[Adm.Lee]

by Eric Schlosser.

Pretty scary stuff. How nuclear weapons (in the US) were developed (hint: rather haphazardly), including their safety systems, deployment plans (generally driven by Pentagon budget infighting), RAND studies and nuclear laboratory studies.

A major focus is the 1980 Damascus incident, when a Titan II missile caught fire in its silo outside Damascus, AR. Almost every chapter loops back to a journalistic retelling of the response by SAC, the Wing HQ, maintenance and security guys on the ground, local farmers and newsmen.

But, it doesn't ignore the many times that nuclear weapons dropped or nearly fired, airplanes carrying them caught on fire, or just lay around waiting for someone to take them. Consider the Davy Crockett nuclear recoilless rifle. The Army asked for 32,000 warheads for it and other artillery mounts in 1961. This, in the same time period that a bomb nearly went off in North Carolina (only one of four safety devices worked) and it was found that there were no serious, armed, guards on US Jupiter and Thor missile sites in Europe. Oh, and President Kennedy found out that the "missile gap" existed, but the reverse of what he'd been preaching-- we had hundreds of bombers and dozens of missiles-- the USSR had 4 ICBMs.

I'm not halfway through it, and I'm thinking lots of Twilight-ish implications. Missiles not launching, missing targets, warheads not going off at the right times, all kinds of sick things.

A 1948-49 scenario, starting from the Berlin Airlift, seems the Soviets' best chance to take Europe without annihilation. I think that's been raised elsewhere around here. It would be super-easy to do US survivors of the 1st ID or Constabulary regiments, and/or the lone British division, overrun by the Soviets. Potential contact with the UK by radio, perhaps aerial resupply.