What I Am Reading - Command and Control

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

Eric Schlosser

Read it in Hardcover at an investment of 640 pages thick with it.

Browsing the book bin at Costco is dangerous, especially when you walk out the door with a 640 page tomb.  None the less this was excellent and consumed it greedily.

"They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial - and they work." - Schlosser

Command and Control looks at the events leading to the creation of the nuclear bomb, it's creation, how it works, initial use and testing, military and political leaders at the time of creation and their general attitudes towards the bomb, protocol for use, as well as the miss management of the stock pile; and technical advancements from a technological perspective as well as following these criteria to the near current world.  It's  thorough and engrossing to say the least.  All of which is spun through the story of the Damascus Arkansas non-nuclear accident that carriers the reader along as they learn about the most feared weapon on the planet.

There are several themes within Command and Control, but it's most prominent is the miss management of our nuclear stockpile throughout the decades.  It's a theme that is carried throughout the book and broadcast to the reader.  It's presented in such a fashion that as a reader, I am surprised a full thermonuclear detonation has not occurred on the many military instillations across the world, let alone on American soil.  Of primary interests to me was the detailed account of how to make the stockpile current, or if nothing else, safe and the resistance from our military leaders towards that effort.  The amount of money the government was spending to make new weapons of even deadlier caliber, in the name of deterrence, was staggering.  Especially compared to the price of updating the clearly unsafe stockpile we have had throughout the years right here in our backyard.  The list of accidents is long.

In addition, Schlosser identifies and outlines some very interesting world leaders and the part nuclear weapons played in politics.  One of the more interesting things for me in the book is to hear about the actions of our presidents and top brass, following World War Two and into the Cold War.  For instance, Kennedy, a notoriously anti-nuclear weapon president and fathered the famous 'Sword of Damocles' speech often said one thing while directly doing another.  A short time after giving said speech about the prolific destruction that a nuclear strategy guaranteed:

"Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us."

He met with top brass and officials about investigating and considered adopting a nuclear strategy that weighed a first strike option as the only option.  Command and Control is full of this sort of horrifying stuff and much much more.  To try and capture it all here wouldn't do it justice. 

I learned a lot and was highly charmed with every horrifying page, highly recommended, especially if you are a fan of history.