42
" Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) planes would quickly get off the ground, climb steeply, and send an emergency war order on a very-low-frequency radio, using an antenna five miles long. SAC began to develop a Post Attack Command and Control System. It would rely on airborne command posts, a command post on a train, a command post at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and a command post, known as The Notch, inside Bare Mountain, near Amherst, Massachusetts. The "
― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
43
" Kennedy thought that his commanders at SAC had made a series of mistakes—the decision to evacuate the control center, the refusal to open the silo door and vent the fuel vapor, the endless wait to reenter the complex, the insistence upon using the access portal instead of the escape hatch, the order to turn on the fan. Worst of all was the feeling that he and Livingston had risked their lives for nothing—and then been abandoned. Livingston had lain on the ground for more than an hour, without his helmet, inhaling oxidizer, before anyone came to help. And the delay in sending a helicopter was incomprehensible. "
― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
49
" Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell—the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War—urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but “anything is better than submission.” Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed. Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace, crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn’t be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, “should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs. "
― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
52
" At a level of about 18,000 parts per million (ppm), the RFHCO would start to melt. At 20,000 ppm, the fuel vapor could spontaneously combust, without any exposure to a spark or flame, just from the friction caused by the movement of air. Waving your hand through the fuel vapor, at that concentration, could ignite it. The "
― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety
54
" For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth … we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion. "
― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety