Command and Control

18 September 1980, evening. At a missile silo near Damascus, Arkansas, an airman doing maintenance drops the socket he is holding. The piece of metal falls nine storeys, punctures the missile's fuel tank, and a leak begins. Inside the silo sits the largest thermonuclear warhead America held at the time. For hours the crews do not know what to do, and the night ends in an explosion. The source is Eric Schlosser's book of the same name. Robert Kenner's documentary builds that night hour by hour from the accounts of the men who were there and joins it to archive material. The film's real subject is not one accident: it is how many incidents of this scale happened in America across the Cold War and how most of them were kept secret for years. Ninety-two minutes. The story accuses nobody; what it shows is that the system itself was not built to withstand human error.