Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

Agnew brought an early version of the electromechanical locking system to Washington, D.C., for a closed-door hearing of the joint committee, putting the switch and the decoder in the seat next to him on a commercial flight from Albuquerque. The coded switch that went inside a weapon weighed about a pound; the decoder weighed about forty. It was a black box with knobs, numbers, and a series of colored lights on it, powered by a large internal battery. To unlock a nuclear weapon, a two-man custodial team would attach a cable to it from the decoder. Then they’d turn the knobs on the decoder to enter a four-digit code. It was a “split-knowledge” code — each custodian would be given only two of the four numbers. Once the correct code was entered, the switch inside the weapon would take anywhere from thirty seconds to two and a half minutes to unlock, as its little gears, cams, and cam followers whirred and spun. When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn’t. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn’t unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security.

The American military, however, vehemently opposed putting any locks on nuclear weapons. The Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Power at SAC, General Norstad at NATO — all of them agreed that locks were a bad idea. The always/never dilemma lay at the heart of military’s thinking. “No single device can be expected to increase both safety and readiness,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued. And readiness was considered more important: the nuclear weapons in Europe were “adequately safe, within the limits of the operational requirements imposed on them.”

Although the description “adequately safe” was hardly reassuring, the possibility of America’s nuclear weapons being rendered useless during wartime, when their locks somehow malfunctioned, was more worrisome to the Joint Chiefs. Even if the locking and unlocking mechanisms worked flawlessly, use of the weapons would depend on effective code management. If only a few people were allowed to know the code, then the death of those few or an inability to reach them in an emergency could prevent the weapons from being unlocked. But if the code was too widely shared, the locks would offer little protection against unauthorized use. The joint committee’s desire for stronger use controls threatened to add complexity and uncertainty to the command and control of nuclear weapons. A State Department official summarized the military’s position: “all is well with the atomic stockpile program and there is no need for any changes.”

The Kennedy administration was far more receptive to the committee’s proposals. The former RAND analysts at the Pentagon were familiar with Fred Iklé’s work and his recommendation, two years earlier, that locks should be put on nuclear weapons. Jerome Wiesner, the president’s science adviser, met with Agnew and agreed that something had to be done about NATO’s atomic stockpile. Wiesner was deeply concerned about the risk of an unauthorized or accidental detonation. He had trained as an electrical engineer, briefly worked at Los Alamos, and advised Eisenhower on nuclear issues. Wiesner supported placing locks on the weapons but had no illusions that locks would completely solve the problem. A skilled technician could open a stolen nuclear weapon and unlock it within a few hours. But Wiesner thought that the locks might help “to buy time” after a weapon had been taken, stop “individual psychotics,” and prevent “unauthorized use by military forces holding the weapons during periods of high tension or military combat.”