Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

At first, Eisenhower told the Joint Chiefs that he was “very fearful of having written papers on this matter.” Later, he agreed to sign a predelegation order, insisting that its existence never be revealed. “It is in the U.S. interest to maintain the atmosphere that all authority [to use nuclear weapons] stays with the U.S. President without delegation,” he stressed. Eisenhower’s order was kept secret from Congress, the American people, and NATO allies. It made sense, as a military tactic. But it also introduced an element of uncertainty to the decision-making process. The SIOP was centralized, inflexible, and mechanistic. The predelegation order was exactly the opposite. It would rely on individual judgments, made in the heat of battle, thousands of miles from the White House. Under certain circumstances, a U.S. commander under attack with conventional weapons would be allowed to respond with nuclear weapons. Eisenhower knew all too well that delegating presidential authority could mean losing control of whether, how, and why a nuclear war would be fought. He understood the contradictions at the heart of America’s command-and-control system — but couldn’t find a way to resolve them during his last few weeks in office.

Breaking In

Colonel John T. Moser and his wife had just finished dinner, and they were getting ready to leave the house for a concert, when the phone rang.

There’s a problem at Launch Complex 374-7, the controller said. It could be a fire.

Moser told his wife to go without him, put on his uniform, got in his car, and headed to the command post. They lived on the base, and the drive didn’t take long. On the way, Moser radioed ahead, telling the controller to assemble the Missile Potential Hazard Team. It was six forty in the evening, about ten minutes after a mysterious white cloud had appeared in the silo.

The command post of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing resembled an executive boardroom, with a long conference table in the middle, communications equipment, and a chalkboard. It could accommodate twenty-five or thirty people. Moser was the wing commander, and when he arrived at the post, it was still largely empty, and the status of the missile, unclear. The sprays were on, dumping water into the silo. Stage 1 fuel pressure was falling, while the oxidizer pressure was rising. Flashing red lights in the control center at 4–7 warned there was a fuel leak, an oxidizer leak, a fire in the silo — three things that couldn’t be happening at once. Adding to the confusion, Captain Mazzaro and Lieutenant Childers, the crew commander and deputy commander at the site, had both called the command post, using separate lines, one mentioning a fuel leak, the other a fire. Now Mazzaro was on the speakerphone, reporting the missile’s tank pressures. His crew was going through checklists, trying to make sense of it all.

Moser was a great believer in checklists. After graduating from Franklin & Marshall College in 1955, he’d joined the Strategic Air Command. Two years later he became the navigator of a KC-97 Stratotanker, an aircraft that refueled B-47 bombers midair. The Stratotanker was a propeller plane, and the B-47 a jet, prone to stalling at low speeds. The two had to rendezvous at a precise location, with the bomber flying behind and slightly below the tanker. At an altitude of eighteen thousand feet, they would connect via a hollow steel boom and fly in unison for twenty minutes, entering a shallow dive so that the tanker could keep up with the bomber. Aerial refueling was a delicate, often dangerous procedure. The crew of the Stratotanker had to coordinate every step carefully, not just with the crew of the B-47 but also with one another. Spontaneous or improvised maneuvers would not be appreciated. Moser later flew as a navigator on KC-135 tankers that refueled B-52s during airborne alerts. The success of these missions depended on checklists. Every move had to be standardized and predictable, as two large jets flew about forty feet apart, linked by a boom, one plane carrying thermonuclear weapons, the other unloading a thousand gallons of jet fuel a minute, day or night, through air turbulence and rough weather.