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

The American custodians of the Jupiters were ordered: “The Jupiters,” according to the historian Philip Nash, “continued to represent one of the gravest command-and-control problems in the Western arsenal.” McNamara was so concerned about unauthorized use of the missiles that he ordered they not be fired, even in response to a Soviet attack on Italy or Turkey. See Nash, Other Missiles of October, pp. 125–127.

“an act of aggression which pushes mankind”: “Letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy,” October 24, 1962, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume VI, Kennedy-Khrushchev Exchanges, p. 170.

“Your action desperate”: Quoted in Al Seckel, “Russell and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (Winter 1984–1985), p. 255.

“As I left the White House … on that beautiful fall evening”: Robert S. McNamara, Blundering into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 11.

almost one hundred tactical nuclear weapons on the island: See Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble,” p. 188.

“Absolutely not … the Soviet Government did raise the issue”: Quoted in Nash, Other Missiles of October, p. 157.

In order to deflect attention from the charge: Nash does a superb job of describing how the Kennedy administration covered up the truth and spread the fiction that no secret deal had been with Khrushchev. See Nash, Other Missiles of October, pp. 150–71.

“genuine peace” with the Soviets: “Text of Kennedy Speech to Class at American U.,” Washington Post and Times Herald, June 11, 1963.

And a hot line was finally created: For the history and workings of the hot line, see Desmond Ball, “Improving Communications Links Between Moscow and Washington,” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 8, no. 2 (1991), pp. 135–59; and Haraldur Þór Egilsson, “The Origins, Use and Development of Hot Line Diplomacy,” Netherlands Institute of International Relations, Issue 85 in Discussion Papers in Diplomacy, No. 85, March 2003.

“We at the embassy could only pray”: Quoted in Egilsson, “Origins, Use and Development of Hot Line,” pp. 2–3.

2,088 airborne alert missions … almost fifty thousand hours of flying time: Cited in “Strategic Air Command Operations in the Cuban Crisis,” p. 48.

The case was settled out of court: For details of the legal battle between Peter George and the creators of Fail-Saft, see Scherman, “Everbody Blows UP.”

“The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost”: The full title of the film is Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The screenplay was written by Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern. Strangelove was directed by Kubrick and released in 1964 by Columbia Pictures.

“The probability of a mechanical failure”: Sidney Hook, The Fail-Safe Fallacy (New York: Stein and Day, 1963), p. 14.

“the Communist determination to dominate the world”: The quote appears on the back cover of The Fail-Safe Fallacy.

“‘fail safe,’ not unsafe”: Roswell L. Gilpatric, “‘Strangelove’? ‘Seven Days’? Not Likely,” New York Times, May 17, 1964. A similarly reassuring article had appeared the previous year in a Sunday magazine carried by the Los Angeles Times and dozens of other large newspapers. See Donald Robinson, “How Safe Is Fail Safe? Are We in Danger of an Accidental War?” This Week Magazine, January 27, 1963.

“The very existence of the lock capability”: “Cable, To General Curtis E. LeMay, From General Thomas S. Power” (SECRET/declassified), NSA, February 17, 1964.

John H. Rubel — who supervised strategic weapon research and development: Rubel went to work at the Pentagon during the Eisenhower administration and remained there for the first few years of the Kennedy administration, eventually serving as assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering. He spoke to me at length about the trouble with the Minuteman launch procedures and his criticisms of the SIOP. For a man of ninety-three, his memory is astonishing. In a recent book — Doomsday Delayed: USAF Strategic Weapons Doctrine and SIOP-62, 1959–1962, Two Cautionary Tales (New York: Hamilton Books, 2008) — Rubel describes his first briefing on the SIOP. He calls the experience a “descent into the deep heart of darkness, a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous, and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half of the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface.” That feeling never entirely left him. Rubel also discussed nuclear weapon issues in an oral history for the John F. Kennedy Library. The entire transcript has been classified, and I’ve requested it under the Freedom of Information Act.

“an accident for which a later apology”: “The Development of the SM-80 Minuteman,” Robert F. Piper, DCAS Historical Office, Deputy Commander for Aerospace Systems, Air Force Systems Command, April 1962 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), NSA, p. 68.