Eric Schlosser, Command and Control (2013) —  perhaps best seen as an aid to thinking about leadership — a mini book review

© 2016 Peter Free

 

13 October 2016

 

 

My take on this book differs from most reviewers'

 

Eric Schosser's — Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety (Penguin Books, 2013) — best serves as a "put yourself in their shoes" text for people looking to become effective leaders, whatever their level.

 

 

Book's gist — deadly complexity and humans don't mix well

 

Command and Control account covers the era of American nuclear weapons evolution. Eric Schlosser discusses the technology used to create the devices themselves, as well as their often equally problematic delivery systems. He also does a good job covering national nuclear weapons strategy and the philosophical wrangling that it was subject to.

 

Most riveting are the author's accounts of the many near misses that occurred with these weapons. Schlosser's core message quotes sociologist Charles Perrow:

 

 

"Our ability to organize does not match the inherent hazards of some of our organized activities."

 

What appeared to be the rare exception [with nuclear weapons accidents], an anomaly, a one-in-a-million accident, was actually to be expected. It was normal.

 

Few bureaucracies were flexible enough to allow both centralized and decentralized decision-making, especially in a crisis that could threaten hundreds or thousands of lives. And the large bureaucracies necessary to run high-risk systems usually resented criticism, feeling threatened by any challenge to their authority.

 

"Time and time again, warnings are ignored, unnecessary risks taken, sloppy work done, deception and downright lying practiced," Perrow found.

 

The instinct to blame people at the bottom not only protected those at the top, it also obscured underlying truth. The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.

 

© 2013 Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety (Penguin Books, 2013) (at pages 460-461) (quoting Charles W. Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton University Press, 1999) (at pages 15-31)) (extracts)

 

 

Stylistic quibbles

 

Command and Control may be too long for general interest readers. The book has about 485 pages of text and another 126 of notes. Some Amazon reviewers found this tedious.

 

A noticeable number of others objected to the author's blow by blow description of the 1980 (Damascus, Arkansas) Titan II missile explosion — interspersed as it is among chapters providing a much broader nuclear weapons history. These readers thought thematic continuity suffered.

 

For my part, I found the author's erratic chronology mildly annoying. He aggravates this flaw by forgetting to keep readers reminded of which year he is addressing, as he abruptly jumps from one event to another. A chronological list of the innumerable weapons "incidents" might have been preferable to the book's hither and yon meandering.

 

Yet . . .

 

 

Outstanding documentation

 

Voluminous source citations are listed at the back of the book by the page number that they modify.

 

Historians will also find the explanatory introduction to Schlosser's footnotes section useful. There, he provides an overview of the comparative utility of various sources.

 

 

Book's main utility

 

Command and Control (probably inadvertently) does a good job of revealing how one's leadership and rank affect situational and strategic perspectives.

 

The book demonstrates how necessary competent leadership is in achieving decent outcomes, from dealing with nuclear weapon accidents to molding the strategy that guides their use.

 

Vignettes are detailed enough for readers to grasp the complexities that people had to deal with. Particularly interesting is the battle between those who wanted to make bombs safer against accidents and those who thought that engineered over-safety would prevent the weapons from exploding when they were needed.

 

Strategists similarly battled between those who advocated almost automated overkill and those who thought a more flexibly graduated response to hostilities would be preferable. Schlosser does an excellent job of highlighting the drawbacks to both orientations.

 

A kill-big-immediately (my words) perspective dominated American policy for decades. Command and control technologies were not reliable enough to maintain even minimal communication during peacetime, much less nuclear war. Schlosser's stories about these early warning network glitches are hair-raising.

 

The Soviet Union, he adds, was even worse off, technologically. As a result, it designed an inner warning ring that automatically would send retaliatory missiles aloft.

 

Rivalries between the United States' military services are also well explained. These pop up at every turn, with the Air Force continually trying to shove the other branches aside.

 

In these inter-service battles, readers will come to understand how nukes evolved from comparatively large sizes down to tactical nukes that one can carry in a suitcase. Though Schlosser does not emphasize the point, it is surprising that terrorists have not yet made off with some of these weapons, scattered and comparatively accessible as he says they were.

 

 

Note

 

I was mildly surprised that to learn that we had a single sentry, armed with a bolt action rifle, guarding numerous nuclear-armed aircraft overseas.

 

In Italy, a man with a revolver was designated the task of watching a cache of tactical nuclear weapons located only meters from a line of forest from which snipers could easily have operated. Italians, with whom he couldn't communicate, moved freely around this guard.

 

Dumb does not even begin to describe some of America's practices during its early nuclear decades.

 

 

Foreign policy buffs will not be surprised to learn that the United States violated the terms of the treaties that allowed it to store nuclear weapons in Europe. In Danish controlled territory, for example, we flew nuclear missions in clear violation of Danish law. Similarly, when some nukes were too dangerous to store on American soil, we sent them to Great Britain without the latter's knowledge.

 

 

Command and Control is recommended — especially to readers interested in the dilemmas that frequently confront all levels of the chain of command

 

The book presents a wide spectrum of nuclear weapons and strategy problems. These span the range from emergencies through more contemplatively undertaken reviews of war strategy and weapons design.

 

These issues challenged the leadership skills of:

 

 

"lowly" airmen and sergeants — who were faced with potentially explosive situations and needed to act quickly

 

through

 

local sheriffs — who had to cope with a vacuum of information in toxic spill situations

 

to

 

nuclear weapons designers and testers

 

and

 

"upward" to America's highest strategists, generals and political leaders.

 

 

Alert readers could ask themselves:

 

 

Could I have handled that situation more effectively?

 

And how would I have pulled that off, given my limited authority?

 

 

For those with on the ground experience in mildly similar contexts, workable answers are not obvious.

 

Command and Control's "simulation" function is its greatest virtue. It invites leadership-oriented readers to grapple with uncertainty in hypothetical ways. Before life slams them with unexpected actualities.