Command and Control Quotes

“American tanks were sent to Checkpoint Charlie as a show of strength. Soviet tanks appeared there at about five in the evening on the twenty-seventh. The British soon deployed two antitank guns to support the Americans, while all the French troops in West Berlin remained safely in their barracks. For”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“Sergeant Paul Ramoneda, a twenty-eight-year-old baker with the Ninth Food Service Squadron, was one of the first to reach the bomber.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“In the early days of the project, Teller was concerned that the intense heat of a nuclear explosion would set fire to the atmosphere and kill every living thing on earth. A”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become “a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Eager to defend the civilian control of nuclear weapons from military encroachment, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara had fought hard to ensure that only the president could make the ultimate decision. But they hadn’t considered the possibility that the president might be clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily—like Richard Nixon, during his final weeks in office. Amid the deepening Watergate scandal, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger told the head of the Joint Chiefs to seek his approval before acting on “any emergency order coming from the president.” Although Schlesinger’s order raised questions about who was actually in command, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“Unlike the hot line frequently depicted in Hollywood films, the new system didn’t provide a special telephone for the president to use in an emergency. It relied on Teletype machines that could send text quickly and securely. Written statements were considered easier to translate, more deliberate, and less subject to misinterpretation than verbal ones. Every”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“The drug use at Homestead was suspected after a fully armed Russian MiG-17 fighter plane, flown by a Cuban defector, landed there unchallenged, while Air Force One was parked on a nearby runway.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell—the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War—urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but “anything is better than submission.” Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed. Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace, crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn’t be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, “should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“McMahon predicted that “total power in the hands of total evil will equal destruction.” The”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Every step appears as the unavoidable consequence of the preceding one,” Einstein said. “In the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. The”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them—if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“Walter Junior, were in the toolshed outside their home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, when a Mark 6 atomic bomb landed in the yard. Mrs.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“Moser was a great believer in checklists.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The cable and the X-unit both had female plugs. Somehow the cable had been installed backward. It would take a couple of days to disassemble the layers of spheres and explosives, remove the cable, and reinstall it properly. “I felt a chill and started to sweat in the air-conditioned room,” O’Keefe recalled. He decided to improvise. With help from another technician, he broke one major safety rule after another, propping the door open to bring in extension cords and using a soldering iron to attach the right plugs. It was risky to melt solder in a room with five thousand pounds of explosives. The two men fixed the cable, connected the plugs, and didn’t tell anyone what they’d done.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

“Captain Barry steered the plane back toward land and ordered the crew to bail out. One of the copilots, Captain Theodore Schreier, mistakenly put on a life jacket over his parachute. He was never seen again. The”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

“At a level of about 18,000 parts per million (ppm), the RFHCO would start to melt. At 20,000 ppm, the fuel vapor could spontaneously combust, without any exposure to a spark or flame, just from the friction caused by the movement of air. Waving your hand through the fuel vapor, at that concentration, could ignite it. The”
― Eric Schlosser, Command and Control