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frontpage Posted by phoinix | Staff • Yesterday
frontpage Posted by phoinix | Staff • Yesterday

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident (eBook)

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Various Retailers have Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (eBook) by Eric Schlosser for $1.99.

Thanks to Deal Hunter phoinix for posting this deal.

Available Retailers: About this eBook:
  • Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America's nuclear arsenal. A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved—and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind. While the harms of global warming increasingly dominate the news, the equally dangerous yet more immediate threat of nuclear weapons has been largely forgotten.
  • Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller, Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policy makers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can't be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States.
  • Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with people who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. Through the details of a single accident, Schlosser illustrates how an unlikely event can become unavoidable, how small risks can have terrible consequences, and how the most brilliant minds in the nation can only provide us with an illusion of control. Audacious, gripping, and unforgettable, Command and Control is a tour de force of investigative journalism, an eye-opening look at the dangers of America's nuclear age.

Editor's Notes

Written by SubZero5 | Staff
  • About this deal:
    • Please see the original post for additional details & give the WIKI and additional forum comments a read for helpful discussion.
  • About this store:

Original Post

Written by phoinix | Staff
Product Info
Community Notes
About the Poster
Deal Details
Product Info
Community Notes
About the Poster
Various Retailers have Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (eBook) by Eric Schlosser for $1.99.

Thanks to Deal Hunter phoinix for posting this deal.

Available Retailers: About this eBook:
  • Famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser digs deep to uncover secrets about the management of America's nuclear arsenal. A groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs, Command and Control explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How do you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved—and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to mankind. While the harms of global warming increasingly dominate the news, the equally dangerous yet more immediate threat of nuclear weapons has been largely forgotten.
  • Written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller, Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a nuclear missile silo in rural Arkansas with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policy makers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can't be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States.
  • Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with people who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. Through the details of a single accident, Schlosser illustrates how an unlikely event can become unavoidable, how small risks can have terrible consequences, and how the most brilliant minds in the nation can only provide us with an illusion of control. Audacious, gripping, and unforgettable, Command and Control is a tour de force of investigative journalism, an eye-opening look at the dangers of America's nuclear age.

Editor's Notes

Written by SubZero5 | Staff
  • About this deal:
    • Please see the original post for additional details & give the WIKI and additional forum comments a read for helpful discussion.
  • About this store:

Original Post

Written by phoinix | Staff

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Top Comments

Dude, read the book. There's stories of airplanes doing their missions where they fly with it armed and accidentally push the button to drop it. Others where it's armed and they forget to disable the altitude trigger during landing, but thankfully it doesn't go off because one of the triggering mechanisms was faulty.

The book never claims Damascus would have exploded. It's about the lax safety culture, the push for development over safety, and the general view by the government during the cold war that an accidental detonation on US soil was preferable to not being able to ensure MAD. Also, a lot of coverage about how our interception system was a sham.

21 Comments

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Yesterday
252 Posts
Joined Oct 2007
Yesterday
barathrum
Yesterday
252 Posts
I read this one several years ago and would recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. It centers around a little known near-disaster that occurred in Arkansas, interwoven with a broad overview of the safety of nuclear weapons. It's a near miracle that we haven't accidentally nuked ourselves, given the number of near misses that have occurred.
Yesterday
415 Posts
Joined Nov 2006
Yesterday
aggiejohn
Yesterday
415 Posts
Quote from barathrum :
I read this one several years ago and would recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. It centers around a little known near-disaster that occurred in Arkansas, interwoven with a broad overview of the safety of nuclear weapons. It's a near miracle that we haven't accidentally nuked ourselves, given the number of near misses that have occurred.
Agree 100%. Great book, the audio book version read by Scott Brick is also quite good.
Yesterday
29 Posts
Joined Apr 2011
Yesterday
anna1770
Yesterday
29 Posts
One of the best books I've ever read. I've passed it around so many times. I love reading about people's responses to emergencies and disasters and this was a masterwork.
Yesterday
115 Posts
Joined Nov 2015
Yesterday
Coffejunkie
Yesterday
115 Posts
Fantastic book. Highly recommend.
Yesterday
310 Posts
Joined Aug 2014
Yesterday
Konraden
Yesterday
310 Posts
Quote from barathrum :
I read this one several years ago and would recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. It centers around a little known near-disaster that occurred in Arkansas, interwoven with a broad overview of the safety of nuclear weapons. It's a near miracle that we haven't accidentally nuked ourselves, given the number of near misses that have occurred.

Nuclear weapons can't be detonated by accident. It's not a miracle it's science and engineering.
1
6
Yesterday
2,520 Posts
Joined May 2013
Yesterday
RacinReaver
Yesterday
2,520 Posts
Quote from Konraden :
Nuclear weapons can't be detonated by accident. It's not a miracle it's science and engineering.
That's, umm, kinda the point of the book. They *can* be detonated by accident and the book outlines a number of incidents which could have resulted in a bomb being detonated on US soil if the device hadn't failed. There's also the other possibility of the material just being conventionally exploded and spreading it over a large area.

I read this book about 6 years ago, when the saber rattling with NK was happening, and it was terrifying.
Yesterday
2,298 Posts
Joined Mar 2008
Yesterday
neoshi
Yesterday
2,298 Posts
Quote from barathrum :
I read this one several years ago and would recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. It centers around a little known near-disaster that occurred in Arkansas, interwoven with a broad overview of the safety of nuclear weapons. It's a near miracle that we haven't accidentally nuked ourselves, given the number of near misses that have occurred.

I'm convinced there's a temporal agency in the future that keeps coming back to save our asses. But that's another book I'm sure.

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Yesterday
310 Posts
Joined Aug 2014
Yesterday
Konraden
Yesterday
310 Posts
Quote from RacinReaver :
That's, umm, kinda the point of the book. They *can* be detonated by accident and the book outlines a number of incidents which could have resulted in a bomb being detonated on US soil if the device hadn't failed. There's also the other possibility of the material just being conventionally exploded and spreading it over a large area.

I read this book about 6 years ago, when the saber rattling with NK was happening, and it was terrifying.

Nuclear weapons are designed to fail. Initiating a nuclear explosion requires a specific series of actions and a specific order of explosions to create the criticality to detonate. Blowing up an unarmed nuclear missile cannot cause a nuclear explosion. They're designed to fail in exactly this kind of scenario. I'll have to read Schlossers argument as to why he thinks Damascus was at risk of a nuclear explosion.

Blowing up a bunch of nuclear material (dirty bomb) is definitely something that can happen but this isn't traditionally what's referred to as a nuclear explosion.
Yesterday
2,520 Posts
Joined May 2013
Yesterday
RacinReaver
Yesterday
2,520 Posts
Quote from Konraden :
Nuclear weapons are designed to fail. Initiating a nuclear explosion requires a specific series of actions and a specific order of explosions to create the criticality to detonate. Blowing up an unarmed nuclear missile cannot cause a nuclear explosion. They're designed to fail in exactly this kind of scenario. I'll have to read Schlossers argument as to why he thinks Damascus was at risk of a nuclear explosion.

Blowing up a bunch of nuclear material (dirty bomb) is definitely something that can happen but this isn't traditionally what's referred to as a nuclear explosion.
Dude, read the book. There's stories of airplanes doing their missions where they fly with it armed and accidentally push the button to drop it. Others where it's armed and they forget to disable the altitude trigger during landing, but thankfully it doesn't go off because one of the triggering mechanisms was faulty.

The book never claims Damascus would have exploded. It's about the lax safety culture, the push for development over safety, and the general view by the government during the cold war that an accidental detonation on US soil was preferable to not being able to ensure MAD. Also, a lot of coverage about how our interception system was a sham.
Yesterday
87 Posts
Joined Feb 2005
Yesterday
willtippin
Yesterday
87 Posts
10/10 book. The audio book is great as well!
Yesterday
453 Posts
Joined Nov 2009
Yesterday
Old_Snake308
Yesterday
453 Posts
Is this the prequel to Command & Conquer ?
1
Yesterday
903 Posts
Joined Jun 2011
Yesterday
Cheapskate27
Yesterday
903 Posts
Quote from Konraden :
Nuclear weapons can't be detonated by accident. It's not a miracle it's science and engineering.
"Science and engineering" are subject to human error, as is the handling and use of techology that results from "science and engineering." These are devices made by humans. Nothing we design is ever perfect, design flaws pretty much always exist - we just hope to minimize and compensate through backup systems. The fact that we haven't blown ourselves up shows we've been very careful with nukes (more-so than air travel, as an example), but the chance for a mistake still exists. Think about the number of nukes Russia, China, and the United States have, number of people responsible for maintaining, developing, disposing, and other handling of these weapons (past, present, and future). And then think about how much you trust humans to never screw things up - and remember, backup systems are designed by humans also.

For a single nuke being handled by an individual or team at any moment, the chances of an unintended disaster are probably extremely low. But when you multiply that risk across time and space, the math could change, significantly.
Yesterday
310 Posts
Joined Aug 2014
Yesterday
Konraden
Yesterday
310 Posts
Quote from RacinReaver :
Dude, read the book. There's stories of airplanes doing their missions where they fly with it armed and accidentally push the button to drop it. Others where it's armed and they forget to disable the altitude trigger during landing, but thankfully it doesn't go off because one of the triggering mechanisms was faulty.

The book never claims Damascus would have exploded. It's about the lax safety culture, the push for development over safety, and the general view by the government during the cold war that an accidental detonation on US soil was preferable to not being able to ensure MAD. Also, a lot of coverage about how our interception system was a sham.

Okay, I think the problem here is you're misunderstanding what I'm saying.

You cannot accidentally detonate a nuclear explosion. Fission isn't something that happens by accident. These bombs have been crashed into the ground, dropped out of planes, set fire, blown up, and more and they've never accidentally detonated because you can't accidentally detonate them. They can't accidentally detonate because they require the specific series of events to detonate them. I'm not talking about someone needing to set them to armed--I'm talking a specific set of explosions inside the bomb. Those explosions can only happen when the bomb is in an explodable state and there's never been a case of that.
1
Yesterday
1,053 Posts
Joined Oct 2008
Yesterday
asuka
Yesterday
1,053 Posts
Quote from Konraden :
Okay, I think the problem here is you're misunderstanding what I'm saying.

You cannot accidentally detonate a nuclear explosion. Fission isn't something that happens by accident. These bombs have been crashed into the ground, dropped out of planes, set fire, blown up, and more and they've never accidentally detonated because you can't accidentally detonate them. They can't accidentally detonate because they require the specific series of events to detonate them. I'm not talking about someone needing to set them to armed--I'm talking a specific set of explosions inside the bomb. Those explosions can only happen when the bomb is in an explodable state and there's never been a case of that.
Seriously suspect you're trolling. In one of these incidents, nearly every fail safe failed. The only reason it didn't detonate (setting off the "series of explosions") was the final trigger, regarded as the weakest fail safe - due to its need to function - acted properly.

There is no guarantee if that same incident was repeated three times, that it would not have resulted in detonation in two out of those three times.
Last edited by asuka March 15, 2025 at 04:40 PM.

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6h ago
1,319 Posts
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6h ago
tribalnoise
6h ago
1,319 Posts
I watched the video special on this several years ago. I think it was on PBS. It was amazing.

https://www.amazon.com/Command-Co...B0D1PBC2LB

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