Eric Schlosser is an investigative journalist drawn to subjects neglected by most reporters. His first book, Fast Food Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), which explored the history and influence of the US fast food industry, was translated into more than 20 languages and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. Schlosser co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, released in 2006. His second bestseller, Reefer Madness (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), investigated the lucrative underground economy of marijuana, migrant labor, and pornography in the United States.
For his latest book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (Penguin, 2013), Schlosser focused his considerable muckraking skills on a subject that gets even less attention than burgers or the US black market: nuclear weapons. A historian by training—he studied American history at Princeton, and earned a graduate degree in British imperial history from Oxford—Schlosser brings this weighty subject to life by taking readers inside the gripping drama of the Damascus Accident: the struggle to prevent a Titan II missile topped with a powerful nuclear warhead from exploding in Damascus, Arkansas, in 1980.
Schlosser began his career as a journalist with the Atlantic Monthly and quickly became an award-winning investigative reporter. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, the Nation, and other publications. He is a playwright and film producer as well as a journalist.
Readers who are familiar with Schlosser's earlier work will not be surprised that his persistent digging unearthed reams of once-secret documents, but they may be surprised to learn that he has favorable things to say about polarizing figures such as President Ronald Reagan and General Curtis E. LeMay, who headed the Strategic Air Command for 13 years before becoming the Air Force Chief of Staff in 1961.
The Bulletin spoke with Schlosser about his new book and his research on the history of efforts to protect nuclear weapons from theft, sabotage, and accidental detonation.
BAS: Why did you choose to focus on the Damascus Accident in your new book?
Schlosser: The story of the Damascus Accident fits perfectly with the larger themes of the book: the difficulty in managing complex technological systems, and the ways in which inadvertence and trivial events can set off potential disaster. And it's also an incredible story. Terrific books have been written about J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller and the Manhattan Project and Cold War diplomacy. By telling the story of the Damascus Accident in such detail and by telling the story of safety engineers at the Sandia National Laboratories, I tried to write more of a history from the bottom up. The book includes Cold War stories about people from whom we haven't heard much: the ordinary enlisted men, the bomber crews, and missile launch officers.
BAS: What was the biggest surprise for you during this huge investigation?
Schlosser: I thought I knew a lot about nuclear weapons, because I had a longstanding interest in the subject; I studied game theory and nuclear strategy in college. One of the most important things I learned [while researching the book] was how profoundly ignorant I was about the subject. An extraordinary amount of important information was kept from the American people, which allowed a handful of policy makers to make important decisions in secret.
BAS: Which parts of your book will be of greatest interest to Bulletin readers, and will go the furthest toward increasing their knowledge of nuclear weapons?
Schlosser: The Bulletin has covered nuclear weapons safety issues in the past, particularly around the time of the Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety of the House Armed Services Committee, chaired by Sidney D. Drell, from 1990 to 1991. But I managed to obtain some fascinating documents on the subject through the Freedom of Information Act that haven't been seen before. And I only scratched the surface. I recently spoke in Albuquerque, and there were a lot of people from the weapons labs in the audience. One of the main criticisms of my book was that I'd committed errors of omission—that there were many other nuclear weapons incidents that I didn't describe, and that, in particular, the Army's handling of its tactical weapons in Europe didn't receive enough scrutiny. But there's been excessive secrecy around this subject. Some of the accidents that I wrote about were 50, even 60 years ago. They involved weapons systems that haven't been in service for decades. And the Soviet Union no longer exists. By comparing different documents on the same subject—with material excised by different government censors—I could often determine what had been blacked out. And most of the time that information had been excised not to protect national security but to protect national security bureaucracies from embarrassment. Whether the information pertains to nuclear weapons accidents or command-and-control issues, it's vital for any meaningful debate about the future of America's nuclear arsenal.
BAS: Are you at all worried that some people may think of this book, and the incidents described in it, as a thing of the past?
Schlosser: My academic background is history. As William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” The Soviet Union is gone, but many of the old Cold War challenges still exist, especially with clear command and control. The always-never dilemma still plagues us: The Pentagon wants to deploy nuclear weapons that are always available for immediate use—but will never be stolen, used without proper authorization, or detonated by accident. The administrative and technical means necessary to ensure the always part of the equation often conflict with those necessary to ensure the never. The Senate hearings on cyber security and cyber attacks last spring were quite sobering. The head of the US Strategic Command testified that he feels confident our nuclear command-and-control system is secure from cyber attack but “we don't know what we don't know.” We know even less about the security of the Russian and Chinese command-and-control systems and their vulnerability to cyber attack.
Unfortunately, there are good reasons for remaining concerned about the safety and reliability of our system; our Minuteman III missile wings continue to fail inspections. And whereas the weapons themselves are much safer than they were during the 1970s and 1980s—thanks largely to Bob Peurifoy and the other engineers at Sandia who fought for modern safety devices—the weapons systems to which they're attached are aging, complex, and, particularly in the Air Force's case, not being managed as they should be managed. The Titan II missile, the weapon at the heart of my book's narrative, was due for retirement in the late 1960s and yet was still on alert until 1987. And when you think of the age of B-52 bombers today, of Minuteman IIIs and their launch complexes, it's concerning. We haven't built a B-52 since 1962, and some of the Minuteman complexes are half a century old. So, sadly, I think the book is all too relevant.
BAS: Did you conclude that a major nuclear weapons accident is inevitable?
Schlosser: I'm not apocalyptic, and I don't think we're all doomed. But there's no question that the United States came close, on a number of occasions, to having our own weapons detonated inadvertently on our own soil. And on a number of occasions, we came alarmingly close to a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. I think the longer there are nuclear weapons in the world, and the more weapons there are, the more likely there's going to be a catastrophic accident—especially when you consider countries like Pakistan and India and Russia. I'm quite critical of how the United States has managed its nuclear arsenal. But we invented this technology, we perfected it, our control systems are probably the best in the world—and it's unsettling how many problems we've had. Other countries, with less experience managing complex technological systems, are likely to have even bigger problems.
BAS: Has anyone put together a comprehensive list of near misses?
Schlosser: I've never seen one. The list released by the Department of Defense in the 1980s is unreliable. It describes 32 “Broken Arrows,” defined as weapons accidents that could cause serious threat to the public—and yet many of the accidents on the list involved weapons that weren't fully assembled. A good many incidents that don't appear on the Pentagon's list posed a real threat of an accidental detonation. They were mundane accidents: someone walks past a missile and notices there's smoke coming out of the warhead; lightning strikes; short circuits; cases in which bombs were offloaded from aircraft improperly, so that they were armed. There were all kinds of ways that stray electricity could trigger a detonation—especially with the rudimentary nature of 1950s and early-1960s technology. You could argue, “Well, the system worked. Our technical competence and the training and heroism of our personnel, they all worked. There wasn't an accidental detonation.” But you wouldn't want to repeat the Damascus Accident too many times to see whether that warhead would detonate. People with firsthand experience in this field over many years say that we avoided an accidental detonation through a combination of technical proficiency, administrative skill, personal heroism, and pure luck. When you think about the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that the United States has built, and that no major city has been destroyed since Nagasaki, you wonder how long that good fortune will last.
BAS: You have 123 pages of endnotes and bibliographic references in your 632-page book. Why did you feel the need to document everything so thoroughly?
Schlosser: The subject of nuclear weapons safety has been cloaked in secrecy for decades—and not just secrecy but a great deal of government disinformation and misinformation and outright lying. I wanted my work to embody a completely different spirit. People who read the book are under no obligation to look at the endnotes or the bibliography, but I provided a comprehensive guide to my sources in the spirit of transparency.
BAS: Had the government documents that you obtained already been declassified?
Schlosser: Some had, some hadn't. Most of the key documents on nuclear weapons safety were declassified at my request. And I want to give a shout-out to the National Security Archive, which has done an incredible job of battling official secrecy and making available thousands and thousands of pages of classified documents from the Cold War era.
BAS: And if you had broadened the scope of your request?
Schlosser: I still have information requests pending, and additional requests that I plan to make. Once I obtain documents from the government, I look through the bibliographies and endnotes of those documents, and then request documents mentioned in them. There's an enormous amount of information that has not yet been made public and really must be made public. There's no reason for most of this information to be kept secret at this point. There's no reason for the government to take years deciding whether to release it. The Cold War is over. The Soviet Union's gone. Most of the nuclear weapons that we built are no longer deployed.
BAS: Is there still a possibility that “a big misunderstanding” could lead one of the world's nuclear states to launch a nuclear weapon?
Schlosser: Statistically speaking, the odds are low; but the negative consequences would be unimaginably high. As long as you have nuclear weapons fully assembled, there's a risk that one will detonate inadvertently. And as long as you have nuclear weapons systems on alert, ready to be used on short notice, there's a risk that one of those will be used inadvertently.
BAS: Is a nuclear weapons accident more likely than an intentional use?
Schlosser: In the case of the US arsenal, absolutely yes. General James Kowalski, the former head of the Global Strike Command, recently said that the greatest risk to the US strategic force is “an accident … [someone] doing something stupid.” The Minot Air Force Base incident of 2007 was extraordinary. Defense Secretary Robert Gates read the riot act to the Air Force and fired its two top officials after they lost control, for a day and a half, of a half-dozen thermonuclear warheads. Three years later, the 898th Munitions Squadron at Kirtland Air Force Base—in charge of about 2,000 nuclear weapons stored there—was decertified. And six years later, serious safety violations are still being committed by Minuteman launch crews. Like Kowalski, I am concerned about an accident, about someone doing something stupid.
BAS: What are your recommendations for how to make nuclear weaponry safer and more secure? If you could change one thing immediately, what would it be?
Schlosser: I would spare no expense in the training of everyone involved in the nuclear enterprise and in the maintenance of our nuclear weapons systems. Much of the equipment is aging and obsolete, and the morale among the personnel who command and manage our nuclear arsenal seems poor. The real aim of my book isn't to push any specific change in nuclear policy. I wrote the book to remind people that thousands of these weapons are out there, waiting to be used—to spark some sort of public debate about nuclear weapons. Why do we have them? How many do we need? Where should they be aimed? What's the theory behind their use? We need to be discussing these things and not just allow fundamental decisions about nuclear weapons policy to be made in secret. All three legs of the nuclear triad are aging—and before billions of dollars are committed to their replacements, to new missiles and bombers and subs, we need to address, head-on, the age-old question: How much is enough? I also think there need to be meaningful arms control talks, not just between the United States and Russia but also with China, India, Pakistan. There need to be real discussions about how to reduce the size of nuclear arsenals worldwide.
BAS: You're not pushing a particular policy, but do you see abolition as an unrealistic goal?
Schlosser: No, I don't. It's been the stated goal of this country since the end of World War II. That question is sort of like asking, “Do you see peace on Earth as an unrealistic goal?” I don't see the abolition of nuclear weapons being achieved next week or next year. But nuclear weapons are the most dangerous machines ever invented. They are useful mainly for killing civilians. And it would be wonderful to reach a level of civilization and compassion where they're not part of the world order. Slavery was a widely accepted, commonplace institution for most of human history—and now it's considered a despicable violation of human rights. As a result, slavery has been largely abolished. Without being too utopian, too idealistic, or too absurd, I think we must have the abolition of nuclear weapons as our ultimate goal. But short of that ideal, anything that can be done to reduce the number of countries possessing nuclear weapons, anything that can be done to reduce the number of those weapons, will lower the odds of some city, somewhere, getting destroyed.
BAS: Experts often say that nuclear weapons have no actual purpose other than to serve as a deterrent. Don't we need them for that one purpose, though?
Schlosser: That argument is currently being made in the United Kingdom, where there's a debate about whether to replace the current fleet of Trident-missile-carrying submarines. For a weapon to serve as a credible deterrent, people have to believe you're actually willing to use it. And then the question arises: What are you going to use it for? The British government is reluctant to discuss where its Trident missiles might be aimed or under what conditions they might be used. In Great Britain, and to a certain extent here in the United States, many argue that “deliberate ambiguity” about nuclear targeting and strategy is essential for a credible deterrent. But my next book is on prisons, and when it comes to crime and punishment, many experts make exactly the opposite argument. For a prison sentence to serve as an effective deterrent, criminologists argue, a potential offender has to know in advance exactly what's going to happen if he or she violates the law. A vague deterrent is considered a meaningless one. Bob Peurifoy—a former vice president at Sandia, a crusader for nuclear weapons safety, and one of the heroes of my book—says, “Let's give our potential enemies the exact coordinates where the warheads will land if they dare to attack us.” There's an intellectual honesty and consistency to that argument. A lot of the deliberate ambiguity about nuclear strategy is simply a means of keeping the public in the dark and avoiding any vigorous debate.
BAS: How would military leaders feel about Peurifoy's idea?
Schlosser: Well, throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union knew more about US targeting policies and war plans than the American people did, but a great deal has changed since the Soviet Union collapsed. Throughout the Cold War, there was this extraordinary inter-service rivalry over nuclear weapons in the American military. Nuclear weapons were considered not only modern weapons but elite weapons. The Air Force and the Navy fought bitterly over access to them, and even the Army wanted its fair share. At one point, the Army said it needed 151,000 nuclear weapons. Today, you find almost the opposite; the Army doesn't have any nuclear weapons and doesn't really want any. The Air Force doesn't really seem to care about them anymore; serving as a Minuteman launch officer is considered a career dead end. Only the Navy's traditional role of maintaining a second-strike, retaliatory force, based on submarines, seems to have relevance. Today it's hard to make a case for how nuclear weapons are effective as weapons—in the age of smart bombs and precision-guided munitions—unless you really want to kill a lot of civilians.
BAS: So nuclear weapons no longer have much cachet?
Schlosser: The American military, to its credit, tries as hard as it can to avoid civilian casualties. After a nuclear detonation, there's going to be collateral damage and fallout. And so nuclear weapons now have little utility in warfare, but they still have enormous symbolic meaning. They've become a status symbol among nations. And I do think that they had a deterrent effect during the Cold War. But the role they play in deterrence today is fundamentally different from the role that they played in 1958 or 1963. The world has changed, but there hasn't been a reexamination of why we have nuclear weapons in the 21st century, what they're for, and how they'll be used.
BAS: How have people in the antinuclear movement reacted to your book?
Schlosser: I think some have been upset with me. In the book, I have some kind things to say about people who played central roles in the nuclear enterprise. For some activists, anyone who's been involved in weapons design is a war criminal. I tried to write something complex, not simplistic. But, ultimately, I hope my book shows the fundamental insanity of this entire system. Command and Control may not be politically correct in every way, but it's as accurate and as truthful as I could make it. The book isn't a diatribe; it's not a rant; it's as calmly factual as possible. To me, the facts speak for themselves—and they are kind of mind-blowing.
BAS: Writing a book is always a difficult undertaking, but you have written other books before. Was this one particularly hard?
Schlosser: This book was the hardest thing, professionally, that I've ever done. It was very difficult to get most of the information. It was a challenge to get many people to speak with me. It was hard to assemble the details of the Damascus Accident. I tried to tell the story from as many perspectives as possible. When a hundred people see an accident, you get a hundred different views about what actually happened. The Air Force accident investigation report was really useful, because it contained testimony that was pretty much contemporaneous. But there were also inaccuracies in it. I had to balance eyewitness accounts with the official version of events and keep in mind that vivid memories can be unreliable, 30 years after an event. And there's an enormous literature on nuclear weapons. I felt like I had to master as much of it as I could. I found a lot of the technical information to be highly complex. First I had to understand it, and then I had to try to write about it clearly. So this book was a real challenge for me. But I care deeply about the subject matter, about the people who risked their lives and their careers trying to prevent nuclear catastrophes. And it's a great privilege to be able to write about something you really care about.
BAS: You did all of the research yourself?
Schlosser: Yes, I did. Which was slightly insane. It helped me to get a broad, wide-ranging view of the subject. One of the great dangers throughout the Cold War was the US government's system of compartmentalized secrecy. When some of the people whom I interviewed read the book, they were amazed to learn things that they weren't permitted to know. The Air Force guys weren't told about nuclear weapons safety problems, and the weapons designers weren't informed about how the weapons were being handled in the field. All of this made everything more dangerous than it needed to be. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has played a crucial role in bringing information about nuclear weapons to the general public. There needs to be a renaissance in interest in nuclear issues, because right now it's just so off the radar it's beyond belief, and yet it's vitally important. I don't know whether I'm going to achieve it with my work, but I'm trying.
BAS: What made this a good time to tackle the subject of nuclear weapons?
Schlosser: When Fast Food Nation came out in 2001, I couldn't get a book contract from any of the big New York publishers. The question I kept being asked was, “Who cares about fast food? Who wants to read about it?” Well, I'm much more interested in writing things that the mainstream media isn't dealing with than in writing the 30th book about the Kardashians. I think that the two great existential threats that we face right now are global warming and nuclear weapons. Global warming is already a big topic of conversation in the United States, thanks, at the moment, to the misinformation being spread by well-funded corporate groups. But there isn't really a national discussion about nuclear weapons. And we need one, desperately. In Command and Control, I set out to tell what I think is an incredible story, full of personal heroism. But I also wanted to remind people that these weapons are still out there, ready to be used.
