Command and Control

[John Bailey]

I'm coming to this debate from a country that has just decided to
debate whether to develop a "missile defence shield" of the Star Wars
variety. We're more Caravan of Courage, of course.

On Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 10:08 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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