Hundreds of close calls we never knew about

Back in the late 1970s and ’80s, I was involved in the antinuclear weapons movement. We tried to warn people about the danger of so many nuclear weapons—more than 50,000. One was too many, many of us felt, but we also tried to argue with such logic as, Why do we need to be able to blow up the world 50 times over? We also warned people about the risk of accidents and an inadvertent error leading to a suicidal nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Little did we know that we were actually understating the danger. Little did we know how many times we came dangerously close to a nuclear war.

Now, with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control (Penguin, 2013), we know much more about that history.

Louis Menand reviews the book in the Sept. 30 issue of The New Yorker. He includes summaries of some of the stories Schlosser tells. For example, on Jan. 25, 1995, more than four years after the end of the Cold War, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin received news at 9:28 a.m. Moscow time that “a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from the vicinity of the Norwegian Sea, and that it appeared to be headed toward Moscow.” Yeltsin had the option of launching an immediate nuclear strike against targets around the world. He had 4,700 nuclear warheads ready to go.

It turned out the “missile” was a weather rocket launched from Norway to study the aurora borealis. “The Norwegians had, in fact, notified the Russians several weeks in advance of the launch,” Menand writes, but “whoever received the notice didn’t grasp the implications or simply forgot to forward it to military authorities.”

This was one of hundreds of incidents after 1945 when “accident, miscommunication, human error, mechanical malfunction or some combination of glitches nearly resulted in the detonation of nuclear weapons.”

Menand includes other stories. In 1958, “a B-47 bomber carrying a Mark 36 hydrogen bomb, one of the most powerful weapons in the American arsenal, caught fire while taxiing on a runway at an airbase in Morocco.” Fortunately, or luckily, and the word must be repeated many times, the explosives in the warhead did not detonate.

Only six weeks later, another Mark 6 landed in the back yard of a house in Mars Bluff, S.C. “It had fallen when a crewman had mistakenly grabbed the manual bomb-release lever.” Fortunately (there’s that word again), the nuclear core had not been inserted. The bomb left a 35-foot crater, killed a lot of chickens and sent family members (humans, that is) to the hospital.

One study discovered that “between 1950 and 1968 at least 1,200 nuclear weapons had been involved in ‘significant’ accidents.” Even the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was a mile off target (and killed 40,000 people).

Perhaps the most harrowing incident occurred in 1980 at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, when a worker dropped a socket into the silo and left a hole in the missile.

The explosive force of a Titan II was three times the force of all the bombs dropped in World War II, including the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. If detonated, it would have wiped out most of the state of Arkansas.

Schlosser also discusses at length the insane strategy of the Cold War powers, which called for full-scale nuclear war in response to any attack. A general tells Schlosser that “we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.” Indeed.

Today many smaller powers also have nuclear weapons, and the possibility of their use, by design or accident, is high.