Command and Control

Remarkably little has been published about nuclear weapon accidents, and I was glad to find two good books that addressed the potential dangers: Nuclear Weapons Safety and the Common Defense, by Joel Larus (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1967), and Shaun R. Gregory’s The Hidden Cost of Deterrence: Nuclear Weapon Accidents (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1990). Both were written, however, without access to the accident reports that have been released through the Freedom of Information Act since the end of the Cold War. Two retired Air Force nuclear technicians, Michael H. Maggelet and James C. Oskins, have done a superlative job of obtaining information about weapon accidents from their former employer. And they’ve made documents on the subject available, largely unedited, in a couple of books that I found extremely useful: Broken Arrow: The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents (Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2007), and Broken Arrow, Volume II: A Disclosure of Significant U.S., Soviet, and British Nuclear Weapon Incidents and Accidents, 1945–2008 (Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2010). Maggelet and Oskins don’t exaggerate the danger of the many bomber crashes and fires that involved nuclear weapons. In fact, they tend to understate the actual risk of an accidental detonation. But what they’ve uncovered is remarkable.

One of the most eye-opening documents that I read for this book was a study prepared for Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger: “The Evolution of U.S. Strategic Command and Control and Warning 1945–1972,” written by L. Wainstein, C. D. Cremeans, J. K. Moriarity, and J. Ponturo, Study S-467, International and Social Studies Division, Institute for Defense Analyses, June 1975 (TOP SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified). It gave me the unmistakable feeling that, during the Cold War, things were never fully under control. Another fine study commissioned at about the same time—“History of the Strategic Arms Competition, 1945–1972,” written by Ernest R. May, John D. Steinbruner, and Thomas W. Wolfe, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Historical Office, March 1981 (TOP SECRET/RESTRICTED DATA/declassified) — strongly reinforced that sense.

A number of articles and books on command and control, written before those two studies were declassified, conveyed how hard it would be to fight a limited nuclear war or pause one to negotiate with the enemy. Desmond Ball was one of the first scholars who publicly challenged the reigning strategic orthodoxy. His article—“Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?” Adelphi Paper #169, International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981—raised some fundamental questions that have never adequately been answered. A series of fine books on the subject soon appeared: Paul Bracken’s The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); Daniel Ford’s The Button: The Pentagon’s Strategic Command and Control System (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); Bruce Blair’s Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985); and the most extensive study of the subject that has been published to date, Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution, 1987), edited by Ashton Carter, John D. Steinbruner, and Charles A. Zraket. Blair is a former Minuteman launch officer who earned a graduate degree at Yale, later joined the Brookings Institution, and now heads Global Zero, an organization devoted to the abolition of nuclear weapons. He has continued to write about command-and-control issues, and I learned a great deal from his work, especially The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1993). A more recent book on command and control during the Cold War largely confirms what the others found: The World Wide Military Command and Control System: Evolution and Effectiveness, by David Pearson (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 2000).