Is there command and control over our nuclear weapons?

Three years ago Eric Schlosser wrote Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (see Alex Wellerstein’s review, Physics Today, April 2014, page 48 . The well-regarded book examined incidents, some long known and others recently discovered, that could have led to accidental nuclear detonation. Now a documentary based on Schlosser’s work and a new book by Washington Post reporter Dan Zak highlight the flaws in and concerns over our nuclear arsenal.

Schlosser’s book focused on the 18 September 1980 Titan II missile explosion near Damascus, Arkansas, which destroyed a US Air Force complex and killed one airman. The new documentary, Command and Control, looks at the incident in more detail. Using a group of actors, special effects, and survivor interviews, and with the Titan missile museum in Sahuarita, Arizona, as his stage, director Robert Kenner reconstructs what happened in Damascus. The museum allowed filmmakers to fly drones down the side of the missile and to fill the silo with smog to create scenes usually reserved for bigger-budget movies, said Emmy Award–winning producer Mark Samels to PHYSICS TODAY at the AFI Docs Film Festival.

The disaster stemmed from a single socket wrench dropped by a technician. The wrench hit the thin metal skin of the missile’s fuel tank, ruptured the skin, and caused fuel vapors to spew into the silo. The missile’s design required that both the fuel and oxidizer tanks be pressurized at all times to prevent the missile from collapsing under the weight of the warhead. The movie walks viewers through what happened at each critical point, and it ratchets up the tension as viewers realize the risks involved and the consequences if the worst-case scenario occurred. Strategic Air Command (SAC) had multiple opportunities to try to contain the accident, yet at each point either paralysis set in or conflicting instructions were given.

The biggest question was, If the missile exploded, what would happen to the warhead? In one of the more shocking interviews in the movie, the former head of nuclear weapons safety at Sandia National Laboratories says that the tremendous heat of the fireball could have melted the electronic circuit board that acted as a fail-safe. Under the worst-case scenario, a new circuit could have formed and detonated the bomb.

The filmmakers adeptly remind the audience that the professionals servicing the equipment were basically 18-year-olds overseen by officers just a few years older. Despite their youth, the personnel were dedicated to their jobs. The events of that night have clearly haunted them for years; some were badly injured or had friends who died in the blast or soon after. All the personnel involved either were blamed for the accident, were discharged, or suffered subsequently in their careers. As one officer states in the movie, “To err is human. To forgive is not SAC policy.”

Making the accident more frustrating is that according to the film, the Titan rockets were obsolete, toxic, and more of a hazard to the US military than to the Soviet Union. The missiles remained part of nuclear deterrence more for domestic political reasons and interservice rivalries than as any kind of master plan for nuclear strategy.

The Titan accident is one of the US’s 32 recorded “broken arrows,” accidental events that involved nuclear weapons, warheads, or components but did not create the risk of nuclear war. Sandia researchers were supposed to be using the lessons from such close calls to redesign the bombs and develop safer ways to transport and protect them from detonation. However, as part of a Freedom of Information Act request, Schlosser discovered that more than 1000 other nuclear incidents have occurred that did not reach the level of a broken arrow. The Sandia researchers didn’t know about most of those cases.

In the movie, Harold Brown, US secretary of defense at the time of the Titan accident, says that he forgot about it shortly afterward. “Do you know how many accidents happen at DoD facilities every day?” he says. This dismissal, from the very top of the organization, of the risks associated with maintaining a nuclear stockpile has led, according to Schlosser, to negligence at SAC and the US Department of Energy that remains to this day: Less than a decade ago, live nuclear warheads were accidentally flown across the country.

Zak takes a different tack in his new book Almighty: Courage, Resistance, and Existential Peril in the Nuclear Age (Blue Rider Press). The theme is civil disobedience: how civilians have protested nuclear weapons and how such weapons have affected communities. Zak focuses on the 28 July 2012 break-in at a nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Megan Rice, an 82-year-old Catholic nun known as Sister Megan, accompanied by a Vietnam veteran and a house painter, cut holes in several security fences, walked up to buildings containing nuclear bomb cores, and splashed the walls with blood. It took six minutes before security guards turned up to investigate. When the three protestors first set off the alarms, the guards assumed that an animal had tripped them, and they simply reset them. Sister Megan received a sentence of 2½ years in jail.

Zak strains to merge the lives of the protesters with the development of the nuclear stockpile. He points out that during the 1940s Sister Megan lived in the same apartment complex as Selig Hecht, the Columbia University biophysicist whose students worked on the Manhattan Project. Zak implies that the connection led Sister Megan to become obsessed with nuclear weapons. In fact, that hypothesis is hard to prove; it seemed more like a shortcut to try to engage the reader.

The chapters jump quickly between past and present, and Zak assumes too much background knowledge from the reader. The US focus of the book overlooks the vast antinuclear demonstrations in other countries, notably Japan, and in Europe. The book also shortchanges efforts by scientists to protest the nuclear weapons buildup. In fact, no examples of researcher pushback appear until 75 pages in. And despite an extensive collection of references, there are some surprising errors, such as a discredited assumption that Japan was willing to unconditionally surrender before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nonetheless, Zak has done a service in reminding the arms control community that it is not just experts who worry about our nuclear arsenal. Other passionate individuals have the faith and commitment also to try to do something about it.

The documentary Command and Control will be in nationwide release 14 September and will appear on PBS’s American Experience early next year. You can read an interview with Eric Schlosser on the Physics Today website. Almighty is in bookstores now.