 Thank you so much for coming out here today for this discussion. My name is Chris Leonard. I'm a fellow here at New America. I'm a journalist. I write about big corporations. And as a journalist, I could not be more excited than I am about today's event. We get a lot of really interesting thinkers coming through here, but today we have that very rare thing, a living, breathing investigative journalist. They still exist, as Eric Schlosser shows us with his work. Eric doesn't really need much of an introduction. He's the author of Fast Food Nation, Reef for Madness, and other work. And we're here to talk about his new book, Command and Control, Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. We're really lucky to be joined by Peter Skoblik, who's an incoming fellow at New America. He's also executive editor of Foreign Policy Magazine and has studied America's nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy for years. A lot of it included in his 2008 book, U.S. Versus Them, How a Half-Century of Conservatism is Undermined America's Security. So it's a little disconcerting to have two people in the same room who know this much about our nuclear weapons, but I think it's going to lead to a really great discussion. And also on that front, I should let everybody know that the conversation is going to be webcast, so everything we say is going to be public. And before we start, I'd like to just give a quick overview of this book and how it fits into a really important body of work. Eric Schlosser came onto the scene in the mid-1990s and wrote a series of magazine articles that somehow remain just as relevant, just as newsworthy, and just as revelatory about America as they did when they were published a decade ago. I think a lot of people have said that Eric Schlosser specializes in writing about the dark corners of American society, but I would refine that a little bit. He writes about what I'd call the invisible underpinnings of our society, these places that aren't out in the open but that affect us all. The vast market for illegal labor, for example, in our fields, the giant sprawling prison industrial complex, or the vast cash market for marijuana. This kind of work culminated in 2001 with the publication of Fast Food Nation, a book everybody's heard about, really overturned the way we think about our food system and opened the way for a huge discussion today happening about our food system. So after that, Eric published Reef for Madness, Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American black market, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It's one of my favorite books. And then after that, he kind of went radio silent for a little while and didn't publish a book for a few years, and now we know why. For over six years, he was reporting command and control. Every publicist who's selling a nonfiction book wants to say that it reads like a suspense novel. Well, let me tell you, this book really does. I had a pit of anxiety and anticipation as I read this, because you really can't believe what you're reading. The book is two parallel narratives. The first one is told in this cinematic micro detail, and it recalls an accident, one of America's worst nuclear accidents, I'd say, which happened in Damascus, Arkansas, and involved one of our most lethal and most powerful hydrogen bombs. I'll let Peter and Eric discuss it, but suffice it to say this is an accident that started when somebody dropped a socket wrench. That simple act set off a chain of events that could have led to the truly incomprehensible, a terrible nuclear accident in the middle of our country. But the book goes on from there to tell the secret history of our modern nuclear weapons complex. That's a story that starts with a chilling account of the detonation of an atomic bomb in Hiroshima. And then, maybe even more scary, the launch of this mass production system for nuclear weapons. Eric estimates we've made 70,000 nuclear weapons since World War II, including hyper-powerful hydrogen bombs, atomic bombs, and even an atomic rifle called the Davy Crockett, which I really wish I didn't know exists, but it is out there. And so he takes stock of this system and how we control it today and points out that even if one atomic weapon was accidentally detonated in the United States, that means we would have had a success rate of controlling these weapons of 99.99857%. Well, through luck and skill, we have managed to have a 100% safety record, but I don't think anybody would feel completely confident in our command and control system after reading this book. So, thank you so much for being here. Really look forward to this discussion. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much, and thank you all for coming. Thanks, Eric, for writing this book and for being here. Let me just, before we start, so I know what level of detail and wonkery maybe we want to get into, how many people have read the book already? Right. Okay. Right. Our host has read the book already. Well, let me just start out by echoing what was just said. It is a fantastic book. And as someone who has been editing and trying to write about nuclear weapons for some 20 years, I just want to note that Eric has pulled off something that is really, really difficult, which is, despite what I have always seen as the inherent sexiness of the subject, admittedly a sexiness that comes from the terror associated with the subject, it is often difficult to write about nuclear weapons and the issues that attend them in an engaging way. And you've managed to do that, you know, with incredible detail and accuracy and, you know, getting to not only the micro of the TikTok about this incident that you focus on, but some of the real macro strategic issues. So congratulations. And I urge everybody to buy at least a copy of the book, if not multiple copies for yourselves and for other people. But since people, you know, haven't had a chance to read it yet, you know, without spoiling the drama of some of the narrative, maybe just give us an overview of what, you know, what we're talking about when we say the Damascus incident and what it meant. I will. And I'll tell you a little bit about how I came to write the book, which explains why it took six years. First, I want to say thank you so much, Chris, and thank you for those kind words about my work. I want to assure all of you, I've never met either of these people before. They are not under my pay. And it's really quite an honor and very flattering to have those compliments about this book because it really took a long time. I spent time with the Air Force after completing Fast Food Nation. And this was before 9-11. And I became very interested in the future of warfare in space. And this was a time when it looked like there was going to be a peace dividend and the Air Force was wonderful. I mean, they opened up their doors and I was able to visit facilities that a journalist could never get near today. And I spent time with the Air Force space command and the US space command and many of these officers had begun in launch crews, ICBM launch crews. And I wound up spending more time talking about nuclear weapons than about directed energy weapons or laser weapons, which were fascinating. But I started hearing these stories about the Cold War. And one of the stories was about an accident with an intercontinental ballistic missile in Damascus, Arkansas. And one of the people I talked to had been there. And the story was just extraordinary. And I couldn't get it out of my mind. And I thought that I would write about it someday. And I was saying earlier, I thought this would be a short book. And I thought I would just tell the minute by minute unfolding of a nuclear weapons accident that I'd never heard of. And I think most people never heard of. And then I met Sid Drell, who was the chairman of the panel on nuclear weapons safety that was appointed by Congress in 1990 to investigate the safety of our weapons. And then I met other weapons designers. And I realized that there actually was the possibility of the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever put on an American missile detonating in rural Arkansas in 1980. And this is sounds like hyperbole, but that would have changed the course of American history. Bill Clinton was governor of the state. His daughter, Chelsea, was one year old. Vice President Mondale happened to be in the state at the time. This weapon was more powerful by three times than all the bombs dropped by all the military during the Second World War, including both atomic bombs. So it started out as a very short investigation of this one weapon accident that was begun by a relatively innocuous event, a workman dropped a socket in the silo. The socket fell about 70 feet. It bounced off the part of the silo. It hit the missile, pierced the skin of the missile, started a fuel leak, and suddenly the Air Force was confronted with a problem that no one had ever had to deal with, which was toxic explosive rocket fuel leaking into a missile silo with a powerful thermonuclear weapon on top of the missile. And one of the things I write about in the book before I get into bigger issues of strategy and nuclear weapon safety is there was profound and true heroism that night in Damascus, Arkansas. And Air Force personnel risked their lives and some were injured and one died trying to save this missile and trying to ensure that there was no fallout or difficulty with a warhead. And one of the themes of my book is I'm looking at nuclear weapons not from the top down. Many, many books have been written about nuclear strategy, about the memoirs of national security advisors. An enormous amount has been written about the Manhattan science, Manhattan Project scientists and beautiful, wonderful books have been written about that subject. But I've tried to write a book that offers history of the Cold War from the bottom up about the ordinary servicemen who, you know, as bomber crews, in bomber crews, in launch crews, as technicians. I write about a bomb squad technician who was trained to go over to damage nuclear weapons and defuse them. There was enormous personal heroism and courage and I feel like part of the aim of this book is to honor those veterans of the Cold War who really haven't been honored elsewhere. So the book is, and by the way, one of them happens to be in the room today. Colonel Al Childers, who I write about in the book, who was one of the real heroes that night in Damascus, later went on to join the State Department, work at the Pentagon, is an expert in nuclear weapons strategy and he behaved incredibly bravely and I hope he'll get up and talk at the end of my talk. We don't always agree on issues and he might have some interesting critique of what I say here today, but a real hero. So the book is about this one accident. It's also about the effort to control our nuclear weapons, not through diplomacy, not through arms control talks, but through administrative systems and technological systems that would guarantee we can always use the weapons when we want to, but that they'll never detonate accidentally, that they can never be used by unauthorized personnel and that they can never be stolen and that's a huge, huge challenge. And I'll end my introduction by saying I genuinely believe that we have done the best job of managing our nuclear weapons of any of the nuclear powers. We invented this technology, we perfected it and this book is a litany of the accidents and near misses that we've had and it should give us pause when we think of other countries who don't have the same industrial capacity, how they might manage this highly complex technology and highly dangerous technology. Anyway, so now I'll shut up and any questions that you have for me, I'll try to answer. Well, thank you for that introduction and that overview and a sense of what drove you to write this and we'll come back to a number of the things that you just mentioned, particularly the individuals and to Colonel Childers, maybe a little bit later. I'm going to take a step maybe back from the profound to the semi-prophane for a second because one of the first thoughts or memories that I had invoked by reading this book was a film from 25 years... No, wait, I'm getting the math wrong a long time ago. When I was still in college, some of you may have seen a John Woo movie called Broken Arrow. Okay, so in this movie, John Travolta steals a nuclear warhead, we have one of our protagonists racing out with a secretary of defense or someone and the secretary, you know, he says, what are we, you know, Mr. Secretary, what are we doing here? You know, it's Ed Harris, I think. And he says, well, we're going to investigate a broken arrow and he says, a broken arrow, it's when we've got a screw up with a nuclear... He may have said when we'd lose a nuclear weapon. And our protagonist says, you know, I don't know what's scarier, that we've lost a nuclear weapon or that it happens so often that we have a term for it. And I'm watching this movie and I'm like, okay, well, this is a bit of Hollywood exaggeration. You know, this term does not exist. I'm still in college at this point of thinking this term does not exist. This sort of thing does not happen. This is cinematic license, but hey, I'll enjoy the movie. Only later to discover not only is the term an actual term, but there is a reason that we have a term for it. And it's that, you know, these incidents have happened relatively frequently and the film misuses it a little bit. It's not about the loss of a nuclear weapon. That's a different term. But one of the things about this book is that the domestic incident, as dramatic and as terrifying as it was, is not, as you suggested in your introduction, a standalone event. It was not unique. And the Department of Defense official list of broken arrows, which is a serious nuclear weapon accident, that one of the criteria would be that it threatens the public. The official list includes 32 broken arrows, 32 accidents. And it's clear from my research that that is a small fraction of the accidents that occurred that threaten the public. And if you look at that list, there are a number of accidents on that list in which there was no possibility of the weapon detonating because the nuclear core wasn't even inserted in the weapon, whereas there were many mundane run-of-the-mill incidents involving short circuits, involving someone walking by a missile and noticing smoke coming from the nose cone or strange sounds coming from inside a thermonuclear weapon. And those accidents, even though they didn't involve plane crashes or fires, in some cases were closer to creating an accidental detonation than many of the more dramatic ones that are on the Defense Department list. Without getting too complicated into the technology of it, all you need to detonate that weapon is getting electricity to the detonators that are connected to the high explosives that surround the nuclear core. And this was a learning curve for our weapons designers who no one had ever done this before. And in designing weapons, they came up with some rudimentary ways to keep the electricity away from the detonators. But as more and more accidents started to happen, they realized that these weapons that were being routinely deployed might actually be much more vulnerable to stray electricity from a fire, from a short circuit within the weapon, from a bomber breaking apart with wires in all kinds of places, to human error. All of these things are not only designed by people, but they're operated by people. And the possibilities for disaster were huge. One document that I got through the Freedom of Information Act was a report by Sandia, laboratory engineer, who listed 1,200 nuclear weapons involved in accidents or incidents of one kind in an 18-year period. And I am absolutely certain that that is an understatement of how many weapons were involved in accidents. Some of them were really minor and trivial, like a weapon dropping four feet off of a loading cart. But some of them were much more serious, involving lightning strikes with nuclear weapons that at that point had not been designed to withstand a lightning strike. So there's still much that has not been revealed, despite my best effort to find out about it. Well, following up on something you just said, one of the things you do very, very nicely, very succinctly, is to draw this contrast between the imperative of the always and the never. Which is to say, nuclear weapons must always be ready and they must always work if the commander in chief decides to use them. They must never be used and must never go off accidentally or have anything else untoward happen. If it is not intended. And yet the weapons are made by human beings, managed by human beings. Human beings do not do absolutes particularly well. We do not do 100% certainty particularly well. So talk to us a little bit about how and how successfully or unsuccessfully this tension between the always and the never was managed. It was a constant tension. And it was a tension that was felt by the weapons designers. It was a tension that was felt by the military officers coming up with a command and control system and administrative system. Every safety mechanism that you put within the weapon has the potential to make that weapon less reliable when it's used. If the safety mechanism isn't well designed and the strategic air commands pilots would risk their lives if war came flying to the Soviet Union. And most likely would be on one way missions just because of it's inconceivable what it would have been like to fly a B-52 into the Soviet Union after it already been hit by nuclear weapons. That crew and that pilot would be pretty upset if the weapon they dropped turned out to be a dud because of safety mechanisms put on it. At the same time, for most of that weapons life it's unlikely it would be used in wartime. And if it lacks those safety devices if it's constantly being removed from a bunker put on a plane and flown that weapon then becomes a danger to the general public. So the people who were designing the weapons were constantly pulled in between the always and the never. The same is true with the military commanders trying to figure out how these weapons might be used. One example of the always, never conflict would be whether to put coated locks on the bombs. I spoke to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara before he passed away. He was stunned when he entered the Department of Defense to find out that none of the weapons that we had given to NATO and really none of the weapons in our arsenal except for some of the atomic land mines which were a trivial weapon, none of these weapons had locks. And what that meant that would be anyone who got possession of the weapon and had some knowledge of weapon design could use it or a low level commander in NATO who had access to the weapon could use it. Now it would seem perfectly common sense. My gosh, we've got to put locks on these weapons and they've got to have codes and only the person who has the code can use the weapon. But that gets into the always, never situation. Let's say you put coated switches onto the weapons and suddenly you're at war and suddenly you can't get in contact with a commander in chief or if you're in NATO, if the communications lines between Europe and the United States have been disrupted, suddenly you can't get the codes. And by having coated locks on our weapons we've rendered all of them inoperable. So this tension between always, never existed throughout the Cold War and it exists to this day. And it's a constant, constant struggle to figure out the right balance and as long as there are nuclear weapons there will be this inherent contradiction. And so I guess that's what I was gonna say. One of the things that I, you know, one of the contrasts that I found remarkable was, we seem to have survived a number or all of these incidents in no small part through luck. As you note, at one point in the book, many of the people that you talk to and you ask them, how did we get through all this site, either luck or divine intervention. Neither of which are really planable from a policy perspective. And yet the people that we had designing, not only the weapons complex itself but the strategy that guided the weapons were some of the most, you know, heavy intellects, you know, these left brain types, you know, McNamara's whiz kids, Herman Kahn, you know, soldiers of reason, you know, as one authors put it, type folks. And yet at the end of the day, however, you know, game theory was developed in no small part to help sort of play out what a nuclear war would look like because nobody had ever fought one before. So you've got all this intellectual energy going into this, and at the end of the day, we're kind of reliant just on luck. I think that you're absolutely right in that again and again I was told during interviews that it was really luck that prevented a major city from being destroyed during the Cold War. I mean, at the peak of the Cold War, we had 32,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union had about 35,000. And you just need one of those to go wrong or one of those to fall into the wrong hands. And you know, it's a disaster. But I would expand it. There was extraordinary technical competence. There was extraordinary patriotism and dedication. And in the book, I write about great personal courage and people willing to risk their lives and luck. If you look back at history, and my background academically is history, and I grew up in the Cold War, the notion that the Soviet Union would vanish and the Berlin Wall would come down and Germany would be reunited and all of this would happen without a Third World War, without thousands, tens of thousands or millions of people being killed was inconceivable. And that's a wonderful outcome. But that outcome was not preordained. I don't believe in theories of inevitability in history. And when you look at the history of the nuclear arms race and the standoff between United States and the Soviet Union, there were a number of instances where that happy ending could have become a disastrous, apocalyptic, horrible nightmare. So the luck was there unquestionably. And we cannot expect that luck to last. And that's one of the most, I think important themes of the book is that human beings are incredibly skilled at creating complex technological systems, but it's much more difficult to manage them once you've built them. And we need to remember that lesson. Well, let me follow up on that just for a second and just we'll take it one level of abstraction further and then we'll come back to Earth a little bit. But what did you learn about human beings' ability to manage complex systems? And is there ever a point where we can become comfortable with them? And the obvious, another analogy here of a complex system where small chance of error, but catastrophic results if it goes wrong would be something like nuclear power, where I think about it and I'm like, it is a scientific process to build a nuclear reactor. We should be able to control these variables. You should be able to have safe nuclear power. And yet, clearly we have not always had, and that including very recently with Fukushima. So did you draw any lessons for how we can get around this problem of complexity when it comes to these very, very sort of, maybe low probability, but enormously high risk situations? You know, the conclusion I came to is very well meaning people running these systems, but people are fallible. And because people are fallible, they can never create a system that's infallible. And there's a sociologist who's written about accidents and has come up with a name, which I think is a really great name, normal accident theories, Charles Perot. And he talks about the most dangerous systems are the ones that are non-linear. A linear system would be like an assembly line. You're running the assembly line, there's a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you have a problem, you just stop the assembly line and you deal with whatever the problem is and when you've fixed it, you resume the assembly line. Non-linear systems have multiple things going on at once. And in these systems, you may not be aware of what's happening in different parts of the system. In Fukushima and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, as the accidents were unfolding, there was real difficulty getting information about what was actually happening. In the nuclear weapons accident in Damascus, Arkansas, exactly the same thing. They had no idea what was happening in the silo. A decision had been made to abandon the launch complex, the launch control center where all of the readouts were. So, you know, at strategic air command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, they literally didn't know what the tank pressures were inside of the missile. And I heard a quote, this book has just come out, and someone who was at my first reading yesterday came over and gave me a great quote. And I think that all command and control experts should be familiar with Mike Tyson's view of this, which is that you may have a plan until you get punched in the face. This system, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, worked perfectly for thousands and thousands of hours. And then it didn't. At the Titan II missile complex in Damascus, Arkansas, there had been small problems. There had been other problems with this missile. But once the skin was pierced with a thermonuclear warhead on top of the missile, nobody had ever confronted a problem like that before. And so I think that we need to have real humility about the technologies that we create and adopt. And the most dangerous thing of all, I think, and it's something that's very, very relevant with America's nuclear weapons today and with America's nuclear command and control system today. One of the most dangerous things of all is complacency because command and control is never fully achieved. It's a process. It's a day in, day out process of management. And if you feel as though you've achieved it, that's almost proof that you haven't and something may go wrong. So I am concerned about our arsenal today. And well, let's talk about that and bring this back to the present day and bring it back to people. One of the things, and I suspect that one of the motivators for the heroism that you talked about and talked about in your book, talked about today among the folks that were serving was that they were on the front lines of the Cold War. And they believed very firmly that what they were doing was helping protect nothing less than not only the United States, frankly, but human civilization writ large. Now that is a motivator. That's a mission. You don't really get much bigger than that. Today, obviously the Cold War is over. We've had many national leaders, including military leaders say explicitly, they cannot imagine the circumstance under which we would use those weapons. Now, you go to, let's say, an ICBM silo today. You've got your launch officers sitting there. You don't even have to be dealing with nuclear weapons. If you tell someone who you are managing, your job is never really going to be meaningful. That is not a strong motivator. It's the exact, exact opposite. You've talked to dozens of officers in the writing of this book, if not more. I mean, what is the morale? What is the sense of mission? How do they feel about where, what is now strategic command and its mission lie today? You know, one of the themes of the book again and again in how not just national security bureaucracies work, but bureaucracies work in general, there is a tendency to refuse to admit error in the case of nuclear weapons safety. Our national security bureaucracies were resistant to the notion that our weapons might be safe for decades until they realize, oh my God, there are safety problems. There's also a tendency, and I don't mean that this is what you are implying, there's a tendency to blame the people at the bottom. There's a tendency to blame the worker who dropped the socket and not the system that allowed, in this case, the Titan II, what I think was an obsolete weapon system to remain on alert for 10 to 15 years after it should have been retired with a shortage of spare parts. And so my real concern is not with the launch officer today in the Minuteman III control center. My concern is with the culture of the Air Force and with the culture at the very highest level that is not investing enough in the nuclear enterprise, and I don't just mean in terms of money, but in terms of thinking and in terms of attention. And if I were to give the pep talk to the launch officer today in the Minuteman III control center, I would say you have the most important job in the American military right now, and you are safeguarding the most destructive weapon in our arsenal. And if you need more compensation, tell me, we'll pay you a little more. If you need anything you need, we should provide for you as opposed to what I've seen very often is a disrespect of the ordinary service men and women who may be 19, 20, 21, 22 years old and yet are given this awesome, awesome responsibility. This in the last six months, we have had two of our three Minutemen wings cited for safety violations. A few years ago, the largest Air Force storage facility for nuclear weapons, the squadron there was completely decertified for safety violations. In 2007, we lost control of six thermonuclear weapons for a day and a half. And Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, I think did the right thing in reading the riot act and firing two Air Force officials, but clearly the message wasn't learned if six years later we're having major safety problems with our nuclear weapons. So I think this goes beyond the individual officers and launch control center. This is about the culture surrounding or the management of nuclear weapons that we have now. I think there's inattention and I think there's huge underinvestment. I mean, we can argue in good faith about how many nuclear weapons do we need to have? 300, 3000, or should we get rid of them all? But I would argue if we're going to have nuclear weapons, we must spare no expense in their management. The B-52 bomber was designed right after the Second World War. The last one was built in 1962 and we have about a hundred of them right now that are meant for nuclear missions. The Minuteman III is from the early 70s but its launch control facilities were probably built in the early to mid 1960s. We should either update systems or we should retire them. And one of the reasons that I wrote this book, even though it's about the Cold War, mainly, and even it's about a lot of weapons systems that are no longer in service, is we need real public debate and discussion about our nuclear weapons, their management, and their strategy because they may be out of sight and out of mind for most of the public, but they're there and accidents are possible and the consequences would be unimaginable. Well, I'm sure there will be folks who wanna ask you about the expenditures that this would entail because of course, when you talk to military officers and Pentagon planners about the mission of the nuclear complex or if you talk to the Department of Energy, they're gonna say, well, we need a lot more than a pep talk. We do need a new bomber, ICBM, SLBM, nuclear capable submarine. We need to invest tens of billion dollars in the nuclear weapons complex that's maintaining the actual warheads in the absence of testing. We haven't conducted nuclear testing for over 20 years. That's a very significant investment. And I would say that's the very reason why we need a public debate. How many weapons do we need? What is the strategy for their use? And those two things should then determine whether we build a new long range bomber, whether we need new land-based missiles. Those things should follow the debate about what are these things for in the 21st century? How do we get the public interested in this? I mean, I notice that you're in your, this is, and I think this goes a tremendous way toward doing it, but you wrote an op-ed for Politico the other day and I noticed that there was a line toward the end that said the American public is not often asked to engage these questions. Sometimes it is very hard to engage the American public. Even when you try, let's say, around the New START Treaty a couple of years ago, this was not a really important public issue. And I mean, you can understand why when people are facing economic crisis, these are kind of abstract issues for them. This, I mean, I think in terms of both the narrative and the style that you've done, it really makes it a concrete issue. And that is very helpful, but we're in Washington and not everyone in Washington is capable of writing a 500 page narrative engaging book. You know, do you have anything you would say about how do we bring the American people into this enormously important discussion? I think that the President of the United States has tried. And I think that his speech in Prague was, whether you agree with his aim or not, an attempt to put this into the national dialogue. And if there are other members of the media here, I cannot think, I mean, in my mind, and I didn't start out feeling this way at all, but the two existential threats that this country faces in my view, I do believe in global warming being a manmade phenomenon and global warming and nuclear weapons. And what I would hate to see happen would be for this national debate to occur because one of our Minutemen III had a problem in the silo or we lost some more of our weapons or some city somewhere in the world is destroyed by a nuclear weapon, that will absolutely begin the national dialogue, but hopefully it won't take that and it's very, very difficult. There's a statistic at the end of the book I use which is that half of the American people either were not yet born or were small children when the Cold War ended. So there's a great deal of historical amnesia, those of us who remember the Cold War are aware of these issues, but there are tens of millions of Americans who don't know anything about nuclear weapons or how they were to be used. One last thing I'd like to add is one of the things that's really prevented more of a national dialogue on these issues is the official secrecy. And at the end of the book I talk about how the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called secrecy a form of government regulation, but you don't even know how much is being regulated by keeping so much of our nuclear strategy and targeting and information secret. Decisions are made about all of this, but they're made by a small group of people without much public debate. And I found in getting stuff through the Freedom of Information Act that again and again things were being kept secret not because they would threaten the national security if they were revealed, but they would threaten embarrassment of different bureaucracies or of the government. And so I don't know how to have that debate, but this is my attempt to try. It's an excellent, it's a superb effort in that effort. I want to open it up to questions in a second and I want to give Colonel Childers a chance to speak. I just wanted to share one thing that I, when I was reading your book and you were talking about how there are so many, particularly men at that time but men and women who served in various capacities in the Cold War trying to present the absolute worst from happening and yet there was not really official recognition of a lot of what was happening. We have monuments for lots of things, we have medals for lots of things, not for preventing global catastrophe. There's just no, I mean, that would presumably be a fairly high ranking medal, but it doesn't exist. And I remember when I first started working on these issues and I worked for a man, some of you know named Spurgeon Keeney who worked with a number of the fellows who were in your book, including Sid Drell and Bob Purifoy. And I had just started working for him and one day he had, for those of you who don't know him, I mean, he had served as an Air Force officer right at the very beginning of the Cold War working on nuclear issues and then was involved in nuclear strategy through administrations for the next three decades. One day he gets in the mail a certificate that I managed to find an example on the internet. This was created by Congress in 1999 and Bill Perry started handing them out. It's a certificate of recognition for service in the Cold War. And it says, in recognition of your service during a period of the Cold War, in promoting peace and stability for the nation, the people of this nation are forever grateful. And it's, on the one hand, very nice. On the other hand, you know, it's a little bit understated given what was at stake. But because there were these tremendous efforts made on behalf of peace and stability and you capture that extraordinarily well and what that meant for individuals. So maybe with that. And there should be a Cold War memorial. There really should be. And the other thing I wanna add before asking Al the disagree or agree or is that through some, this was not a marketing anything. This was just the strangeness of how life works. Today is the 33rd anniversary of what happened in Damascus, Arkansas. So Al, over to you. Do we have a, hi, welcome. I think we have a microphone for you. I had an opportunity to read the book, but I also had an opportunity to participate in the events that led up to the book. I also think it's significant too that this is dealing with an area called Damascus and WMD. And I think if you wanna get into the debate on nuclear weapons, it should be a WMD debate. And if chemical weapons are so critical to get rid of and we've signed chemical weapons conventions, we've signed nuclear treaties, but chemical weapons convention and the biological weapons convention were to get rid of these all together. And now we're in a situation where we have to figure out a way to get rid of them from a country that has threatened their own people by them. And if you turn to look at nuclear weapons and what this book is about, I'm very much proponent for keeping nuclear weapons until everybody decides to get rid of them. But these are weapons that are almost more dangerous to us than they are to the enemy now. And it's almost as though we've turned these weapons on ourselves. And I don't mean to make that as a political statement, but that's the way I see them today. I was fortunate to survive Damascus. I was an old second lieutenant at the time. I'd been enlisted for a while and I got out and went to college and I came back in. And I was actually 27 years old, 33 years ago. And as we heard, it blew up 33 years ago. It blew up mainly because, as we point out, there was a socket that dropped. It was a completely freak accident, but it was caused by a number of events that put that young man into a situation where he dropped that socket. And when you read the book, you'll just shake your head because everything from the vehicle not working that morning to our crew, let me step back here a little bit. Our crew actually changed sites. We weren't even supposed to be at that site that day. We were going to that site because there was very little going on that day and I had someone to train. So we asked to swap with another crew because there was so much maintenance going on at the site that we were supposed to go to. Every little event that led up to that day, you could never have anticipated. And that's what I came away from reading the book. I actually had a totally different perspective on what happened after that socket dropped for the last 33 years. Then I came to understand when I read the book. I thought I was the only officer that was left behind and I thought I was the only officer that was left behind because I got out of a vehicle to help some folks. And then I realized there were two other officers running around in the dark trying to dodge the fire, trying to figure out where the reentry vehicle went, trying to not get hit by debris that was coming off the silo. And it turns out there were several people running around in the dark trying to pick up bodies that night and trying to find people that we couldn't find. I was fortunate in my career to continue through nuclear systems. I was an operator that night. I was a crew dog. But I had an opportunity in my career to also learn missile maintenance. I was in missile acquisition. I had transitioned into the ground launch cruise missile system deploying nuclear weapons to Europe so that NATO would have these nuclear weapons under the Reagan era. That led me into an arms control world and I had several assignments in arms control, not just in the nuclear world but in the conventional world and the chemical and biological world too. So I had some tours in the arms control world. I had an assignment in the State Department. I was on the Secretary of State's policy planning staff for a little while trying to write about these kinds of things in 1998 when nobody was really interested in them. So I didn't last very long as the only military member on the policy planning staff trying to write about nuclear weapons in 1998 and how we should have a policy about these things. Nobody wanted to talk about them in 1998. I also had a great opportunity to work for several combatant commands and one of them was for CENTCOM and I finished my career with CENTCOM in the Pentagon as their liaison officer. But one of the things that bothered me in working with the combatant commands is none of the combatant commands. I can't speak today because I don't know if it's changed but none of the combatant commands at the turn of the century even considered nuclear weapons as part of their war planning tools. They only considered conventional weapons and you saw that even when we were going into Iraq the first time and the second time when people thought that Saddam had nuclear capability we had no plans at the time to use nuclear weapons in that situation. So nuclear weapons have not been a part of the planning inventory outside of the strategic command for several decades I would tell you now since the end of the Cold War and I never quite understood that. I also had dinner last night with a person who was trying to write a book on a nuclear strategy. A lot of us old retired military guys are bothered by the fact that we're not really certain what the nuclear strategy is. It seems to be nuclear surety maintaining the safety and security of systems not to have a capability to actually use one of them. And that bothers us because we see these as tools in our inventory that if we're gonna have these tools we ought to be able to figure out how we're going to use them if we ever want to use them. And if we're not gonna use them then let's find a better tool. So I ended up leaving service as an Air Force Colonel. Felt very blessed after that night I never thought I'd have a career after that to tell you the truth. But it turned out that that was a defining moment in my career. It caused me to do something that a lot of folks found valuable and it caused me to understand that you need to try to plan for the unanticipated too. We had a lot of checklists that we tried to run that night. We had a lot of sensors in the silo before we evacuated that site. And these sensors all told us things that we had checklists to accomplish. And we literally ran every checklist in our book and could not figure out what was wrong in the silo even though every sensor told us what was supposed to happen it wasn't happening that way. And we couldn't figure it out until we turned to the person who had dropped the socket again, the two guys that were out there. And we said, why is this happening? Because our checklists are not shutting this down. It doesn't make any sense. And then one I'm moaned up to with the fact that he had dropped a socket. And we didn't know it for a couple of hours that he had done that. If he had told us, that was human frailty. If he had told us, we could have taken some different actions and gotten out of our checklist and thought through the problem a little bit better. And that's what we're faced with every day. And this book comes across a little bit as a historical document. But as they pointed out up front, I think the most important thing to remember is these guys are still out there. These men and women are still out there. There are women on crew out there every day. These men and women are out there on crew. But it's not them that you need to be concerned about too. You need to be concerned about the fact that these delivery systems are what makes these weapons almost dangerous. These old bombers, these old missiles, that these boosters that they're sitting on. You have to actually go out there and do some kind of maintenance on them. Those people out there doing the maintenance, moving these things around, taking them out of the silo, putting them back in. That's when accidents occur. Those men and men guys out there sitting nowhere near their missiles. The brave guys out there today, the brave men and women out there today are the ones that are actually doing the maintenance on these things. They're the ones to having to touch them and take them in and out of those silos every day. And I don't think we give those people enough credit. We always think of the ones that are flying the planes. We always think of the ones that are sitting in the silos ready to turn keys when they're told to do it. The ones that are doing the dangerous missions are the ones that are out there that have to touch them constantly. And those are the ones we need to give the most credit to. Well, thank you. That's all I wanted to say. Sorry to take so long. No, no, not at all. I appreciate your perspective. A remarkable chance to hear from someone who was there and played such a role. And really, thank you. Thank you very much for that incredibly valuable. So let's open it up to questions. We have a few minutes. Yes, in the back, I can't see your face, but first hand, it went up. And if you could just introduce yourself, tell us who you are. Sure. Hugh Gustafson, I write a column for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. I'm an anthropologist who's written a couple of books about the nuclear weapons labs. So let me be devil's advocate. Your book is constructed around an accident that happened over 30 years ago. The weapons system has long since been retired. The warheads that are deployed today have permissive action links, fire resistant pits, systems that make it much harder to detonate them with stray electrical impulses and so on. Is this just yesterday's problem? I mean, have the weapons designers at Livermore and Los Alamos wrap their minds around this and produce a new generation of warheads where this couldn't happen? Is that why the book has to be constructed around something that happened so long ago? So did you find weapons designers who were worried that this could happen today? I wish that this was purely a work of history that was fascinating in the way that reading about British imperial history in the 1880s might be. But if you look at what the heart of our deterrent is right now, our submarine-based missiles, which are a great majority of the missiles that we have, have some safety issues that were written about and discussed in 1990 and 1991. The warheads on our submarine-launched missiles do not have fire-resistant pits. The warheads don't have insensitive explosives, which are less likely to detonate. And one of the big problems with the Titan II, or with the Trident II missiles is when they were designed during the Cold War, we wanted to get as many warheads to the Soviet Union as possible and have them be as powerful a warhead as possible. So there's quite a unique design of that Trident II missile. On most missiles, the warhead or warheads sit on top of the missile, as it would in a Minuteman III. But with the Trident, the third stage of the Trident has the warheads surrounding the third stage rocket engine. And there was a decision made to use a very high energy propellant so that you could get them farther. That rocket solid fuel detonates too easily in an accident. And so every time, and this is something that the Drell Panel on Nuclear Weapon Safety wrote about in 1990, but to this day, warheads with that design and missiles with that design are being used and the people who are loading and unloading the warheads and the missiles in Georgia and in Washington State, I hope, are being very careful. Because if you have the detonation of one of those rocket engines, you have many warheads in close proximity. And the Drell Panel on Nuclear Weapon Safety concluded the explosion of one missile could set off explosions in other missiles. There could be the possibility of a small nuclear detonation, not a large one, a small one, but the much greater concern would be plutonium scattering, a lot of plutonium being scattered in the state of Georgia in Washington. It's the same issue with the British Trident because they're using the same missiles, so it's of interest in Scotland. These problems are not on the level of some of the problems that we had with our nuclear weapons in the late 1950s, 1960s. These warheads are significantly safer than the ones of the late 1950s, 1960s. But the issue of nuclear weapons safety was by no means solved. And that's why, again, I think the greatest threat that we face with our own weapons is complacency. And if they are gonna build new Trident missiles, I really hope that they put the warheads on top, that they use insensitive high explosives in the warheads, and that they use a rocket fuel that is less likely to explode in an accident. Next? Yes, ma'am. Just hang on one second. Let's get you a microphone. So my questions may be a little bit... Can you just tell us who you are as well? Yes, my name is Chelsea Too. I'm a legal fellow for the Center for Biological Diversity, which is a national environmental advocacy and litigation group. So my questions might be a little off topic around what's discussed today, but when you're talking about engaging the public in debates about nuclear weapons, and specifically nuclear weapons and climate change, could you elaborate a little bit on your thoughts regarding this issue? And then my second question is, what lessons can nuclear energy production and management learn from nuclear weapons production and management? When you say the relationship between nuclear weapons and climate change, I'm not quite sure what you meant. To me, those are the two greatest threats that we face. I mean, and I'm not being ironic about it, but one of the dangers still, and there are scientists who are climate scientists who are still looking at it, it was particularly a danger during the Cold War that if you had too many nuclear detonations, you would create something called nuclear winter because so much dust would be brought up into the atmosphere that it would block the sun. The most recent studies suggest that you don't need to have 500 or 1,000 or 10,000 weapons detonating. The most recent studies suggest you could have 30, 40, 50 and change the climate. Now, I'm not saying that is the solution to global warming, but the studies show that you could have a return of a mini ice age, et cetera, et cetera. There are some huge differences between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, but the fundamental similarity is something that was remarked upon, which is that these are low risk, high consequence, complex technological systems. And I have friends who are environmentalists who are very strong proponents of nuclear power. I'm not one. I could be one someday, but for me, until they figure out what to do with nuclear waste, I think it's highly irresponsible to continue producing nuclear waste. But we just need to have technological systems in which the worst case scenario involves limited damage. Because if the worst case scenario involves catastrophic, unlimited, unknowable consequences, maybe we shouldn't do it. Steven Young with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Thanks for your book. I look forward to reading it. I gave it the quick DC read and looked at the index. And happy to see there's a large part of it talking about Bob Purifoy, that I've known for a decade. He was just an amazing man. I love talking to him. He has fast landing views. He's strongly held views. Do you have a favorite Purifoy story? Or you can tell us about you working with him at all? Bob Purifoy was an engineer at the Sandia National Laboratories. And I think Sandia hasn't gotten the attention it deserves because Los Alamos is where the physicists invent the physics package, the nuclear core. And it's a very illustrious job, but it's the people at Sandia who actually figure out the machinery of the nuclear weapon. And it's their job, which is primarily crucial in terms of the always never question. And Bob Purifoy was an engineer who worked on nuclear weapons. Eventually was vice president of Sandia. And I think as a national hero because he fought a bureaucratic battle for decades to get modern safety devices installed into our weapons. He became aware that there were safety problems with our weapons. And you would think that the powers that be would say, oh my gosh, thanks a lot. And we're gonna do something about this right away. But I think there was a denial of how serious the problem was. And he had to fight this battle at great personal cost. And he won. You would never create a nuclear weapon today that didn't include the type of safety devices that he was fighting for. And he was eventually vindicated. My favorite stories are the ways in which he very cleverly would outmaneuver the military or people who were disagreeing with him. And one of them was the placement of the accelerometer. And the accelerometer would be a safety switch that wouldn't only close once there was a certain amount of momentum of a missile being launched. And there was some question about whether Sandia, and I'm remembering the anecdote wrongly. So it's gonna be a terrible anecdote. But there was some question as to whether Sandia had the authority to interfere with the army weapon as it's going up. So he put the accelerometer on, accelerometer on, so then it was going down. Now I may have it reversed. I can't remember if it was the upper or the down. But in any event, this was caused because he was reading some document on this nuclear weapon and the document was very clear that there was nothing to prevent a saboteur from getting inside the weapon and detonating it. So he put this device in there that made sure that the weapon had to be accelerating at a certain velocity before a circuit could close. And he was constantly coming up with ways to put safety mechanisms in weapons. And Bob Purifoy is as far from being a left wing bleeding heart liberal as you will find. He believed in deterrence. He believed in the necessity of nuclear weapons. He believes in the necessity of them to this day. But he thinks that they should pose a greater threat to our enemies than to ourselves. A great man. My name is Eric Singer. I'm a historian and I teach courses on these issues at University of Baltimore. My work is on how Baltimoreans would have responded to a nuclear attack. And my question is, are you concerned that by focusing on the minutiae of the system, by focusing on the maintenance and the repair and keeping up with new technologies and ensuring that the technologies remain in place, are you concerned that that might legitimize the entire system? I think that's a valid concern. The book looks at a lot more than just the minutiae of the weapons. And if you have a copy here, I'll read you the lyric that is the epigraph that's from one of my favorites. And this is Leonard Cohn. And the lyric ends, there is a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. So by looking at the problem, you get a view of the bigger system. And the book looks at nuclear strategy, nuclear targeting. What's the justification for these weapons? But realistically, and by the way, I completely support our president's dream and desire for a world without nuclear weapons. But until we get to that day, so long as there is a single nuclear weapon anywhere in this country, I am greatly concerned with the technology of that weapon and the competence of the people who manage it and the systems that control it. So, you know, until they're all gone, we need to spend, whatever we need to spend to make sure that they're managed safely. We just have a couple more minutes, gentlemen by the door. Hi, my name is Patrick Bond. It just strikes me as there was an awful lot of fairly irrational thought that went into the first 25, 30 years of atomic weapons design and atomic strategy has, you know, things like the army trying to develop nuclear weapons with a kill radius greater than the effective combat radius and the Navy doing the same thing. It seems like there's a tremendous amount of bad ideas that are hidden behind the security screen and you can't even have kind of a rational discussion about what's going on. And it seems like there was just, you know, built into the DNA a lot of somewhat folly if you look at the history of what went on with Cyop and they could find that 90% of the Cyop was this bureaucratic mania, not any rational effective strategy. And until you can have a kind of a big general discussion about really what you're doing and really why you want to do it, you can't ever get kind of the craziness out of there that grows in the shadows. Yeah, and I mean, one of the reasons that our policy was so crazy and inconsistent is there were so many competing bureaucratic centers of power. There were rivalries between the different armed services and each one wanted nuclear weapons and came up with justifications for why it needed nuclear weapons. I mean, the Davy Crockett, you know, rocket rifle propelled, you know, atomic weapon was not a really rational weapon, but the Army at one point was arguing that it was as important to our arsenal as the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Now there were weapons that did have a logic to them and there were commanders who were quite prepared to use them in a way that made sense. Having said that, you know, to understand this system and without demonizing anybody and without making it evil warmongers versus, you know, wonderful peaceniks, it was again something that McNamara said, which I think made a lot of sense. Each step seemed perfectly logical when it was made and those steps led to a place of madness. And re... What was that nuclear policy? Nuclear policy, nuclear policy. Well, in terms of nuclear policy, you know, the single integrated operational plan which is the nuclear war plan was the most tightly guarded secret of the Cold War except maybe the Soviets knew about it, but certainly American people haven't been allowed to know about it in detail. And the details that have come out since the end of the Cold War, particularly through General Lee Butler, who was the last head of the Strategic Air Command, I mean, multiple weapons at railway bridges, you know, dozens and dozens of weapons that one individual target in Moscow, there was just, there was no one person who understood all the workings of the system or all the workings of the targeting. And so you had through accretion over the years, just a plan that if you were to read it from a common sense point of view was just madness. We have, well, just one more question. Gentleman on the aisle. I'm Colonel Dale Dusset. I've been around a long time. I was given a direct commission by General LeMay to help form a group to update command and control from World War II to modern days. So I was way before these things, but what we did led to this. And in my later career, I was assigned to the Pentagon and I was the interface between the Defense Department and FEMA. And a question came up about dirty bombs and dirty nuclear, not explosions, but dirty nuclear materials are small explosions and how we would handle that. And when I pursued that through FEMA and the administration, it said I was out of my authority. And so they took the work that we did and classified it in three different ways and split it up and I never knew whatever happened to it. But as far as I know, that's still a question. And we had a lot of scenarios of people bringing dirty materials up the Potomac in a small boat, which you could do, and offloading it a number of strategic spots in Washington and those questions, as far as I know, have never been fully pursued. It's easy to deal with a missile or a direct bomb, but these small things can be done by not only terrorists, but the internal people that are dissatisfied, which is a good example is a couple of days ago, that have access to that materials because we really don't cover and we don't have these plans to cover that material like we do the missiles and I think it's still an issue. Did you look at what, you know, at U.S. response to not only these accidents or potential of accidents, but, you know, I didn't, but I did spend some time with the late Fred Charles Ickele, who was very concerned about that scenario, among other scenarios, and some of these problems just don't lend themselves to easy resolution in a free society, except to the degree that we can put controls on this material within this country, which may have commercial and industrial uses, but needs to be tracked much more carefully because of how easily it can be turned into a weapon and it would not have the same consequences as a nuclear detonation, but it would have very bad consequences, nevertheless. Well, I'm afraid we're out of time, but please join me in thanking Eric Schlosser for his time. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Thank you. And again, congratulations, Eric. Please buy a copy of the book. Thank you. Now, is this my copy? That's my copy.