“a powerful case for disarmament”
Eric Schlosser has, no doubt unwittingly, continued the work of a former Selly Oak Colleges’ President, John Ferguson, who was also singer, cricketer, professor of classics and first dean of the OU’s Faculty of Arts.
John wrote a book recording the large body of information about nuclear weapons-related accidents, but – though he was the author of several readily published books, some on defence/peace issues – he could find no company willing to print this one.
Now Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, has published Schosser’s account, which Financial Times contributing editor John Lloyd, describes as “An investigation into America’s nuclear arsenal (which) is also a powerful case for disarmament”, continuing:
“Page after relentless page, it drives the vision of a world trembling on the edge of a fatal precipice deep into your reluctant mind. In so doing it forces the conclusion that if, as it claims, only luck and courage have kept humanity from disaster many times over, then failures of one or both of these qualities will undo us before long . . .
“Command and Control confronts the formidable complexities of the development, manufacture, upgrading, maintenance and storage of nuclear weaponry . . . “
Schlosser shows that potentially horrific accidents happened regularly during the last 70 years as other countries joined the nuclear ‘club’, even in the US, where stocks are among the best kept in the world.
“The installations are safer now than they were in the first decades of hair-raising sloppiness, when accidents were routinely denied and covered up. But vast errors still occur, and new dangers threaten. In August 2007, six cruise missiles with nuclear warheads were mistakenly shipped from one US base to another, and were unguarded for a day and a half until accidentally found. This year, a report by the US Defence Science Board warned that no one knew how vulnerable the command and control system was to a cyber attack – which might, deliberately or accidentally, trigger a launch”.
Human error
Despite the near-misses, no warhead has ever been detonated inadvertently on American soil. But as Schlosser points out, nuclear weapons are the most dangerous technology ever invented:
“Anything less than 100% control of them, anything less than perfect safety and security, would be unacceptable. And if this book has any message to preach, it is that human beings are imperfect.”
Lloyd says that we can, “in ironic company with old cold warriors turned peaceniks such as Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, press the case for the reduction and final destruction of weapons of mass destruction”.
He concludes, “If that pressure does not work, and political agreements cannot be made, we face – as we have for the past seven decades – annihilation”.
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