Command and Control

Sidney Drell introduced me to the issue of nuclear weapon safety, and I’m profoundly grateful for the assistance that he gave me with this book. Drell is a theoretical physicist who for many years headed the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University, a founding member of JASON, a former adviser to both the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories, and a former member of the president’s foreign intelligence advisory board. And he served, between 1990 and 1991, as the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety. Drell also introduced me to Bob Peurifoy, a former vice president at the Sandia National Laboratory — and through Peurifoy, I met Bill Stevens, the former head of nuclear safety at Sandia. More than anything else, these three men helped me understand the effort, pursued for decades, to ensure that nuclear weapons would never detonate accidentally or without proper authorization.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, I obtained some fascinating reports about nuclear weapon safety. Among the more useful were: “Acceptable Premature Probabilities for Nuclear Weapons,” Headquarters Field Command, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, FC/10570136, October 1, 1957 (SECRET/RESTRICTRED DATA/declassified); “A Survey of Nuclear Weapon Safety Problems and the Possibilities for Increasing Safety in Bomb and Warhead Design,” prepared by Sandia Corporation with the advice and assistance of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and the University of California Ernest O. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, RS 3466/26889, February 1959 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified); “Accidents and Incidents Involving Nuclear Weapons: Accidents and Incidents During the Period 1 July 1957 Through 31 March 1967,” Technical Letter 20-3, Defense Atomic Support Agency, October 15, 1967 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified); “Accident Environments,” T. D. Brumleve, chairman, Task Group on Accidents Environments Sandia Laboratories, Livermore Laboratory, SCL-DR-69-86, January 1970 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified); and “A Review of the U.S. Nuclear Weapon Safety Program—1945 to 1986,” R. N. Brodie, Sandia National Laboratories, SAND86-2955, February 1987 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified).

The best and most thorough history of nuclear weapons safety was written by Bill Stevens: “The Origins and Evolution of S2C at Sandia National Laboratories, 1949–1996,” Sandia National Laboratories, SAND99-1308, September 2001 (OFFICAL USE ONLY). It has never been released to the public, but I managed to obtain a copy — and I did not get it from Stevens. In 2011 Sandia produced an informative two-hour documentary, ALWAYS/Never: The Quest for Safety, Survivability, and Survivability that has also been classified OFFICIAL USE ONLY and never released to the public. Through an anonymous source, I got a copy of that, as well. It is absurd that these two historical works are not freely available. Neither contains classified information. And both illuminate subjects of enormous national importance.

I feel fortunate to have spent time with the late Fred Charles Iklé. Although our political views were in many ways quite different, I found him to be an eloquent, deeply patriotic opponent of nuclear war. And he spoke to me at length about his two pioneering studies on nuclear weapons safety and use control: one of them written with Gerald J. Aronson and Albert Madansky, “On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation,” research memorandum, Project RAND, USAF, Santa Monica, California, October 15, 1958, RM-2251 (CONFIDENTIAL/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified), and the other written with J. E. Hill, “The Aftermath of a Single Nuclear Detonation by Accident or Sabotage: Some Problems Affecting U.S. Policy, Military Reactions, and Public Information,” Research Memorandum, Project RAND, US Air Force, Santa Monica, California, May 8, 1959, RM-2364 (SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified). I am also grateful to Harold Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, for describing his work to assure the one-point safety of nuclear weapons, to place locks inside warheads and bombs, and to provide adequate security to American weapons deployed overseas. And I spoke to the late Robert McNamara about his determination, as secretary of defense, to make nuclear weapons safer and less vulnerable to unauthorized use.