|
6ebf4e6
|
Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them--if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
d48ea75
|
The cable and the X-unit both had female plugs. Somehow the cable had been installed backward. It would take a couple of days to disassemble the layers of spheres and explosives, remove the cable, and reinstall it properly. "I felt a chill and started to sweat in the air-conditioned room," O'Keefe recalled. He decided to improvise. With help from another technician, he broke one major safety rule after another, propping the door open to bri..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
63f5c91
|
Public lotteries are essentially regressive taxes imposed on the poor.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
7011ac9
|
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.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
5f2a4ee
|
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-tech marvels, the pale blue jumpsuits, comic books, and Bibles, future archeologists may find other clues to the nature of our civilization--Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbeque Wing bones, and the red, white, and blue of..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
2aa7063
|
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.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
8a84c13
|
On any given day in the United States about one-quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
76164c9
|
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 officers argued that the United States should bomb the Soviet Union before it obtained any nuclear weapons. General
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
e9437c9
|
In 1978, the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda every day; today he drinks nearly three times that amount, deriving 9 percent of his daily caloric intake from soft drinks. Soda consumption among teenaged girls has doubled within the same period, reaching an average of twelve ounces a day. A significant number of teenage boys are now drinking five or more cans of soda every day. Each can contains the eq..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
a1b85da
|
Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) planes would quickly get off the ground, climb steeply, and send an emergency war order on a very-low-frequency radio, using an antenna five miles long. SAC began to develop a Post Attack Command and Control System. It would rely on airborne command posts, a command post on a train, a command post at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and a command post, known as The Notch, ins..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
b422447
|
Kennedy thought that his commanders at SAC had made a series of mistakes--the decision to evacuate the control center, the refusal to open the silo door and vent the fuel vapor, the endless wait to reenter the complex, the insistence upon using the access portal instead of the escape hatch, the order to turn on the fan. Worst of all was the feeling that he and Livingston had risked their lives for nothing--and then been abandoned. Livingsto..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
27ebf13
|
AT&T's telephone lines and Western Union's telegraph lines were the only direct links between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them would be knocked out by a thermonuclear blast, and most radio communications would be, as well. The command-and-control systems of the two countries had no formal, reliable means of interacting. The problem was so serious and so obvious, Schelling thought, everybody must have assumed somebody els..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
aaed902
|
The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a "horror strategy."
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
7f16764
|
During the same week that Kennedy appealed for an end to the arms race at the United Nations, he met with a handful of military advisers at the White House to discuss launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. General Thomas Power encouraged him to do it. According to notes of the meeting, held on September 20, Power warned that the United States now faced the greatest danger, ever, of a Soviet nuclear attack.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
a8a9454
|
The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
dacb24c
|
General Electric backed the Carousel of Progress, which featured an Audio-Animatronic housewife, standing in her futuristic kitchen, singing about "a great big beautiful tomorrow."
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
47e57ff
|
American tanks were sent to Checkpoint Charlie as a show of strength. Soviet tanks appeared there at about five in the evening on the twenty-seventh. The British soon deployed two antitank guns to support the Americans, while all the French troops in West Berlin remained safely in their barracks. For
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
1747885
|
In the early days of the project, Teller was concerned that the intense heat of a nuclear explosion would set fire to the atmosphere and kill every living thing on earth. A
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
0704f3c
|
Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell--the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War--urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but "anything is better than submission." Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that th..
|
|
nuclear-weapons
winston-churchill
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
df32dd5
|
Moser was a great believer in checklists.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
045591e
|
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 again. The
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
2a40ebc
|
The federal government has the legal authority to recall a defective toaster oven or stuffed animal--but still lacks the power to recall tons of contaminated, potentially lethal meat.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
bb53173
|
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 much insight into the nature of mass consumption.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
acb4de1
|
Sides of beef suspended from an overhead trolley swing toward a group of men. Each worker has a large knife in one hand and a steel hook in the other. They grab the meat with their hooks and attack it fiercely with their knives. As they hack away, using all their strength, grunting, the place suddenly feels different, primordial. The machinery seems beside the point, and what's going on before me has been going on for thousands of years--th..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
6d8ed05
|
A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that 7.5 percent of the ground beef samples taken at processing plants were contaminated with Salmonella, 11.7 percent were contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, 30 percent were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus, and 53.3 percent were contaminated with Clostridium perfringens.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
3033f07
|
Health officials soon traced the outbreak of food poisoning to undercooked hamburgers served at local Jack in the Box restaurants. Tests of the hamburger patties disclosed the presence of E. coli 0157:H7. Jack in the Box issued an immediate recall of the contaminated ground beef, which had been supplied by the Vons Companies, Inc., in Arcadia, California. Nevertheless, more than seven hundred people in at least four states were sickened by ..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
29bf2ea
|
Nineteen members of an Army detachment were arrested on pot charges at a Nike Hercules base on Mount Gleason, overlooking Los Angeles. One of them had been caught drying a large amount of marijuana on land belonging to the U.S. Forest Service. Three enlisted men at a Nike Hercules base in San Rafael, California, were removed from guard duty for psychiatric reasons. One of them had been charged with pointing a loaded rifle at the head of a s..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
705c2a7
|
One historian has described the federal government's 1950s highway-building binge as a case study in "interstate socialism"--"
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
c4ff7de
|
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 single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life," General Butler later recalled. "I came to fully appreciate the truth ... we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, an..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
28207cf
|
A poor grasp of dead reckoning may have led Christopher Columbus to North America instead of India, a navigational error of about eight thousand miles.
|
|
dead-reckoning
editor
gaffs
navigation
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
2ecfe1f
|
And the secrets of the Titan II had recently been compromised. Christopher M. Cooke, a young deputy commander at a Titan II complex in Kansas, had been arrested after making three unauthorized visits and multiple phone calls to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Inexplicably, Cooke had been allowed to serve as a Titan II officer on alerts for five months after his first contact with the Soviet embassy was detected. An Air Force memo lat..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
a32f528
|
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 doors, and put three feet of dirt on top. "It's the dirt that does it," Jones explained. "Everyone's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around."
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
1aa5ea8
|
A few weeks later alarms went off in an air defense bunker south of Moscow. A Soviet early-warning satellite had detected five Minuteman missiles approaching from the United States. The commanding officer on duty, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, tried to make sense of the warning. An American first strike would surely involve more than five missiles--but perhaps this was merely the first wave. The Soviet general staff was alerted, and ..
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
88aac06
|
Stan Spray, a Sandia engineer who burned, crushed, and routinely tortured nuclear weapon components to discover their flaws
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
4eb6a7b
|
Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. The
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |
|
afc2562
|
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.
|
|
|
Eric Schlosser |