Command and Control (96 page)

A number of the Soviet Union's own war plans
:
See Hoffman,
Dead Hand,
p. 94.

About 100 million Americans watched
The Day After
:
Cited in Robert D. McFadden, “Atomic War Film Spurs Nationwide Discussion,”
New York Times
, November 22, 1983.

another B-52 had caught on fire on a runway
:
See Phyllis Mensing, “5 Die in B-52 Fire at Air Base,” Associated Press,
January 27, 1983.

the retrofits were halted . . . because the program ran out of money
:
Peurifoy interview.

“The worst probable consequence of continuous degradation”
:
“
‘
Hot' Topic!, Nuclear AID [Accidents, Incidents, Deficiencies] Topics,”
USAF Nuclear Surety Journal
, no. 90-01, p. 5.

“Naturally, this would be a catastrophe”
:
Ibid.

“follow procedures and give the weapons a little extra care”
:
Ibid.

A software glitch could launch a Pershing II missile
:
Peurifoy and Stevens interviews. See also Stevens, “Origins and Evolution of S
²
C,”
pp. 116-18.

Reagan watched red dots spreading across a map
:
See Reed,
At the Abyss,
pp. 233-34.

Reagan's belief in the plan was sincere
:
Two well
-
researched books argue persuasively that Reagan hoped to protect the United States from a nuclear attack and rid the world of nuclear weapons. The
books suggest that Reagan's tough Cold War rhetoric hid a warmer, more peace-loving side. And yet both books fail to place Reagan's subsequent arms control efforts in a wider political context. The massive antinuclear demonstrations in the United States and Western Europe are mentioned on only three of the roughly eight hundred pages in these books—and with disparagement. On October 5, 1982, President Reagan said that the nuclear freeze movement was “inspired . . . by people who want the weakening of America.” The huge demonstrations that soon followed no doubt influenced his subsequent behavior, as did his wife Nancy, who strongly supported arms control talks. Reagan's transformation into an outspoken nuclear abolitionist, though heartfelt, followed—and did not lead—American public opinion. Although written without access to many declassified documents, Frances FitzGerald's
Way Out There in the Blue
has a broader perspective. See Lettow,
Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
; Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson,
Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster
(New York: Crown, 2009); and Rich Jaroslovsky, “Reagan Blasts Nuclear Freeze Movement, Saying Some Seek ‘Weakening of America,'”
Wall Street Journal
, October 5, 1982.

“impotent and obsolete”
:
“President's Speech on Military Spending and a New Defense,”
New York Times
, January 27, 1983.

The Day After
left even him feeling depressed
:
Thomas Reed, one of Reagan's national security advisers, thought the film “understated . . . the horrors of nuclear war.” See Reed,
At the Abyss
, pp. 250, 255.

“A nuclear war cannot be won”
:
“Transcript of Statement by President,”
New York Times
, April 18, 1982.

“
The President
agreed this could be sorted out”
:
“Memorandum of Conversation, Hofdi House, Reykjavik, 3:25–6:00, October 12, 1986, United States Department of State (
SECRET
/
SENSITIVE
/declassified), p. 9, in George P. Shultz and Sidney D. Drell,
Implications of the Reykjavik Summit on Its Twentieth Anniversary
(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2007), p. 210.

The euphoria . . . didn't last long
:
See Ibid., pp. 211-15.

almost half of the weapons in the American stockpile
:
Peurifoy interview.

Peurifoy wrote to the assistant secretary for defense programs
:
A more detailed account of the bureaucratic inertia can be found in Stevens, “Origins and Evolution of S
²
C,” pp. 162-66.

“The potential for a nuclear weapon accident”
:
Quoted in ibid., p. 164.

The
Post
ran a series of his articles
:
See R. Jeffrey Smith, “Defective Nuclear Shells Raise Safety Concerns; U.S. Secretly Repairing Weapons in Europe,”
Washington Post
, May 23, 1990; “Pentagon Urged to Ground Nuclear Missile for Safety,”
Washington Post
, May 24, 1990; “Pentagon to Await Missile Safety Study; Weapons Will Remain on ‘Alert' Bombers,”
Washington Post
, May 25, 1990.

“weapon meets all our current safety standards”
:
Quoted in “Pentagon to Await Missile Safety Study.”

“no safety hazards to the public”
:
Quoted in R. Jeffrey Smith, “A-Missiles Ordered Off Planes; Weapons Grounded Pending Completion of Safety Review,”
Washington Post
, June 9, 1990.

The Drell Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety
:
“Report of the Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 101st Congress, Second Session,” Sidney D. Drell, Chairman, John S. Foster, Jr., and Charles H. Townes, December 1990. For Drell's testimony and a discussion of the panel's findings, see “The Report of the Nuclear Weapons Safety Panel,” Hearing Before the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, 101st Congress, Second Session, December 18, 1990.

“a realization that unintended nuclear detonations”
:
The panel singled out the SRAM as the cause of “greatest concern,” warning a fire could cause “the potential for dispersal of plutonium, or even of the generation of a nuclear detonation.” “Report of the Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety,” p. 25.

“affirm enhanced safety as the top priority”
:
Ibid., p. 33.

A separate study on nuclear weapon safety
:
“Report to the Congress: Assessment of the Safety of U.S. Nuclear Weapons and Related Nuclear Test Requirements,“ R. E. Kidder, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, July 26, 1991.

Three weapons received an A
:
Ibid., p. 4.

General Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney
:
For the decision to change the SIOP
and reduce the number of targets in the Soviet Union, see Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico,
My American Journey
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), pp. 540–41; and Reed,
At the Abyss,
pp. 278-84, 287-92.

Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow
:
Cited in Reed,
At the Abyss,
p. 283.

“With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan
”
:
“Speech to the Canadian Network Against Nuclear Weapons,” George Lee Butler, Montreal, March 11, 1999.

Butler eliminated about 75 percent of the targets
:
Cited in R. Jeffrey Smith, “Retired Nuclear Warrior Sounds Alarms on Weapons,”
Washington Post
, December 4, 1996.

National Strategic Response Plans
:
See “Memorandum for the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, From General George L. Butler, Commander in Chief, United States Strategic Command, Subject: Renaming the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP),” September 2, 1992, (
CONFIDENTIAL
/declassified). This document was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

“State Committee for the State of Emergency”
:
For the attempted coup, see William E. Odom,
The Collapse of the Soviet Military
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 305–46; Hoffman,
Dead Hand,
pp. 369–76; and Mikhail Tsypkin, “Adventures of the ‘Nuclear Briefcase': A Russian Document Analysis,”
Strategic Insights
, Center for Contemporary Conflict, Naval Postgraduate School, vol. 3, issue 9 (2004).

President George H. W. Bush announced a month
later
:
See “Remarks by President Bush on Reducing U.S. and Soviet Nuclear Weapons,”
New York Times,
September 28, 1991.

“The long bitter years of the Cold War are over”
:
Quoted in Steve Kline, “SAC, America's Nuclear Strike Force, Is Retired,” Associated Press
,
June 2, 1992.

EPILOGUE

hidden by a repair tag
:
Charles Perrow's succinct, unsettling account of the mishap at Three Mile Island can be found in his book,
Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 15-31.

his
shirt caught on the handle of a circuit breaker
:
Ibid., pp. 43–44.

A lightbulb slipped out of the hand
:
Ibid.

“trivial events in nontrivial systems”
:
Ibid., pp. 43–46.

“Our ability to organize”
:
Ibid., p. 10.

“tightly coupled”
:
Ibid., pp. 89–100.

“No one dreamed that when X failed”
:
Ibid., p. 4.

“those closest to the system, the operators”
: Ibid., p. 10.

“Time and time again, warnings are ignored”
:
Ibid.

“the highest state of readiness for nuclear war”
:
Sagan,
The Limits of Safety,
p. 62.

an Atlas long-range missile was test-launched
: Ibid., pp. 78–80.

“so loose, it jars your imagination”
:
Quoted in ibid., p. 110.

“In retrospect,” Melgard said
:
Quoted in ibid.

one of the most dangerous incidents
:
Ibid., pp. 135–38.

“numerous dangerous incidents . . . occurred”
:
Ibid., p. 251.

“a stabilizing force”
:
Ibid.

“Nuclear weapons may well have made
deliberate
war”
:
Ibid., p. 264.

less by “good design than good fortune”
:
Ibid., p. 266.

“Fixes, including safety devices”
:
Perrow,
Normal Accidents
, p. 11.

“Do Artifacts Have Politics?”
:
The essay can be found in Langdon Winner,
The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 19–39.

“As long as it exists at all”
:
Ibid., p. 34.

“born secret”
:
The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 required that “all data concerning the manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons” must be classified, and it created a new legal category for such information: Restricted Data. An amendment to the act in 1954 added another category of secret
knowledge—Formerly Restricted Data—that pertains mainly to the military uses, capabilities, and deployments of nuclear weapons. Despite the apparent meaning of that name, Formerly Restricted Data is still classified information that can't be released to the public without permission from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. For insight into the Orwellian world of nuclear secrecy, see Howard Morland, “Born Secret,”
Cardozo Law Review,
vol. 26, no. 4 (March 2005), pp. 1401–8; “Restricted Data Declassification Decisions, 1946 to the Present,” RDD-8, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Health, Safety and Security, Office of Classification, January 1, 2002 (
OFFICIAL USE ONLY
/declassified); and “Transforming the Security Classification System,” Report to the President from the Public Interest Declassification Board, November 2012.

“Accidents and Incidents Involving Nuclear Weapons”
:
The document, cited previously, is “Accidents and Incidents Involving Nuclear Weapons: Accidents and Incidents During the Period 1 July 1957 Through 31 March 1967,” Technical Letter 20-3, Defense Atomic Support Agency, October 15, 1967 (
SECRET
/
RESTRICTED DATA
/declassified).

a Genie antiaircraft missile released from a fighter
:
Ibid., Incident #33, p. 14.

a Boar missile crushed by the elevator
:
Ibid., Incident #3, p. 53.

a Mark 49 warhead blown off a Jupiter missile
:
Ibid., Incident #11, p. 34.

smoke pouring from a W-31 warhead atop a Nike missile
:
Ibid., Incident #51, p. 89.

the retrorockets of a Thor missile suddenly firing
:
The launch pad was evacuated, and when technicians returned to the site they found that the “latch safety pins” were still holding the reentry vehicle atop the missile. “The cause of the incident,” the report concluded, “was failure to follow prescribed safety rules for the Thor missile.” See ibid., Incident #42, p. 87.