Greg Mitchell

‘NYT’ Fingers McClatchy for ‘Terror’ Leak—and Now McClatchy Hits Back

Greg Mitchell on October 1, 2013 - 1:02 PM ET

(AP/Mark Lennihan)

Yesterday morning the top story at the New York Times site reported on US analysts feeling that the early-August leak to the media on how Al Qaeda communicates had done more to harm our anti-terrorism effort than anything revealed by Edward Snowden. You remember: we briefly closed some of our embassies, for starters.

And the Times quickly recounted how it refused to publish the names that were key in the information, at the request of the government, and only did so after our security folks had given them clearance—after the McClatchy news outlet went with it.

The communication intercepts between Mr. Zawahri and Mr. Wuhayshi revealed what American intelligence officials and lawmakers have described as one of the most serious plots against American and other Western interests since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. It prompted the closing of 19 United States Embassies and consulates for a week, when the authorities ultimately concluded that the plot focused on the embassy in Yemen.

McClatchy Newspapers first reported on the conversations between Mr. Zawahri and Mr. Wuhayshi on Aug. 4. Two days before that, the New York Times agreed to withhold the identities of the Qaeda leaders after senior American intelligence officials said the information could jeopardize their operations. After the government became aware of the McClatchy article, it dropped its objections to the Times’s publishing the same information, and the newspaper did so on Aug. 5.

This was a rather serious claim against rival McClatchy, so I awaited some kind of response. Now McClatchy hits back at the Times in this report.

For example: “McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher said: ‘We believe that if the Yemenis knew that the United States had intercepted conversations between two al Qaida honchos, Americans should as well.’” More:

Ever since that report, the Times article said, terrorists had stopped using “a major communications channel” that U.S. officials had been monitoring and that intelligence officials “have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaida’s leaders and operatives.”

Asher, in a statement, said that in the nearly two months since McClatchy had published its story, no U.S. agency has contacted the newspaper company about the article or has asked any questions about the origins of the story.

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“Multiple sources inside and outside of the Yemeni government confirmed our reporting and not one of them told us not to publish the facts,” Asher said.

Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert and the author of “The Last Refuge,” a book on al Qaida in Yemen, backed Asher’s assessment, saying that he had been told before the McClatchy report that Zawahiri and Wuhayshi were the two men who’d been monitored and that many people in Yemen knew the details of the communication. Johnsen had made a similar statement to McClatchy in early August.

“The idea that the identities of Wuhayshi and Zawahiri are responsible for the difficulties the U.S. is having in tracking al Qaida and AQAP is laughable,” Johnsen said Monday, referring to the Yemen al Qaida affiliate by its initials. “The U.S. publicly closed 19 embassies, the participation of Wuhayshi and Zawahiri was well known in Yemen. I was told about it prior to McClatchy publishing it. And once the leaks start from the U.S. government they can be hard to stop or to control.”

Robert Scheer explores the differences between state-sanctioned leaks and those from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.

Media Coverage of Shutdown Threat: A Journalistic ‘Disgrace’

Greg Mitchell on September 30, 2013 - 9:33 AM ET

(AP/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

Probably the smartest thing I read all weekend on the pending government shutdown, and the debt ceiling crisis, came from James Fallows. And, courtesy of the often laughable (and dangerous) Washington Post editorial section, we get yet another example in this parade of disgrace this morning.

At his Atlantic blog, Fallow slammed media for once again practicing “false equivalence,” but does provide links to a few folks who have gotten it right (see below). Read the whole thing as he traces a historic fiasco we haven’t seen in decades, maybe over a century. Here’s an excerpt:

As a matter of journalism, any story that presents the disagreements as a “standoff,” a “showdown,” a “failure of leadership,” a sign of “partisan gridlock,” or any of the other usual terms for political disagreement, represents a failure of journalism and an inability to see or describe what is going on….This isn’t “gridlock.” It is a ferocious struggle within one party, between its traditionalists and its radical factions, with results that unfortunately can harm all the rest of us—and, should there be a debt default, could harm the rest of the world too…

In case the point is not clear yet: there is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can’t be buffed away or ignored. If someone can think of a precedent after the era of John C. Calhoun, let me know.

Today the Post published this editorial drivel:

Ultimately, the grown-ups in the room will have to do their jobs, which in a democracy with divided government means compromising for the common good. That means Mr. Boehner, his counterpart in the Senate, Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), minority leaders Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the president. Both sides are inordinately concerned with making sure that, if catastrophe comes, the other side takes the political hit. In truth, none of their reputations stands to benefit.

Of course, we get ths kind of “analysis” from Politico all the time, but thankfully here’s Roger Simon, today under the title (with a Beatles reference?), “The Frauds on the Hill Target Obama”:

And since when did the extremists in Congress care about the will of the people? Is it the will of the people that government be closed, salaries stopped, services suspended?

Slyness and game-playing rule the day. Having lost the vote on Obamacare, the extremists and those who fear them will vote to cut off the funding of government unless Obamacare is suspended. And then they will try to force the United States to default on its debt.

Not because they wish to do the will of the people, but because they wish to thwart the will of the people.

And when, in those rare moments, they decide to earn their salaries of $174,000 per year (plus expenses, plus perks, plus pensions) and actually pass a bill, what do they do? The week before last, the House voted to cut $40 billion from the food stamp program over the next 10 years.

It voted to deny people food.

And stop for presses for this:

At 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, POLITICO congressional reporter Ginger Gibson tweeted: “I’m not over exaggerating when I say I can smell the booze wafting from members as they walk off the floor.”

What is the old joke? “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.”

Some of our lawmakers appear to be having both.

Dave Weigel of Slate just posted an excellent debunking of GOP claims that the Dems have been just as bad in the past in holding debt ceiling increases hostage. For updates on the shutdown see my daily blog Pressing Issues.

And here are those valuable links courtesy of Fallows:

For examples of coverage that plainly states what is going on, here is a small sampling: Greg Sargent, Derek Thompson, John Gilmour (on why Ronald Reagan believed in compromise), Jonathan Rauch, Brian Beutler, Jonathan Chait, Andrew Sullivan (also here), Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas, Dan Froomkin. On today’s Diane Rehm show News Roundup, panelists Ruth Marcus, Janet Hook, and Todd Purdum all said with a bluntness unusual for a D.C.-based talk show that we are witnessing the effects not of gridlock but of one party’s internal crisis.

Read John Nichols on the looming government shutdown and DC statehood.

‘The Guardian’ Posts Shocking Video on H-Bomb That Nearly Exploded in North Carolina

Greg Mitchell on September 27, 2013 - 1:42 PM ET

US nuclear weapons test, October 31, 1952. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/National Nuclear Security Administration)

A few days back I covered the new book on nuclear weapons accidents and near-accidents in the US by Eric Schlosser, Command and Control. This was quickly followed by the release of a document, via The Guardian, proving how close we really came—i.e., very—to a detonation in North Carolina in 1961 that could have killed millions on the East Coast.

A fallout map tracing the likely path of the radiation was even published.

Now The Guardian, also via Schlosser, posted today an “official” video from the Sandia labs (see below) that documents the accident, along with this story. The video also mentions other accidents.

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Of course, the near-miss was kept hidden from Americans for years—and how close we came until this day. Sclosser tells The Guardian that the significance of the video was that it “conclusively establishes that the Sandia weapons lab itself was concerned about the risk of accidental detonation. Their own experts said that disaster was prevented by a single switch that they knew to be defective.” And see my book and ebook Atomic Cover-up.

Read Greg Mitchell’s article on the anniversary of the “Atomic Plague” cover-up.

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Will Iran’s Call for ‘No Nukes’ Inspire US Media to Probe Israel’s Nuclear Policy?

Greg Mitchell on September 26, 2013 - 11:52 AM ET

Recently elected president of Iran Hassan Rouhani. (AP/Ebrahim Noroozi)

It’s no secret that Israeli leaders have, so far, acted cooly about the new offers (including at the United Nations this morning) by Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani to renounce the building of nuclear weapons. Andrew Sullivan had a good take on this yesterday, suggesting that some no doubt prefer the current ambiguity, which encourages a possible Israeli and US strike against Iran to allegedly resolve most of their fears.

But another reason, rarely explored until now, is that Israel knows that the anti-nuke claims by Iran also focus attention, finally, on the fact that Israel already has a top-secret nuclear arsenal, with at least eighty weapons, according to the latest expert analysis.

So it’s one thing for Iran to now say it will never build nukes. It’s another when they call (as Rouhani did today) for a nuclear-free region.

Calls for a nuclear-free world, or global abolition, always sound grandiose and unrealistic. But regional? The only regional nuclear nation there is Israel. Yet neither Israel nor the US will even admit publicly what everyone knows—the Israelis have had nukes for decades and already “used” them as deterrent and hammer in Middle East conflicts.

The US media has long failed to mention, or at least highlight, the existence and issues raised by Israel’s nuclear program. You won’t find many pundits in the archives writing about—and certainly not denouncing it. I’ve done a bit of a search and so far can’t find a single poll that has asked the American public the simple question, “Does Israel possess nuclear weapons?” I would guess the that something like 20 percent would say yes. I’m afraid many in Congress and in the media are also ignorant or uncertain about this.

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But we may be starting to see more media attention. Here’s an extensive AP story today. And The New York Times carried an op-ed a few days ago written by two American experts on non-proliferation, titled, “Let’s Be Honest About Israel’s Nukes.” Just one excerpt:

An obstacle of America’s own making has long prevented comprehensive negotiations over weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. While the world endlessly discusses Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the likelihood that it will succeed in developing an atomic arsenal, hardly anyone in the United States ever mentions Israel’s nuclear weapons.

Mr. Obama, like his predecessors, pretends that he doesn’t know anything about them. This taboo impedes discussions within Washington and internationally. It has kept America from pressing Egypt and Syria to ratify the chemical and biological weapons conventions. Doing so would have brought immediate objections about American acceptance of Israel’s nuclear weapons.

And their conclusion:

And if Israel’s policy on the subject is so frozen that it is unable to come clean, Mr. Obama must let the United States government be honest about Israel’s arsenal and act on those facts, for both America’s good and Israel’s.

Greg Mitchell’s book Atomic Cover-up is available in new print and ebook editions.

Phyllis Bennis gives Obama’s speech on Iran a close read.

Denby Hits Harvard for Publishing Book on Hollywood Moguls’ Aiding Nazis

Greg Mitchell on September 24, 2013 - 11:01 AM ET

Hitler and Goebbels tour a German film studio, 1935. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/German National Archives)

The book was sure to be controversial, and I’ve covered its claims for months, going back to pre-publication. Now David Denby of The New Yorker, first in a book review and last night in a blog post at the magazine’s site, forcefully calls out perceived errors and omissions—and slams the hallowed Harvard University Press for publishing the opus.

The book, by Ben Urwand, is titled, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler. The title alone promises a lot (and guarantees controversy). Based on new archival research, it claims that top moguls at Hollywood studios—usually they were Jewish—made all sorts of bargains and film edits to guarantee that they would keep their share of the German film market, and gain other favors.

Some of this has been suggested by others, and some of it is no doubt true. But Denby points to what he considers gross exaggerations or even outright errors, which he demands should be pulled or corrected. (I know this era fairly well from chronicling Hollywood’s first all-out plunge into US politics in my book on Upton Sinclair’s landmark race for governor or California in 1934.)

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Read the Denby critique yourself and make up your own mind. Denby also quotes from recent Urwand interviews. Surely the authors will be responding to The New Yorker soon. The Chronicle for Higher Education covered the early controversy. Watch the two most famous scenes in Chaplin's The Great Dictator. Here’s Denby’s balanced conclusion:

My own wish, for whatever it’s worth, is that Louis B. Mayer, the Brothers Warner, Harry Cohn, Adolph Zukor, and the others had puffed their chests and said the following in the thirties: “To hell with Gyssling and his threats. To hell with the anti-Semitic bastards in the country who want to see us drown. To hell with the Anti-Defamation League, which is telling us we can’t do anti-Nazi pictures or pictures with Jews in them because it would call attention to ourselves. We built a magnificent entertainment business, and we’re going to make the pictures we want to make.” But they didn’t say that. They negotiated, they evaded, they censored their creative people, they hid, they schemed to preserve their business in the future. They behaved cravenly. But they did not collaborate.

I repeat: I cannot see how Harvard University Press could have published this book without some basic fact-checking and a sterner sense of intellectual relevance and organization. Something broke down here in the vetting process, and that likely includes the expert academic reader reports that Harvard University Press surely commissioned, which are meant to protect the author, the press, and the facts.

By the way, in the book we also learn that Hitler loved Laurel and Hardy and hated Tarzan.

UPDATE: A writer who recently had a book published by another academic press sent me this note, asking me to leave off his name:

Having published a book this year with xxxxxxxxxxx, and after talking
about that experience with friends who left the University of Chicago
Press, I can tell you the norm in academic publishing is astonishingly
slipshod. No in-house editorial guidance, checking, or copy editing is
offered; staffs are overworked and underpaid, and responsible for
releasing an overwhelming amount of material, books and journals, every
quarter. One Chicago English PhD candidate told me typos and other
errors are now accepted as an internet-driven norm; that is, they are
everywhere and not considered a very big deal when weighed against a
work's overall arguments, and the wider need to publish a ton of stuff.

I doubt Harvard, despite the brand name, is at all exceptional here.

Michael Sorkin questions a recent book defending Hitler’s master architect.

WikiLeaks Critiques New ‘Fifth Estate’ Film on Assange—and Provides Script

Greg Mitchell on September 22, 2013 - 11:26 AM ET

Julian Assange (Reuters/Valentin Flauraud)

The Fifth Estate is finally about to open, after the major studio drama, directed by BIll Condon, debuted this month at the Toronto film fest—and no surprise, WikiLeaks folks, as far as we know, are not happy with it.

I’ve written about the film since shooting began, and covered Assange’s early critique. At that point he had not seen the script but didn’t like the whole notion of basing it partly on ex-comrade Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s super-critical book. Then Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Assange, offered some kind words about WikiLeaks, and some said WikiLeaks would come off okay.

I haven’t seen it so I can’t weigh in just now. But WikiLeaks, in a new web posting, says they have obtained various scripts including what they say was the near-final one—and claim friends saw it in Toronto and noted a late change or two. So in any case they are, they say, basing their full critique on the finished film, more or less. They even published a script (see link that follows, scroll to top).

Read the details here. Besides claiming inaccuracies about WikiLeaks and DDB and his role and deeds, there’s this:

* Julian Assange was never in a cult, but THE FIFTH ESTATE claims that he was.

* Julian Assange does not dye or bleach his hair white, as claimed in the film.

* While these interpolations may serve to enhance the dramatic narrative of the film, or to build an enigmatic or interesting central character, they have the effect of further falsely mythologizing a living person as sinister and duplicitous.

And this: “THE FIFTH ESTATE falsely implies that WikiLeaks harmed 2,000 US government informants. Not even the US government alleges that WikiLeaks caused harm to a single person.” (See my books The Age of WikiLeaks and Truth and Consequences, on the Bradley Manning case).

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Main point:

The film is fictional. Most of the events depicted never happened, or the people shown were not involved in them. It has real names, real places, and looks like it is covering real events, but it is still a dramatic and cinematic work, and it invents or shapes the facts to fit its narrative goals.

There are very high stakes involved in how WikiLeaks is perceived. This film does not occur in a historical vacuum, but appears in the context of ongoing efforts to bring a criminal prosecution against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for exposing the activities of the Pentagon and the US State Department. The film also occurs in the context of Pvt. Manning's upcoming appeal and request for a presidential pardon.

People should not in any way treat this film as an historical account of WikiLeaks, its activities or its personnel. Hopefully, they will be inspired to approach the topic with an open mind, and to support WikiLeaks.

Trailer:

Greg Mitchell previews The Fifth Estate.

'NYT' Corrects D.C. Shooter/AR-15 Story—But Key Claim Remains

Greg Mitchell on September 20, 2013 - 11:13 AM ET

Police block off the M Street, SE, as they respond to a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, September 16, 2013. (Reuters/Joshua Roberts)

After two days of criticism and rising doubts, The New York Times finally corrected a crucial fact in one of its featured pieces this week, by Michael Schmidt, on the massacre at the Navy Yard in Washington, DC. But the correction only heightened the mystery.

It all began when Schmidt broke the story that Aaron Alexis had fired off a few rounds from the assault rifle at a Virginia shooting range and gun store, but was prevented from buying it because state law prevents such quick sales to out-of-staters. So Aaron bought the shotgun that ended up doing plenty of damage itself. The Times even featured the role of the law right in the headline (“State Law Prevented Sale…”).

It was an important angle. The media had falsely reported that Alexis had used an AR-15 during his rampage, based on police reports, and was being accused by the usual gun advocates of deliberately pushing that lie to help its gun control allies. But here was a new detail that seemed to fully bolster the gun control argument: the killer had tried to buy an assualt rifle, which could have fired many more rounds and faster than a shotgun (he only had twenty-four shells for that weapon) but been turned away thanks to a gun measure.

But the next day a Washington Times reporter, who has used the shooting range in the past, charged that there is no such law in Virginia and her sources claimed Alexis didn’t even try to buy the AR-15—and she demanded the Times correct its story. It did not, for quite a spell.

CBS News offered a story that fell somewhere in between, stating that he did try to buy weapon but was rebuffed—for an unknown reason. NBC said a lawyer for the shooting range/gun store told them he didn’t know if Alexis did try to purchase the AR-15.

Then Talking Points Memo talked to the same lawyer for the store and now he denied that Alexis tried to buy the AR-15. Mediaite talked to a salesman at the store, who refused to give his name, who also claimed that Alexis did not try to purchase the assault rifle.

Nevertheless, hosts and guests on cable news, and others on the web, continued to use the he-couldn’t-buy-an-AR-15 claim.

Late last night, the Times corrected the Schmidt article. However, it did not change—and still has not revised—the key claim that the shooter tried to buy gun and was stopped by the law. Now there’s no explanation of why that occurred, if it did occur. If not prevented because he was out of state, then why?

Here’s the correction:

An article on Wednesday about the gunman in the Navy Yard shooting, using information from senior law enforcement officials, misstated a provision in Virginia state gun law. Out-of-state buyers must provide additional forms of identification to purchase a high-capacity AR-15 rifle; the laws do not prohibit the sales of all AR-15 rifles to all out-of-state residents.

Stay tuned.

The Creepiest Anti-Obamacare Commercial Ever—as Young Woman Visits ‘Doctor’

Greg Mitchell on September 19, 2013 - 10:10 AM ET

(YouTube)

You may not believe your eyes (or, given the atmosphere today, maybe you will), but check out one of the creepiest commercials ever, the first in a promised series by a major anti-Obamacare group. It features a young woman who has just signed up for Obamacare coverage spreading her naked legs in the doctor’s office for an OB-GYN exam—and a leering Uncle Sam doctor pops up between them.

The overall theme is “Opt Out” and it’s aimed at college students (and naturally, funded by groups with ties to the Kochs) and you can see full background here. It aims to spend $750,000 and get young folks to “burn your Obamacare card.”

What a switcheroo. It's normally the Republican officials at the state level who aim to "play doctor" concerning women.

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UPDATE: I was just sent Planned Parenthood's response:

Statement of Eric Ferrero, VP for Communications, Planned Parenthood Federation of America:

“It is hard to tell if this is real or if it’s a ‘Saturday Night Live’ parody about the hypocrisy of extremists who want to be in every exam room in America but don’t want to expand access to quality health care. These are the same extreme Koch-funded political groups who have tried to pass transvaginal ultrasound laws and other laws allowing politicians to interfere with people’s personal medical decisions. These videos are the height of hypocrisy, but more importantly they are irresponsible and dangerous, designed to spread misinformation and discourage people from getting access to high quality, affordable health care.”

Tom Friedman Spies Swiss Cashier With Pink Hair—And Worries About Obama Going Bald

Greg Mitchell on September 18, 2013 - 2:17 PM ET

Tom Friedman (Charles Haynes/Flickr)

Syria has brought out the worst in New York Times columnists. I’ve already chronicled the missteps by Bill Keller and Nick Kristof (Bruni was okay but let’s not even mention Douthat and Dowd), and now today we hit a kind of laughable peak, or trough.

There have been a lot of classic ledes (that is, opening paragraphs) for Thomas Friedman over the years, often featuring cab drivers in foreign hots spots, but today’s may take the cake—or the Swiss chocolate in this case. At least he didn’t ask the cashier for her woman-in-the-street opinion on a big subject, his usual angle. Here we go:

I was at a conference in Bern, Switzerland, last week and struggling with my column. News of Russia’s proposal for Syria to surrender its poison gas was just breaking and changing every hour, forcing me to rewrite my column every hour. To clear my head, I went for a walk along the Aare River, on Schifflaube Street. Along the way, I found a small grocery shop and stopped to buy some nectarines. As I went to pay, I was looking down, fishing for my Swiss francs, and when I looked up at the cashier, I was taken aback: He had pink hair. A huge shock of neon pink hair—very Euro-punk from the ’90s. While he was ringing me up, a young woman walked by, and he blew her a kiss through the window—not a care in the world.

Observing all this joie de vivre, I thought to myself: “Wow, wouldn’t it be nice to be a Swiss? Maybe even to sport some pink hair?” Though I can’t say for sure, I got the feeling that the man with pink hair was not agonizing over the proper use of force against Bashar al-Assad. Not his fault; his is a tiny country. I guess worrying about Syria is the tax you pay for being an American or an American president—and coming from the world’s strongest power that still believes, blessedly in my view, that it has to protect the global commons. Barack Obama once had black hair. But his is gray now, not pink. That’s also the tax you pay for thinking about the Middle East too much: It leads to either gray hair or no hair, but not pink hair.

Then he’s off into ruminations on Syria. Remember: Unlike Keller and Kristof, he was “dovish” on a US attack. Will that change in the space of six months—one Friedman Unit?

Anyway, here’s how he wraps it up:

I agree with Obama on this: no matter how we got here, we’re in a potentially better place. So let’s press it. Let’s really test how far Putin will go with us. I’m skeptical, but it’s worth a try. Otherwise, Obama’s hair will not just be turned gray by the Middle East these next three years, he’ll go bald.

New Book by Eric Schlosser Exposes Ticking Nuclear Time Bombs Here at Home

Greg Mitchell on September 17, 2013 - 9:58 AM ET

(Creative Commons)

Since 1982, it’s possible that I have written more words about nuclear dangers, past and present, than anyone, in several hundred articles, two books and (in recent years) dozens of blog posts. I was also the editor of Nuclear Times magazine for four years. So I’ve observed, and charted, the rise and fall of American concern about nuclear weapons and their use for over three decades—or more, as I’ve been interested in this subject going back to ducking-and-covering back in my 1950s school days.

Unfortunately, after the heyday of the antinuclear movement of the early 1980s, public protest and political agitation for drastic cuts in nuclear arsenals, or even abolition, have faded. This has happened even though Ronald Reagan, of all people, called for abolition nearly thirty years ago, and now President Obama has done the same.

Yes, the United States and Russia have reduced their arsenals—largely by getting rid of outmoded weaponry and delivery systems—but as I noted last week (and this may surprise you), we still have 7700 nuclear warheads and maintaining that posture costs us $60 billion a year.

Also: we still have a “first-use” policy. That is, we retain the “right” to use our weapons first in a conflict, not just in retaliation.

That’s the key reason that so much of my writing has explored the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, and the “cover-up” in the US afterward (see my book Atomic Cover-up). Although our presidents, top officials, policymakers and pundits all proclaim “never again,” they inevitably turn around and defend the two times these weapons have already been used against people (killing more than 200,000, mainly women and children). In other words: they attest to the usefulness of the weapons in certain extreme cases. That means they have drawn a “red line”—in the sand, where it can easily disappear.

Anyway: Some help may be on the way in turning the tide of inaction and knee-jerk, often uninformed, opinion.

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and other books, is out today with his much-awaited Command and Control, filled with scary stories about nuclear accidents and near-accidents in the US, with special focus on a 1980 missile silo crisis. As it happens, two years before that, in 1978, I assigned for Crawdaddy a piece by novelist Tim O’Brien on the threat of just such an accident.

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Hopefully, getting scared about a nuke accident here at home might do what the Cold War “doomsday” scenarios, the mega-popular TV movie The Day After and the threat posed by modern-day terrorists with “suitcase bombs” have not—get Americans talking again about getting rid of these weapons, or at least reducing down to near-zero.

I’ll return this week with more on Schlosser and his book (you can read its first chapter now here), but I see, in an interview with Rolling Stone today, that he agrees with me about steep reductions, now. As he says:

I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, but the first step would be for the major nuclear powers to meet and begin greatly reducing the sizes of their arsenals. The fewer weapons there are, the less likely there is to be a catastrophic accident. I mean, that’s just the law of probability. Realistically, you have an alternative: You can abolish nuclear weapons or you can accept that one day they’re going to be used. It’s just almost unimaginable what that would mean.

Greg Mitchell observes the anniversary of the “Atomic Plague” cover-up.