The book skilfully and pragmatically interweaves two stories. One explores in depth the nuclear deterrent we have lived with since 1945. It's a sometimes unnerving history of the Cold War, America and Russia's nuclear arsenals, secrecy and how we, the public, stood on the very brink of the nuclear abyss. The other is the equally chilling story of a major accident in Arkansas Launch Complex 374-7.
Principally because of content, not length, Command and Control is not a book for the faint-hearted. Heavily researched, it draws on declassified documents and interviews with the designers and handlers of nuclear weapons. Running to 632 pages it includes 95 pages of notes, a 28-page bibliography, a glossary, index and ''cast list'', an in-depth referencing that should mute the most sceptical of readers, particularly those who cast a jaundiced eye on the anti-nuclear lobby.
The book is highly relevant to today. Thousands of nuclear warheads, says the author, ''still sit atop missiles belonging to the USA and Russia''. Hundreds more are possessed by India, China, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Great Britain and France.
Today's existing nuclear threat was predicted fairly early on, the book says. Before the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard and more than 68 other Manhattan Project scientists petitioned President Franklin D Roosevelt. They warned that a nuclear attack would place American cities in ''continuous danger of sudden annihilation''.
The petition never reached President Roosevelt and, before dying suddenly in 1945, he had failed to advise Vice President Truman of the existence of the Manhattan Project. Albert Einstein also signed the petition. In a televised public statement after President Truman had taken office, he criticised the militarisation of America and the ''disastrous illusion'' that this new weapon would somehow make America safer. The attitude in the USA at the end of WW2 turned from one of relief to one of fear.
It is impossible not to make comparisons with the Mid-60s black comedy released during the Cold War, Dr Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dr Strangelove made us laugh at what was, and is, terrifyingly close to reality as Command and Control discloses in detail.
The film is about the threat of accidental nuclear war and Command and Control acknowledges that, as one of two similar films released at that time, Dr Strangelove was ''by far the more authentic of the two''. Today, the book suggests we have moved from Cold War to cold comfort. It tells us the subsequently endorsed campaign by a wide variety of former Cold Warriors, including George H.W. Bush, to eliminate nuclear weapons, became US policy in 2009. However, Obama, despite committing to a world without nuclear weapons, has warned that while the threat of global war had gone down, the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.
This book put a lot of flesh onto my ''bare bones'' knowledge of the Cold War and the events surrounding it. In particular, the threat of, not so much a nuclear attack by the Soviets, but the very real threat of an American nuclear accident on a British airfield and escaped by a hair's breadth in one case. Because of the very detailed content, Command and Control was a difficult book to review, but is, nevertheless, an absorbing read, and an alarming picture of what so easily might have been.
*(M.A.D - Mutually Assured Destruction, a nuclear strategy that seeks to maintain peace by ensuring that adversaries have the capability to destroy one another).
- Ted Fox is a Dunedin online marketing consultant.
