American Experience S29E01 - Command and Control

From Robert Kenner, the director of the groundbreaking film Food, Inc., comes "Command and Control," the long-hidden story of a deadly accident at a Titan II missile complex in Damascus, Arkansas, in 1980. Based on the critically-acclaimed book by Eric Schlosser, this chilling documentary exposes the terrifying truth about the management of America's nuclear arsenal and shows what can happen when the weapons built to protect us threaten to destroy us. Filmed in a decommissioned Titan II missile silo in Arizona, the documentary features the minute-by-minute accounts of Air Force personnel, weapon designers, and first responders who were on the scene that night. "Command and Control" reveals the unlikely chain of events that caused the accident and the feverish efforts to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States – a warhead 600 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Woven through the Damascus story is a riveting history of America's nuclear weapons program, from World War II through the Cold War, much of it based on recently declassified documents. A cautionary tale of freak accidents, near misses, human fallibility, and extraordinary heroism, "Command and Control" forces viewers to confront the great dilemma that the U.S. has faced since the dawn of the nuclear age: how do you manage weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them?