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Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a missile silo in rural Arkansas, where a single crew struggled to prevent the explosion of the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States, with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort to ensure that nuclear weapons can''t be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with men who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view.>
About the author
Eric Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation (2001), Reefer Madness (2003), Command and Control (2013), and Gods of Metal (2015). Command and Control was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He’s helped to produce numerous films, including Fast Food Nation, There Will Be Blood, and Food, Inc. Two of his plays, Americans and We the People, have been staged in London. He is currently at work on a book about prisons.
Report
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
