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

The British government had planned to rely on a series of deep underground shelters built in London during the Second World War. But the Strath report suggested the need for an alternate seat of government far from the capital. In the Wiltshire countryside, about a hundred miles west of London, a secret abandoned aircraft engine factory hidden inside a limestone mine was turned into a Cold War bunker larger than any in the United States. Known at various times by the code names SUBTERFUGE, BURLINGTON, and TURNSTYLE, it was large enough to provide more than one million square feet of office space and house almost eight thousand people. Although the original plans were scaled down, the completed bunker had miles of underground roads, accommodations for the prime minister and hundreds of other officials, a BBC studio, a vault where the Bank of England’s gold reserves could be stored, and a pub called the Rose & Crown.

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During the closing months of the Truman administration, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had once again asked for control of America’s nuclear weapons. And once again, their request had been denied. But the threat of Soviet bombers and the logistical demands of the new look strengthened the arguments for military custody. By keeping the weapons at half a dozen large storage sites, the Atomic Energy Commission maintained centralized, civilian control of the stockpile. The arrangement minimized the risk that an atomic bomb could be stolen or misplaced. Those AEC sites, however, had become an inviting target for the Soviet Union — and a surprise attack on them could wipe out America’s nuclear arsenal. The Joint Chiefs argued that nuclear weapons should be stored at military bases and that time-consuming procedures to authorize their use should be scrapped. Civilian custody was portrayed as a grave threat to readiness and national security. A democratic principle that seemed admirable in theory could prove disastrous in an emergency.

According to the AEC’s rules, if the Strategic Air Command wanted to obtain the nuclear cores of atomic bombs, the president of the United States would have to sign a directive. Local field offices of the AEC and the Department of Defense would have to be notified about that directive. Representatives of those field offices would have to contact the AEC storage sites. Once the proper code words were exchanged, keys would have to be retrieved, storerooms unlocked, nuclear cores carried outside in their metal containers. At best, SAC would get the cores in about twelve minutes. But the process could take a lot longer. Local officials might have to be tracked down on vacation or awakened in the middle of the night. They might have to be persuaded that this was the real thing, not a test.

In June 1953, President Eisenhower approved the shipment of nuclear cores to American naval vessels and overseas bases where the other components of atomic bombs were already stored — and where foreign governments had no authority to dictate how the bombs might be used. Cores were removed from the AEC stockpile, placed under military control, and shipped to sites that met those criteria: American naval vessels and the island of Guam. The following year the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked for permission to store bomb components and nuclear cores at SAC bases. Dispersing the weapons to multiple locations, the Pentagon argued, would make the stockpile much less vulnerable to attack. The AEC didn’t object to handing over more nuclear cores. The chairman of the commission, Lewis Strauss, agreed with most of LeMay’s strategic views. And the new general manager of the AEC, General Kenneth Nichols, had not only argued for years that the military should control America’s atomic bombs, he’d pushed hard for dropping them on Chinese troops during the Korean War.