Command and Control (79 page)

The rest involved training weapons
:
See ibid.

a B-36 bomber took off from Eielson Air Force Base
:
For a description of the accident see Michael H. Maggelet and James C. Oskins,
Broken Arrow: The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents
(Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2007), pp. 33–44, and Norman S. Leach,
Broken Arrow: America's First Lost Nuclear Weapon
(Calgary, Ontario, Canada: Red Deer Press, 2008), pp. 75–111.

On at least four different occasions, the bridgewire detonators
:
See “Accidents and Incidents Involving Nuclear Weapons,” p. 1, Accident #1.

At least half a dozen times, the carts used to carry Mark 6 bombs
:
See ibid., p. 8, Incident #1.

Dropping a nuclear weapon was never a good idea
:
According to a study released by the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project in 1958, “Extreme shocks can cause failure of one or more of the
presently used safety devices and warhead components, which could contribute to a full-scale nuclear detonation, particularly if the X-unit is already charged.” See “A Study on Evaluation of Warhead Safing Devices,” Headquarters Field Command, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, FC/03580460, March 31, 1958, (
SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA
/declassified), p. 18.

when the Genie was armed, it didn't need a firing signal
:
See “Vulnerability Program Summary: Joint DOD-AEC Weapon Vulnerability Program,” Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, FC/010 May 1958 (
SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA
/declassified), p. 44.

a B-29 bomber prepared to take off from Fairfield-Suisun
:
For the story of the plane crash and its aftermath, see Jim Houk, “The Travis Crash Exhibit,”
Travis Air Museum News,
vol. XVII, no. 3 (1999), pp. 1, 5–11; John L. Frisbee, “The Greater Mark of Valor,”
Air Force Magazine
, February 1986; and the accident report reproduced in Maggelet and Oskins,
Broken Arrow
, pp. 65–77.

“a long training mission”
:
Quoted in “Bomb-Laden B-29 Hits Trailer Camp; 17 Killed, 60 Hurt,”
New York Times
, August 7, 1950.

an American B-47 bomber took off from Lakenheath
:
I first learned about this accident from a document obtained by the National Security Archive: “B-47 Wreckage at Lakenheath Air Base,” Cable, T-5262, July 22, 1956 (
SECRET
/declassified). The accident report is reproduced in Maggelet and Oskins,
Broken Arrow
, pp. 85–87.

“The B-47 tore apart the igloo”
:
“B-47 Wreckage at Lakenheath Air Base.”

“Some day there will be an accidental explosion”
:
Morgenstern made the assertion in 1959. Quoted in Joel Larus,
Nuclear Weapons Safety and the Common Defense
(Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 1967), p. 17–18.

“Maintaining a nuclear capability”
:
“A Survey of Nuclear Weapon Safety Problems,” p. 14.

“Acceptable Military Risks from Accidental Detonation”
:
Although I did not obtain the Army study, its conclusions are explored in “Acceptable Premature Probabilities for Nuclear Weapons,” Headquarters Field Command, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, FC/10570136, October 1, 1957 (
SECRET/RESTRICTRED DATA
/declassified).

the acceptable probability of a hydrogen bomb . . . should be 1 in 100,000
:
See ibid., p. 4.

The acceptable risk of an atomic bomb . . . set at 1 in 125
:
See ibid. p. 4

the “psychological impact of a nuclear detonation”
:
Ibid.

“there will likely be a tendency to blame”
:
Ibid.

Human error had been excluded as a possible cause
:
Ibid., p. 6.

“The unpredictable behavior of human beings”
:
Ibid.

the odds of a hydrogen bomb exploding . . . should be one in ten million
:
Ibid., p. 13.

odds of a hydrogen bomb detonating by accident, every decade, would be one in five
:
For a nuclear weapon with a yield greater than 10 kilotons, removed from stockpile storage, the study proposed an accidental detonation rate of 1 in 50,000 over the course of ten years. Putting 10,000 of those weapons into “handling, maintenance, assembly and test operations,” therefore, lowered the odds of an accidental detonation to 1 in 5 every decade. See Ibid., p. 14.

the odds of an atomic bomb detonating by accident . . . would be about 100 percent
:
For a nuclear weapon with a yield lower than 10 kilotons, removed from stockpile storage, the study proposed an accidental detonation rate of 1 in 10,000 per weapon over the course of ten years. If the United States possessed 10,000 of such weapons, at least one of them would most likely detonate by accident within that period. See ibid., p. 14.

During a fire, the high explosives of a weapon might burn
:
See “Factors Affecting the Vulnerability of Atomic Weapons to Fire, Full Scale Test Report No. 2,” Armour Research Foundation of Illinois Institute of Technology, for Air Force Special Weapons Center, February 1958 (
SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA
/declassified), and “Vulnerability Program Summary,” pp. 10–20, 58–60.

The time factor for the Genie was three minutes
:
Cited in “Vulnerability Program Summary,” p. 59.

Carl Carlson, a young physicist at Sandia, came to believe
:
A short biographical sketch of Carlson—who advocated passionately on behalf of nuclear weapon safety, resigned from Sandia in frustration at one point, and later took his own life—can be found in Stevens, “Origins and Evolution of S
²
C at Sandia,” p. 236.

“
the real key”
:
“A Survey of Nuclear Weapon Safety Problems,” p. 28.

the T-249 control box made it easy to arm a weapon
:
See ibid., pp. 21–27.

“
a weapon which requires only the receipt of intelligence
:
Ibid., p. 51.

“always/never”
:
Peter Douglas Feaver succinctly explains and defines the “always/never problem” of controlling nuclear weapons in his book,
Guarding the Guardians,
pp. 12–20, 28–32.

“a higher degree of nuclear safing”
:
Quoted in “A Survey of Nuclear Weapon Safety Problems,” p. 13.

“Such safing,” Quarles instructed
:
Quoted in ibid.

The Optimum Mix

“A super long-distance intercontinental”
:
“Text of Soviet Statement,”
New York Times
, August 27, 1957.

a radio signal of “beep-beep”
:
Some experts speculated, erroneously, that the beeping was part of a Soviet secret code. See Marvin Miles, “Russ Moon's Code Sending Analyzed,”
Los Angeles Times
, October 9, 1957.

boasted that Laika lived for a week
:
See Max Frankel, “Satellite Return Seen as Soviet Goal,”
New York Times
, November 16, 1957.

she actually died within a few hours of liftoff
:
Like the Soviet Union's other space dogs, Laika was a stray picked up on the streets of Moscow. She died from excess heat in the capsule. See Carol Kino, “Art: Boldly, Where No Dog Had Gone Before,”
New York Times,
November 4, 2007.

“weakened the free world” and “starved the national defense”
:
Quoted in “Rocket Race: How to Catch Up,”
New York Times,
October 20, 1957.

“a devastating blow to U.S. prestige”
:
Quoted in “Why Did U.S. Lose the Race? Critics Speak Up,”
Life
, October 21, 1957.

“plunge heavily” into the missile controversy
:
For a fine account of how
Sputnik
affected political and bureaucratic rivalries not only in the United States but also in the Soviet Union, see Matthew Brzenzinski,
Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age
(New York: Henry Holt, 2007). The quote by George Reedy can be found on page 213.

“blast the Republicans out of the water”
:
Quoted in ibid., p. 182.

putting “fiscal security ahead of national security”
:
Quoted in Christopher A. Preble, “Who Ever Believed in the ‘Missile Gap'?: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security,”
Presidential Studies Quarterly
, vol. 33, no. 4 (December 2003), p. 806.

“The United States does not have an intercontinental missile”
:
These quotes can be found in a report prepared by the CIA for the newly elected president, John F. Kennedy: “Compendium of Soviet Remarks on Missiles,” February 28, 1961 (
SECRET
/declassified), NSA.

More than twenty thousand Hungarian citizens were killed
:
Cited in Mark Kramer, “The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New Findings,”
Journal of Contemporary History
, vol. 33, no. 2 (April 1998), p. 210.

hundreds more were later executed
:
Cited in ibid., p. 211.

He was particularly irritated by a secret report
:
The report was “Deterrence & Survival in the Nuclear Age,” Security Resources Panel of the Science Advisory Committee, November 7, 1957 (
TOP SECRET
/
declassified), NSA.

“It misses the whole point to say”
:
Quoted in Robert J. Donovon, “Killian Missile Czar: Ike Picks M.I.T. Head to Rush Research, Development,”
Daily Boston Globe
, November 8, 1957.

“we have slipped dangerously behind the Soviet Union”
:
Quoted in “Excerpts from the Comments of Senator Johnson, Dr. Teller, and Dr. Bush,”
New York Times,
November 26, 1957.

“just about the grimmest warning”
:
Stewart Alsop, “We Have Been Warned,”
Washington Post and Times Herald,
November 25, 1957.

“locate
precise blast locations”
:
Wainstein, et al., “Evolution of U.S. Command and Control,” p. 218. For the science behind the Bomb Alarm System, see “Operation Dominic II, Shot Small Boy, Project Officers Report—Project 7.14: Bomb Alarm Detector Test,” Cecil C. Harvell, Defense Atomic Support Agency, April 19, 1963 (
CONFIDENTIAL/FORMERLY RESTRICTED DATA
/declassified).

The logistics of such a “ground alert”
:
For the origins and workings of SAC's ground alert, see “The SAC Alert Program, 1956–1959,” Headquarters, Strategic Air Command, January 1960
(
SECRET
/declassified), NSA, pp. 1–79, and “History of the Strategic Air Command, 1 January 1958—30 June 1958,” pp. 25–57.

a mean son of a bitch
:
In his memoir, Power belittled the military's role in peacekeeping, defending national security, and maintaining deterrence. “Putting aside all the fancy words and academic doubletalk,” he wrote, “the basic reason for having a military is to do two jobs—to kill people and to destroy the works of man.” See Thomas S. Power, with Albert A. Arnhym,
Design for Survival
(New York: Coward-McCann, 1964), p. 229.

“sort of an autocratic bastard”
:
Quoted in Coffey,
Iron Eagle,
p. 276.

The basic premise of SAC's airborne alert
: For the origins of this bold strategy, see “The SAC Alert Program, 1956–1959,” pp. 80–140, and “History of Strategic Air Command, June 1958—July 1959,” Historical Study No. 76, Volume I, Headquarters, Strategic Air Command (
SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA
/declassified), pp. 107–36.

The mission would “fail safe”
:
The idea of relying on fail-safe procedures to send bombers toward the Soviet Union was first proposed by RAND in a 1956 report. See “Protecting U.S. Power to Strike Back in the 1950's and 1960's,” A. J. Wohlstetter, F. S. Hoffman, H. S. Rowen, U.S. Air Force Project RAND, R-290, September 1, 1956, (
FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
), pp. 59–62. For SAC's adoption of fail safe, see “History of the Strategic Air Command, 1 January 1958—30 June 1958,” pp. 66–74.

“Day and night, I have a certain percentage of my command”
:
Quoted in “Alert Operations and Strategic Air Command, 1957–1991,” Office of the Historian, Headquarters Strategic Air Command, December 7, 1991, p. 7. Power made the remark at a press conference in Paris, and the boast unnerved some of America's NATO allies. See “Lloyd Defends H-Bomb Patrols by U.S.,”
Washington Post and Times Herald,
November 28, 1957.

Designers at the weapons labs had been surprised
:
Peurifoy interview. See also “A Review of the US Nuclear Weapon Safety Program—1945 to 1986,” R. N. Brodie, Sandia National Laboratories, SAND86-2955, February 1987 (
SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA
/declassified), p. 11.

“nuclear safety is not ‘absolute,' it is nonexistent”
:
“A Survey of Nuclear Weapon Safety Problems,” p. 53.