[Amazon Link](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Command-Control-Eric-Schlosser/dp/0141037911) This one has been sat in my kindle backlog for a while, and I finally got around to reading it. I discovered it on a Hacker News post a few years ago when someone referenced a specific passage and it was interesting enough to pull me in. The book essentially charts the history of the management of nuclear weapons from World War 2 until the late 80's. It might sound incredibly dry, but given the stakes when things go wrong, it's actually really quite interesting. Whilst the subject matter is fascinating, I would have preferred something that was more chronologically ordered. There was definitely a progression of time in the book but it did jump around quite a lot. The main focus of the book is the [Damascus Titan missile explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion) in 1980. The author keeps coming back to this incident throughout the book after jumping around into increasingly later periods of time. I grew frustrated that I had to wait until the end of the book to find out what happened. This is one of the most heavily researched books I've ever seen, I was beginning to get bored when I looked at the progress counter and I was only around 60% of the way through, but then the book abruptly ends and it turns out the last 40% is basically references, so came as quite a relief. It does show in the contents of the book itself, but it sometimes goes too far, back to the childhoods of so many people you lose track of who they are and why they're relevant to the story. The contents left me feeling vaguely uneasy. Everything you read about nuclear weapons safety suggests the risk of an accident is extremely low, but the US government were saying the same thing back in the 50's even with glaring safety issues. There were clearly institutional safety issues, ranging from the people at the top not wanting to pay to upgrade weapons safety measures, to the people on the ground accidentally pulling handles mid-flight and releasing bombs over the US or (I kid you not) dropping weapons from height on a runway because the crane failed, due to servicemen using the crane to pick up planes on the runway for fun. All in all an interesting book, but the structure and sometimes excruciating detail made it a tough read.