Command and Control : Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (Paperback)

from Sullywriter

Despite a few surprisingly sloppy factual errors, this is a remarkable chronicle of nuclear weapons mishaps from the 1940s to the present with emphasis on one of the worst and more recent ones in Arkansas. These are terrifying stories of naiveté, hubris, and sometimes downright incompetence. Schl...

from

The thesis is that nuclear weapons are inherently unsafe because evidently there have been 100s of accidents already - Schlosser provides excruciating details. Schlosser used FOI (Freedom of Information) to obtain and report for the first time many of the accidents. He does so while retelling the...

from joefreedom

A long read, but an eye-opening and, at times, mind-boggling account of individual heroism, human foibles and just how fortunate we've been that there hasn't been an accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon in the US since the invention of same. We've also been fortunate that nuclear war hasn't ...

from arubabookwoman

This is a sobering look at U.S. nuclear policy from immediately after WW II until the end of the Cold War. Inserted among this history is a minute by minute account of an accident in a nuclear missile silo in Damascus Arkansas in the 1980's. After the end of WW II, there was no cohesive plan for ...

from gregorybrown

Having read a fair number of books about the Cold War and its arms race, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much new information was in Schlosser's COMMAND AND CONTROL, and how well it was all woven into some excellent storytelling. Intentional use of nuclear weapons was a constant fear in the...