Book Review: Command and Control

In a gripping account that begins with the Trinity Test in 1945, Command and Control spans the entirety of the Cold War, along with the surreal close shaves that could have almost obliterated the developed world. The book is long because the period and characters it covers, from the irascible General Curtis LeMay to the idealistic Sandia Laboratory deputy head Robert Peurifoy, are highly complex and complicated. Mr. Schlosser, of Fast Food Nation fame, does an excellent job explaining the mechanics and mechanisms of nuclear warfare. Readers are educated not just on the process of nuclear fission and fusion, but how these are translated into explosive processes yielding megatons of destruction. A dark, nuclear age dawned when the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, followed two days later by another on Nagasaki. The almost perfect delivery of these bombs belied the haphazard tinkering that continued even when the plane was in the sky, on the way to Nagasaki. Minor faults, like a wire put in the wrong place, had the potential to ripple through a series of unrelated processes, magnifying the effects and eventually leading to disaster. It was as if there were an infinite number of ways to get it wrong (kaboom) and one way to get it right.

Mr. Schlosser weaves major “Broken Arrow” accidents through the narrative, starting with the Damascus Incident in 1980, when a Titan II warhead exploded and was sent flying in rural Arkansas. A missile technician died after inhaling copious amounts of oxidizer that destroyed his lungs. The missile silo had sprayed oxidizer after another technician accidentally dropped a socket which tore off the cap of the Titan II missile. He cites other incidents, like a B-36 bomber crashing in British Columbia with a Mark 4 nuclear bomb. Many other incidents give the reader a sense of how close it was to an accidental nuclear explosion. Alongside the geopolitical undercurrents of containment and “Mutually Assured Destruction,” the fear and anxiety is palpable. Repeatedly, the world in every decade from 1945 to 1989 (when the Berlin Wall fell), was on the brink of nuclear extinction.

Better heads - or rather, as Mr. Schlosser shows - better luck often prevailed. Despite the numerous close shaves and accidents, a global thermonuclear meltdown was largely avoided for six decades. This, in part, is testament to the heroism of missile technicians, officers, and scientists who stood in the way of detonation. When machine failed, man often stepped up to prevent disaster, including calling off a retaliatory alert when both the USSR and US had computers warning their adversary fired first. Through this, Mr. Schlosser showed how the Strategic Air Command was transformed by the force of personality of one General Curtis LeMay, a “bomber general” who had developed the doctrine of strategic bombing in the Second World War. He inveighed against the other branches of the military and kickstarted the nuclear arms race. But in doing so, General LeMay created a top-down hierarchy that failed to recognize the limitations of man and machine. In many ways, the generals themselves were blinded by the sheer power of the bomb and the nuclear arsenal. They became reckless, irreverent and in many ways, unable to visualize the ethics of nuclear warfare.

The book concludes with a postscript of how the nuclear age has largely faded from view after the fall of the USSR. The shift towards nuclear peace was largely precipitated by the end of the Soviet Union and the proliferation of nuclear test bans. In the military, the bomber generals were eventually ousted by more dynamic fighter pilots who eventually wrested control of the Air Force and channelled its capacities into fighter jets. Furthermore, Sandia National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, representing the manufacturing arm of the nuclear axis, began to gain more power and thus, instituted a greater degree of safety awareness dealing with nuclear weapons. The book, however, warns that nuclear powers continue to hold considerable ability to hurt and destroy millions of people.

The nuclear thesis is central to the book, which actually focuses on command and control capabilities of the US military force. It argues, largely successfully, that these capabilities arose out of the need to coordinate between numerous branches, geographies, and timezones of the byzantine military apparatus in the US, including the military-industrial complex. In showing how command and control fell short so many times, Mr. Schlosser shows how the lessons were (I can only hypothesize here) learned and used to build a more integrated strike force. The decentralized nature of warfare often requires largely independent units of soldiers to make their own decisions. Yet, these decisions often have consequences that far outweigh and outsize the original decision. Nuclear warfare is the extreme case in point: a single officer could have blown up the world.