Command and Control: How Things Spin Out of Control

Eric Schlosser

A single death is a tragedy.
A million deaths is a statistic.
                --Joseph Stalin


The Phantom's general theory of large numbers is that the bigger the number, the less likely it is to represent anything real. The corollary to this rule is large numbers of things become unmanageable and if you really want to lose something, do not hide it in a desolate place,  but in a place filled with large numbers of things.

To illustrate:  Whenever you hear a particular disease kills ten million people a year, you know that is wrong. That can only be based on death certificates and even one death certificate is unreliable, and a hundred is 1/100 less reliable and so forth. Whenever you hear a disease, like osteoporosis costs $15 billion a year, you know, ipso facto that's a bogus number. Nobody in the cost analysis of disease business knows how to count that high.

On the if you really want to lose something, hide it among lots of other things: You have only to think of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc, where the arc is hidden, for good, in a large government warehouse, in a wooden box amid thousands of other wooden boxes--the classic needle in a haystack.

As for manageability--you have only to read Eric Schlosser's wonderful book, Command and Control, to see firsthand, how, when you have thousands of nuclear missiles, as opposed to dozens, the supervision of each missile becomes thinner, less expert, more likely to devolve to the care of less than rigorous human beings.

So, here you have a nuclear missile in Arkansas, one of thousands peppered across the continent, cared for by several shifts of Air Force enlisted men and officers, most of them in their 20's, which is perforated, accidentally, by an airman wielding a wrench, which loses its socket, which falls and clangs off the side of the missile, perforating it's metal,  penetrating to the fuel supply, which spurts out in a pressurized stream from the inside of one compartment near the bottom of the three staged missile, which results in a compartment at the base of the tower becoming empty and unable to support the weight of the missile compartments above, which will then collapses down toward the concrete floor in a collapse like what we all saw in films of the World Trade Center collapsing, which will set off a nuclear detonation, which can trigger nuclear detonations in nearby silos and which can vaporize the state of Arkansas and parts of a few neighboring states. 

And the whole idea of having thousands of missiles was that it was supposed to make us safer.

And this all happens--the manufacture and placement of thousands of missiles--because somebody had an idea and sold that idea--that all these missiles would make us safe from Soviet attack. 

Problem is, this idea is not, you'll excuse the phrase, rocket science. In fact, as far as this theory of nuclear "deterrence" is concerned, there is no science at all, which is to say, no testing of the theory.  All this effort gets made because somebody thinks it will work, without ever being able to, or inclined to test that theory.

It's essentially a theory of psychology: We can frighten them with all these missiles.  We can hold our cards and never have to play them, because they will all be terrified of calling our cards. They just won't risk their pot.

Could we have terrified the Soviets with just 100 missiles, spread out among nuclear submarines, along the 48th parallel and along the Alaskan coast?  

We had General Curtis LeMay talking to how many generals in the Pentagon, to the President and to how many Congressmen?  And this system of 10,000 missiles gets built. 

We would never invest that kind of effort or money on any medical research effort, or on any healthcare system.

But when it came to building a missile attack system built on a dream, we were all over that, right here in America.

One has to ask:  Why is that?