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

“cut off from normal life”: The quote comes from LeMay’s memoir. Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), p. 32.

a particular form of courage: American bomber crews had one of the most stressful and dangerous assignments of the Second World War. Remaining in formation meant flying directly through antiaircraft fire; breaking formation was grounds for court-martial. For the pressures of the job and the need for teamwork, see Mike Worden, Rise of the Fighter Generals: The Problem of Air Force Leadership, 1945–1982 (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1998), pp. 8–11.

more than half would be killed in action: The typical tour of duty for an American bomber crew was twenty-five missions. A study of 2,051 crew members who flew bombing missions over Europe found that 1,295 were killed or declared missing in action. The study is cited in Bernard C. Nalty, John F. Shiner, and George M. Watson, With Courage: The U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1994), p. 179.

“Japan would burn if we could get fire on it”: The prediction was made by General David A. Burchinal, who flew in one of the early firebomb attacks on Japan. Quoted in Richard H. Kohn and Joseph P. Harahan, eds., Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals Curtis E. LeMay, Leon W. Johnson, David A. Burchinal, and Jack J. Catton (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1988), p. 61.

“I’ll tell you what war is about”: Quoted in Warren Kozak, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2009), p. xi.

“We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people”: Although more Japanese were most likely killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than in Tokyo, LeMay’s remark succinctly conveys his view of nuclear weapons. See LeMay, Mission with LeMay, p. 387.

“about the darkest night in American military aviation history”: Ibid., p. 433.

“I can’t afford to differentiate”: Quoted in Kohn and Harahan, Strategic Air Warfare, p. 98.

“Every man a coupling or a tube”: LeMay, Mission with LeMay, p. 496.

“we are at war now”: Ibid., p. 436.

San Francisco was bombed more than six hundred times: Cited in ibid.

“a single instrument: … directed, controlled”: The quote, from an article by air power theorists Colonel Jerry D. Page and Colonel Royal H. Roussel, can be found in Michael H. Armacost, The Politics of Weapons Innovation: The Thor-Jupiter Controversy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 101.

Louis Slotin was tickling the dragon: For Slotin’s accident and its aftermath, see Stewart Alsop and Ralph E. Lapp, “The Strange Death of Louis Slotin,” in Charles Neider, ed., Man Against Nature (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), pp. 8–18; Clifford T. Honicker, “America’s Radiation Victims: The Hidden Files,” New York Times, November 19, 1989; Richard E. Malenfant, “Lessons Learned from Early Criticality Accidents,” Los Alamos National Laboratory, submitted for Nuclear Criticality Technology Safety Project Workshop, Gaithersburg, MD, May 14–15, 1996; and Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (New York: Dial Press, 1999), pp. 184–88.

“Slotin was that safety device”: “Report on May 21 Accident at Pajarito Laboratory,” May 28, 1946, in Los Alamos, “Lessons Learned from Early Criticality Accidents.”

David Lilienthal visited Los Alamos for the first time: For the disarray at Los Alamos and the absence of atomic bombs, see Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume 2, 1947–1952 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), pp. 30, 47–48; May et al., “History of Strategic Arms Competition,” Pt. 1, p. 2; Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War 1945–1950 (New York: Vintage, 1982), pp. 196–99; Necah Stewart Furman, Sandia National Laboratories: The Postwar Decade (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), pp. 233–36; and James L. Abrahamson and Paul H. Carew, Vanguard of American Atomic Deterrence: The Sandia Pioneers, 1946–1949 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), p. 120.

“one of the saddest days of my life”: Quoted in Herken, Winning Weapon, p. 196.

“The substantial stockpile of atom bombs”: Quoted in Furman, Sandia National Laboratories, p. 235.