Command and Control

[Monte Davis]

"the long-hidden story... exposes the terrifying truth..."

No offense or pushback intended to Ish or to Schlosser, but that's some
choice vonBraunery from a promotional copy writer at PBS. Because I have
mad skillz to penetrate the deepest darkest cover-ups, I was able to find
the long-hidden story top center on p. 1 of the New York Times for Sept.
21, 1980:

AIR FORCE IS SILENT ON WHEREABOUTS OF WARHEAD FROM DEMOLISHED SILO
The Air Force continued today to refuse even to confirm or deny the
existence of a nine-megaton nuclear warhead on the Titan II missile that
blew up in its silo yesterday, and some angry state officials and local
residents insisted that the military should tell them whether it had
recovered the warhead and what condition it was in...

As a nerdy Boomer into rocketry and aviation, conversant with lotsa
apocalyptic post-Bomb 1950s and 1960s  SF, I knew about the nuclear-weapons
oopsies at Palomares in Spain, in South Carolina, and in Greenland as they
happened. 'Command and Control' is a well-researched, well-written, and
valuable book (and mostly free of that kind of now-it-can-be-told hype).
But what it says in essence is: If tens of thousands of nuclear weapons,
year after year, are deployed on and transported among several thousand
aircraft and missile silos and submarine launch tubes, and dozens of
storage sites, accidents *will* happen. Does that really come as a surprise
or shock to anyone with any experience of (1) large organizations and (2)
human fallibility?

It takes a lot of very precise, very precisely timed technology to detonate
a nuclear weapon. The chances of a fall, nearby explosion, vehicle crash,
etc. setting one off -- as opposed to scattering a few kg of plutonium
around, which is bad but not catastrophic -- are much less IMHO than those
of a military misstep (with or without technology glitches) in a crisis,
which in turn are less than the chance of political leaders being as stupid
again as they were in 1914 and 1939. Which are you going to worry about
most? On the same front page as the Times story above is "Nation's Military
Anxiety Grows as Russians Gain" -- which translated to "Reagan campaign
warns that we have only 24,000 nukes to the USSR's 32,000." That bothered
me a hell of a lot more than missile propellant burning in rural Arkansas.

I said "vonBraunery" above because all this strikes me as parallel to the
periodic rediscovery, again and again over most of my lifetime, of
Operation Paperclip, Dora/Mittelwerk, and Secret Evil Nazi Mastermind WvB.
As I've argued here many times, almost everything about that story was
known, or trivially deducible from what was known, by 1950. I used to think
it was just bad journalism and publishers' PR hype to keep trotting it out
as Shocking Revelation: What von Braun and the National-Security Deep State
Hid From Us. But I've come to believe it's really a deeply rooted moral
evasion, a way of *not* thinking about how and why the USA (followed by the
USSR, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and sooner
or later Iran) spent several trillion dollars on nuclear weapons and their
prompt, reliable delivery. Similarly, while I'm all in favor of the safest
possible handling of nuclear weapons, I think too much focus on the risk
that one might go off by accident can be a way of *not* thinking about what
thousands of them have been deliberately, painstakingly, expensively
*designed* to do.
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