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I second that recommendation. I'd also highly recommend Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosse
by sillywalk 3y ago
I second that recommendation. I'd also highly recommend Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser, which discusses similar C&C issues as well as nuclear accidents, and efforts to efforts to make nukes safer and more reliable e.g. PALs and insensitive explosives, and more and it inter-cuts with the story of an "incident" at a Titan missile silo in Arkansas.
- aenis 3y ago...and for some lighter reading, anything by James Mahaffey, in particular the "Atomic Accidents". Both insightful - and bizzarely entertaining to read.
- Spooky23 3y agoHonestly, that book was pretty meh. I liked Schlosser’s earlier work, but you could have summed up command and control in about 40 pages. I’d recommend “Soldiers of Reason”, which is about the RAND corporation and the thought process behind the madness. Hearing about how military bureaucracy does stupid and incompetent things is a given… understanding how a lunatic like LeMay was in charge of and restrained from initiating a global apocalypse is more enlightening, if not terrifying.
- sillywalk 3y agoI'll have to take a look at that book. Apparently LeMay's successor Thomas Power was even more crazy. LeMay was quoted as privately saying that Power was mentally "unstable" and a "sadist."