COMMAND AND CONTROL -->Documentary Film Review<--

On September 18, 1980 an Air Force worker performing routine maintenance on a Titan II missile dropped the socket from his socket wrench. The socket dropped eighty feet and punched a hole in the side of the rocket’s first-stage fuel tank, causing rocket fuel to leak out. The incident occurred at the Titan II ICBM Missile Silo 374-7 site. The site was administered by the nearby Little Rock Air Force Base outside of Damascus, about an hour’s drive north of Little Rock. The event is sometimes referred to as “The Damascus Incident” or “The Damascus Titan Missile Explosion”. This mishap triggered a series of events that are the basis for the documentary film Command and Control which is itself based on the book Command and Control by Eric Schlosser. At the time a young Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas.

The Titan II missile carried the largest warhead ever deployed by the United States, the W-53 warhead. The Titan II missile itself was the largest missile deployed by the United States, as tall as a nine story building. It was aging by 1980, having been used in the 1960’s to launch men into low earth orbit for Project Gemini. Although it was old, it had not been retired because it was being used as a bargaining chip in nuclear weapons talks with the Soviet Union.

The W-53 warhead deployed on the Titan II was a thermonuclear weapon, colloquially referred to as a hydrogen bomb. A thermonuclear weapon uses a nuclear fission reaction to ignite a nuclear fusion reaction, and is much more powerful than the nuclear fission bombs dropped on Japan. Modern nuclear weapons are thermonuclear (fusion) bombs, because they are much more powerful than fission weapons. The W-53 had a yield of nine megatons, an explosive force that is hard to imagine.

A thermonuclear weapon has never been used in war, so no one really knows what the effect would be. The first test in the South Pacific of an “H” bomb turned out to be more powerful than the physicists expected. An often used way to describe a nine-megaton blast is that it contains more explosive power than all the bombs dropped during WWII combined, including both atom bombs dropped on Japan. In addition to the explosive force, the radioactive contamination from such an explosion is vast and devastating. The film contains a chilling graphic that describes how if one of these bombs was dropped on Washington DC, it would cause fatalities from radioactivity as far away as New York City. Anyone within a twenty mile radius of the explosion would be incinerated, and most buildings within ten miles of the explosion would collapse.

Command and Control heightens dramatic tension by contrasting eyewitness accounts of Air Force men with civilian accounts. Civilians didn’t know what was going on, but at least one nearby farmer knew something was up when nearby roads were blockaded. There are dramatic re-creations of the events within the missile silo - the filmmakers received permission to film in an abandoned missile silo and so didn’t build mock-ups. Unlike some documentaries, the recreations are believable. Sometimes it is hard to know what is a re-creation and what is actual footage.

Even though on some level we know that a thermonuclear warhead didn’t explode in Arkansas in 1980 (we would have heard something about that, wouldn’t we?) the film has the dramatic tension of a thriller because we don’t know what will happen to the warhead. Within a day, the leaked rocket fuel explodes, throwing the thermonuclear warhead into a nearby field. What with the confusion of the fuel explosion (in which one man was killed), it takes some time for the Air Force to figure out what happened to the warhead. For a few tension-filled hours, no one knows where the warhead is. Much of the film’s drama results from the variance between what the Air Force knows and what it tells civilians, including high-placed government officials. Even if you’re not disposed to believe in governmental conspiracies and cover-ups, your faith in the verisimilitude of government pronouncements (especially military ones) will be shaken by this documentary.

Another intriguing aspect of this documentary is how complex and yet fragile nuclear weapons installations are. The people who designed these weapons aren’t the people who maintain them, and also aren’t the people responsible for using them. The people who use and maintain these weapons aren’t physicists, and don’t have an overall understanding of how they work. Everyone knows their own small role, but no one has the big picture. In order to get around this lack of comprehension, every action regarding the maintenance and deployment of these weapons is spelled out in a guidebook. Everything is literally done by the book. The problem with this approach is that if something unexpected happens - something as simple as a person dropping a wrench - there’s nothing in the manual that covers the situation. No one knows what to do, no one wants to do anything without proper authorization, and no one wants to be responsible when something goes wrong. So what possibly could have quickly been dealt with can spiral out of control and create unmanageable chaos.

At the end of the film, the then Secretary of Defense Harold Brown makes a startling admission. Accidents were not unusual in the Defense Department, he says. There must have been several every day. The movie makes the point that nuclear weapons are threatening to the owner as well as the enemy. Now that the Cold War is over, people don’t think about our nuclear arsenal much anymore. The film made me curious about the current state of our nuclear weapons arsenal. How many are there? Have they been updated with current technology, or are these old weapons still deployed?

This is a good film that could have been better by bringing the viewer up to date on the current state of our nuclear defense, but perhaps that is another documentary. Another question this film raises is how secret our nuclear arsenal should be in a democracy - this accident happened more than thirty years ago but is only now being reported on. By shining a light on this forgotten aspect of the Cold War, Command and Control is a worthwhile documentary. It manages to be entertaining, informative and chilling.

This documentary receives four out of five whales!

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