demolition team sent there to disassemble the warhead. I was also helped a great deal by many who preferred not to be named.

After reading the testimony and/or interview transcripts of more than one hundred people somehow involved with the accident, I found that no two of them remembered it exactly the same way. Their accounts differed and sometimes conflicted, about details large and small. The narrative presented in this book is my version of what occurred, based on careful scrutiny of the available evidence. When someone's memory, thirty years after the fact, seemed at odds with his official testimony under oath, I gave much greater credence to the latter. All of the dialogue and all of the thoughts attributed to people in this book come directly from their testimony or from interviews. None was invented by me. A more definitive account of the Damascus accident would include, as a primary source, the transcript of what was said by high-ranking Air Force officers on the Missile Potential Hazard Net. The discussion was recorded, but the Air Force refused to give me a copy of the tape. I have filed a request for it under the Freedom of Information Act.

Sid King, Gus Anglin, Sam Hutto, and other residents of Van Buren County, Arkansas, told me about the civilian response to the accident. Reba Jo Parish and her late husband, Ralph, graciously allowed me to wander the land on their farm where Launch Complex 374-7 once stood. My visits to the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona provided a strong sense of how 374-7 must have looked and felt before the explosion. The museum is located at a decommissioned Titan II site, and everything has been carefully preserved, including an actual missile in the silo. All that's missing are the propellants, the launch crew, and a nuclear warhead. I'm grateful to Yvonne Morris, the museum's director, and to Chuck Penson, its archivist and historian, for all their help. Morris served on a Titan II crew and shared her perspective on those years. Penson showed me around the complex and helped me explore the many documents, training manuals, and videos in the museum's collection. Penson's book—
The Titan II Handbook: A Civilian's Guide to the Most Powerful ICBM America Ever Built
(Tucson: Chuck Penson, 2008)—provides an excellent, well-illustrated overview of the weapon system. A book by David K. Stumpf looks at the subject in greater detail:
Titan II: A History of a Cold War Missile Program
(Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). Stumpf not only did an extraordinary amount of original research for his book, he also donated all of its source materials to the Titan museum, a generous act.

Contemporary newspaper accounts were another good source of information about
the Titan II and the Damascus accident. Walter Pincus, a correspondent for the
Washington Post
, did a particularly fine job of investigating the missile system, ignoring Air Force denials, and seeking the facts. The
New York Times,
the
Arkansas Gazette
, and the
Arkansas Democrat
also covered the story well. I'm grateful to Randy Dixon, the former news director at KATV-TV in Little Rock, and to Albert Kamas, an attorney in Wichita, who helped me to find local television coverage of problems with the Titan II.

The literature about nuclear weapons is vast, and I tried to read as much of it as possible. A number of books stand apart from the rest; the quality of their thinking and prose match the importance of the subject matter. John Hersey's
Hiroshima
(New York: Knopf, 2003) is one of the greatest works of nonfiction ever written. Compassionate and yet tough minded, Hersey calmly describes the destruction of a city without hyperbole or sentimentality. Despite all the horrific imagery, the book is ultimately about the resilience of human beings, not their capacity for evil.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), by Richard Rhodes, is another classic. Rhodes skillfully conveys the drama and high stakes of the Manhattan Project, the clash of big egos and great minds. He also explains the science, physics, and technical details of the first nuclear weapons with admirable clarity. Much like
Uncle Tom's Cabin
and
The Jungle
, Jonathan Schell's
The Fate of the Earth
(New York: Knopf, 1982) had an electrifying effect when it was first published and helped to create a social movement. The book retains its power, more than thirty years later. An extraordinary biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin—
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
(New York: Vintage Books, 2006)—uses the genius, idealism, contradictions, and hypocrisy of one man to shed light on an entire era of American history. Perhaps my favorite book about nuclear weapons is one of the most beautifully written and concise. John McPhee's
The Curve of Binding Energy
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974) not only has great literary merit, it also prompted engineers at Sandia to confront the possibility that terrorists might try to steal a nuclear weapon. Martin J. Sherwin and John McPhee were both professors of mine a long time ago, and the integrity of their work, the scholarship and ambition, set a high standard to which I've aspired ever since.

A number of other writers and historians influenced my view of how nuclear weapons affected postwar America. Barton Bernstein, a professor of history at Stanford University, has written complex and persuasive essays about President Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb. Paul Boyer's
By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) shows how the euphoria that accompanied the end of the Second World War soon became a deep anxiety about nuclear war that endured for almost half a century.
The Wizards of Armageddon, The Untold Story of the Small Group of Men Who Have Devised the Plans and Shaped the Policies on How to Use the Bomb
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), by Fred Kaplan, explains how RAND analysts and brilliant theorists rationalized the creation of a nuclear arsenal with thousands of weapons. In
Whole World on
Fire: Organizations, Knowledge & Nuclear Weapons Devastation
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), Lynn Eden delves into the mentality of war planners who excluded from their calculations one of the principal effects of nuclear weapons: the capability to ignite things. Lawrence Freedman's
The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) is the finest book on the subject, clear and authoritative—although the gulf between clever strategic theories and the likely reality of nuclear war has always been vast. The best overview of how nuclear weapons have affected American society is
Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Insitution Press, 1998), edited by Stephen I. Schwartz. And since 1945, the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
has been publishing timely, informative, and reliable articles about the nuclear threat.

During my research for
Command and Control
, I spoke to Pentagon officials from every postwar administration, except that of President Harry Truman. But my understanding of the Cold War owes much to the work of historian John Lewis Gaddis, most notably his recent biography,
George F. Kennan: An American Life
(New York: Penguin Press, 2011), and his synthesis of more than thirty years studying the conflict,
The Cold War: A New History
(New York: Penguin Books, 2007). The opening of archives in the former Soviet Union has added a much-needed new perspective to events long narrowly viewed from the American side, and a number of books have supplanted earlier histories or added important new details. I learned much from Vojtech Mastny's
The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and from two excellent books by Alexsandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali:
Khruschchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) and
“One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

Some of the most compelling books about the Cold War have been written by people who helped to wage it. For the Truman years, I strongly recommend the deeply personal works of James Forrestal and David E. Lilienthal—Walter Millis, ed.
The Forrestal Diaries
(New York: Viking Press, 1951) and
The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Volume II: The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950
(New York: Harper & Row, 1964). One of the most perceptive observers of President Eisenhower's strategic thinking was McGeorge Bundy. But his epic book—
Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years
(New York: Random House, 1988)—is less trustworthy about the Kennedy administration in which Bundy served. I also learned a great deal from books by Kenneth D. Nichols, a strong proponent of nuclear weapons, and by Herbert F. York, a former head of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory who came to doubt their usefulness. Nichols's memoir is
The Road to Trinity: A Personal Account of How America's Nuclear Policies Were Made
(New York: William Morrow, 1987), and York wrote two books about his experiences,
Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970) and
Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist's Odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva
(New York: Basic Books, 1987). Thomas C. Reed, a nuclear weapons designer and close adviser to Ronald Reagan, wrote a blunt, fascinating account of the Cold War's final chapter,
At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2004). The Cold War memoir that I found to be the most interesting and revelatory was written by Robert M. Gates, the former secretary of defense and director of the CIA:
From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).