Weapons accident in damascus arkansas that occurred in 1980. And i use that story, that narrative as a way of looking at the management of our Nuclear Weapons really since the First Nuclear device was invented in 1945. And i hope to remind readers that these weapons are out there. That theyre still capable of being used and that theres probably no more important thing that our government does and manage them. Because these are the most dangerous machines ever built, and i think the subject has fallen off the radar quite a bit in the cold war. Host lets talk about the story. You were telling the story from the ground up. You chose tying it to missile explosion at so why that particular explosion rather than many other incidents that you can lock in the book . Guest my interest in writing about Nuclear Weapons was sparked by i spent time in the air force. I finished writing my book fast food nation and one of the officers told me as sort of the damascus accident to hed been in a Missile Launch crew and i just thought it was an extraordinary story. I had never heard of it. I could not believe what happened, and the more i learn about it the more it seemed like it was a very good way to look at these much larger themes about Nuclear Weapons, of our strategy for using them and about our management of them. Is a story in which a seemingly trivial event, someone drops a tool, leads to a potential catastrophe. The dropping of the tool damages and intercontinental ballistic missile, creates a situation where the missile might explode, and in this case the missile has the most powerful Nuclear Warhead the United States has ever deployed on a ballistic missile. So it was quite a story. And originally i thought the book would be relatively short. I was just going to tell that story, but the more i learned, the story got bigger and bigger. And it was another narrative about the effort what happens during actions, and another narrative about the effort to control them from a command and control point of view. I hate to turn the tables on you, but where were you when this missile exploded and what do you remember of it . Post that i remember the explosion, i was in the government and didnt actually have any responsibility for it. But the risks of Nuclear Accident has been something ive worked about as well for many years of my career. So lets explore a little bit, sort of what you have learned about those risks. Because in the case of titan for example, and in the case of these other mishaps, no Nuclear Weapon has actually exploded. Guest no Nuclear Weapon has detonated. Some Nuclear Weapons have exploded and spread plutonium, which is not a good thing but not as bad as a detonation to the book is a critique of a lot of the management of Nuclear Weapons, but at the same time it recognizes that enormous tactical ingenuity, great organizational skills, and huge amounts of personal courage and bravery are responsible for the fact that weve never had an accident or nuclear detonation. Host so you dont think its lock transit and theres lock. If you think about the fact that we have manufactured about 70,000 Nuclear Weapons and weve never had one that thats incredible management. Weve never lost one. Thats incredible inventory. Weve never lost one to other people. But in this business anything less than perfect is unacceptable. And theres no question that we have come close to having detonations on american soil. And the damascus accident is only one of the incidents. Another accident i wrote about was a b52 bomber that broke apart over North Carolina just a few days after john f. Kennedys inauguration. And that weapon came very close. Host we want it to be 100 . That guest i think enormous praise and credit must go to the weapons designer. Must go to the ordinary servicemen who i really try to write about at length. There been hundreds of books written about Nuclear Weapons and very few of them have been written about the day in and day out management. And the people who risk their lives and lost their lives time to prevent nuclear catastrophe. At the same time, theres an inherent risk in having Nuclear Weapons that are capable of being used quickly. And as long as weapons are maintained in that status, theres going to be the possibility of one going off when its not supposed to. So you tell us the history of efforts that make the weapons themselves say for. Guest yes. Host you can talk about the fact that in the past, many of these weapons were what you call, what we call alert. That is, they were ready to detonate. But lots has changed since the end of the cold war and youre the first to say that. So do you think that its hard to judge, but how worried should i be today about the possibility of a Nuclear Accident . Theres no question that the weapons that the United States has today are far more safe than the ones that we have deployed in the 1950s, even through the 1980s it and one of the narratives of the book is the effort includes the safety of our weapons. And i focus on one engineer in particular became Vice President of the laboratories. He devoted his career to eliminating safety problems with the weapons. It would be nice to think that it was usually supported by the grace National Security bureaucracies in doing that. But it was a real battle. There were others like him who believe in the need for safe Nuclear Weapons to but there always was this inherent contradiction between military demands of having the weapons immediately available and reliable, and then the more civilian need to not have one of them detonate on american soil. I think that helped the military as our not having it be dangerous. Getting back to todays weapons, they are much safer. The weapons themselves are much safer than the ones that were deployed again as recent as the 1980s. But i do have some concerns about the contemporary management of our arsenal, particularly the problems with the air force has had in recent years. In 2007, half a dozen german Nuclear Weapons were loaded inadvertently onto an airplane. The plane were flown across the United States without the pilot realizing there were Nuclear Weapons on board, and then that plane got on a runway for nine hours unattended. So that have a dozen Nuclear Weapons that nobody knew were missing for a day and a half. And that showed management fault that i think were extraordinary. Because there were many steps along the way in which standard operating procedures, and using common sense were ignored. The people who removed the weapons from the bunker never checked to see if they were Nuclear Weapons. They were never asked to cite any piece of paper saying that they were removing Nuclear Weapons. The security guys never checked as th the vehicle went past to e if your Nuclear Weapons on board. The crew that loaded the weapons never looked to see if your Nuclear Weapons. The pilots never checked. And in that case you could argue, the system works. Terrorists didnt get the weapons. Rogue officers didnt get the weapons. But you shouldnt have sex Nuclear Weapons that dont need to be signed for. And that cant be accountable for for a dnf. Just this year, we have three wings, just this year two of them have been found to have raised safety violations and their commanders have been vote relieved of command. The third as a few years ago lost communication with an entire squadron of missiles. Thats 50 missiles and they were sure why it happened but it turned out to be a trivial mechanical fault, but its not good to be able to not commit it with your missiles for an hour. And it raised the possible that our command and control system might be vulnerable to cyber attack. So a lot of a lot of the problems that arrive in the book have been addressed. But the same with commandandcontrol issues have been solved would be a mistake. Because with Something Like commandandcontrol which is a process, its never fully process, its never fully achieved. The record, the Safety Record was perfect until its not. Host you right. So theres still risks as long as you have Nuclear Weapons. And you know, the differences from the past to the pres preset have to do with kind of the ways in which some dangers have arisen. Some of those are not as difficult as in the past. And clearly different arsenals, that is, the United States and russia, are different in terms of their safety. If you asked me i would probably tell you i could stay awake worrying about pakistan and india and their Nuclear Arsenals. But i think its important to make those differences, not to say that there are not problems. I dont think anybody says it could be. But just to understand the nature of these kinds of things. Guest i tried to make a point clear in the book. We invented this technology. We have longer extend greater than any other nation. And i would bet our safety mechanism at our command and control mechanisms are superior to those in any other nation. Host but they are not necessary perfect. Guest i know what i was going to say is, i do think its true, its quite sobering, challenges we face and the problems we fixed. And at the end of the book i look at the rate of industrial accidents in other countries as a measure of their proficiency in dealing with complex technologies. And i worry about pakistan and india and north korea and iran getting one of these weapons. A u. N. Inspector who became for me with the iraqi design for their Nuclear Weapon, which was never asked to build, said it was quoted as saying he would be worried it might detonate if it fell off of the table. And that might be an exaggeration, but these are very complicated machines. And you dont want them to go wrong. Host couldnt agree with you more. So youre an Investigative Reporter, and an awardwinning Investigative Reporter. And ive been thinking about that sort of profession. And it seems to be more and more a lost art. So my question now is, do you agree, is your profession going out of business . And second, why do you continue to be an Investigative Reporter . Guest i think the need for my profession may be greater now in the country than it has benow in the country than it has been in 100 years. And the ability for people to practice my profession and be paid to do it is probably the worst that its been in 100 years. The first thing that newspapers tend to cut out their investigative reporting units. This sort of investigation, i spent six years on this book, but at a newspaper, investigative reports take weeks, months. They can be legally, there can be liability issues. And as newspapers have cut back, i think that Investigative Reporters are probably the first to go, and celebrity us a call in this may be the last to go. And so it is an endangered art, but anbut in a democracy i thins an essential one. My background academically is history. And so ive tried to cacademicas history. And so ive tried to combine those two sort of investigative reporting in a contemporary implications of what im writing about and my academic backgrou background, and try to we look at history that may be has been thoroughly explored. And i think this book combines those. Host you show yourself to be a great just went along the way. Guest thank you. By the way, thank you very much because you know a thing or two about the subject house of representatives but i also wonder if your Investigative Reporter, what you want to happen on the other side of the book. And so im thinking that you would probably want to see some changes, potentially. So let me play should if i can into situation where the secretary of defense called you in and says okay, tell me what you want me to do given what you now understand about commandandcontrol, United StatesNuclear Arsenal. Guest let me preface the answer to that part of the question by saying, i try very hard not to write rant or diatribe, and the books that i write dont end with a point by point political program. I did the best i can to allow the facts because i see them, to write as a calm tone as possible so my persona and my cleverness and my ideology isnt at the forefront. What im really trying to do is take subjects i think are very important, that the Mainstream Media may not be addressing, and particularly take very powerful institution that are very secretive and provide information. To the public so that decisions can be made on the basis of information and not on basis of this information, or disinformation or im not necessarily talking about the pentagon here. Im just as easily talking about mcdonalds, and their marketing versus the reality of how they procure their food. So for me, Nuclear Weapons is a subject of existential importance, and the book is just remind people they are there and provoke a dialogue. Not to impose my point of view. Having said that host i can imagine you dont have a few thoughts. Guest i do. Having said that, where the secretary of defense to call me and then asked for my advice, which is about as likely as a meteor striking this building as we speak host not talking about probabilities. Guest i would say the first thing that we need to do immediately is spare no expense in the management of a Nuclear Weapon that we currently have. Make sure that those who work with them are trained to the max, make sure that they have a testing equipment that they need right now, the testing whether we have for Nuclear Weapons backs dates back to the 1970s. Really invest in that infrastructure immediately. High morale. People who are well compensated. The very best officers being encouraged to enter the Nuclear Field as opposed to the Nuclear Field particularly and air force right now seeming like a career deadend. Those are things that we could do within a few years. And in a bigger sense, im a great believer that the fewer weapons possessed by few countries is better and safer. Not just in terms of accidents but in terms of potential for nuclear war. So we have had arms control agreements that our bilateral between the United States and the soviet union, and now with russia. But i think we need to find a way to engage the other Nuclear Powers in our control talks, and i can go off on all of the kind of specific things. But one of the important things about the book is the book is about a very unnerving and unsettling subject. Having spent six years investigating it, im not overwhelmed with doom and gloom. Im not a public. I dont think any of this is hopeless. And really if i thought it was i wouldnt have bothered to write the book. Host and spend all those years. I want to come back to the writing in the book, but just in a few words i was trying to capture kind of the theme. Thats one of the things that i tried to do. I want to try one out on you at this point. So the theme might be good people, very dangerous things, and a bureaucracy that you cannot trust. Guest those are some of the things. I would say good people come up well intended, patriotic, dangerous things, and peoples behavior in bureaucracy is not always the best behavior. Someone recently, i read the basic rule of success in a bureaucracy is better to be wrong than alone. And what one of the engineers, people i wrote about who i think are a true hero, he was right about the problems with our Nuclear Weapons. But he had to pay a price. He had to be alone. Yet to be a thorn in peoples sites, and his career might have gone a lot farther if he hadnt ruffled feathers costly trying to push Nuclear Weapons safety. Another fundamental theme i think in the book is that we are much better at creating complex technologies than we are at managing it. And theres just, its hard to anticipate what can go wrong, how it might go wrong, and if its an automobile that breaks down, thats unfortunate. If its an airliner that has some unanticipated mechanical flaw, thats tragic for those passengers. But with a Nuclear Weapon that goes wrong, the potential impact is almost unimaginable. And thats why we have to be extra vigilant with these highrisk technologies. Host i dont think any of us would a disagree with that. Lets take a short break and we will come back. Host eric, you talked throughout the book about the people. Youve been talking about the heros, the folks you got to know along the way. But im kind of interested in your story. That is, kind of in very personal terms what it was like to write this book. To get up in the morning, go to your computer, try to get the documents, talk to people. So tell us your story. Guest it was an extraordinary challenge for me. But is also fascinating. Nuclear weapons are the greatest National Security risk to the United States, and the most important weapons in our arsenal. And for those two reasons is very difficu