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

“In that case, we have no choice”: Quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman: A Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), p. 350.

Albert Einstein read a prepared statement: See “Einstein Fears Hydrogen Bomb Might Annihilate ‘Any Life,’” Washington Post, February 13, 1950.

the “hysterical character” of the nuclear arms race: For the full text of Einstein’s statement, see “Dr. Einstein’s Address on Peace in the Atomic Era,” New York Times, February 13, 1950.

the “disastrous illusion”: Ibid.

“In the end, there beckons more and more clearly”: Ibid.

“psychological considerations”: “Effect of Civilian Morale on Military Capabilities in a Nuclear War Environment: Enclosure ‘E,’ The Relationship to Public Morale of Information About the Effects of Nuclear Warfare,” WSEG Report No. 42, Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, Joint Chiefs of Staff, October 20, 1959 (CONFIDENTIAL/declassified), p. 53.

“Weapons systems in themselves”: Ibid.

“information program”: Ibid., p. 54.

“What deters is not the capabilities”: Ibid.

“Any U.S. move toward abandoning or suspending work”: Quoted in Hans Bethe, “Sakharov’s H-Bomb,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1990, p. 9.

the transfer of eighty-nine atomic bombs: See Wainstein et al.,“Evolution of U.S. Command and Control,” p. 31: and Feaver, Guarding the Guardians, pp. 134–36.

the transfer of fifteen atomic bombs without cores: Wainstein et al., “Evolution of U.S. Command and Control,” p. 31.

personal responsibility for the nine weapons: Ibid., p. 32.

the United States had about three hundred atomic bombs: Ibid., p. 34.

more than one third of them were stored: Eighty-nine were in Great Britain, fifteen on the Coral Sea, and nine on the island of Guam.

the AEC had eleven employees: See “History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 Through September 1977,” Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Atomic Energy), February 1978 (TOP SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), p. 13.

“Our troops guarded [the atomic bombs]”: Quoted in Kohn and Harahan, Strategic Air Warfare, p. 92.

“If I were on my own and half the country”: Quoted in ibid., p. 93.

applied for a patent: Innovations in nuclear weapon design had been secretly patented since the days of the Manhattan Project. For a fascinating account of how a legal procedure originally created to ensure public knowledge became one used to deny it, see Alex Wellerstein, “Patenting the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Intellectual Property, and Technological Control,” Isis, vol. 99, no. 1 (March 2008), pp. 57–87.

“a bomb in a box”: Quoted in Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, Volume 1, p. 182.

“In addition to all the problems of fission”: Quoted in Anne Fitzpatrick, “Igniting the Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Project, 1942–1952,” (thesis, Los Alamos National Laboratory, LA-13577-T, July 1999), p. 121.

The machine was called MANIAC: The effort to create a hydrogen bomb not only depended on the use of electronic computers for high-speed calculations, it also helped to bring those machines into existence. For the inextricable link between thermonuclear weapon design and postwar computer science in the United States, see “Nuclear Weapons Laboratories and the Development of Supercomputing,” in Donald MacKenzie, Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 99–129; “Why Build Computers?: The Military Role in Computer Research,” in Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 43–73; Francis H. Harlow and N. Metropolis, “Computing and Computers: Weapons Simulation Leads to the Computer Era,” Los Alamos Science, Winter/Spring 1983, pp. 132–41. Herbert L. Anderson, “Metropolis, Monte Carlo, and the MANIAC,” Los Alamos Science, Fall 1986, pp. 96–107; N. Metropolis, “The Age of Computing: A Personal Memoir,” Daedalus, A New Era in Computation, vol. 121, no. 1, (1992), pp. 119–30; and Fitzpatrick, “Igniting the Elements,” pp. 99–173.

a mushroom cloud that rose about twenty-seven miles: See “Progress Report to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Part III: Weapons,” United States Atomic Energy Commission, June Through November, 1952 (TOP SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), p. 5.

The fireball … was three and a half miles wide: Cited in Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, Volume 3, p. 67.

more than a mile in diameter and fifteen stories deep: See Appendix A, Summary of Available Crater Data, in “Operation Castle, Project 3.2: Crater Survey, Headquarters Field Command, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, June 1955 (SECRET/FORMERLY RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), p. 60.

yield of the device was 10.4 megatons: Cited in “Operation Ivy 1952,” United States Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Tests, Nuclear Test Personnel Review, Defense Nuclear Agency, DNA 6036F, December 1, 1982, p. 17.