Command and Control is a non-fiction scary book. Eric Schlosser writes about America’s nuclear weapons. Their history, manufacture, testing, safety and how we planned on using them. He illustrates the big picture by focussing on a nuclear missile accident involving a Titan II missile explosion at a silo near Damascus, Arkansas back in the 1980’s. A technician accidentally dropped a socket in the silo that pierced the skin of the rocket and started a slow leak of the oxidizer that over the course of some hours eventually led to the missile exploding. The Air Force was totally unequipped for such an emergency and took very few steps to protect their own people or the general public. They wouldn’t even tell the doctors treating the enlisted men what the oxidizer was to help in the treatment. Eventually the lowest level person involved was blamed for the whole thing and it was swept under the rug. 

(Rocket Garden at San Diego Air and Space Museum. Creative Commons license on Flickr)

Turns out that there were hundreds of accidents involving nuclear weapons some of which could have led to an accidental nuclear detonation. In fact some warheads were lost at sea in some of these accidents. The Air Force refused to retrofit existing warheads with the latest safety measures because they would rather spend their money on acquiring new weapons and they were afraid that the safety feature could be hacked by the enemy to make the weapons inoperable in case of war.

(Training on a B57 Nuclear Weapon. San Diego Air and Space Museum.  Creative Commons license on Flickr)

He also talks about the nuclear strike plans of the United States up until recently. There was to be no throttled response to a nuclear attack. Once a nuclear attack order was given the US was going all in with all of its thousands of warheads including hundreds for the city of Moscow alone. The command and control system of the USA has always been a problem and planners were afraid that a pre-emptive Soviet attack would “decapitate” the USA and not allow for a measured response. He goes into how for a long time we and Russia were on high alert and how easy it would be for a war to accidentally begin.

(B52 Bombers, photo by Air Force Global Strike Command. Creative Commons license on Flickr)

Schlosser point in all this is not that our leaders were evil or that our military was not dedicated and patriotic in performing their duties. It is that the weapons systems are so complex that we can never guaranty their safety but we need to do what we can. So far we have been very lucky that we haven’t had an accidental nuclear detonation but we cannot count on being lucky. Fortunately both sides have now backed off our triggers a little bit but there are new players now” China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea and some of these guys are very irrational.

I loved this scary book. Get it from your library and give it a read. 

(A collection of gas station signs in Tulsa, Oklahoma)

The book is about the Oil Industry, its start and development and how the industry affected the world around it. I was really interested in it because even though I am not in the oil industry, I am in the energy industry and have been for 40 years this May. I started out working summers, chopping weeds and fixing flowline leaks for Mobil Oil Corporation as a roustabout in the Wasson Field in the Permian Basin of west Texas. The energy industry has employed me for forty years.

(Stripper Oil Well in Osage County, Oklahoma)

The first thing I learned is that oil saved the whales. What! Yep. I didn’t know that oil was first used to make kerosene for lighting our homes and businesses. Oil replaced whale oil. The whales were being hunted to extinction in order to get their oil for lighting. So next time you start cussing the oil industry, just remember to thank them for the whales that are left.

(I am not sure what this is but it sure is a manly piece of equipment pertaining to drilling oil wells)

The book focuses mainly on the business and political side of the business rather than the technical and geological side. So he writes about the John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Companies and goes into some depth on the sharp business practices. I’ve seen some sharp business practices in my time by Rockefeller took them to a new level. The book goes into other companies also, many of whom I have worked for in my career. There really and truly was a global contest going on between companies trying to keep and grow their oil business.

(Fellow citizens, pipeline construction union members advocating for Keystone XL at Corps of Engineer hearing in Tulsa)

This of course led to the huge integrated companies that sourced their oil in the Middle East and Venezuela and used that oil in their refineries and then fought each other for market share at the corner gasoline station. When I started work for Mobil it was in the last days of when they and other majors controlled oil production in the Middle East.

(Fellow citizen protesting Keystone XL at a Corps of Engineers hearing in Tulsa)

The book spends a lot of time on the buildup to the first oil crisis where the Middle East countries who had the oil realized that they were basically giving this valuable commodity away plus the realized that they could withhold oil to punish countries they didn’t have the “right” policies toward Israel. And then of course the whole Iranian debacle where the Shah was deposed and the hostages and the humiliation of the United States as we danced the dance we were told to dance.

(Getting ready for massive hydraulic fracturing of a well in the Colony Wash Field of Oklahoma)

And then later, the recession of the 80’s that caused oil consumption to plummet and the OPEC countries outdid each other in discounting their oil prices to maintain market share. And then when Saudi Arabia got tired of being the swing producer and then jacked up their output and flooded the world with cheap crude oil. That led to the oil energy recession of the 80’s where tens of thousands of my fellow energy employees were driven out of the industry. But what the heck, gas was below a buck.

(Cryogenic Natural Gas Processing Plant in the Mississippi Lime field of Oklahoma)

The book is good and it is thorough but it is controversial. Some people don’t like it because they say that Yergin is an apologist for the oil industry. I am not sure what that means because he writes about the intrigues and schemes both legal and otherwise by the captains of this industry and doesn’t glorify them or admire them for those things at all. They really are hair raising and if one wonders why we have all our anti-trust and insider trading laws this book would be a good place to start.

(Increased density drilling in the Cana Woodford Shale field of Oklahoma,)

I am friends with a lot of people who are not in the industry and it is no big secret that the industry is held in low regard. It gets blamed for a lot the ills. And some of it is justified. I’ll tell you that that not one drop of oil would get produced if somebody didn’t buy it. World oil demand is over 100 million barrels of oil a day. I happen to know that a 100 tank car railroad train of oil holds 66,000 barrels of oil. The world is burning enough oil every day to fill out 1515 of these trains.

(http://www.advisorperspectives.com/commentaries/global_111211.php)

And that is why the industry is drilling wells here, there and everywhere. They are doing it so that you and I can buy gasoline relatively cheaply. I am not one that thinks that drillers should be allowed to drill anywhere they want. I think that our country through our legislators and government should set the rules and hold the drillers accountable for violating them.

Oooooops, sorry. I got on an editorial. 

The book is good. But it is a grind to read. I loved it. I give it five stars.

The Silver Linings Playbook is a novel a man’s attempts to reenter society after being in a “neural care facility” for several years. The man is “Pat” he is in his mid 30’s and we meet with him just as his mother signs him out of the facility (what Pat calls the “Bad Place”) and brings him and a load of prescriptions and an appointment for a psychiatrist.

Pat is really concerned about ending the “apart time” with his wife Nikki and thinks that if he really changes himself to become a more positve person, and to be kind instead of right, and if he can lose enough weight by doing multi-hour workouts and running ten miles a day then the apart time will end and he will be reunited with Nikki.

When Pat gets home we see part of the reason he is so messed up. His father is totally disconnected from his family and is a big fan of the Philidelphia Eagles and lets their winning and losing determine his mood for the coming week.

The best parts of the book concern the dedication and daffiness of the football fans. The elaborate hours long tailgate parties complete with generators, satellite televisions, and lazyboys. Pat’s doctor it turns out is part of the “Asian Invasion” fans, all from India who come in their own bus and wear identical jerseys. 

Anyway, to cut to the chase, this is a book about a messed up guy who slowly finds his way back into life and learns to face his demons and face reality. I loved it and I’ll give it four stars. 

The book was made into a movie. I can’t say one is better than the other. They are two separate things in my mind. Check out my movie review.

A Delicate Truth is truly a thriller. It is about a joint American-British military-private industry anti-terror operation in Gibralter and the aftermath years later. I’m not going to spoil a thing about it except to say that this book is LeCarre at his best. The villains are truly banal, the heroes are trying to do the right thing but don’t exactly know what to do.

This book has a trailer. It gives a pretty good idea about the book.

This book is seriously good. I give it five stars out of five. Get it at the library. I’m a slow reader but I tore through this one in a matter of hours. Get it, read it, try and put it down.