Eric Schlosser is the author of The New York Times bestsellers Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The Nation.
“Deeply reported, deeply frightening . . . a techno-thriller of the
first order.” —Los Angeles Times
“An excellent journalistic investigation of the efforts made since
the first atomic bomb was exploded, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico,
on July 16, 1945, to put some kind of harness on nuclear weaponry.
By a miracle of information management, Schlosser has synthesized a
huge archive of material, including government reports, scientific
papers, and a substantial historical and polemical literature on
nukes, and transformed it into a crisp narrative covering more than
fifty years of scientific and political change. And he has
interwoven that narrative with a hair-raising, minute-by-minute
account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in
1980, which he renders in the manner of a techno-thriller . . .
Command and Control is how nonfiction should be written.” —Louis
Menand, The New Yorker
“A devastatingly lucid and detailed new history of nuclear weapons
in the U.S. . . . fascinating.” —Lev Grossman,
TIME Magazine
“Command and Control ranks among the most nightmarish books written
in recent years; and in that crowded company it bids fair to stand
at the summit. It is the more horrific for being so
incontrovertibly right and so damnably readable. Page after
relentless page, it drives the vision of a world trembling on the
edge of a fatal precipice deep into your reluctant mind... a work
with the multilayered density of an ambitiously conceived novel . .
. Schlosser has done what journalism does at its best when at full
stretch: he has spent time—years—researching, interviewing,
understanding and reflecting to give us a piece of work of the
deepest import.” —
Financial Times
“The strength of Schlosser's writing derives from his ability to
carry a wealth of startling detail (did you know that security at
Titan II missile bases was so lapse you could break into one with
just a credit card?) on a confident narrative path.” —The
Guardian
“Perilous and gripping . . . Schlosser skillfully weaves together
an engrossing account of both the science and the politics of
nuclear weapons safety . . . The story of the missile silo accident
unfolds with the pacing, thrill and techno details of an episode of
24.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Disquieting but riveting . . . fascinating . . . Schlosser’s
readers (and he deserves a great many) will be struck by how
frequently the people he cites attribute the absence of accidental
explosions and nuclear war to divine intervention or sheer luck
rather than to human wisdom and skill. Whatever was responsible, we
will clearly need many more of it in the years to come.” —New
York Times Book Review
“Easily the most unsettling work of nonfiction I've ever read,
Schlosser's six-year investigation of America's ‘broken arrows’
(nuclear weapons mishaps) is by and large historical—this stuff is
top secret, after all—but the book is beyond relevant. It's
critical reading in a nation with thousands of nukes still on
hair-trigger alert . . . Command and Control reads like a
character-driven thriller as Schlosser draws on his deep reporting,
extensive interviews, and documents obtained via the Freedom of
Information Act to demonstrate how human error, computer glitches,
dilution of authority, poor communications, occasional
incompetence, and the routine hoarding of crucial information have
nearly brought about our worst nightmare on numerous occasions.”
—Mother Jones
“Eric Schlosser detonates a truth bomb in Command and Control, a
powerful expose about America’s nuclear weapons.” —Vanity
Fair
“Nail-biting . . . thrilling . . . Mixing expert commentary with
hair-raising details of a variety of mishaps, [Eric Schlosser]
makes the convincing case that our best control systems are no
match for human error, bad luck, and ever-increasing technological
complexity.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Vivid and unsettling . . . An exhaustive, unnerving
examination of the illusory safety of atomic arms.” —Kirkus
(starred review)
“The lesson of this powerful and disturbing book is that the
world’s nuclear arsenals are not as safe as they should be. We
should take no comfort in our skill and good fortune in preventing
a nuclear catastrophe, but urgently extend our maximum effort to
assure that a nuclear weapon does not go off by accident, mistake,
or miscalculation.” —Lee H. Hamilton, former U.S.
Representative; Co-Chair, Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s
Nuclear Future; Director, the Center on Congress at Indiana
University
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