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Chapter 10. Nuclear Safety Procedures in Fail-Safe
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nuclear safety Procedures in fail-safe 163 It is one of the major premises of this study that the nuclear bomb is not a single object, however feared, but the most dramatic weapon within a whole military system. We have seen how Mordecai Roshwald satirizes the dehumanizing effects of such a system because it reduces the human operative to an extension of the larger machine. One of the main ironies of Level 7 is that no individual makes any important military decisions; war breaks out and ultimately humanity is destroyed by mistake. We turn now to narratives that take us to the nuclear brink and that dramatize different problems of control in preventing situations from tilting over that brink. One of the most important narratives to deal with the issue of systems malfunction was Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s 1962 novel Fail-Safe, which takes as its title a strategy or devices designed to make malfunction impossible. In the wake of the Korean War, President Eisenhower ordered a major increase in U.S. defense spending, but the nuclear buildup of the late fifties received a double shock in 1957 when the Russians launched their first ICBM and the Sputnik satellite. The U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) promptly reduced its threat reaction time to fifteen minutes or less and by the end of the decade was maintaining a round-the-clock airborne alert force. During the 1950s both super powers had been developing complex systems of weaponry (including surveillance , delivery, monitoring, etc.), which were being designed to respond rapidly andautomatically.ThesociologistC.WrightMillsoutlinedtheprobablesequence as baldly as possible: “Should accident or breakdown occur, S.A.C. drops its stuff. Or the missile is launched. The Americans have massively retaliated. The Russians retaliate massively. A few hours later the world is a radioactive shambles, chaPter 10 Nuclear Safety Procedures in Fail-Safe 164 under the shadow a chaos of disaster.”1 In 1958 Eisenhower announced details of the new fail-safe defense system, an engineering term which signified that the system had built-in safeguards against accident. The most prominent of these, the one novelists immediately picked up, was whether it was possible or not for a renegade bomber for whatever reason to go past its fail-safe point and thus trigger a nuclear holocaust . Mills, for one, was unimpressed by the new system and argued that neither malfunction nor human error could be ruled out. These developments had a number of consequences that bear directly on the fiction of nuclear accident. First, the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction (with its appropriate acronym MAD) made triumphalist rhetoric absurd. Second, the refinement of the American defense machine meant that a potential technological sequence of strike, response, and counterresponse was taking shape, a sequence that might happen more rapidly than human response. Mordecai Roshwald satirized both of these factors in Level 7 by divorcing political rhetoric from actuality and by streamlining his defense bunker to the last extreme. Mills had similarly identified a military ethos that used “men as ‘functions’ of a social machinery and which was rapidly developing its own impetus,” apparently diminishing the role of human action within this new context.2 A foretaste of the sort of narrative that would be created by these new military circumstances was given by a dispatch that appeared in the New York Times on 19 April 1958: Imagine that you are the commander of a B-52 jet bomber of the United States Strategic Air Command. You are in flight toward an enemy target. You are carrying thermonuclear bombs capable of more destructive force than the combined American and British Air Forces delivered in all of World War II. This is not practice. Eight minutes ago you were dispatched from base. You are bound northward across the Pole, flying faster than the speed of sound. Fourteen minutes ago your base, and every other Strategic Air Command base in the world, received a flash from the DEW line (distant early warning) network across northern Canada that the radarscopes indicated a convergence of foreign objects flying swiftly toward the United States. Your aircraft was the last of the sortie off the runway; you were airborne in six minutes; you have been flying for eight minutes. Enemy missiles that must have passed you in flight would be due to strike North America in one minute. Other United States bombers are in the air all over the world with reprisal bombs. [18.232.169.110] Project MUSE (2024-03...