Quotes from Eric Schlosser

We found very little correlation between turnover and profitability...

Although the original plans were scaled down, the completed bunker had miles of underground roads, accommodations for the prime minister and hundreds of other officials, a BBC studio, a vault where the Bank of England's gold reserves could be stored, and a pub called the Rose & Crown. •

The Redstone often carried a 4-megaton warhead but couldn't fly more than 175 miles. The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.

A brand offers a feeling of reassurance when its products are always and everywhere the same.

Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) planes would quickly get off the ground, climb steeply, and send an emergency war order on a very-low-frequency radio, using an antenna five miles long. SAC began to develop a Post Attack Command and Control System. It would rely on airborne command posts, a command post on a train, a command post at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and a command post, known as The Notch, inside Bare Mountain, near Amherst, Massachusetts. The

A poor grasp of dead reckoning may have led Christopher Columbus to North America instead of India, a navigational error of about eight thousand miles.

About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.

Sergeant Paul Ramoneda, a twenty-eight-year-old baker with the Ninth Food Service Squadron, was one of the first to reach the bomber.

In the early days of the project, Teller was concerned that the intense heat of a nuclear explosion would set fire to the atmosphere and kill every living thing on earth. A

Daniel Ford, a former head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, revealed that, among other things, the destruction of a single, innocuous-looking building in Sunnyvale, California, located "within bazooka range" of Highway 101, could disrupt the operation of Air Force early-warning and communications satellites.

Thomas K. Jones, an undersecretary of defense, played down the number of casualties that a nuclear war might cause, arguing that families would survive if they dug a hole, covered it with a couple of doors, and put three feet of dirt on top. "It's the dirt that does it," Jones explained. "Everyone's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.

The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the United States is now about three times higher than the national average.

Even if the locking and unlocking mechanisms worked flawlessly, use of the weapons would depend on effective code management. If only a few people were allowed to know the code, then the death of those few or an inability to reach them in an emergency could prevent the weapons from being unlocked. But if the code was too widely shared, the locks would offer little protection against unauthorized use. The

McMahon predicted that "total power in the hands of total evil will equal destruction." The

The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.

The management no longer depends upon the talents or skills of its workers---those things are built into the operating systems and machines. Jobs that have been deskilled can be filled cheaply. The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced.

Some of the most painful and debilitating injuries are the hardest to prove.

And should Armageddon come, should a foreign enemy someday shower the United States with nuclear warheads, laying waste to the whole continent, entombed within Cheyenne Mountain, along with the high-tech marvels, the pale blue jumpsuits, comic books, and Bibles, future archeologists may find other clues to the nature of our civilization—Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbeque Wing bones, and the red, white, and blue of a Domino's pizza box.

The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.

During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. And as a final act of defiance, SAC demonstrated the importance of code management to the usefulness of any coded switch. The combination necessary to launch the missiles was the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000. Peurifoy

Although European protest marches had focused mainly on the United States for the previous six years, it was the leadership of Western Europe who most strongly opposed creating a world without nuclear weapons.

Great leaders sometimes need to appear unbalanced, he thought: "What seems 'balanced' and 'safe' in a crisis is often the most risky.

During the same week that Kennedy appealed for an end to the arms race at the United Nations, he met with a handful of military advisers at the White House to discuss launching a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. General Thomas Power encouraged him to do it. According to notes of the meeting, held on September 20, Power warned that the United States now faced the greatest danger, ever, of a Soviet nuclear attack.

To know a country you must see it whole.