Mad Fiction

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Notes

1. Schlosser industriously pried loose many of the classified documents used throughout his book through Freedom of Information requests. He also draws appreciatively on the trove of declassified documents obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive at The George Washington University and its nuclear guru, Bill Burr.

2. Of other studies of a more technical nature that substantially overlap the Schlosser book, I would recommend Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), especially the chapter by myself, John E. Pike, and Stephen I. Schwartz, “Targeting and Controlling the Bomb,” pp. 197–268; Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Peter D. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); Janne E. Nolan, Guardians of the Arsenal: The Politics of Nuclear Strategy (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1989); Bruce G. Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1985), and Bruce G. Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Brookings Institution Press, 1993).

3. See Alex Wellerstein, “NUKEMAP,” <http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/>.

4. President John F. Kennedy straddled this fence. His national security team viewed President Dwight D. Eisenhower's predelegation arrangements as an unauthorized launch waiting to happen, and recommended ending the practice. But Kennedy fretted about his standing at the Department of Defense if he went against the judgment of a revered four-star general like Eisenhower. He vacillated, and in the end, he struck an ambiguous pose, neither issuing new predelegation letters of last resort under his signature, nor revoking the previous letters signed by Eisenhower. Ambiguity be damned, General Thomas Power believed without question that he inherited General Curtis LeMay's authority to transmit the Go code if the lines to President Kennedy went down. Power was in charge of the strategic forces during the Cuban missile crisis, which were plagued by a multitude of command and communications problems. The nation came closer to a Power-directed nuclear strike against Soviet forces and territory than anyone realized at the time.

5. Bruce G. Blair, “Russia's Doomsday Machine,” New York Times, October 8, 1993, p. A35; William J. Broad, “Russia Has ‘Doomsday’ Machine, U.S. Expert Says,” New York Times, October 8, 1993, p. A6.

6. Jonathan Schell, The Gift of Time (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), pp. 191–94.

7. Bruce G. Blair, “Where Would All the Missiles Go?” Washington Post, October 15, 1996, p. A15.

8. See Department of Defense, “Report on Nuclear Employment Strategy of the United States Specified in Section 491 of 10 U.S.C.,” June 19, 2013, <http://www.defense.gov/pubs/reporttoCongressonUSNuclearEmploymentStrategy_Section491.pdf>. It is worth noting that this statement of requirement was classified top secret only weeks before being publicly released. What was believed to cause extremely grave damage to national security if disclosed suddenly became benign.

9. Silo-sitters have actually said this for twenty years. For a representative view from three generations of Minuteman launch officers who served in Montana during the past forty years, see Bruce Blair, Damon Bosetti, and Brian Weeden, “Bombs Away,” New York Times, December 7, 2010, p. A33.

10. See “De-Alerting Strategic Forces,” in George P. Shultz, Sidney D. Drell, and James E. Goodby, eds., Reykjavik Revisited: Steps Toward a World Free of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2008).