Book of the week: Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser

(Penguin, $36)

Eric Schlosser’s latest work is “the most edifying” and “most frightening” book I have read this year, said Matthew Price in Newsday. Deeply researched and masterfully written, this history of nuclear weaponry will wake many readers to the fact that the world has come close to nuclear catastrophe many times—often because of the mishandling of American bombs and warheads. As Schlosser reports, from 1950 to 1968 alone, at least 1,200 nuclear weapons in the nation’s arsenal were involved in accidents. In 1961, for instance, a bomb 250 times more potent than the one dropped on Hiroshima fell from a stricken B-52 near Goldsboro, N.C.—and would have detonated if one fragile switch had failed. “That things did not go boom” seems to owe mostly to “dumb luck.”

But Command and Control isn’t just history: “The nowness of the story is the point,” said John Lloyd in the Financial Times. “The hair-raising sloppiness” that has characterized U.S. management of its nuclear stockpile suggests how dangerous the world has become now that membership in the nuclear club numbers seven and counting. And weapons management hasn’t been the only weak link. America’s vaunted detection system has mistaken a flock of birds and even the moon rising over Norway as imminent Soviet attacks. One grave mishap is revisited again and again, in a tense account woven through the book. In 1980, a falling wrench socket punctured the casing of a Titan II missile in Damascus, Ark., causing an explosion that tossed the nuclear warhead 200 yards out of its silo. If that ticking bomb had detonated, much of Arkansas would have been leveled.

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But it didn’t explode, did it? said Arthur Herman in The Wall Street Journal. Schlosser wants readers to conclude that nuclear weapons are simply too dangerous to have around, but he’s “too good a reporter and historian” to hide a different truth: No U.S. nuclear weapon yet has accidentally exploded or even leaked radioactive material, and our weapons stockpile has been made safer and more secure decade after decade. “The most dismaying revelations” in the book, unfortunately, are not about near accidents, said Walter Russell Mead in The New York Times. For decades, each Cold War president had only a “rigid and inflexible” strategic plan to work from in the event of a nuclear confrontation. Surely, some of today’s nuclear nations have similar plans, and each can turn a simple misunderstanding into “an inexorable march toward disaster.”