December 13, 2013
Elliot Lake, ON
By: Eric Schlosser
Penguin Press 2013
ISBN 978-1-59420-227-8
Elliot Lake, ON
Book Review:
“Command & Control”
the DAMASCUS ACCIDENT, and the illusion of safety.
“Command & Control”
the DAMASCUS ACCIDENT, and the illusion of safety.
By: Eric Schlosser
Penguin Press 2013
ISBN 978-1-59420-227-8
I grew up in the “Cold War” with the threat of nuclear war every day; of course you could not live every day in terror. Being in denial like an ostrich is not good either – like we say in flying “ignorance is not bliss.” If you were one of the thousands of characters in this book, perhaps many did live everyday in terror, hence the exessive use of drugs by some.
My life took a turn of “peace” after the “Cuban Missile Crisis” though during that event I remember lying on my bed and saying (not praying) just do it, blow us to Hell. Fortunately, I had a real epiphany not psychotic imaginary denial. Nevertheless, if I had been privy to the info in the book my life may have been more sober and focused for the next thirty years – not that the Berlin Wall coming down ended the nuclear threat. You should read the book, we were often a hair's breath from eternity; the eastern seaboard of North America for one came close several times to a holocaust.
In flying we like redundancy, in nukes they like “fail safe” -NOT...
OK my typing will be challenged here, let's get a few tidbits from the book to illustrate:
The book starts off with a “Titan II” disaster near Damascus, Arkansas in the period of Bill Clinton as governor. One dropped wrench caused a rupture in a fuel tank, eventually the thing blew up spreading debris including nuclear material; fortunately the warhead did not detonate. Several lives were lost, as were 55 lives in a previous accident due to vapors at another site. Some of the heroes of the story at Damascus are woven through the book and to its conclusion – hum, is there a conclusion? I am not an anti-war or anti-nuke advocate, more a realist washed in my world-view. The book illustrates heroes, and power broker hard heads, aka “Dr. Strangelove.”
There is just so much information, too much, lets jump past missles to flying...
>“The Air Force assured the public that the two weapons had been unarmed and that there was never any risk of a nuclear explosion. Those statements were misleading. The T-249 control box and ready/safe switch, installed in every one of SAC's bombers, had already raised concerns at Sandia. The switch required a low-voltage signal of brief duration to operate --- and that kind of signal could easily be provided by a stray wire or a short circuit, as a B-52 full of electronic equipment disintegrated midair[which several did].
>A year after the North Carolina accident, a SAC ground crew removed four Mark 28 bombs from a B-47 bomber and noticed that all of the weapons were armed. But the seal on the ready/safe switch in the cockpit was intact , and the knob hadn't been turned to GROUND OR AIR. The bombs had not been armed by the crew. A seven-month investigation by Sandia found a tiny metal nut had come off a screw inside the plane and logged against an unused radar-heating circuit. The nut had created a new electrical pathway, allowing current to reach arming line --- and bypass the ready/safe switch. A similar glitch on the B-52 that crashed near Goldsboro would have caused a 4-megaton thermonuclear explosion. “It would have been bad news --- in spades,” Parker F. Jones, a safety engineer at Sandia, wrote...
With strong northerly winds, the ground-burst of that 4-megaton bomb in Goldsboro would have deposited lethal fallout over Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.” (pages 246-7)
>At an air defense site in Jackson Township, New Jersey, a helium tank ruptured near a BOMARC missle, starting a fire. A pair of explosions soon followed inside the concrete shelter that housed the missile. Fiftiy-five other BOMARCs lay in similar shelters, beneath corrugated steel roofs, nearby...The high explosives had burned , instead of detonating, and the nuclear core had melted onto the floor. The shelter contained most of the radioactivity. But water from the fire hoses had swept plutonium residue under the doors , down the street, and into a drainage ditch.” (pages 248-9)
>During a tour of NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a few months earlier, Peter G. Peterson, the executive vice president of the Bell & Howell Company, had been allowed to sit in the commander's chair...As Peterson sat in the commander's chair, the number above the map began to climb. When it reached 4, NORAD officers ran into the room . When it reached 5, Peterson and the other executives were quickly escorted out and put in a small office...
The vice commander of NORAD, Air Marshall C. Roy Slemon, a dapper Canadian with small mustache, managed to track down the head of NORAD, General Laurence S. Kuter, who was in an Air Force plane above South Dakota.
“Chief, this is a hot one,” Slemon said.
The BMEWS indicated that the Soviets had launched a all-out missile attack against North America. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were on the phone, awaiting confirmation. The United Stated had only minutes to respond.
“Where is Khrushchev?” Slemon asked his officers. Khrushchev's in New York today, at the United Naations, NORAD'S chief of intelligence said.
Slemon immediately felt relieved...
Amid the confusion, it might be impossible to determine who was America's commander in chief.”
[David: another incident was started by a faulty computer repair – a worker left tape in a mainframe. Again, fail-safe lines by At&T were supposed to have been installed in duplicate and were NOT ! ] (page 254)
[ Maybe more later? Get the book at library. Available as an ebook. ]
>”Most of this book has been devoted to stories of accidents, miscalculations, and mistakes, tempered by a great deal of personal heroism. But one crucial fact must be kept in mind: none of the roughly seventy thousand nuclear weapons built by the Untied States since 1945 has ever detonated inadvertently or without proper authorization. The technological and administrative controls on those weapons have worked, however imperfectly at times --- and countless people, military and civilian, deserve credit for that remarkable achievement. Had a single weapon been stolen or detonated, America's command-and-control system would still have attained a success rate of 99.99857 percent. But nuclear weapons are the most dangerous technology ever invented. Anything less than 100 percent control of them, anything less than perfect safety and securtiy, would be unacceptable. And if this book has any message to preach, it is that human beings are imperfect.” (page 480 – not the end)”
My life took a turn of “peace” after the “Cuban Missile Crisis” though during that event I remember lying on my bed and saying (not praying) just do it, blow us to Hell. Fortunately, I had a real epiphany not psychotic imaginary denial. Nevertheless, if I had been privy to the info in the book my life may have been more sober and focused for the next thirty years – not that the Berlin Wall coming down ended the nuclear threat. You should read the book, we were often a hair's breath from eternity; the eastern seaboard of North America for one came close several times to a holocaust.
In flying we like redundancy, in nukes they like “fail safe” -NOT...
OK my typing will be challenged here, let's get a few tidbits from the book to illustrate:
The book starts off with a “Titan II” disaster near Damascus, Arkansas in the period of Bill Clinton as governor. One dropped wrench caused a rupture in a fuel tank, eventually the thing blew up spreading debris including nuclear material; fortunately the warhead did not detonate. Several lives were lost, as were 55 lives in a previous accident due to vapors at another site. Some of the heroes of the story at Damascus are woven through the book and to its conclusion – hum, is there a conclusion? I am not an anti-war or anti-nuke advocate, more a realist washed in my world-view. The book illustrates heroes, and power broker hard heads, aka “Dr. Strangelove.”
There is just so much information, too much, lets jump past missles to flying...
>“The Air Force assured the public that the two weapons had been unarmed and that there was never any risk of a nuclear explosion. Those statements were misleading. The T-249 control box and ready/safe switch, installed in every one of SAC's bombers, had already raised concerns at Sandia. The switch required a low-voltage signal of brief duration to operate --- and that kind of signal could easily be provided by a stray wire or a short circuit, as a B-52 full of electronic equipment disintegrated midair[which several did].
>A year after the North Carolina accident, a SAC ground crew removed four Mark 28 bombs from a B-47 bomber and noticed that all of the weapons were armed. But the seal on the ready/safe switch in the cockpit was intact , and the knob hadn't been turned to GROUND OR AIR. The bombs had not been armed by the crew. A seven-month investigation by Sandia found a tiny metal nut had come off a screw inside the plane and logged against an unused radar-heating circuit. The nut had created a new electrical pathway, allowing current to reach arming line --- and bypass the ready/safe switch. A similar glitch on the B-52 that crashed near Goldsboro would have caused a 4-megaton thermonuclear explosion. “It would have been bad news --- in spades,” Parker F. Jones, a safety engineer at Sandia, wrote...
With strong northerly winds, the ground-burst of that 4-megaton bomb in Goldsboro would have deposited lethal fallout over Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.” (pages 246-7)
>At an air defense site in Jackson Township, New Jersey, a helium tank ruptured near a BOMARC missle, starting a fire. A pair of explosions soon followed inside the concrete shelter that housed the missile. Fiftiy-five other BOMARCs lay in similar shelters, beneath corrugated steel roofs, nearby...The high explosives had burned , instead of detonating, and the nuclear core had melted onto the floor. The shelter contained most of the radioactivity. But water from the fire hoses had swept plutonium residue under the doors , down the street, and into a drainage ditch.” (pages 248-9)
>During a tour of NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a few months earlier, Peter G. Peterson, the executive vice president of the Bell & Howell Company, had been allowed to sit in the commander's chair...As Peterson sat in the commander's chair, the number above the map began to climb. When it reached 4, NORAD officers ran into the room . When it reached 5, Peterson and the other executives were quickly escorted out and put in a small office...
The vice commander of NORAD, Air Marshall C. Roy Slemon, a dapper Canadian with small mustache, managed to track down the head of NORAD, General Laurence S. Kuter, who was in an Air Force plane above South Dakota.
“Chief, this is a hot one,” Slemon said.
The BMEWS indicated that the Soviets had launched a all-out missile attack against North America. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were on the phone, awaiting confirmation. The United Stated had only minutes to respond.
“Where is Khrushchev?” Slemon asked his officers. Khrushchev's in New York today, at the United Naations, NORAD'S chief of intelligence said.
Slemon immediately felt relieved...
Amid the confusion, it might be impossible to determine who was America's commander in chief.”
[David: another incident was started by a faulty computer repair – a worker left tape in a mainframe. Again, fail-safe lines by At&T were supposed to have been installed in duplicate and were NOT ! ] (page 254)
[ Maybe more later? Get the book at library. Available as an ebook. ]
>”Most of this book has been devoted to stories of accidents, miscalculations, and mistakes, tempered by a great deal of personal heroism. But one crucial fact must be kept in mind: none of the roughly seventy thousand nuclear weapons built by the Untied States since 1945 has ever detonated inadvertently or without proper authorization. The technological and administrative controls on those weapons have worked, however imperfectly at times --- and countless people, military and civilian, deserve credit for that remarkable achievement. Had a single weapon been stolen or detonated, America's command-and-control system would still have attained a success rate of 99.99857 percent. But nuclear weapons are the most dangerous technology ever invented. Anything less than 100 percent control of them, anything less than perfect safety and securtiy, would be unacceptable. And if this book has any message to preach, it is that human beings are imperfect.” (page 480 – not the end)”