Command and Control

Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation, sets the history of American nuclear weapons against a minute-by-minute account of the 1980 accident at a Titan II missile silo near Damascus, Arkansas, where a dropped wrench socket punctured a fuel tank and the explosion that followed threw out a nine-megaton warhead. Around that story he traces the efforts of scientists, officials and officers to keep weapons from being stolen, sabotaged, used without permission or set off by accident, and tells the stories of bomber pilots, missile crews and maintenance workers. He also revisits the 1961 Goldsboro and 1966 Palomares B-52 crashes. It reached the final round for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in History.

NETOPIA mobilPay founder Antonio Eram recommended it to young people interested in a career like his.