When Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, chooses a topic to write about, he doesn’t think small. In this case, nothing less than the command and control structure and safety of America’s nuclear arsenal. Framed by the detailed account of the explosion of a Titan 2 nuclear-warhead-tipped missile in its silo in rural Arkansas in 1980, Schlosser gives a detailed overview of the development of America’s nuclear arsenal, the efforts to keep it safe from accidental detonation, and the military’s, chiefly the Air Force’s, attempts to resist those efforts. Their perverse reasoning was that any measures designed to prevent accidental detonation would hamper the weapons’ effectiveness if they ever actually were used.
The author’s point I believe was to demonstrate that nothing is ever 100% safe because it is technology designed and operated by humans, who are, by our very nature, fallible. Yet it is a strangely reassuring book, because of all the accidents discovered by the author in the writing of this book, all the ways things could go wrong (poor design, espionage, dangerous handling, inadequate safety procedures, drug use by weapons handling and maintenance crews, and possible mental breakdown of key individuals), none has ever resulted in the detonation of a nuclear weapon, … so far.