Command and Control

[Monte Davis]

I liked the Radiolab piece too. Alex Wellerstein, a contributor to that
episode, has some of the best-informed and most thoughtful work online at
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/.

But for me the insanity/futility of nukes by the thousands really wouldn't
be mitigated significantly much by a better protocol to review or check a
president's order. When I look back at what the best and brightest (used
ironically or not) have done in history, I don't trust *anyone* or *any*
government with destructive power on the scale we came to take for granted
in the 1950s and 1960s.

On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 8:07 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
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