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Command and Combust

America's Secret History of Atomic Accidents

Gregory D. Koblentz
GREGORY D. KOBLENTZ is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University.
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. By Eric Schlosser. Penguin Press, 2013, 632 pp. $36.00.

Between 1950 and 1980, the United States experienced a reported 32 “broken arrows,” the military’s term for accidents involving nuclear weapons. The last of these occurred in September 1980, at a U.S. Air Force base in Damascus, Arkansas. It started when a young technician performing routine maintenance on a Titan II missile housed in an underground silo dropped a socket wrench. The wrench punctured the missile’s fuel tank. As the highly toxic and flammable fuel leaked from the missile, officers and airmen scrambled to diagnose the problem and fix it. Their efforts ultimately failed, and eight hours after the fuel tank ruptured, it exploded with tremendous force. The detonation of the missile’s liquid fuel was powerful enough to throw the silo’s 740-ton blast door more than 200 yards and send a fireball hundreds of feet into the night sky. The missile’s nine-megaton thermo*nuclear warhead -- the most powerful ever deployed by the United States -- was found, relatively intact, in a ditch 200 yards away from the silo.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic..._combust-122313

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