Schlosser states his goal for Command and Control: “This book assumes that most of its readers know little about nuclear weapons, their inner workings, or the strategic thinking that justifies their use… It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.” The book works very well this way. If you wonder “why would anyone want to blow up the world?”, this book shows the premise of that question is wrong. You will learn the “whys” behind the nuclear arms race. This is a long book: 448 pages of text, with 229 pages of notes, bibliography, and index. So even if you’re familiar with the Cold War, you’re bound to learn something.

Schlosser’s book covers efforts to ensure American nuclear weapons don’t “go off by accident, [or] by mistake.” Schlosser uses an accident with a Titan II missile as the frame for the book. He covers the accident in great detail from the view point of many of those involved, so stringing the chapters together would have been an information overload. Instead, he intersperses chapters on the accident with history of the Cold War, political battles among military and scientific factions, biographies of some of the people involved, and other accidents – especially with airborne warheads.

Schlosser shows how “trivial events in non-trivial systems” can lead to significant problems. Some of these incidents sound ridiculous: a janitor cleaning the floor in a nuclear reactor caught his shirt on a circuit breaker, tripped the breaker and shut the reactor down for four days; a plane on an aircraft carrier inexplicably rolled off the deck, sending the pilot, plane, and its nuclear warheads to the bottom of the ocean, never to be recovered.

In many of the accidents, blame was placed on human error, but “the real problem lay deeply embedded within the technological systems… what appeared to be… a one-in-a-million accident was actually to be expected. It was normal.”

This is a scary thought. No matter how smart and well-intentioned we are, certain types of systems – high risk, tightly coupled systems with many interconnected, simultaneous actions – bring surprises. “The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.” I need look no further than today’s headlines on Ebola in Texas for an example.

Schlosser’s framing accident is the famous explosion of a Titan II missile outside Damascus, Arkansas. A technician dropped a socket during routine maintenance. The falling socket damaged the system, starting a leak of highly-volatile oxidizer. Through a chain of mishaps, the warhead was blown out of the silo and the installation was destroyed. Many people were injured or killed. In a fine example of the confusion such incidents cause, even long after the fact, key soldiers involved were both reprimanded and awarded medals for heroism. I was often struck by the courage and creativity of the “little people” who figured in this and other incidents described.

The accidents provide enough excitement to keep a reader going through the important policy issues. Schlosser brings us through the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, up to today.

You will find many famous names in the book: for example, Presidents Eisenhower, Carter, and Reagan; Carl Sagan and his nuclear winter hypothesis; and physicists Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer. Tensions flared between the military’s need for warheads to detonate reliably and civilians’ need to prevent accidents. There were further factions within each group. Budget concerns delayed installing safety upgrades and left soldiers with malfunctioning protective gear. Insistence on perfect performance focused on punishing errors instead of improving systems. Constant fear on both sides of the Cold War that the other would launch a pre-emptive strike was justified – there were those arguing for just such a strike on both sides. If a nation waited until it was attacked, even if it could shoot down 90% of the attacking bombers, it would still be destroyed. Pre-emptive attack seemed the only sure way to survive.

Some of the stories are echoed today. For example:

• The Soviets were so successful at faking a large air force that America feared a “bomber gap.” America’s response was to build almost 2,000 bombers, while the Soviets had, in reality, about 150. Consider that Sadam Hussein helped bring on America’s invasion by faking – he encouraged the belief he had weapons of mass destruction.
• When America planned to deploy Pershing II missiles in Europe, they encountered “a nuclear version of the Stockholm syndrome. Throughout Western Europe, protestors condemned American missiles that hadn’t yet arrived – not the hundreds of new Soviet missiles already aimed at them.” Consider that Iraq tells America they don’t want American troops in their country fighting ISIS, even as their cities fall.

I hope those of us inside the nuclear weapons complex and those who protest against nuclear weapons will read the book, but not to cherry pick items that put their opponents in a bad light. As another book reviewed here shows, good people often disagree, yet we need each other to succeed. It is useful to see how America navigated this complex and dangerous time. After all, complex and dangerous times await us in the future.