Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV After Words 20130930 : vimars

CSPAN2 Book TV After Words September 30, 2013

Management because these are the most dangerous machines ever built. And i think the subject has fallen off their radar quite a bit since the end of the cold war. Host lets talk about the story. You are telling a story about the ground up. You chose the whistle explosion. Why that particular explosion rather than any other incidents you like in the book lacks guest my interest i spent time in the 04 writing my book for the resignation and one of the officers told me the story of the accident. He had been in the Missile Launch crew and i thought of an extraordinary story. I had never heard of it. I could not believe what happened. And the more i learned about it, the more it seemed like it was a very good way to look at these much larger themes about the Nuclear Weapons about our strategy for using them and the management of them. It is a story that is a seemingly trivial event someone drops the toole that leads to a potential catastrophe. The dropping of the tool damages the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile and creates a situation the missile might explode. And in this case it had been 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. And i was just going to tell that story. But the more i learned the story got bigger and bigger because the effort to make the weapons safe during the accident. And another narrative about the effort to control them from the command and control point of view. I hate to turn the tables on you but where where you when the missile exploded and what do you remember . Host i remember the explosion but i was in the government and i didnt have any of responsibility for it. But the risk of Nuclear Accidents has been something that ive read about for many years of my career. Lets explore a little bit sort of what you have learned about those risks because in the case of the titan for example and in the cases of all of these other mishaps, no Nuclear Weapon has exploded. 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 destination detonation. Its a critique of the weapons but at the same time, it recognizes that enormous technical ingenuity, great Organizational Skills and a huge amount of personal courage and bravery are responsible for the fact that weve never had an Accidental Nuclear detonation. So you think its and there is luck. If you think about the fact that weve manufactured about 70,000 Nuclear Weapons and weve never had one detonate accidentally that is incredible management. Weve never lost one. Thats an incredible inventory control. Weve never lost one to other people. But in this business anything less than perfect is unacceptable. There is no question that we have come close to having the destination on american soil. And the damascus accident is only one of the incidents. Another accident ive read about was the b52 bomber that broke apart in North Carolina just a few days after john f. Kennedys inauguration. And that came very close. Host we agree we want it to be 100 . Guest i think enormous praise and credit must go to the designers. It must go to the ordinary servicemen who i really try to write about at length. Theres been hundreds of books written about the Nuclear Weapons and very few of them are written about the management and people that risk their lives and lost their lives trying to prevent the nuclear catastrophes. At the same time there is an inherent risk in having the Nuclear Weapons that are capable of being used quickly. And as long as the weapons are maintained in that status, theres going to be a possibility that one going off when its not supposed to. Host you show the history to make the weapons themselves safer. And you can talk about the fact that in the past many of them are what we call alert and ready to come quickly but lots has changed since the end of the cold war and you are the first to say that. So do you think that its hard to judge but how worried should lady today about the possibility of a Nuclear Accident . Guest there is no question the weapons the United States have today are far more safe than the ones in the 1950s and even through the 1980s. One of the narratives of the book is the effort to improve the safety of the weapons. And one in particular the became Vice President of the National Laboratory and who devoted his career to the safety problems with a weapon and would be nice to think that he was a huge leak supported by the various security bureaucracies in doing that. But there was a real battle and those that believe in the need for safe Nuclear Weapons. But theyre always was this inherent contradiction between the military demands and having weapons immediately available and reliable and the more civilian need to not have them detonate on american soil. Getting back to todays within, the weapons themselves are much safer. Since the 1980s i do have some concerns about the contemporary management. In 2007, half a dozen Nuclear Weapons were loaded inadvertently on to an airplane. Was flown across the United States. That set on the of roadway intended in the theres half a dozen Nuclear Weapons that nobody knew were missing for a day and a half. In which the Standard Operating Procedures and even the common sense were ignored. The people that we move to the weapons from the bunker would check to see if there are Nuclear Weapons. There were security guys that were never checked to see if there were Nuclear Weapons on board. The crew that loaded the weapon never looked to see. The pilots never checked and in that case they could argue the system worked. Terrorists didnt get the weapons and officers didnt get the weapons. But you shouldnt have fixed Nuclear Weapons that dont need to be signed for and that cant be accounted for four a day and a half. Just this year, just this year two of them have been found to have serious safety violations and the commanders have been relieved of the command. Of the third has a few years ago lost the occasion with an entire squadron thats 50 missiles. They werent sure why it happened. It turned out to be a mechanical fault but its not good to be able to communicate the missiles for an hour and a raised the possibility that the command and control system might be vulnerable to further attacks. So a lot of the problems i write about in the book had been addressed. But to say the command and control issues have been solved with Something Like the command and control which is a process its never fully achieved to read the Safety Record is perfect until its not. Host there are still risks as long as you have Nuclear Weapons. And the difference is from the past to the president have to do with the ways in which the dangers have arisen and some of those are not as difficult as in the past. And clearly that if read arsenals that is the United States and russia are different in terms of their safety. If you ask me i would tell you like to stay awake worrying about pakistan and india and their Nuclear Arsenals. But we think its important to make those differences not to say there are not problems. I dont think anybody says there couldnt be put to understand the nature of the problems. I try to make that point clear in the book. We invent this technology and have experience more than any other nation and the safety mechanism and our kinetic control mechanisms are superior to those in any of the nation. Host but they are not necessarily perfect. Guest than what i was going to say is given those facts, which i think is true, its quite sobering that challenges that we face and the problems that we face. And at the end of the book, i look at the rate of industrial accidents and other countries as a measure of the proficiencies dealing with the complex technologies, and i worry about pakistan and india and north korea. Are you an inspector that became familiar with the design for the Nuclear Weapon, which was never actually built but he would be worried it might detonate if it was capable and that might be an exaggeration but these are very complicated machines and we dont want them to go wrong. I couldnt agree with you more. You are an Investigative Reporter and an Award Winning Investigative Reporter. And ive been thinking about that sort of protection and it seems to be more and more a lost art. Do you agree is your profession coming out of business, and second, why do you continue to be an Investigative Reporter . I think the need for the profession may be greater now in this country than has been in the hundred years. And the ability to practice the profession and be paid to do with is probably the worst that its been in a hundred years. The first things newspapers tend to cut our their investigative reporting units. The sort of investigation and i spent six years on this book. But the investigative reports take weeks, months. They can be legally liable the issues and as newspapers have cut back, the Investigative Reporters are probably the first to go and the celebrity gossip columnist may be the last to go so it is an endangered art but in a democracy at think it is an essentials. My background academically is history so i tried to combine the sort of investigative reporting in a contemporary implication of what im writing about and the background and trying to we look at history that maybe hasnt been fully explored. And i think this book combines that few host to show yourself to be a good historian along the way. Guest thank you very much. You know a thing or two about the subject. Host if you are an Investigative Reporter when you want to happen from the other side of the book. So in the thinking that he would probably want to see some changes potentially some attention to it let me grace you if i can with the sec to the defense calls you in and says okay, tell me what you want me to do given what you now understand about command and control United States Nuclear Arsenal. What me preface that by saying i tried very hard not to write the wilentz or diatribes and the books i write to dont and with a point by point political program. I do the best i can to allow the fact is as i see them to speak for themselves to write in as koln of the tone as possible so that my persona and my cleverness and ideology isnt at the forefront. I take subjects i think are very important and the Mainstream Media may not be addressing and particularly to take very powerful the institutions that are secretive and provide information to the public so that decisions can be made on the basis of information and not on the basis of misinformation. And im not necessarily even talking about the pentagon. Im just as easily talking about mcdonalds and other marketing versus the reality of how they procure their food. But for me, Nuclear Weapons is the subject of existential one portents, and the book is just to remind people and provoke the dialogue not to impose my point of view. Having said that host i cant imagine then you have a few thoughts . Guest i do. Having said that, the secretary of defense were he to call me and ask for my life which is about as likely as a meteor streaking the building i would say the first thing that we need to do immediately is spare no expense in the management of the Nuclear Weapons that we currently have. Make sure that those that work with them are trained to the max. Make sure they have the testing equipment they need. Right now some of the testing equipment that we have dates back to the 1970s and really invests in that infrastructure immediately. High morale and people that are compensated. They are the very best officers encouraged to enter the Nuclear Field as opposed to the Nuclear Field particularly in the air force right now in a career that ended those are things that we could do within a few years. And the bigger sense, i am a great believer that the fewer weapons possessed by fewer countries is better and safer not just in terms of accidents, but in the potential of a nuclear war. So, we would have arms control agreements that are bilateral that in the United States and soviet union and now with russia that i think we need to find a way to engage the other Nuclear Powers in our control pilat i could go all of on all kinds of other specific things. But one of the important things about bill ploch it is it is a very unsettling subject. But having spent six years investigating it, i am not overwhelmed with the doom and gloom. I dont think that any of this is hopeless. If i thought that there was i wouldnt bother to write the book host i want to come back to the riding of the book but just in a few words i was trying to capture the femur. Thats one of the things i try to do so i want to try one on you on this point. It might be good people, very Dangerous Things and a bureaucracy that you cannot trust. Guest i say good people, well intended, patriotic, Dangerous Things, and peoples behavior in bureaucracy is not always the best behavior. Someone recently i read the basic law rule of success in a bureaucracy is that it is better to be wrong than to be alone. And what one of the engineers had people that i wrote about who is a true hero, he is right about the problems with our Nuclear Weapons. But he had to pay a price. He had to be a form in peoples sides and his career hve gone a lot farther if he hadnt ruffled feathers constantly trying to push for the 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 them. Its just hard to anticipate what can go wrong, how it might go wrong, and if it is an automobile that breaks down, that is unfortunate. If it is an airliner that has some unanticipated mechanical flaw, that this tragic for those passengers. But with a Nuclear Weapon if it goes wrong, the potential impact is almost unimaginable. And thats why we have to be extra vigilant with these technologies. Host lets take a short break host we will disagree on that. Lets take a short break and then come back. Host you talk throughout the book about the people. Youve been talking about the folks that you got to know along the way, but im kind of interested in your story that is kind of in very personal terms of what it was like to write this book, to get that in the morning, go to the computer to get the documents, talk to people so tell us your story. Guest it was an extraordinary challenge for me but it was also endlessly fascinating. Nuclear weapons are their greatest nationalsecurity risk to the United States and in the most important weapons in the arsenal. For those two reasons its a very difficult to get information about the subject. So i relied on documents that others obtained in the freedom of information act, the National Security archive is a nonprofit based in washington, d. C. That has done a terrific job of assembling such documents in an archived those were useful to me. Ive got documents through the freedom of information act, myself. It took a long time to get them. Host so they write you back or they dont write you back . Guest you write and they dont write you back. It took me a couple of years but i reached out to people that had a firsthand experience in dealing with Nuclear Weapons and many books have been written about Nuclear Weapons but most of them had been written by Manhattan Project physicists or about those people at the National Security advisers had written memoirs but very few books had been written about the day in and day out management of the Nuclear Arsenal by the people that do eight. So i really reached out to the former members of the Missile Launch cruise, technicians, the bomb squad technicians who if their job was to render a Nuclear Weapon. And the stories they had to tell were absolutely fascinating and this history was amazing to me. I studied Nuclear Strategy as an undergraduate. I felt like i was very familiar compared to other people about Nuclear Weapons and yet this Research Made me realize i was profoundly ignorant. So much of this information has

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