Command and Control

Robert Kenner's "Command and Control" reenacts and reflects on Eric Schlosser's book about America's nuclear proliferation and how simple and inevitable accidents continue, even post-Cold War, to place all humans on the brink of destruction.

On September 18, 1980 -- 36 years ago this week -- a Titan II missile worker dropped a socket down eight stories from the top of the country's most powerful, 33,000-pound nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile, which punctured the fuel tank and created a gas leak.

What followed was an egregious litany of bellicose, incomprehensible incompetence from the top brass of the military industrial complex, nine hours of unconscionable inaction, missed opportunities and criminal dereliction to control a potential nuclear disaster potentially 600 times more powerful than Hiroshima, mere miles from where Vice President Mondale was visiting Arkansas.

The surviving workers interviewed said they were initially loyal to the U.S., they didn't know the targets or whom they might kill, but they were "prepared to destroy an entire civilization to protect my country." One of the reasons the many thousands of weapons had been stockpiled was as a bargaining chip with the Soviet Union.

The Damascus, AR, 374-7 complex employees were not informed that that country might be their own. "I never considered that our own warheads might detonate on our own continent," one said. "It's immense power just on the verge of slipping out of control."

After the puncture, the on-site experts were made to evacuate, many against their will. They tried to secure the codebooks into the safe, but that had never been done before so they didn't fit. The escape lights didn't work. Local authorities were not informed, but news leaked out. The Air Force diverted traffic from the site. The PTS team trained to handle emergencies was removed, and young, untrained men were sent into the hole in their place (and they had to break down the many security doors that the evacuees were told to secure).

An explosion finally happened, which "looked like the sun coming up" in the middle of the night. Many were injured or killed by flying gravel, glass, glowing steel and "chunks of concrete the size of semi trailers." The Air Force continued to neither "confirm nor deny," especially what had happened to the warhead or where it landed. They finally found it in a ditch, remarkably unexploded.

The Department of Defense has reported 32 "broken arrows" (compromised WMDs), but the Department of Energy says that over a thousand nuclear weapons have had similar incidents.

An interviewee notes that they're all blamed on human error, which is to say, on the operator, the little guy. Two of the men who went back into the silo to try and help received letters of reprimand.

Seven years after this incident the last Titan II was deactivated. Yet there are still over 7,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S., and accidents continue.

Schlosser says that, so far, none have ever been detonated by accident, but that's due in part to pure luck, which eventually runs out.

"Machines go wrong," he reminds in this terrifying story, a document that reminds us to continue to question America's nuclear arms program and remain vigilant in expecting answers.