Command and Control

Contemporary newspaper accounts were another good source of information about the Titan II and the Damascus accident. Walter Pincus, a correspondent for the Washington Post, did a particularly fine job of investigating the missile system, ignoring Air Force denials, and seeking the facts. The New York Times, the Arkansas Gazette, and the Arkansas Democrat also covered the story well. I’m grateful to Randy Dixon, the former news director at KATV-TV in Little Rock, and to Albert Kamas, an attorney in Wichita, who helped me to find local television coverage of problems with the Titan II.

The literature about nuclear weapons is vast, and I tried to read as much of it as possible. A number of books stand apart from the rest; the quality of their thinking and prose match the importance of the subject matter. John Hersey’s Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, 2003) is one of the greatest works of nonfiction ever written. Compassionate and yet tough minded, Hersey calmly describes the destruction of a city without hyperbole or sentimentality. Despite all the horrific imagery, the book is ultimately about the resilience of human beings, not their capacity for evil. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), by Richard Rhodes, is another classic. Rhodes skillfully conveys the drama and high stakes of the Manhattan Project, the clash of big egos and great minds. He also explains the science, physics, and technical details of the first nuclear weapons with admirable clarity. Much like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle, Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982) had an electrifying effect when it was first published and helped to create a social movement. The book retains its power, more than thirty years later. An extraordinary biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin — American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage Books, 2006) — uses the genius, idealism, contradictions, and hypocrisy of one man to shed light on an entire era of American history. Perhaps my favorite book about nuclear weapons is one of the most beautifully written and concise. John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974) not only has great literary merit, it also prompted engineers at Sandia to confront the possibility that terrorists might try to steal a nuclear weapon. Martin J. Sherwin and John McPhee were both professors of mine a long time ago, and the integrity of their work, the scholarship and ambition, set a high standard to which I’ve aspired ever since.

A number of other writers and historians influenced my view of how nuclear weapons affected postwar America. Barton Bernstein, a professor of history at Stanford University, has written complex and persuasive essays about President Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb. Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) shows how the euphoria that accompanied the end of the Second World War soon became a deep anxiety about nuclear war that endured for almost half a century. The Wizards of Armageddon, The Untold Story of the Small Group of Men Who Have Devised the Plans and Shaped the Policies on How to Use the Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), by Fred Kaplan, explains how RAND analysts and brilliant theorists rationalized the creation of a nuclear arsenal with thousands of weapons. In Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge & Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), Lynn Eden delves into the mentality of war planners who excluded from their calculations one of the principal effects of nuclear weapons: the capability to ignite things. Lawrence Freedman’s The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) is the finest book on the subject, clear and authoritative — although the gulf between clever strategic theories and the likely reality of nuclear war has always been vast. The best overview of how nuclear weapons have affected American society is Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Insitution Press, 1998), edited by Stephen I. Schwartz. And since 1945, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been publishing timely, informative, and reliable articles about the nuclear threat.