Command & Control by Eric Schlosser is a book I have a bad habit of boring people with at parties. This is more a reflection of my lack of charisma than the book itself!
It’s a fantastic history of the era of nuclear weapons, through the lens of just how often we nearly completely fucked it up, and the people that risked everything to pull us back from the brink, despite those in charge often making the dumbest possible decisions.
As an engineer this resonates with me. For example when engineers and scientists advocated for putting code locks on the bombs to prevent any old loony setting off nukes (rather than the loonies in charge), the people in charge set all the codes to 0000! Another great story is when a guy stumbling in a US bomber accidentally drops a nuke on an American farm.
For me, apart from the engineering marvels, I have a strange mix of comfort and fear from the fact that we, as a species, were so close to the brink of catastrophic self-annihilation, but with a mixture of luck and human ingenuity we managed to survive!
The writer, Eric Schlosser, does a fantastic job of wrapping all this fascinating information in a gripping narrative which makes the whole thing a joy to read. I also have the audiobook which I also recommend if you that’s your thang.
Anyway buy it today on Amazon and earn me fractions of a penny.
So why am I suddenly doing book reviews?
So recently I set up an Amazon Associate account, mostly because when people bug me for tech gear recommendations it’d be nice to make something if they buy whatever I recommend.
That being said, this is hardly a high traffic blog with tons of content, so I doubt I’ll be paying off my mortgage any time soon, (I doubt I’ll make a penny!) but I figured it’d be interesting.
I think I need to actually use it within a month of setting it up, hence this post!
Now, after saying I set it up for tech recommendations I started with a book I read ages ago but came up in conversation today!
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