Command and Control

At the height of the Cold War in the American heartland, a combination of human error, aging equipment, mismanagement, and bad luck threatened to set off a nuclear weapon far more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Schlosser uses this long-forgotten incident to examine the nuclear near [...]
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At the height of the Cold War in the American heartland, a combination of human error, aging equipment, mismanagement, and bad luck threatened to set off a nuclear weapon far more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Schlosser uses this long-forgotten incident to examine the nuclear near-misses of the past sixty years. He pays tribute to the scientists, engineers, and military officers who struggled to insure that nuclear weapons wouldn't go off by accidentor by the deliberate acts of madmen and fanatics. It is miraculous, Schlosser concludes, that an American city has not yet been destroyed by a nuclear weapon. And there is no guarantee that such good luck will last. A former Secretary of Defense and a former dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government have both suggested the odds are about even that a nuclear weapon will be detonated on American soil by the end of this decade. Command and Control takes us into nuclear weapons laboratories, missile silos, and the cockpits of B-52 bombers to show how perilously close we have come to disaster. It is a saga of technological ingenuity and blind faith in science, of personal heroism and bureaucratic incompetence, of a desperate need for control and the ultimate illusion of control. It is a sobering account of how many lives can depend on the proper functioning of a single switch.