By Mike Matejka
Occasionally I’ll share a recent book I read on the WJBC Forum, and I’d like to recommend a real life thriller, which might leave you actually frightened, Eric Schlosser’s “Command & Control,” with a subhead, “Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident and the Illusion of Safety.”
Readers might remember Schlosser as the author of “Fast Food Nation,” which opened our eyes to how our burgers are produced, resulting in some dietary changes and revamping of fast food menus.
In this latest book, he looks at the past 70 years of the atomic age, the near misses that thankfully didn’t explode, how secrecy has changed our government and how nuclear weapons and policies evolved. The cliff hanger in the book is a Titan Missile II Silo in Damascus, Arkansas, where one dropped tool set off an incredible fatal fire and another near miss incident with a nuclear warhead. Schlosser skillfully weaves what happens in Damascus with other near-misses on land, sea and in the air, plus how command and control shifted within our governmental structures.
To quote General George Lee Butler, who became head of the Strategic Air Command in 1991, as he reviewed the nuclear plans under his air command, “we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in great proportion.”
And of course, this thorough documentation of nuclear near mishaps in the U.S. arsenal does not even touch deeply on what happened to nuclear weapons under Russian, French, Chinese, British, Israeli, Pakistani or Indian control. It is simply a very thorough examination of what happened with U.S. weapons. We all owe a great thank you to those U.S. military personnel who safely handled those weapons and should mourn those who died in fires, crashes and from radiation exposure in near miss incidents.
Why is this book important? Two things – it’s been 70 years since those first mushroom clouds appeared over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No nation has used those weapons since, and because of that, we forget the volatility of the thousands of armed warheads that still remain. Secondly, this country is currently debating an agreement with Iran. There are those who say the Iranians can never be trusted, just like many said the Soviets could never be trusted.
But thanks to arms agreements, we and Soviets stepped back, pace by pace, from the nuclear precipice. The same maybe true with Iran. Even without total trust, opening a dialogue and beginning some preliminary ground rules could help contain another nation with a dangerous weapon. “Command & Control” is a fascinating and sometimes frightening book, and like General Butler noted, we have been extremely lucky.
Mike Matejka is the Governmental Affairs director for the Great Plains Laborers District Council, covering 11,000 union Laborers in northern Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. He lives in Bloomington with his wife and daughter and their two dogs. He served on the Bloomington City Council for 18 years, is a past president of the McLean County Historical Society and Vice-President of the Illinois Labor History Society.
The opinions expressed within WJBC’s Forum are solely those of the Forum’s author, and are not necessarily those of WJBC or Cumulus Media, Inc.
