Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) is a mouthful of military jargon. In this edited volume, which is presented as an “unclassified primer on America’s NC3 system and the way forward to a modernized, twenty-first-century backbone of deterrence,” one finds a bewildering number of attempts at defining what exactly NC3 is, and what it is not.[1] The first attempt uses official US Air Force guidance, which starts by defining Nuclear Command and Control (NC2) as consisting of five functions: force management, planning, maintain situational awareness, decision-making, and force direction (5). These are each in turn defined by their “activities” that contribute to Command, Control, and Communications (C3). NC3, then, is “the means to execute these mission essential functions,” as provided by “an integrated system comprised of facilities, equipment, communications, procedures, and personnel.”[2]
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 104
James J. Wirtz and Jeffrey A. Larsen, eds., Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: A Primer on US Systems and Future Challenges. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2022.
Reviewed by Alex Wellerstein, Stevens Institute of Technology
9 July 2024 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE104 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: John Krige | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) is a mouthful of military jargon. In this edited volume, which is presented as an “unclassified primer on America’s NC3 system and the way forward to a modernized, twenty-first-century backbone of deterrence,” one finds a bewildering number of attempts at defining what exactly NC3 is, and what it is not.[1] The first attempt uses official US Air Force guidance, which starts by defining Nuclear Command and Control (NC2) as consisting of five functions: force management, planning, maintain situational awareness, decision-making, and force direction (5). These are each in turn defined by their “activities” that contribute to Command, Control, and Communications (C3). NC3, then, is “the means to execute these mission essential functions,” as provided by “an integrated system comprised of facilities, equipment, communications, procedures, and personnel.”[2]
Clear as mud, and impressively circular, even for the US military. Reading through the essays, of course, one pieces together a somewhat clearer picture of this elephant, but, ultimately, NC3 is inherently poorly defined and this, perhaps, is one of the reasons that finding an agency to “own” it from top to bottom has proved rather elusive over the years. One of the essays describes NC3 as the systems that “provide the links between nuclear forces and presidential authority,” which is a bit clearer.[3] A definition that I quite like (in that it dares to not simply replicate official jargon) describes NC3 as “the nervous system of nuclear deterrence.”[4] The short foreword emphasizes that NC3 comprises “more than two hundred subsystems, touching all three legs of the triad of nuclear delivery systems, and requiring a fully integrated infrastructure of space-, ground-, air-, and sea-base capabilities,” and as such is, “the most complex and yet least-known component of the nuclear weapons complex.”[5] To elucidate what NC3 is meant to accomplish, several of the essays repeat the common framing of NC3 as the “always/never” problem: to serve their deterrence role, nuclear weapons must always be usable and functioning whenever properly authorized to do so (also called “positive control”), while never being usable (or exploding accidentally) if they haven’t been so authorized (“negative control”).
If I were trying to explain NC3 to a genuine beginner, I would personally define it as the collections of systems, both organizational and technical, that seek to allow designated political and military authorities to maintain control over the use of nuclear weapons, and to make decisions about their possible use. In this definition, the word “control” is doing a lot of work, running the entire gamut of the technical, organizational, and political contexts that these weapons exist in. This is why the scope of NC3 is so large and unwieldy, connecting real-time intelligence information from satellites, radars, far-flung military bases, and so on, to conversations in the White House and the Pentagon, and from there down to the switches, keys, and buttons that launch officers might be turning and pressing inside underground silos and submarines. The goal of all of this, of course, is to maintain a credible threat that, within minutes of a decision from the president (or their designated successor), US nuclear weapons could be used against another nation, at any time, no matter what. Because this kind of threat is thus tied to the fate of millions, if not billions, of people worldwide (including Americans), this control must necessarily also include control against accidental or unauthorized use of this power.
As such, NC3 covers the multiple, redundant, and complex electronic systems that allow orders to be transmitted under extreme circumstances (i.e., in the middle of an on-going nuclear war, to submarines hiding on the bottom of the ocean, etc.), and even minutiae like how far apart certain switches in missile silos are kept (so that a single officer cannot operate them without the aid of another, a reification of the “two-person rule”). At a deeper level, they involve, and seek to reify, weighty questions of civics: Who should be allowed to make a legally authorized order to use nuclear weapons? What checks and balances should exist at different levels of the political and military hierarchy, and how should they be enforced? In the US system, the president (or their designated successor) has a position of “sole authority” to order the use of nuclear weapons, for example, but the implementation of these orders by the military is also in principle subject to legal interpretations of the laws of war, and this presidential power has at times been “pre-delegated,” with use authorization given to the military under certain circumstances. These latter, thorny, controversial political questions are, tellingly, not discussed at all in the volume under review, despite this being a prominent popular framing for NC3 since at least the end of the Nixon administration, and certainly within the last decade.
There have been many books written on NC3 issues over the years, both popular (like Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control) and scholarly (like Scott Sagan’s The Limits of Safety, Bruce Blair’s Strategic Command and Control, Paul Bracken’s The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces, and a tremendously useful volume edited by Ashton Carter, John Steinbruner, and Charles Zraket, Managing Nuclear Operations).[6] They range in their scale, scope, and underlying assumptions about the subject under study. Many of them are ultimately discussions about the underlying question of the control of nuclear weapons, if only because a lack of control (whether technical, physical, or political) over nuclear weapons is a very disturbing possibility, given their destructive potential. There is no consensus among them on this question of control, some arguing that control is very good, others emphasizing that it is not so good, others questioning the ultimate possibility of total control, and so on.
There is also a far less public side of this discourse which takes place almost exclusively in think tanks, military universities, and the Department of Defense itself. I speak not of classified studies, which must exist at some great length (a few have been declassified over the years), but rather of a sort of parallel unclassified discourse on this subject that sees its goals more as enabling “nuclear deterrence” than analyzing it.[7] This is its own “tribe” of sorts, with its own assumptions, norms, rules of membership, and general professional ecosystem.[8]
It is with all of this in mind that I read this volume. Its contributors are primarily political science professors, many of whom have, judging by the book’s biographical notes, connections to the world of the military and military education, and the book’s acknowledgments section seems to indicate that the book is aimed at preparing “operators of the newly designated NC3 weapons system for the challenges ahead.”[9] Accordingly, most of the essays take for granted the point of view that nuclear weapons are here to stay, that nuclear weapons are necessary for national security, and that nuclear weapons maintain the peace and are the cornerstone of deterrence. The core tension of the book is its view on the nuclear status quo, which is “good” in the sense that the contributors have extreme confidence in the nuclear weapons of the United States and especially in the people who manage them, but “bad” in the sense that if the system was perfect as it was, it wouldn’t be in dire need of an expensive overhaul.
The volume, again, is meant as a “primer” on NC3. I admit I read it more in an anthropological mode than for its semantic value, as someone who has already read quite a lot about NC3 systems. I was particularly interested in how the essays here describe the history of nuclear weapons, because the history of nuclear command and control is famously fraught, filled with hair-raising tales of accidents, trigger-happy generals with utter contempt for civilian oversight, fears of trigger-happy presidents, close calls, false alarms, and near misses. This particular volume repeatedly appeals to the importance of understanding “history” when understanding NC3, and to its credit has dedicated several chapters to a historical overview of the topic. Almost every chapter has some invocation of history in it to make its core point.[10]
But the actual historical content engaged with is very constrained, and occasionally quite inaccurate in both detail and generalities. The dedicated history chapters are fairly superficial overviews of nuclear history in general (the standard narratives), with very little engagements with NC3 history in particular. For example, the first historical chapter (“NC3 During the Bomber Age”) spends a lot of time retreading the basics of the Manhattan Project, but ignores any of the actual NC3-related issues regarding the uses of the bomb.[11] It does not, for example, remark on the (by now quite common in the historical literature) point that Truman was not himself deeply involved in the so-called “decision to use the atomic bomb,” and that his most significant intervention in the operation was halting the use of the next atomic bomb after Nagasaki, declaring that no further atomic weapons could be used without his express presidential approval. Personally, I think this is a very significant point to bring up when thinking about the early days of NC3—that the earliest real issue of command and control, one that lasted throughout the rest of the Truman administration and into the Eisenhower administration—was about denying the military access to the weapons.[12]
The second historical chapter (“NC3 During the Missile Age”) is a similarly broad overview for the rest of the Cold War.[13] It manages to almost totally avoid discussing what I would consider many of the really vital NC3 issues in this period, like President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s policy of pre-delegated authority, which allowed military commanders to use nuclear weapons on their own judgment under certain conditions, or the deployment of the “nuclear football” as a means of extending presidential control outside of the White House.[14] The deployment of Permissive Action Links (PALs), the “locks” that are meant to prevent unauthorized use of nuclear weapons (especially for weapons deployed outside of the United States) is mentioned in passing without any real discussion of what went into their development and deployment.[15] The numerous “Broken Arrow” nuclear accidents of the 1960s are ignored (one from 1958 is included).[16] (At least a few chapters [4 and 7] mention “false alarm” incidents, which is some consolation.[17]) The film Dr. Strangelove is invoked as emphasizing that “keeping human decision-makers in the loop needed to remain a top priority,” which was not, I suspect, Stanley Kubrick’s intended message. (49)
As a historian, I am interested less in the shortcomings of the historical content of the book than I am in the repeated urging about the importance of understanding the history of NC3, the underlying structure that these historical accounts hew to, and the “work” that the presentation of “history” does in such a book. All of the historical invocations in this volume follow essentially the same narrative. One could summarize it as: the United States built nuclear weapons to fight the good fight during World War II, but quickly found them necessary for the emerging Cold War, as the Soviet Union emerged as the major threat to US security. To deal with this threat, the United States built up the technical and organizational capacity for perpetuating mass destruction on them and all of their allies/subjugated peoples. It did so, of course, with a focus on “deterring, not starting, a third world war” (43), and only ever doing what was “needed” to be done or what was “required” by the times. If it had too many weapons at times (“overkill”), that was either the fault of “gaps in US intelligence” (47) or lack of interservice coordination. If, in retrospect, it didn’t make the weapons terribly safe and secure that was because of the “limits of technology” (46).
Some authors note that there have been a few “embarrassing incidents” (87) and “operational glitches” (26) regarding nuclear weapons over the years. They are referring to the loss-of-control incident in 2007, in which six air-launched cruise missiles were accidentally and inappropriately transported by airplane, or the various scandals regarding nuclear weaponeers cheating on their certification exams, both of which are essentially attributed to the “decades of neglect” (27) for funding nuclear weapons. Instead of indicating “some fundamental dishonesty” on behalf of the Air Force officers who cheated on their certification exams, it really just reflected that they treated the exams as “another routine and inconsequential training requirement” (27).[18] Ultimately, these histories seem to conclude, all was done as well as could be expected at the time—maybe even better. Unfortunately, when the Cold War abruptly ended, and “the world shared a collective sigh of relief” (210), people stopped investing in nuclear weapons or NC3, so that now the United States finds itself in the middle of a new, even scarier period equipped with a “vintage” system that has not been substantially overhauled in decades. Its leaders are obliged to deal with new technological threats (cyberattacks, etc.), using an old, outmoded, underfunded NC3 system.
This is a classic, rationalized rise-and-fall narrative of the nuclear enterprise. In most essays, excesses are excused, mistakes are forgiven, and trust was justified. There is, we are assured, no real reason to ever worry about the loss of control. Except, of course, for the fact that at the end of the Cold War, attention waned, and now we find ourselves once again thrust into peril. But there is an answer readily at hand—“modernization.” It is discussed in almost every chapter, with the penultimate section devoted entirely to it, and it becomes very clear almost immediately that the book as a whole argues for that policy.[19] The narrative of the book is delicate. On the one hand, the authors demonstrate that the nuclear establishment is and has always been over all responsible, but on the other they describe a serious flaw or deficit: it needs to be “modernized.”
“Modernization” is the term used for replacing (and upgrading) “legacy” nuclear infrastructure with something new, which is always fantastically expensive. The “modernization” program has been going on in the “legs” of the nuclear triad since the late 2000s. NC3 systems, however, were left out of these allocations. The book covers this history in more detail than the earlier history, although it does so through an almost exclusively bureaucratic lens, and working backwards from the assumption that “modernization” is the correct solution to the threats the United States faces. Though partial, these histories are somewhat useful, as the book goes into some detail in various chapters about how and why US Strategic Command was given the responsibility to create an entirely new NC3 system that would phase out the multitude of other systems currently in place. The penultimate chapter in particular describes the mass of the bureaucratic activities that were required to make this happen, which is an actually quite fascinating look at how institutional “consensus” is generated, especially regarding a system like NC3 which is inherently different from most military systems. The infrastructural and dispersed nature of NC3 systems, which exist mainly as pervasive connections between more well-bounded systems (like ICBMs or submarines), meant that getting any particular agency or branch of the military to take “ownership” of it was quite difficult. Ultimately the way around this was, after several twists and turns, to somewhat unceremoniously dump it into the lap of US Strategic Command and tell them to figure it out.[20]
What will this “modernized” NC3 system look like? Nobody seems to know at this point, except that it is somehow meant to be a comprehensive overhaul (not just more piecemeal additions) and yet it is also not to be a single “thing” (because it will still be a system of systems, and will never be as coherent or unified as, say, a submarine). Is it an “evolutionary” system built up of many parts (like the current one), or a “top down,” total replacement? This volume does not tell us; to its credit, it admits, in the conclusion, that nobody really knows what it is going to look like, except for the fact that it “will not be inexpensive,” but will be cheaper than “replacing any one of the legs in the triad.”[21]
Generally speaking, most of the essays in this volume are not particularly probing or analytical. One could argue that a “primer” should not be expected to do such fundamental probing, but I think there is a missed opportunity here, even within the limited audience and purpose imagined by most of the book’s contributors. There are occasionally interesting nuggets of information—like how, contrary to the “we stopped caring about NC3” narrative that pervades the book, the US actually did spend a lot of money trying to overhaul a major NC3 system during the post-Cold War by giving a fat contract to Boeing, but after a decade of cost overruns and little to show for it, it finally canceled that particular boondoggle (187)—but there is no grand framework, except a driving insistence that NC3 modernization is a policy every sane person should be getting behind.[22] The litany of standard mantras about deterrence keeping the peace, “always/never,” the straightforward Cold War, contrasted with the dangerous world of today, the failure to adequately fund the nuclear weaponeers after the end of the Cold War, and so on, pervades the volume. One could imagine a more interesting and provocative approach, even towards the same ends. For example: Regarding “always/never,” is “always” of equal importance as “never”? (Personally, I think “never” probably needs to be 100 percent “never,” because the risks associated with loss of negative control are inherently large, while some lesser amount of “always” would be satisfactory for deterrence purposes, since the risk to an adversary of even a partial success of a nuclear retaliation would still be unacceptably high. But the point is that asking the question, and engaging with it, is probably more interesting than just supplying an answer to it, and certainly more interesting than implicitly assuming the answer to it.)
One chapter in particular stood out for me, however, and deserves some specific praise. Jon R. Lindsay’s chapter on “Cyber Operations and Nuclear Escalation,” looks at the intersections of NC3, “cyberwarfare,” and nuclear threats, and is truly excellent.[23] It does the work you would want a chapter in a “primer” to do, and then some. It serves as an excellent, readable introduction to its topic, and makes no attempt to either over-hype the threat (or, for that matter, over-rationalize every past decision that the US military has ever made), and applies original analysis, raises important questions about matters that are unknown (and perhaps unknowable), and ultimately synthesizes a lot of complex material in a way that is engaged and feels fresh. I came away feeling like I had a genuinely better understanding of the many dimensions of the topic and a good framework (helpfully rendered into both prose and table format) for how one might think about the many different possibilities in which cyber operations could be deployed in the nuclear space (and their relative risks, and how that might affect whether a given party—including the United States itself, who Lindsay points out is one of the few countries known to have actually engaged in hostile NC3 cyber operations—might weigh their feasibility). This chapter is worth the read, whatever level of knowledge one might have on the topic.
What I particular appreciated about Lindsay’s chapter is not just its specific analyses (which feel quite smart), but also that he seemed to be the one author represented in this volume who had exposure to more nuanced ways of thinking about technological systems. His background appears to be Systems Engineering, that hybrid field that emerged out of cybernetics and has many interesting conceptual overlaps with critical studies in the history of technology and science and technology studies. He is the author who describes NC3 as the “nervous system” of the nuclear arsenal, and he also describes it as a “sociotechnical system,” which is how I would be inclined to think about it, even if it is a bit of jargon I would probably not use in mixed company. NC3 is a collection of many different systems that are mixtures of human-technical interactions within larger, historically-situated organizations and contexts. This feels especially necessary for his topic—a sense of NC3 as systems with components that are situated in space and time is absolutely important if you are worried about the possibility of a subcomponent (e.g., a chip) being compromised at some “earlier” stage of the production line—but even in general, his is an approach that sees the technologies involved as far more than just the “gadgets” that get rendered into military diagrams about NC3 (satellites, radars, submarines, etc.). This sense of technology includes the “gadget,” but sees the “gadget” itself as the product of a long chain of production, a long chain of organizational decisions, and a product that is necessarily in contact with other people (“users”), other systems, and in a constant state of decay and maintenance.
This kind of understanding of technological systems, which is thoroughly and inseparably enmeshed in their contexts in the broadest sense, is a far more useful way to think about any technology than the “gadget” approach, but especially for something like NC3, which necessarily is about those sociotechnical linkages (it is literally meant to be a series of links between the president in his role as commander in chief and the detonation of one or many nuclear weapons), it is absolutely essential if one does not want to fall back either on the bland mantras previously disparaged. It would not at all preclude support for “modernization” or nuclear weapons as a whole, but it would require a deeper digging into how these systems would integrate into the real world and its many complexities.
I had hoped, going into it, that this volume might be an updated, if slimmer and more focused, version of the Carter, et al., Managing Nuclear Operations volume.[24] It is not that. Still, it is good to venture out of the boundaries of one’s own field and mindsets, and the book did force me to do that. It brought back a memory from me from the “before times,” when, in late January 2019, I was fortunate-enough to be invited to an unclassified workshop that was hosted at Stanford on the subject of “NC3 Systems and Strategic Stability.”[25] It was a fascinating experience, mostly from an anthropological perspective, because it involved several of these different groups of people coming together and talking about these issues, including several of the authors in this volume. The highlight of the experience was a very high-ranking military officer telling the conference attendees (all of this was unclassified) that when he came into his job in the nuclear complex, he had tried to find out whether, if it came down to it, the US NC3 system would actually function as designed if it were engaged in a nuclear conflict. He told us that he never actually got a satisfying answer to that question, which was itself a remarkable admission, given that he was in a position to get that information if anyone was. But, ultimately, he concluded that it “probably” would work, and left it at that.
Alex Wellerstein is Associate Professor and Director of Science and Technology Studies at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Prior to becoming a professor, he was an Associate Historian at the Center for the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics, and was prior to that a postdoctoral fellow at the Belfer Center’s Managing the Atom and International Security Programs at the Harvard Kennedy School. He received his PhD from the Department of History of Science at Harvard University in 2010, and received a BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002. His first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, was published by the University of Chicago in 2021. His second book, on nuclear weapons policy in the Truman administration, is expected to be published by HarperCollins in 2025.
[1] Jeffrey Larsen, “Conclusion: US NC3 at a Critical Juncture,” in James J. Wirtz and Jeffrey A. Larsen, eds., Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: A Primer on US Systems and Future Challenges (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2022): 209-220, here 210. Hereafter Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications.
[2] James J. Wirtz, “Introduction: Assuring Control of the Nuclear Force,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: 1-11, here, 5-6. For the full definition, see Air Force Instruction 13-550 (16 April 2019): https://static.e-publishing.af.mil/production/1/af_a10/publication/afi13-550/afi13-550.pdf.
[3] Jeffrey A. Larsen, “US Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: An Overview,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: 71-92, here, 73.
[4] Jon R. Lindsay, “Cyber Operations and Nuclear Escalation: A Dangerous Gamble,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: 121-144, here 123.
[5] Rebecca K.C. Hersman, “Foreword,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: xi-xii, here xi.
[6] Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Penguin, 2013); Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Bruce Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1985); Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Ashton B. Carter, John D. Steinbruner, and Charles A. Zraket, eds., Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1987). To this list, one might also add William Perry and Tom Z. Collina, The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2020), Daniel Ford, The Button: The Pentagon’s Strategic Command and Control System (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), and Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
[7] The best of the once-classified studies is Leonard Wainstein, et al., “The Evolution of U.S. Strategic Command and Control and Warning, 1945–1972,” IDA Study S-467 (Institute for Defense Analyses, June 1975): https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA331702. Sandia National Laboratories’ in-house documentary film, Always/Never: The Quest for Safety, Control, and Survivability, released publicly in 2015, also does a very good job at introducing and discussing these issues in the context of Sandia technical contributions to the safety and control of the weapons themselves: https://newsreleases.sandia.gov/always_never/.
[8] The classic essay on these tribes is Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12, no. 4 (1987), 687-718.
[9] “Acknowledgments,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: xiii.
[10] It also has a chapter that is an almost exclusively technical overview of orbital dynamics as related to satellites, and a chapter that is meant as a short work of speculative fiction: Matthew R. Crook, “Space Architecture for NC3: Systems and Technologies,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: 93-117; Wade L. Huntley, “Technology Threats to NC3: A Future Scenario,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: 161-182. I will be ignoring these chapters here for reasons of space, although the latter provides interesting insights into part of the imagination of fear that motivates the policy assumptions of the book.
[11] James Clay Moltz, “NC3 during the Bomber Age: 1945-57,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: 35-48. It also contains a few unfortunate errors, such as claiming (43) that the Ivy King device tested in 1952 was a boosted device (it was not).
[12] See, for example, J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, Revised ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997/2004), 5-6, 86. The “custody” dispute would continue until the mid-1950s, when the decision to develop sealed-pit weapons rendered it essentially moot.
[13] James Clay Moltz, “NC3 During the Missile Age, 1957–91,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: 49-68.
[14] See, e.g., Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine, chapters 3 and 7. In general, Ellsberg’s book is an almost mirror image view of NC3 history from this volume, as told by someone who was tasked with analyzing the defects of the American NC3 system in the early 1960s.
[15] See, e.g., Peter Stein and Peter Feaver, Assuring Control of Nuclear Weapons: The Evolution of Permissive Action Links (Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, 1987).
[16] The “Mars Bluff Incident,” in which a Mark 6 bomb was inadvertently dropped from a B-47 bomber onto a family’s house in South Carolina, is used as an opening anecdote to frame the importance of NC3. As the bomb lacked a fissile core, it never had the possibility of a nuclear detonation, unlike many of the accidents in the 1960s, when sealed-pit weapons became standard in the stockpile. Wirtz, “Introduction,” in Wirtz and Larsen, eds., Nuclear Command Control and Communications, 1-11, here 1-2.
[17] Larsen, “US Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications”; Wade L. Huntley, “Technology Threats to NC3: Past Lessons and Current Challenges,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: 145-160.
[18] “Embarrassing incidents” comes from Larsen, “US Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications,” An Overview,” 87; “decades of neglect” comes from Wirtz, “Deterrence,” 26.
[19] Michael S. Malley, “NC3 Modernization: Progress and Remaining Changes,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: 185-208.
[20] Malley, “NC3 Modernization.”
[21] Jeffrey A. Larsen, “Conclusion: US NC3 at a Critical Juncture,” in Wirtz and Larsen, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications: 209-220, here 217.
[22] Michael S. Malley, “NC3 Modernization.”
[23] Lindsay, “Cyber Operations and Nuclear Escalation,” 121-144.
[24] Ashton B. Carter, John D. Steinbruner, and Charles A. Zraket, eds., Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1987).
[25] It was organized by the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, the Preventative Defense Project at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (Stanford), and the MacArthur Foundation’s Technology for Global Security program. Many of the papers given were reworked into articles that are published on the Nautilus Institute’s website, at https://nautilus.org/.