
A Sneak Peek at Eric Schlosser's New Book on Nuclear Weapons - edw519
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/eric-schlosser-command-control-excerpt-nuclear-weapons
======
jlgreco
_" The two propellants were extremely efficient"_

This is not particularly true. Hypergolic fuel mixes are less efficient than
LOX/LH2 _(which is nontoxic (exhaust is water vapor) though still hazardous of
course)_ and LOX/RP-1 _(more or less nontoxic again. RP-1 is just fancy
kerosene)_. The only real reasons to use them in first stages^ is that you can
store them in the rocket _(problematic with cryogenic fuels /oxidizers like
LH2 and LOX since they will boil off over a short period of time)_ and the
ignition system is simpler _(not really a big deal)_.

LOX/RP-1 was actually used with earlier ICBMs like the Soviet _R-7_ , the
American _Atlas_. Storable hypergolic fuel mixes followed these, though now
modern ICBMs are solid fuel rockets (storable, and safe for people on the
ground).

Hypergolic fuel mixes have caused issues for non-military rockets too. During
Apollo-Soyuz there was a leak of N2O2 into the Apollo capsule. Not a very good
situation at all, but for that application they are really the best tool for
the job. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo-Soyuz_Test_Project#Re-
en...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo-Soyuz_Test_Project#Re-
entry_and_aftermath)

^ Hypergolic fuels are also useful in engines that you need to start/stop
multiple times, and in upper stages that need to store their fuel for a while.

~~~
arethuza
Seems like a good place to mention: "Ignition - An informal history of liquid
rocket propellants"

[http://www.amazon.com/Ignition-informal-history-liquid-
prope...](http://www.amazon.com/Ignition-informal-history-liquid-
propellants/dp/0813507251)

~~~
redthrowaway
_Ignition_ also comes up regularly in Derek Lowe's "Things I won't work with"
blog, which is highly entertaining in its own right.

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/)

~~~
arethuza
I first saw a reference to _Ignition_ in the "Things I won't work with" entry
on chlorine trifluoride - the stuff you can use to set fire to sand...

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php)

------
at-fates-hands
Nice anti-nuke story. I know people want us to give up our Nukes, but with a
host of middle eastern countries within grasp of nuclear technology, doing so
would be asinine.

It's also interesting to note no where in the article do they talk about how
the US has continually reduced its nuclear stockpile, or that we've been at
the forefront of promoting non-proliferation.

What's also missing from the article is several policies from the Bush
Administration which sought to update the technology we already have to keep
the technology a lot safer and easier to maintain like the Reliable
Replacement Warhead program:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_Replacement_Warhead_Pr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliable_Replacement_Warhead_Program)

"The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) was a proposed new American nuclear
warhead design and bomb family that was intended to be simple, reliable and to
provide a long-lasting, low maintenance future nuclear force for the United
States. Initiated by the United States Congress in 2004, it became a
centerpiece of the plans of the National Nuclear Security Administration
(NNSA) to remake the nuclear weapons complex. In 2008, the Congress denied
funding for the program, and in 2009 the Obama administration called for work
on the program to cease."

~~~
alexqgb
Why would it be asinine?

Seriously, so what if they have nukes? Simply having them doesn't mean you can
use them.

After all, that's what the Cold War demonstrated. If you're going to use them,
you have to use them in numbers great enough to wipe out every city in every
nation opposing you. In essence, your own use must be heavy enough to
absolutely ensure no possibility of retaliation.

Accordingly, it's not enough for Tehran to nuke Tel Aviv. They also have to
nuke every city in every nation that's part of NATO and they'd have to do so
at the exact same time.

In the Soviet era, we mitigated a threat of this magnitude with the Nuclear
Triad, which distributed our weapons on moving platforms around the globe,
ensuring that even if we were obliterated by a Soviet attack, we could make
our very last act one of equally devastating retaliation. The resulting
situation, known as Mutually Assured Destruction (yes, MAD), was the thing
that not only kept the Cold War cold, but ensured (in theory) that any direct
conflicts that did break out would never go nuclear.

You must realize that there is absolutely no way for any middle eastern
country to build arsenals and delivery platforms formidable enough to
replicate the Soviet stance. And even if there were, the enormous gulf between
the size of their economies and ours means they couldn't get a quarter of the
way there without the US rearming - even from from scratch - and recreating
the MAD dynamic.

The nuclear logic is simple: unless you can use them on a scale large enough
to avoid any threat of retaliation, you cannot use them at all. You can't even
threaten to use them without putting your own life at risk. In that regard,
they're like trying to take hostages on an airplane post-9/11\. Knowing what
we all know now, every one of passengers will be thinking the exact same
thing: corner the bastard and either cripple or kill him.

Like soldiers dressed in bright red coats, nuclear arms are a relic of age
that has passed, never to return. The more openly we can acknowledge this, the
better off the world will be.

~~~
malandrew
I don't know about anyone else, but the simple fact that a large portion of
human beings would elect other human beings with the capacity and resolution
to press the button in case of a MAD-type event to be completely asinine. The
people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause
assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that
should ever be in a position of leadership. How we, the Russians and several
other countries reached the conclusion that such people should be leading us
is frightening and reflects quite poorly on the capacity of our species to
scale.

Is there any other social, colony-creating species out there that has
developed a similar mechanism for retaliation against some threat that also
guarantees the wiping out of their own colony?

~~~
alexqgb
"The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause
assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that
should ever be in a position of leadership."

That was the cornerstone of Cold War propaganda. The leaders who'd do this
weren't our own, they were the Soviet's. And as Godless Communists, they
weren't even proper human beings to begin with, which made them even more
dangerous. The only way to keep these monsters in check was to let them know
that killing every one of us (which was surely their deepest desire) would
also be the end of them.

In reality, this was just not the case. As the animated map of nuclear tests
shows, the most threatening country on Earth was US, by a wide margin. We took
an early, unchallenged lead in developing nuclear arms, and maintained it
relentlessly for decades.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=856fWEltiXo)

Watching this, it's hard to maintain the fiction that we were the good guys
reluctantly responding to the looming Soviet threat. Put simply, there was no
nuclear threat when we started arming ourselves heavily. In anything, you
wonder why the Soviets took so long responding to the growing threat posed -
without serious provocation - by the Americans.

------
rsync
... obligatory recommendation of the book "Normal Accidents" if you want to
see this trend discussed across a broad range of threat vectors, from nuclear
plants to shipping disasters ... and the common threads that link them all.

------
grannyg00se
"The warhead had a yield of nine megatons—about three times the explosive
force of all the bombs dropped during the Second World War, including both
atomic bombs"

My god. That alone is enough to scare me. Why on earth would you create a
single weapon so powerful when you aren't limited to only one? I guess I don't
fully grasp the concept of an arms race because no matter how I think about it
that just seems grossly irresponsible.

~~~
chiph
The Soviets had (and the Russians still maintain) the one anti-ballistic
missile system allowed by treaty. It's emplaced all around Moscow. In
addition, Soviet leadership had constructed a series of deep bunkers and
transport systems under Moscow -- there is/was another subway system
underneath the civilian Moscow system for Kremlin leadership to use.

So should a missile (of several targeted against Moscow) make it through the
ABM system, it would still have to destroy a very hard target. And so you need
a big bomb to ensure destruction.

~~~
grannyg00se
Interesting. That sounds like urban myth material - a special subway under the
subway.

But from my limited knowledge, bigger and bigger nukes wouldn't make a
difference against deep hardened bunkers since they don't penetrate before
detonation. When you look at pictures of atomic bomb damage you don't see deep
craters, you see a wide area of surface level damage.

~~~
cynwoody
There was a special subway line, Metro 2†, which ran from the Kremlin to
Khodynka Airfield, Moscow's downtown airport, next to GRU HQ. In the event of
an imminent threat, the Soviet leadership would have hopped onto Metro 2, been
transported to Khodynka, and been flown from there to a secure command post
somewhere in the Urals.

†[http://books.google.com/books?id=rsB-5-e0RwgC&pg=PA65&dq=sub...](http://books.google.com/books?id=rsB-5-e0RwgC&pg=PA65&dq=subway+kremlin+khodynka&hl=en&sa=X&ei=tHg2UpqrAba14AP3qoDoBQ&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=subway%20kremlin%20khodynka&f=false)

Also see:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2)

------
tptacek
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accide...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents)

~~~
js2
One of my favorites:

 _The Tybee Island B-47 crash was an incident on February 5, 1958, in which
the United States Air Force lost a 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) Mark 15 nuclear bomb
in the waters off Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia, United States. During a
practice exercise, the B-47 bomber carrying the bomb collided in midair with
an F-86 fighter plane. To protect the aircrew from a possible detonation in
the event of a crash, the bomb was jettisoned. Following several unsuccessful
searches, the bomb was presumed lost somewhere in Wassaw Sound off the shores
of Tybee Island._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-
air_colli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-
air_collision)

~~~
bun-neh
We actually lost a nuclear weapon just off the coast of Spain. Even scarier is
that these are not the only two instances in which nuclear weapons have gone
(and still remain) missing due to negligence or accident.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash)

------
mikevm
Book link: [http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-
Illu...](http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-
Illusion/dp/1594202273)

------
rwmj
If you want to read another terrifying book (about Russian biological weapons)
I highly recommend:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biohazard_%28book%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biohazard_%28book%29)

------
fiatmoney
The only reason to keep nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert is if you're
worried you might have to use them or lose them in a first strike. Now that we
have almost impossible-to-target (in quantity alone) nuclear submarines with
missiles capable of serving whatever strategic purpose you'd need, there's no
reason to be spreading the risk around to land- and air-based systems as well.

~~~
rdl
I'm not sure if I believe this, but the US argument for retaining the triad is
this:

We need to at least retain the land ICBM because they are responsible for most
of the aim points for an enemy counter force strike. They are basically the
size of several states, and sink hundreds or thousands of missiles, making a
first strike implausible for anyone except the Russians.

With the SSBN force, they are pretty safe while at sea, but supported from two
bases, each of which could be destroyed by a single missile. If you had 10
weapons, you could basically take out all long term US strategic forces,
except for at-sea SSBN, if you got rid of the land ICBMs. The submarines would
then be in a horrible position of "use them or lose them."

I think you could accomplish this by keeping the entire force on lower alert,
which has largely been the case since the fall of the USSR.

~~~
malandrew
I would hope that most of these first strike targets sit at the bottom of deep
valleys, so that if a missile strike were to hit them that much of the
resulting damage was buffeted and contained by the valley walls. I imagine
that much of the fallout would also be captured by valley itself and that any
future rains would funnel all contaminated material to the lowest point in the
valley. In essence, every single one of these first strike targets should be
designed to be massive sinks for radioactivity.

On your second comment, I'm actually surprised that those two bases are that
vulnerable. I was under the impression that they would be fortified the same
way Russian naval bases like Object 825 GTS, one of the bases for nuclear
armed submarines, is.

~~~
mpyne
Well you can probably look at most of the two U.S. bases right on Google Maps.
It's certainly defended against conceivable land attack but as mentioned in
the other comment, there's not a lot you can do to make it invulnerable to
nuclear strikes.

~~~
malandrew
Norad is protected against a 30 megaton nuclear explosion. What level of
protection do you need to be protected from the greatest conceivable explosion
today? Do any facilities in the world meet the criteria for protection from a
direct detonation of this magnitude? If not, what is the most fortified
installation in the world and how close does it get to being protected from
any conceivable attack today?

~~~
hga
No, not at all. In fact, we supplemented ground bunkers with airborne command
and control systems at the same time we started building the Cheyenne Mountain
complex. It's axiomatic that you don't place all your eggs in one basket if
you care very much about survival, as we used to. E.g. sometime around 1970 I
think we judged the Soviets would be able to land very powerful nukes with
sufficient simultaneity at both of Cheyenne Mountain's exterior entrances,
negating the passive defense of the blast door entrance.

Sub pens would be a _much_ more difficult problem; note also the relative
incompressiblity of water compared to air.

If you're really really serious about this sort of thing, you need a defense
in depth of active defenses. For deterrence it doesn't matter if all or even
any of them work in practice, just that the perception that your strikes will
very possibly fail.

And/or if you maintain enough targets, enough systems, with interlocking
constraints making a time-on-target for all of them well neigh impossible,
well, that's why we still maintain the triad.

~~~
rdl
In reality there's also a lot of politics (both congressional
districts/states, and inter-service rivalry) to the Triad. Especially for the
Army's piece (tactical weapons), which I think we've mostly phased out, and
IMO manned bombers for the most part.

~~~
hga
While by definition you're partly correct, the triad itself, which never had
an Army competent, is carefully designed to make sure of significant serious
retaliatory return.

Bombers are critically important because you can launch them in all sorts of
circumstances including ones short of war without their necessarily even being
able to have their warheads go boom
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_action_link)).
They're also obviously not vulnerable to ABM systems except the dual use ones.
Or various gambits that make the space though which ballistic missiles have to
travel hostile, e.g. zero intelligence "gravel".

When the stakes are survival, redundancy is your friend.

------
adam-f
I don't understand why an accidental detonation of a warhead would produce
"lethal" fallout. Yet there's comparatively little concern (and rightfully so)
over the 2000+ intentional test detonations done around the world so far?

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY)

~~~
rosser
St. George, UT, downwind of the Yucca Flats test site, had a markedly
increased cancer rate among the people who lived there at the time. A friend's
aunt had her thyroid removed as a teenager, presumably consequent to fallout
exposure from nuclear weapons testing. (Naturally, the government made her and
her family agree never to say, or even speculate aloud about why it was done
when they paid for the surgery...)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._George,_Utah#Nuclear_conta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._George,_Utah#Nuclear_contamination)

~~~
malandrew

        "Naturally, the government made her and her family agree 
        never to say, or even speculate aloud about why it was 
        done when they paid for the surgery..."
    

I find it shocking that we afford the government the unilateral right to gag
an individual from talking in exchange for treatment owed. I would hope that
our judicial system would review such an arrangement and nullify a non-
disclosure clause in this incident. Near as I can tell it sounds like your
friend's aunt never entered into a binding legal relationship with those that
contributed to her cancer until after it had been demonstrated that they were
at fault. How those responsible can get a judgement or arbitration that
includes such a non-disclosure when that party is so obviously wrong and at
fault is simply mind-boggling.

~~~
philwelch
Most out-of-court settlements entail non-disclosure and non-disparagement.
It's fairly standard.

------
dominik
Tangential, but I just finished reading _A Canticle for Leibowitz_. Amazing
sci-fi book that deals with the aftermath of nuclear war.

------
adsr
This was a fascinating read, and disturbing. Make sure you read the interview
as well at the end of the story.

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/interview-
eric-s...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/interview-eric-
schlosser-command-control-nuclear-weapons-accidents)

------
DanielBMarkham
Thanks Ed! It's going in my stack.

------
johnchristopher
Mandatory Star Trek clip:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPBzj90Su8A](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPBzj90Su8A)

------
JamesArgo
Stories like this make me brood on quantum immortality.

