Command and Control

Although I did a great deal of research for this book, I also benefited enormously from the writing, expertise, and firsthand experience of others. I’ve tried in these notes to acknowledge my debt to the many people whose work influenced mine. For the past six decades, the intense official secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons has presented an unusual challenge to journalists and scholars who write about the subject. Sometimes the only thing more difficult than obtaining accurate information is demonstrating to readers that it’s true. I have done my best here not to cite or rely solely upon anonymous sources. Nevertheless, over the years, I’ve spoken to countless people who formulated or carried out America’s nuclear weapon policies, including three former secretaries of defense, presidential advisers, heads of the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories, physicists and engineers once employed at those labs, Pentagon officials, Strategic Air Command generals, bomber pilots and navigators, missile crew commanders, missile repairmen and bomb squad technicians trained to handle weapons of mass destruction. Most of their names never appear in this book. And yet what they told me helped to ensure its accuracy. Any factual errors in these pages are entirely my own.

One of the primary sources for my narrative of the Damascus accident was a three-volume report prepared by the Air Force: “Report of Missile Accident Investigation: Major Missile Accident, 18–19 September 1980, Titan II Complex 374-7, Assigned to 308th Strategic Missile Wing, Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas,” conducted at Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas, and Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, December 14–19, 1980, Eighth Air Force Missile Investigation Board, December 1980. When I contacted the Air Force for a copy of this report, I was told that the Air Force no longer possessed one. I later found a copy among the congressional papers of Dan Glickman at Wichita State University. I am very grateful to Mary Nelson, a program consultant in the department of special collections there, who arranged for the report to be photocopied for me. Other copies, I subsequently learned, are held at the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona, and at the Jacksonville Museum of Military History in Jacksonville, Arkansas.

The accident report contains more than a thousand pages of maps, charts, photographs, analysis, and testimony from ninety-two witnesses. The material was invaluable for reconstructing what happened that night in Damascus. Two other official reports on the Titan II were much less reliable but still worth reading, if only for what they failed to say about the missile: “Assessment Report: Titan II LGM 25 C, Weapon Condition and Safety,” prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee and House Armed Services Committee, May 1980; and “Titan II Weapon System: Review Group Report,” December 1980.

David H. Pryor, who was a U.S. senator from Arkansas in 1980, helped me to understand the state’s political culture at the time and shared his long-standing concerns about the Titan II. One of his former aides, James L. “Skip” Rutherford III, described his own investigation of the missile’s safety and his secret meetings with airmen from Little Rock Air Force Base. I tracked down one of those airmen, who spoke to me, off the record, and confirmed Rutherford’s account. At the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, I found many useful memos and documents about the Titan II in the David H. Pryor Papers, especially in Group II, Boxes 244–84.