It didn’t take much to nearly annihilate Arkansas. In 1980, a young repairman, who was standing on a platform working on a missile in the town of Damascus, dropped a socket from his wrench. It fell 70 feet, took a bounce and pierced the fuel tank of the missile, which was armed with a nuclear warhead three times more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Over the next 10 hours, as the fuel leak created a series of other chemical reactions, the Air Force scrambled to figure out what to do with a ticking time bomb, and the fixes weren’t entirely successful. There was a deadly explosion, in the end – it just wasn’t a catastrophic one.
At the time, the United States was still in the thick of the Cold War. Duck-and-cover drills were a memory, but the threat of nuclear attack was still very real. Since 1991, those fears of nuclear war with the Russians have disappeared; the bombs, however, haven’t.
That’s one eye-opening reminder in “Command and Control,” a documentary by Robert Kenner based on the book by Eric Schlosser, who’s famous for writing “Fast Food Nation.”
“There’s sort of this amnesia that’s washed over all of us to the point where we’ve stopped being concerned that the planet could end because of a mistake,” Kenner said during a recent visit to Washington with Schlosser. “That complacency makes it more dangerous.”
These kinds of near-misses — 32 documented ones, but probably many more — are called “broken arrows,” and the stories are startling both because of their frequency and because Americans assume that the greatest threats to our safety will come from afar.
The movie’s second thread is a more comprehensive examination of the way the United States kept upping the ante on arming itself during the Cold War. The more weapons we had, the more safe we presumably were — except when we weren’t. Like the time a plane broke apart over North Carolina and dropped a hydrogen bomb that inadvertently went through nearly all of its steps to detonate. A last-ditch precaution — a part of the bomb that looked a lot like an on-off light switch — prevented catastrophe.
We can blame some of the broken arrows on a culture of secrecy at the time. As an example, during the Cold War, one of the people in charge of weapons safety wasn’t privy to the accidents that were happening in the field. The good news is, that’s changed.
“The warheads and bombs are much safer today than they were in 1980,” Schlosser said. “There was such a denial there was a problem, because once you admit there’s a problem, you have to admit that all of your weapons are potentially unsafe and that was too much to deal with.”
The bad news is, we have new threats that weren’t around 35 years ago, like cyberattacks on nuclear command systems.
“That sounds like the plot of ‘WarGames,’” Schlosser admitted. But it’s real. If terrorists wanted to do extensive damage, what better way than to get the nuclear codes? In 2012, the National Security Agency acknowledged that the computer systems that control America’s nuclear weapons are “under constant attack” from hackers.
The point of writing the book and making the movie wasn’t to lobby for certain policy changes. Schlosser and Kenner simply want to call attention to the thousands of very powerful bombs stashed around the country in places like the Nevada National Security Site near Las Vegas or the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. They aren’t apocalyptic doomsayers.
“I don’t lie in bed at night thinking that a nuclear warhead is going to go off,” Schlosser said. “But it’s concerning, and it’s definitely a problem that can be addressed. The consequences of one weapon going off anywhere is going to be unimaginable.”
The two have a history of spurring change with their work. Schlosser’s influential “Fast Food Nation” was the inspiration for Kenner’s Oscar-nominated “Food, Inc.” Since the book and movie, farmers markets have multiplied and consumers have increasingly rejected processed food, leading even fast-food chains to embrace healthier fare.
They received a lot more pushback on that book and movie than on “Command and Control.” When he was gathering research on nukes, Schlosser worried that the government would come knocking. Instead, after the release of his book, he was invited to talk about the issues with people who were running our nuclear weapons complex.
“Fast Food Nation” and “Food, Inc.,” by contrast, prompted threats, lawsuits, disruptive bookstore appearances and the need for security.
“It’s scarier to criticize these big corporations than it is to be critical of national security policy,” Schlosser said. “What’s interesting is in the ’70s, the CIA and all these government agencies were going after journalists and critics of the Vietnam War, and now it’s critics of Ronald McDonald that have to worry.”
As the United States continues to figure out what to do with its most powerful weapons, Schlosser and Kenner hope to raise awareness and get people talking.
“Congress over the next couple years will be discussing modernizing our whole arsenal, and we need a real discussion of, how many do we need? What kind do we need?” Schlosser said.
In the meantime, we’re still living among deadly technology that’s run by humans, who, as we know, make mistakes.
“The fact of something going wrong is low probability, but the consequences of something going wrong are tremendous,” Kenner said. “Think what would happen if a very small bit of that warhead goes off. Everyone will say, ‘Why haven’t we been dealing with this?’ This is the most important issue that we’re not thinking about.”