Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (34 page)

For the events surrounding the Minot-Barksdale
whoopsie
and the general readiness at Barksdale, I have relied in the main on the official reports commissioned by the Air Force and the Pentagon in the debacle’s aftermath. Thank you to the pseudonymous “Nate Hale” for shaking loose the “Limited Nuclear Surety Inspection Report” that followed the September 2007 Air Combat Command inspection at Barksdale. Reporting by Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus in the
Washington Post
offered extra detail of the Minot-to-Barksdale mishap.

Jaya Tiwari and Cleve J. Gray have compiled a most useful index of nuclear near-disasters in their paper “U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents.” For those particularly interested in the North Carolina incident, it’s worth poking around the website Broken Arrow: Goldsboro, NC, The Truth Behind North Carolina’s Brush with Disaster at
www.ibiblio.org/bomb/index.html
.

Readers might also enjoy
Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry
, by Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger; and
Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons
, by my friend Joseph Cirincione.

Although I have not used them as sources per se, readers interested in exploring the basic thesis here from different analytical and historical vantage points might find useful the writings of James Fallows (
National Defense
), Andrew Bacevich (
The New American Militarism
,
The Long War
,
The Limits of Power
), James Carroll (
House of War
), and Eugene Jarecki (
The American Way of War
).

I’m the slowest writer on earth. I make sloth look blurry with speed. First thanks therefore go to Crown and the very patient Rachel Klayman for letting this whole process take as long as it needed to.

Thanks to Mark Zwonitzer for expert research, assistance, and yet further calm, good-humored patience. With Mark: book; without Mark: no book. And thanks to Sierra Pettengill for appropriately ferocious fact checking.

If I ever write a sequel to this book that’s just about the inadvertently hilarious policy and culture of nuclear weapons, it will be thanks to the early and very fun research I did on that topic with my friend Shelley Lewis.

Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord Literistic has been a stalwart pal as well as an extraordinarily effective noodge; I’m thankful also to the SLL office staff for letting me essentially take up room and board in their conference room on Bleecker Street for months at a time.

My boss at MSNBC, Phil Griffin, my executive producer, Bill Wolff, and the whole staff of
The Rachel Maddow Show
have been more than indulgent with the time, brainpower, and stress diversion this book entailed. Special thanks to Lauren Skowronski and Julia Nutter for making impossible logistics work as if by magic.

Thank you to Penny Simon at Crown for deftly ushering the book into the world in a way that I’d have no clue how to arrange on my own.

But mostly I am thankful to my beloved Susan, for letting this project and my obsession with these ideas take up so much space in our lives. Without family support, I never would have been able to do this.

And without the genuine inspiration I get from my generation of veterans, I never would have wanted to do this. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are less than 1 percent of the US population. But they are a huge part of why I’m bullish on America’s capacity to adapt, lead, and succeed in the twenty-first century.

Rachel Maddow has hosted the Emmy Award–winning
Rachel Maddow Show
on MSNBC since 2008. Before that, she was at Air America Radio for the duration of that underappreciated enterprise. She has a doctorate in politics from Oxford and a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford. She lives in rural western Massachusetts and New York City with her partner, artist Susan Mikula, and an enormous dog.