At the height of the Cold War in the American heartland, a combination of human error, aging equipment, mismanagement, and bad luck threatened to set off a nuclear weapon far more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. In unprecedented detail, Schlosser uses this long-forgotten incident to examine the nuclear near-misses of the past sixty years. He also pays tribute to the scientists, engineers, and military officers who struggled to insure that nuclear weapons wouldn't go off by accident - or by the deliberate acts of madmen and fanatics. It is miraculous, Schlosser concludes, that a city has not yet been destroyed by a nuclear weapon. And there is no guarantee that such good luck will last.COMMAND AND CONTROL takes us into nuclear weapons laboratories, missile silos, and the cockpits of B-52 bombers to show how perilously close we have come to disaster. Schlosser does not offer a simplistic condemnation of military warmongers or irresponsible leadership. Indeed, he finds much to admire in the ordinary men and women who risked their lives - and sometimes lost them - in order to keep the free world safe in the nuclear age. It is a saga of technological ingenuity and blind faith in science, of personal heroism and bureaucratic incompetence, of a desperate need for control and the ultimate illusion of control. It is a sobering account of how many lives can depend on the proper functioning of a single switch.COMMAND AND CONTROL unveils the risks faced by every country that chooses to possess nuclear weapons. Drawing upon recently declassified documents and interviews with arms designers, defense mavens, and the crews who manned our arsenal, Schlosser does far more than sound the alarm about today's nuclear threat. In the same way that FAST FOOD NATION used the workings of our food system to paint a portrait of society, COMMAND AND CONTROL shows how a system designed to control our nuclear weapons has come to endanger and control us.