Command and Control

[John Bailey]

Radiolab had a very compelling episode recently titled Nukes, which
looked at the exact process by which a nuclear strike can be launched
by a US president and what checks and balances there are to prevent a
childish and easily irritated prez from making the call (spoiler:
none).
I was also unaware just how many and how often nuclear warheads get
lost, including one that fell on a rural US farmhouse and killed
everyone inside.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/nukes/

On Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 6:33 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> "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.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l