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

“completely safe”: The quote comes from an Air Force historian’s summary of the Air Force position. See ibid., p. 70.

an independent panel was appointed to investigate: The panel was headed by James C. Fletcher, who later became the head of NASA. For the Fletcher committee’s work, see ibid., p. 71, and Rubel, Doomsday Delayed, pp. 17–21.

a series of minor power surges: The Minuteman launch switches relied on notching motors that rotated a single notch when the proper electrical pulse was sent. The turning of the launch keys transmitted a series of specific pulses — and once they were received, the notching motors rotated the notches, completed a circuit, and launched all the missiles. But a series of small power surges could mimic those pulses and activate the motors. The motors might silently rotate, one notch at a time, over the course of days or even months, without the launch crews knowing. And then, when the final notch turned, fifty missiles would suddenly take off. Rubel interview.

“I was scared shitless”: The engineer was Paul Baran, later one of the inventors of packet switching. Quoted in Stewart Brand, “Founding Father,” Wired, March 2001.

the redesign cost about $840 million: Cited in Ball, Politics and Force Levels, p. 194.

To err on the side of safety: See Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight, pp. 276–79; and “Strategic Air Command Operations in the Cuban Crisis,” pp. 72–73.

“Mr. McNamara went on to describe the possibilities”: “State-Defense Meeting on Group I, II, and IV Papers,” p. 12.

“to fire nuclear weapons”: Ibid.

“whether or not it was Soviet launched”: Ibid.

“every effort to contact the President must be made”: The predelegation policy from the Eisenhower era was largely retained. See “Memorandum from the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy) to President Johnson,” September 23, 1964 (TOP SECRET/declassified), in U.S. State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume X, National Security Policy (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2002), p. 158.

a strategy of “Assured Destruction”: “Draft Memorandum from Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson,” December 6, 1963 (TOP SECRET/declassified), in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume VIII, National Security Policy, p. 549.

“30 % of their population, 50 % of their industrial capacity, and 150 of their cities”: Ibid.

the equivalent of 400 megatons: See Enthoven, How Much Is Enough, pp. 207–10.

McNamara said, “Thank God”: “Transcript, Interview with Robert McNamara, March 1986, Part 2 of 5,” WGBH Media Library and Archives.

The move would improve “crisis stability”: Ibid.

The new SIOP divided the “optimum mix”: For the details of SIOP-4, adopted by the Johnson administration in 1966 and still in effect when McNamara left office, see William Burr, “The Nixon Administration, the ‘Horror Strategy,’ and the Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969–1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 7, no. 3 (2005), pp. 42–47.

The number of nuclear weapons in the American arsenal: At the end of the Eisenhower administration, the United States had about 19,000 nuclear weapons. By 1967, the size of the arsenal had reached its peak: 31,255 weapons. When McNamara left office, the number had fallen slightly to 29,561. See “Declassification of Certain Characteristics of the United States Nuclear Weapon Stockpile,” U.S. Department of Energy, December 1993, and “Fact Sheet, Increasing Transparency in the U.S. Nuclear Stockpile,” U.S. Department of Defense, May 3, 2010.

the number of tactical weapons had more than doubled: In 1960 the United States deployed about 3,000 tactical weapons in Western Europe; in 1968, about 7,000. See Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, and William Burr, “Where They Were,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December 199, p. 29.

A centralized command-and-control system … had proven disastrous: The top-down management style that McNamara brought to the Vietnam War almost guaranteed an American defeat. “The men who designed the system and tried to run it were as bright a group of managers as has been produced by the defense establishment of any country at any time,” the military historian Martin van Creveld has noted, “yet their attempts to achieve cost-effectiveness led to one of the least cost-effective wars known to history.” McNamara’s office determined not only the targets that would be attacked but also set the rules for when a mission would be canceled for bad weather and specified the training level that pilots had to meet. For Van Creveld, “To study command as it operated in Vietnam is, indeed, almost enough to make one despair of human reason.” See Martin van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 232–60. The quotes can be found on page 260.

“I don’t object to its being called McNamara’s war”: “‘McNamara’s War’ Tag OKd by Defense Chief,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1964.