A peak into Discount Armageddon and Command and Control

I live!  Back at home and back to accessible internet that is not moving at a crawl on a mobile device! Hurray!

Now that I have figured out that it is Friday I can post something for Book Beginnings on Friday, hosted by Rose City Reader. I finished this a few days ago and quite enjoyed it ... Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire.

Prologue

Verity danced circles around the living room, her amateurish pirouettes and unsteady leaps accompanied by cheers and exultations from the horde of Aeslin mice perched on the back of the couch. The cheering mice reached a fever pitch on the few occasions where she actually managed to get both feet off the ground and land again without falling. Her brother looked up from his book, snorting once before returning to his studies. At nine, Alexander considered himself above younger sisters and their tendency to act like complete idiots when given the slightest opportunity. 


And for a nonfiction section, I heard an interview with the author on NPR for this one and just picked up the paperback: Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser ...

Not Good

On September 18, 1980, at about six thirty in the evening, Senior Airman David F. Powell and Airman Jeffrey L. Plumb walked into the silo at Launch Complex 374-7, a few miles north of Damascus, Arkansas. They were planning to do a routine maintenance procedure on a Titan II missile. They'd spent countless hours underground at complexes like this one. But no matter how many times they entered the silo, the Titan II always looked impressive. It was the largest intercontinental ballistic missile ever built by the United States: 10 feet in diameter and 103 feet tall, roughly the height of a nine-story building. It had an aluminum skin with a matte finish and U.S. AIR FORCE painted in big letters down the side. The nose cone on top of the Titan II was deep black, and inside it sat a W-53 thermonuclear warhead, the most powerful weapon ever carried by an American missile. The warhead had a yield of 9 megatons — about three times the explosive force of all the bombs dropped during the Second World War, including both atomic bombs.

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For The Friday 56 hosted at Freda's Voice something from page 56 of Discount Armageddon

Recovering the height I lost during my getaway would have been too much trouble, especially when I could feel the bruises forming as I ran. My left ankle was throbbing steadily, making my footing questionable at best. One of the first rules of successful free running talks about how you do it with injured ankles, wrists, knees, or hips. It's a simple rule: don't. It's a good way to do permanent damge, and unless you're being chased by a hungry wendigo, no shortcut is worth that.

one ... Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion

For a moment Powell and Plumb just stood there, stunned, looking down at the fuel pouring out of the missile and the white mist floating upward, reaching level 6, level 5 and level 4. 

Oh, my God, Plumb thought, we've got to get the hell out of here. 

Powell radioed the control center. There's some kind of white, milky substance in the air at level 7, he said. And that's all he said.