Dangerous systems usually required standardized procedures and some form of centralized control to prevent mistakes. That sort of management was likely to work well during routine operations. But duri...
Captain Barry steered the plane back toward land and ordered the crew to bail out. One of the copilots, Captain Theodore Schreier, mistakenly put on a life jacket over his parachute. He was never seen...
Beslenme biçimi, bir ulus hakkında sanatı veya edebiyatından daha çok bilgi verebilir. ABD'de herhangi bir günde yetişkin nüfusun yaklaşık dörtte biri bir fast food restoranına gidiyor. Fast food sekt...
And should Armageddon come, should a foreign enemy someday shower the United States with nuclear warheads, laying waste to the whole continent, entombed within Cheyenne Mountain, along with the high-t...
A country with fewer atomic bombs than its adversary had an especially strong incentive to launch an attack out of the blue. And for that reason, among others, a number of high-ranking American office...
One crucial fact must be kept in mind: none of the roughly seventy thousand nuclear weapons built by the United States since 1945 has ever detonated inadvertently or without proper authorization. The...
Unlike other commodities, however, fast food isn’t viewed, read, played, or worn. It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry offers, both literally and figuratively, so muc...
Today the U.S. government can demand the nation-wide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contami...
The impact of McDonald’s on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.
The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.
Secrecy is essential to the command and control of nuclear weapons. Their technology is the opposite of open-source software. The latest warhead designs can’t be freely shared on the Internet, improve...
One historian has described the federal government’s 1950s highway-building binge as a case study in interstate socialism—
Nuclear weapons may well have made deliberate war less likely, Sagan now thought, but the complex and tightly coupled nuclear arsenal we have constructed has simultaneously made accidental war more li...
For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the...
Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. The
Daniel Ford, a former head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, revealed that, among other things, the destruction of a single, innocuous-looking building in Sunnyvale, California, located within baz...
As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and ra...
A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants--mainly a...
Walter Junior, were in the toolshed outside their home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, when a Mark 6 atomic bomb landed in the yard. Mrs.
Thomas K. Jones, an undersecretary of defense, played down the number of casualties that a nuclear war might cause, arguing that families would survive if they dug a hole, covered it with a couple of...