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

Schlosser, Eric

4.26

13,293 ratings by Goodreads

9780143145011: Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

ISBN 10: 0143145010 ISBN 13: 9780143145011

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 2013

The author of Fast Food Nation presents a minute-by-minute account of an H-bomb accident that nearly caused a nuclear disaster, examining other near misses and what the author perceives as America's growing susceptibility to a catastrophic event. Simultaneous.

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Review:

So damnably readable. It drives the vision of a world trembling on the edge of a fatal precipice deep into your mind ... a piece of work of the deepest import, with the multilayered density of an ambitiously conceived novel (John Lloyd Financial Times)

Do you really want to read about the thermonuclear warheads that are still aimed at the city where you live? Do you really need to know about the appalling security issues that have dogged nuclear weapons in the 70 years since their invention? Yes, you do. In Schlosser's hands it is a reading treat ... he's a natural genius (Jonathan Franzen Guardian, Books of the Year)

Part techno-thriller, part careful historical investigation ... beautifully written and impressively researched (Gerard DeGroot Daily Telegraph)

Brilliant, gripping, chilling (Steven Shapin London Review of Books)

The author of Fast Food Nation does for the American nuclear industry what he did for industrial food production (Economist, Books of the Year)

Eric Schlosser detonates a truth bomb in Command and Control (Vanity Fair)

Deeply reported, deeply frightening . . . a techno-thriller of the first order (Los Angeles Times)

An excellent journalistic investigation of the efforts made since the first atomic bomb was exploded, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, to put some kind of harness on nuclear weaponry. By a miracle of information management, Schlosser has synthesized a huge archive of material, including government reports, scientific papers, and a substantial historical and polemical literature on nukes, and transformed it into a crisp narrative covering more than fifty years of scientific and political change. And he has interwoven that narrative with a hair-raising, minute-by-minute account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in 1980, which he renders in the manner of a techno-thriller . . . Command and Control is how nonfiction should be written (Louis Menand The New Yorker)

A devastatingly lucid and detailed new history of nuclear weapons in the U.S. . . . fascinating (Lev Grossman Time)

Command and Control ranks among the most nightmarish books written in recent years; and in that crowded company it bids fair to stand at the summit. It is the more horrific for being so incontrovertibly right and so damnably readable. Page after relentless page, it drives the vision of a world trembling on the edge of a fatal precipice deep into your reluctant mind . . . a work with the multilayered density of an ambitiously conceived novel . . . Schlosser has done what journalism does at its best when at full stretch: he has spent time - years - researching, interviewing, understanding and reflecting to give us a piece of work of the deepest import (Financial Times)

About the Author:

ERIC SCHLOSSER is the author of The New York Times bestsellers Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Nation.

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