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

the groundburst of that 4-megaton bomb in Goldsboro: The amount of fallout would not have been as great as that produced by the far more powerful Bravo test. But the Goldsboro bomb could have spread deadly radioactive material across a large area of the northeastern United States.

“pay any price, bear any burden”: “Text of Kennedy’s Inaugural Outlining Policies on World Peace and Freedom,” New York Times, January 21, 1961.

The story scared the hell out of him: Interview with Robert S. McNamara.

A B-47 carrying a Mark 39 bomb had caught fire: Peurifoy and Stevens interviews. See also Airmunitions Letter, June 23, 1960, p. 37, and Maggelet and Oskins, Broken Arrow, pp. 113–18.

A B-47: … caught fire on the runway at Chennault Air Force base: See Airmunitions Letter, June 23, 1960, p. 53.

In the skies above Hardinsburg, Kentucky: See Airmunitions Letter, Headquarters, Ogden Air Material Area, No. 136-11–56B, June 29, 1960 (SECTET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified, pp. 13–46, Maggelet and Oskins, Broken Arrow, pp. 129–32.

a “crunching sound”: Quoted Maggelet and Oskins, Broken Arrow, p. 132.

At an air defense site in Jackson Township: For details of the BOMARC accident, see “Report of Special Weapons Incident … Bomarc Site, McGuire AFB, New Jersey,” 2702nd Explosive Ornance Disposal Squad, United States Air Force, Griffiss Air Force Base, New York, June 13, 1960 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA declassified); Airmunitions Letter, No. 136-11-56C, Headquarters, Ogden Air Material Area, September 8, 1960 (SECRETRESTRICTED DATA/declassified; and George Barrett, “Jersey Atom Missile Fire Stirs Brief Radiation Fear,” New York Times, June 8, 1960.

An Air Force security officer called the state police: See “Jersey Atom Missile Fire.”

Fallout from the BOMARC’s 10-kiloton warhead: See “Civil Defense Alerted in City,” New York Times, June 8, 1960.

The accidents in North Carolina and Texas worried Robert McNamara the most: McNamara interview. See also “Memorandum of Conversation (Uncleared), Subject: State-Defense Meeting on Group I, II, and IV Papers,” January 26, 1963 (TOP SECRET/declassified), NSA, p. 12.

“bankruptcy in both strategic policy and in the force structure”: “Robert S. McNamara Oral History Interview—4/4/1964,” John F. Kennedy Oral History Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, p. 5.

“The Communists will have a dangerous lead”: Quoted in Desmond Ball, Politics and Force Levels: The Strategic Missile Program of the Kennedy Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 18. Although Ball’s work was written before the declassification of many important national security documents from the Kennedy era, the book’s central arguments are still convincing. I also learned a great deal about the Kennedy administration’s aims from How Much Is Enough? 1961–1969: Shaping Defense Program (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1971), by Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith. Enthoven was one of McNamara’s most brilliant advisers. For Kennedy’s attacks on the strategic thinking of the Eisenhower administration, see 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), pp. 801–26.

“We have been driving ourselves into a corner”: Quoted in William W. Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 40.

General Maxwell D. Taylor’s book, The Uncertain Trumpet: Taylor argued that the United States needed “a capability to react across the entire spectrum of possible challenge, for coping with anything from general atomic war to infiltrations and aggressions.” He was later a major architect of the Vietnam War. See Maxell D. Taylor, The Uncertain Trumpet (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 6.

“The record of the Romans made clear”: “Summary of President Kennedy’s Remarks to the 496th Meeting of the National Security Council,” January 18, 1962 (TOP SECRET/declassified), in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume VIII, National Security Policy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996), p. 240.

The chief of naval operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, warned: Western Europe would suffer radiological effects from a massive American attack on the Soviet Union, but South Korea was likely to receive even worse fallout. See “Chief of Naval Operations Cable to Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet, Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet, Commander-in-Chief U.S. Naval Forces Europe,” November 20, 1960 (TOP SECRET/declassified), NSA, p. 1.

“whiz kids,” “defense intellectuals,” “the best and the brightest”: David Halberstam’s book on this highly self-confident group remains authoritative: The Best and the Brightest (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).