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2328a2a
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During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. And as a final act of defiance, SAC demonstrated the importance of code management to the usefulness of any coded switch. The combination necessary to launch the missiles was the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000. Peurifoy
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Eric Schlosser |
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8484222
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Although European protest marches had focused mainly on the United States for the previous six years, it was the leadership of Western Europe who most strongly opposed creating a world without nuclear weapons.
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Eric Schlosser |
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d15d12e
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Although the original plans were scaled down, the completed bunker had miles of underground roads, accommodations for the prime minister and hundreds of other officials, a BBC studio, a vault where the Bank of England's gold reserves could be stored, and a pub called the Rose & Crown. *
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Eric Schlosser |
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c4671c4
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It was faster that way, the violation seemed trivial, and officers in the control center had no way of knowing what the enlisted men were doing in the silo. The
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Eric Schlosser |
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f31e475
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The drug use at Homestead was suspected after a fully armed Russian MiG-17 fighter plane, flown by a Cuban defector, landed there unchallenged, while Air Force One was parked on a nearby runway
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Eric Schlosser |
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a745813
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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 bazooka range" of Highway 101, could disrupt the operation of Air Force early-warning and communications satellites."
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Eric Schlosser |
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76fb0f9
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The Snark eventually ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the Amazonian rain forests of Brazil.
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Eric Schlosser |
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be8aa46
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When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn't. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn't unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security.
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Eric Schlosser |
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804cf08
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Every step appears as the unavoidable consequence of the preceding one," Einstein said. "In the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation."
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Eric Schlosser |
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2a37ded
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But one of Arnold's commanders was too cocky and nonchalant. He once removed a dummy weapon from a storage bunker in broad daylight, put it into the back of his pickup truck, covered it with a tarp, drove right past security, and disassembled it in front of his girlfriend. Arnold thought the move was stupid and irresponsible, as well as a major breach of security. Inside the bunker, the dummy weapons were stored beside the real ones.
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Eric Schlosser |
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f0fea48
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We found very little correlation between turnover and profitability...
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Eric Schlosser |
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d693664
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You can't have this kind of war," Eisenhower said at a national security meeting a couple of years later. "There just aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets."
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Eric Schlosser |
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d1cdcd3
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A brand offers a feeling of reassurance when its products are always and everywhere the same.
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Eric Schlosser |
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0bddb1f
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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 during an accident, Perrow argued, "those closest to the system, the operators, have to be able to take independent and sometimes quite creative action." Few bureaucracies were flexible enough to allow both centralized and decentralized decision ma..
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Eric Schlosser |
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94fd7ce
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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 likely." Researching The Limits of Safety left him feeling pessimistic about our ability to control high-risk technologies. The fact that a catastrophic accident with a nuclear weapon has never occurred, Sagan wrote, can be explained less by "g..
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Eric Schlosser |
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4e4d771
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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, improved through anonymous collaboration, and productively used without legal constraints.
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Eric Schlosser |
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939035d
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At a level of about 18,000 parts per million (ppm), the RFHCO would start to melt. At 20,000 ppm, the fuel vapor could spontaneously combust, without any exposure to a spark or flame, just from the friction caused by the movement of air. Waving your hand through the fuel vapor, at that concentration, could ignite it. The
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Eric Schlosser |
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6afffdd
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A typical artificial strawberry flavor, like the kind found in a Burger King strawberry milk shake, contains the following ingredients: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amylketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate..
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Eric Schlosser |
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b59e6ef
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About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.
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Eric Schlosser |
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6386be6
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We have found out... that we cannot trust some people who are nonconformists,' declared Ray Krock, one of the founders of Mcdonald's, angered by some of his franchisees. 'We will make conformists out of them in a hurry... The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.
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Eric Schlosser |
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8b2aa98
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Indeed, market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name.
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Eric Schlosser |
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03d05e5
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Americans already drink soda at an annual rate of about fifty-six gallons per person - that's nearly six hundred twelve-ounce cans of soda per person.
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Eric Schlosser |
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f16a439
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The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the United States is now about three times higher than the national average.
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Eric Schlosser |
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d6e0a71
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The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle.
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Eric Schlosser |
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1f5cc84
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Unlike the hot line frequently depicted in Hollywood films, the new system didn't provide a special telephone for the president to use in an emergency. It relied on Teletype machines that could send text quickly and securely. Written statements were considered easier to translate, more deliberate, and less subject to misinterpretation than verbal ones. Every
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Eric Schlosser |
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68801a9
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Even if the locking and unlocking mechanisms worked flawlessly, use of the weapons would depend on effective code management. If only a few people were allowed to know the code, then the death of those few or an inability to reach them in an emergency could prevent the weapons from being unlocked. But if the code was too widely shared, the locks would offer little protection against unauthorized use. The
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Eric Schlosser |
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479ff18
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McMahon predicted that "total power in the hands of total evil will equal destruction." The"
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Eric Schlosser |
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9077593
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What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand.
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Eric Schlosser |
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8965e34
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Some of the most painful and debilitating injuries are the hardest to prove.
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Eric Schlosser |
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0715395
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A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toilet seat. According to Gerba, 'You'd be better off eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink.
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Eric Schlosser |
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23c6874
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Like Cheyenne Mountain, today's fast good conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking facade.
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science
truth
health
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Eric Schlosser |
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5978b30
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The Air Force's demand for self-contained, inertial guidance systems played a leading role in the miniaturization of computers and the development of integrated circuits, the building blocks of the modern electronics industry.
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Eric Schlosser |
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b14c64e
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The first duty of the command and control system is to survive," Baran argued, proposing a distributed network with hundreds or thousands of separate nodes connected through multiple paths. Messages would be broken into smaller "blocks," sent along the first available path, and reassembled at their final destination. If nodes were out of service or destroyed, the network would automatically adapt and send the data along a route that was sti..
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Eric Schlosser |
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0e7a226
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The typical American now consumes approximately three hamburgers and four orders of french fries every week.
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Eric Schlosser |
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a39e120
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The Redstone often carried a 4-megaton warhead but couldn't fly more than 175 miles. The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.
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Eric Schlosser |
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e94dd29
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Andropov's concerns were heightened by the Reagan administration's top secret psychological warfare program, designed to spook and confuse the Kremlin. American naval exercises were staged without warning near important military bases along the Soviet coastline; SAC bombers entered Soviet airspace and then left it, testing the air defenses. The
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Eric Schlosser |
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c776cac
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Today approximately three-quarters of all $100 bills circulate outside the United States.
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Eric Schlosser |
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32e4ab1
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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 technological and administrative controls on those weapons have worked, however imperfectly at times--and countless people, military and civilian, deserve credit for that remarkable achievement. Had a single weapon been stolen or detonated, Ame..
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Eric Schlosser |
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a25b22c
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To know a country you must see it whole.
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Eric Schlosser |
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edc78e0
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No great monument has been built to honor those who served during the Cold War, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them in the name of freedom. It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.
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Eric Schlosser |
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550b082
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Americans not only smoke more marijuana but also imprison more people for marijuana than any other western industrialized nation.
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Eric Schlosser |
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0ff8821
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The current demand for marijuana and pornography is deeply revealing. Here are two commodities that Americans publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing amounts.
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Eric Schlosser |
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3acdb95
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Eager to defend the civilian control of nuclear weapons from military encroachment, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara had fought hard to ensure that only the president could make the ultimate decision. But they hadn't considered the possibility that the president might be clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily--like Richard Nixon, during his final weeks in office. Amid the deepening Watergate scandal, Secretary o..
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Eric Schlosser |
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ff77df8
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The drug use at Homestead was suspected after a fully armed Russian MiG-17 fighter plane, flown by a Cuban defector, landed there unchallenged, while Air Force One was parked on a nearby runway.
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Eric Schlosser |