Will I love Command and Control?

Many people find books on the dangers of nuclear weapons to be technical and boring. Schlosser’s Command and Control avoids these off-putting aspects by immersing readers in a thriller about an accident that came close to wiping Arkansas off the map while Bill Clinton was governor.

By interweaving this gripping account with frightening details of other nuclear weapons accidents, Schlosser keeps readers turning page after page.

Command and Control is the gripping story of an accident at an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile silo in Arkansas in 1980 that resulted in the explosion of a Titan II missile.

The explosion blew the concrete lid off the silo and sent the missile’s nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead hurtling one hundred metres through the air. Fortunately, the warhead, which had 500 times the explosive power of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, did not explode.

Interwoven with the minute-by-minute account of this accident, Schlosser gives a riveting history of the development of nuclear weapons by the U.S. military and discusses the… show more.

More recent than Kaplan’s Wizards and more episodic but making it clear how close we came to destruction in the Cold War. With journalistic flair, he drives the narrative with real hair-raising episodes most notably a blow-by-blow account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in 1980. It’s a book that every student should read as the new generation needs to know how close to disaster we came in between 1947 and 1991 and the world could easily revert into a new Cold War. 

A disquieting but riveting book that includes a detailed account of a real-life but little-known nuclear accident, and then looks at every aspect of nuclear risk, examining problems with the command and control systems that in theory were supposed to provide presidents with the information they would need to make the decision on whether the United States should retaliate against a Soviet strike but that were and probably still are well beyond the capacity of any human beings to deal with safely.

An accident in an Arkansas missile silo and the minute by minute attempt to discover what had happened and to prevent a nuclear explosion. This narrative is brilliantly interwoven with the stories of accidents, mishaps, computer malfunctions and human errors that nearly led to nuclear disaster over four decades of Cold War tension.