In the shadow of the bomb

'Are you military?" Eric Schlosser asks my ex-Army officer father as he gets a book signed at the Science Gallery in Dublin. Schlosser can apparently recognise military men at a glance. He has spent six years talking to air-force officers while researching Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety, a book about the management and politics of nuclear weapons. He has just spent this sunny afternoon gently terrifying an Irish audience on the subject.

He hadn't intended to spend so long writing it. He'd finished Fast Food Nation, his bestselling exposé of the fast-food industry, written another book, about the United States' black markets, and was researching space weapons. "The future of warfare is in space," he says. But when Schlosser started to investigate that subject he found that a lot of his interviewees had started their careers working in nuclear-missile silos. They started to tell him stories, "astonishing stories" about near misses and false alarms.

So he began to investigate. He learned about warplanes with bombs on board falling into the sea and cases of bombers carrying nuclear warheads crashing or exploding. He learned about how a malfunctioning early-warning system almost sent the world to the brink of war, twice, and about US defence secretaries weeping in their offices because of stress. He learned about an accident in a Titan II missile silo in 1980 that could have wiped out Arkansas – and, incidentally, its then governor, Bill Clinton. It seemed that the world had escaped a nuclear conflagration by fluke and that the danger had not passed. “The scariest thing,” he says, “was realising that the people who really understand this subject the best are scared. And if they’re scared we should be scared.”

Investigative reporter
Schlosser's career has been a diverse one. He studied history, learned nonfiction writing with the renowned New Yorker journalist John McPhee, became a playwright – "an unsuccessful one," he says, and laughs – and worked in the film industry before becoming an investigative reporter for Atlantic Monthly in the 1990s. "I really don't believe in a hierarchy of writing," he says. "The writers I really admired growing up were writers who threw themselves into the big issues of the day and really engaged with society, not necessarily writing diatribes or political tracts or agitprop – I hate agitprop – but writers who felt themselves part of society and concerned with society. You can do that in novel, in a play or as a journalist."

Fast Food Nation uncovered the working conditions of fast-food employees, the use of chemicals in food production, the grim realities of factory farming and how the food was marketed to children. The fast-food industry responded viciously.

“I’m not like Michael Moore, trying to get into your face to provoke a reaction,” he says. “I felt what I wrote was calm and factual and straightforward. But they came after me in a personal way. People would show up trying to disrupt my talks. Letters and emails would be sent to schools saying I was an unfit person to talk to students because I was a proponent of pornography and drug use. It was really unpleasant. Stuff was put on the internet about me. It was like a political campaign: attack the character and integrity of your opponent rather than discuss the issues.

“I actually feel much more relaxed writing about nuclear weapons than writing about hamburgers. . . because these are strong, powerful corporations that are litigious and hire private security agencies. I could be delusional, but I have more faith that the American government won’t mess with me in a personal way than some of these corporations.”

This is not to say he’s complacent about government interference. So far there has been no official response to his revelations. “But if you hear that I’ve been involved in some totally bizarre accident a few weeks from now . . .” He laughs.

Then he says, more seriously: “While I was doing this book I was quite careful to have everything encrypted, to not have emails say anything that could get people in trouble. I’ve scrubbed my computers of things that could get people in trouble. When I leave I unplug my computer from the internet, so no one can get on to it while I’m not there.”

Edward Snowden’s revelations about surveillance by the US National Security Agency made him realise that he wasn’t being unduly paranoid. “I wonder now if all my efforts were futile,” he says.

“I wonder if they have the keys to all the best encryption programs. I will never now have any file of importance on a computer attached to the internet. I have separate computers: one for online work and another that’s never online, which is where I keep those encrypted files.”

So far the air force and government staff he interviewed for Command and Control have been happy with what he wrote. He has a lot of sympathy for "the people who had to live with the knowledge of how dangerous things were." He recalls interviewing one 82-year-old veteran whose wife, sitting beside him on the sofa, had never heard him talk about these things. "These people have an old-school sense of integrity and honour . . . Some were treated very badly by the air force but were very heroic."

Thriller
The book reads a little like a thriller, alternating the story of the missile accident in Damascus, Arkansas, with other incidents and a detailed history of nuclear weaponry and foreign policy. He charts the bomb's evolution from inexpensive military deterrent to potential ender of civilisation. And he discovered that the most consistent risk of nuclear disaster came not from warmongering politicians, Bay of Pigs-style stand-offs or the flawed thinking behind mutually assured destruction but from computer glitches, human error and bad maintenance. A loose wire could have triggered an apocalypse.

And it still might, he says. "We need fewer weapons in fewer hands. We had arms reduction in the United States and Russia. We went from 32,000 nuclear weapons [in the US] to 1,500 or 1,600 on alert now. But China needs to be included in those discussions. They need to sit down and think about how to reduce the danger of their weapons."

There are new threats. He outlines instances in recent years when US missiles went temporarily missing or went offline. “Computer hacking is the new fear,” he says. It doesn’t take many warheads to cause havoc. “The latest studies on nuclear winter suggest 40 nuclear detonations in cities would bring up enough debris to precipitate another ice age. Pakistan has 100 nuclear weapons, and India has 80 or 90. If they get into it the rest of the world will be affected. There’s no safe place.”

And Ireland and other small countries shouldn’t be complacent. Winston Churchill once estimated that 10 hydrogen bombs were all that it would take to destroy Britain. By the 1960s, says Schlosser, the Soviet Union was ready to hit Britain with 300. “For Ireland, next door, with its neutral foreign policy, these issues remain relevant.”

Journalistic rigour
He stresses that everything he publishes is checked and double-checked. He writes calmly and factually without hyperbole. He points proudly to the lengthy footnotes – "Here's how I got [the information]. Here's where it came from, if you want to find it."

He worries that journalistic rigour is dying and that American media is awash with punditry and opinions. “As an investigative reporter I feel like an endangered species,” he says.

“I’ve friends who are amazing writers who have four other jobs and don’t earn money from their writing, and I’ve also got to know some very successful American writers who are total bullshit artists and plagiarists and frauds. There’s not necessarily any correlation between the worthiness of what you’re doing and how well you’re doing . . . I feel lucky to be able to write about things I care about, but if you see two years from now that I’ve done a Britney Spears biography, it means I hit hard times and need to pay the mortgage.”

His next book will not be about Spears. It is, instead, a book on the American prison system, one he began researching before being distracted by nuclear weaponry. "It's about how we went from a prison population of 300,000 to one of more than two million and what that says about the United States . . . I have a subtitle: How the Land of the Free Became a Nation Behind Bars. Like the missile silos or the factory farms, these are hidden worlds that impact us but that we don't think about."

So why does he think the long cold war never spiralled into a nuclear one? “A lot of it was luck,” he says. “It’s like someone tells you not to drive because you’ve had too much to drink. You say, ‘F**k you, I’m fine!’ You drive home. It’s rainy. The roads are bad. It’s a dark night. But you make it home and think, I’m glad I didn’t listen to Charlie – there was no way I was going to have an accident. But if you were in the car behind, looking at how you were taking those curves, you’d have been terrified.”

He laughs sadly. “I’m delighted no city has been destroyed by nuclear weapons, but it’s absurd to think it will never happen.”