Command and Control

You won't find much about the 1980 Damascus Titan Missile Explosion on Wikipedia. It was one of those minor Cold War mishaps that barely made it beyond the local news. A young airman was doing routine maintenance at an Arkansas ICBM site. He didn't fully appreciate the difference between a ratchet and a socket wrench (who knew there was a difference?) and accidentally dropped the heavy steel head of his tool into the silo of an aged Titan II missile. The head punctured the skin of the missile, resulting in a fuel leak and, a few hours later, an explosion that wrecked the silo, killing one airman and wounding 21 others. Fortunately, the Titan's nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead, the most powerful US bomb then in existence, did not explode.

This low-key but powerful documentary examines the chain of events that led to the accident and, more pertinently, looks at the wider significance of what did and didn't happen. There are interviews with the surviving site crew and some impressive re-enactments of the sequence of events, so realistic that at first you think it must be authentic historical footage. The investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, author of an acclaimed book about the Damascus accident, had a large hand in this production and appears periodically in the film.

Knowing little about Damascus, you might be tempted to chalk it up as a calamity avoided because the safety systems in place actually worked. By the time the film is over, you won't be so dismissive. The most serious nuclear threat to the US at this time (because it occurred on a frequent daily basis, and had little to do with international tensions) was from accidents within its own arsenal. (A similar situation must surely have prevailed in the Soviet Union.)

Are we safer now, given that there are far fewer nukes deployed and Command and Control organizations have learned from past experiences? The documentary has a clear answer, and it's probably not the one we hoped for.

This is a woeful film; very boring. All the things which Stanley Kubrick brilliantly spoofed in his ultra-dark comedy, "Dr. Strangelove" (1964) were spot on. That was over 50 years before this cheesy film was released! Kubrick was smart enough to realize the entire notion of using nuclear power in a war is insane! I am stunned the human species is still alive. I encourage anyone everyone to read the book this "docudrama" is based on ("Command and Control") and watch the film "Dr. Strangelove" instead of this garbage.

As a nation, we would all like to think that our country's nuclear weapons program is as safe as it could be-or at least that's the illusion our military leaders have wanted us to believe since nuclear weapons were first developed in 1945. But we would be wrong.

COMMAND AND CONTROL, a 2016 episode of the ongoing PBS program "The American Experience", shows us why. Based on the best-selling book of the same name by Eric Schlosser (who appears as one of the interviewees), the film details one particular nuclear weapons incident that most people in American don't remember or don't realize actually happened. It was an incident at a missile silo outside of Damascus, Arkansas on September 18, 1980, in which one of the technicians working on a Titan II missile accidentally dropped one of his tools down into the silo...and on its way down, the tool punctured the fuel tank of that missile, allowing the fuel to escape and, not long after that, causing the silo to explode and sending the warhead on the missile out into a nearby ditch. One of the men involved in containing the incident was killed in the blast; and for the longest time, it was blamed strictly on the human error of the technician inside the silo. But the truth is, accidents involving our nuclear deterrent were much more frequent than the military or civilian leaders were ever willing to admit to us. Not only were the Titan II missiles in question considered virtual antiques of our nuclear arsenal by 1980, but there were as many as a thousand accidents involving both the Titans and other missile classes, several of which almost led to the leakage of radioactive materials, once in 1961 in North Carolina, and then five years later in 1966 in Spain. This is vital information that the American public never knew about...at least not until Schlosser's book and this subsequent PBS documentary film.

Director Robert Kenner does a great deal at laying out in disturbing and chilling detail the lead-up and the immediate aftermath of the Damascus Incident, an incident that, had that warhead exploded inside the silo, could have killed or nuked everyone and everything within a 70-mile radius of the place. Former defense secretary Harold Brown is interviewed about how even he wasn't fully aware of how dangerous the situation was, given that the incident happened under his watch (during the last months of Jimmy Carter's presidency), as well as the men involved in the silo: Jeffrey Plumb; Allan Childers; Greg Devlin; James Sandaker; and others, along with the actual residents, media representatives, and law enforcement officials whose very existence was threatened by what was going horrifyingly wrong at that silo; former U.S. senator from Arkansas David Pryor, and film footage of folks like then-governor of Arkansas (and future U.S. president) Bill Clinton. There is real fear in the eyes and words of the men involved at Ground Zero in Damascus over what they saw there, and the reality that the Strategic Air Command (known as SAC, whose motto was always "Peace Is Our Profession") wanted to act as if it was only human error that was involved.

But the truth is much more frightening. Nuclear power, because of its own dangers and because of the fallibility of the human race, will always be inherently dangerous. Nuclear weapons are especially vulnerable in this regard. COMMAND AND CONTROL gives the lie to the notion that everything's okay in this arena. It definitely isn't.

The message of Robert Kenner's documentary Command and Control is crisp and scary. Atomic weapons are man-made machines. Man-made machines sooner or later break. A very serious accident, or even atomic apocalypse is only a matter of time. Actually a very serious accident did happen in 1980 at a nuclear missile in Arkansas, when the area around, the continent and maybe the whole world was close to a disaster maybe similar in proportions to the one that happened in Chernobyl in Ukraine (than part of the Soviet Union) a few years later.

I liked the low-key documentary style of this production. The authors restrained from commenting too much (although there are a few punch lines) and let the facts speak. It is amazing how much filmed material was available if we are taking into account the classified nature of the events that took place. We can also draw some conclusions, this being mostly left to us, viewers. At the end of the day the safety systems in place worked, but the wrong decisions of the human factors did not lack either. What was different from the incident in the Soviet Union besides the very existence and quality of the safety equipment was also the fact that the decisions were made at a relative low level, and eventually the right decisions prevailed. Heroism was there, at least one precious life was lost, and several people remained with physical and psychological traumas, not to speak about the imposed silence about the events. For these people the film is an act of recovery and rehabilitation which seems to be well deserved.

One more thought could not escape me when seeing this film - how young the heroes of this story were. The safety of the nuclear devices was put in the hands of very young people in uniform, who were only a few years before just kids. Many of the members of the emergency teams were also very young. Maybe one day a film needs to be made about those kids, or men and women who have been so recently kids to whom we trust not only the manipulation of deadly weapons, but the very existence of the planet and of life on it.

If you think the answer is zero, you really need to watch this. Beyond the shocking lack of accountability among the scientists who created these machines, and the military that operates them, I was really bothered by the (mis-)treatment of the crewmen who responded to the site.