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

the computers at the NORAD headquarters: For the November false alarm, see “NORAD’s Missile Warning System: What Went Wrong?” Comptroller General of the United States, Report to the Chairman, Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Comptroller General of the United States, MASAD-81-30, May 15, 1981; “Report on Recent False Alerts from the Nation’s Missile Attack Warning System,” U.S. Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Ninety-sixth Congress, First Session, October 9, 1980; and Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 225–31.

about four times a day: There were 1,544 “routine” missile display conferences in 1979. Cited in “Report on Recent False Alerts,” p. 4.

triggered by forest fires, volcanic eruptions: Ibid.

a Threat Assessment Conference … once or twice a week: Ibid., p. 5.

a Missile Attack Conference had never been held: Ibid.

A technician had put the wrong tape into one of NORAD’s computers: According to a subsequent investigation, “test scenario data was inadvertently fed into the online missile warning computers which generated false alarms.” One could also argue that it was right tape — inserted in the wrong place at the wrong time. See “NORAD’s Warning System: What Went Wrong?” p. 13. See also A. O. Sulzberger, Jr., “Error Alerts U.S. Forces to a False Missile Attack, New York Times, November 11, 1979.

The computers at NORAD had been causing problems: See “NORAD’s Information Processing Improvement Program — Will It Enhance Mission Capability?” Controller General of the United States, Report to the Congress, September 21, 1978.

the Honeywell 6060 computers were already obsolete: See “NORAD’s Warning System: What Went Wrong?” p. 8.

despite protests from the head of NORAD that they lacked sufficient processing power: See “NORAD’s Information Processing Improvement Program,” pp. 13–14.

“due to the lack of readily available spare parts”: Ibid., p. 7.

Many of the parts hadn’t been manufactured by Honeywell for years: Ibid.

twenty-three security officers … stripped of their security clearances: See “AF Guards Disciplined in Drug Probe,” Washington Post, January 17, 1980.

“FALSE ALARM ON ATTACK SENDS FIGHTERS INTO SKY”: See “False Alarm on Attack Sends Fighters into Sky,” New York Times, November 10, 1979.

Zbigniew Brzezinski … was awakened by a phone call: For the details of Brzezinski’s early-morning call, see Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 114–15. Gates tells the story well but conflates the cause of the June false alarm with that of the previous one in November. I tried to confirm the story with Brzezinski, who declined to be interviewed for this book. But he did discuss the incident with Admiral Stansfield Turner, the director of the CIA at the time. See Stansfield Turner, Caging the Nuclear Genie: An American Challenge for Global Security (New York: Westview Press, 1997), p. 17.

2,200 missiles were heading toward the United States: See Gates, From the Shadows, p. 114; Turner, Caging the Nuclear Genie, p. 17; Sagan, Limits of Safety, pp. 231–32.

a defective computer chip in a communications device: See “Report on Recent False Alerts,” p. 7.

The faulty computer chip had randomly put the number 2: Ibid.

at a cost of forty-six cents: Cited in “Missile Alerts Traced to 46 Item,” New York Times, June 18, 1980.

Bob Peurifoy became concerned: Peurifoy interview.

“It’s our stockpile. We think it’s safe.”: Peurifoy interview. Stevens confirmed that response.

“the magnitude of the safety problems”: This quote comes from a document that Peurifoy used during briefings on nuclear weapon safety at Sandia. On a single page, he assembled quotations from the Department of Defense, the Air Force, and others asserting that the American nuclear stockpile was safe. The original sources, from which the quotes have been drawn, are on file at Sandia. I feel confident that these quotes are accurate. On page 116 of “Origins and Evolution of S2C,” Stevens writes that the Pentagon’s response to the Fowler Letter “can be characterized as mostly delaying actions in the guise of requiring safety studies of each of the weapons involved.”

“The safety advantages gained by retrofitting”: Quoted in “Sandia briefing document.”

Modification of any current operational aircraft: Quoted in ibid.

a six-digit code with a million possible combinations: See “Command and Control Systems for Nuclear Weapons,” p. 40.

the Air Force put a coded switch in the cockpit: Ibid., p. 12.

The combination … was the same at every Minuteman site: Bruce G. Blair first disclosed this fact in 2004, and the easy-to-remember combination was confirmed for me by a Sandia engineer.

cost … was about $100,000 per weapon: Peurifoy interview.

cost about $360 million: Ibid.