A horror story with a happy ending (hopefully)

Command and Control is not a piece of light reading – in any sense. But it is an absolutely essential book.

It tells the story of the United States’s nuclear weapons programme from the Manhattan Project to the present day, with an emphasis on safety management (with the story of a particular accident in a Titan II missile silo in 1980 foregrounded).

Finishing it you are left wondering why you are there at all – because it is surely more by luck than design that civilisation has managed to survive in the nuclear age – particularly through the forty-five years of the Cold War when, more or less, fundamentally unsafe weapons were handed out willy-nilly to military personnel who were not even vetted for mental illness.

We read of how politicians – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter – all tried (to various degrees – Eisenhower comes off worst as fundamentally weak man) to get some sort of grip on the nuclear colossus and all essentially capitulated to a military more interested in ensuring their weapons would work when needed, than they were safe when not.

The good news is that the book has a relatively happy ending: in that the end of the Cold War and the persistent efforts of a few scientists and engineers, deep within the US nuclear weapons programme, eventually led to safety being given a greater priority. The chance of an accidental nuclear war is probably less now than it has ever been – but the chance is not zero.

The book, per force, does not give us much insight into the Soviet (or Chinese, or indeed French, British, Indian, Israeli or Pakistani) nuclear programme – was it safer because state control was so much more strict (the fear of Bonapartism), or more dangerous because the Soviets were always running to catch up? The book suggests both at different points.

It’s brilliantly written too – so if you want a bit of chill to match the summer sun in your holiday reading I do recommend it.