Eric Schlosser: 'The people who are most anti-nuclear are the ones who know most about it'

In the autumn of 1999 Eric Schlosser was invited to Vandenberg Air Force base in California to witness the launch of a Titan II missile, the largest intercontinental ballistic missile America has ever built. At the time, he was a moderately well-known magazine writer, and Fast Food Nation, the book that would act as his personal rocket launcher propelling him into the literary stratosphere, was still two years away from publication.

"They let me go up into the tower and I found myself standing next to the missile. It was right there," he says, stretching out his hand as though to touch the missile's cool metal shell. "It was a deeply impressive thing."

Schlosser was a child of the 70s and grew up with dire warnings of nuclear Armageddon ringing in his ears, largely dismissing them in his mind as fear-mongering and make-believe. "But my God! Watching that missile take off, seeing it soar over the coast of Mexico – it was visceral. These are real! They work! That ICBM was more powerful than any cold war story I'd heard."

That shattering experience set Schlosser on a journey that has resulted, 14 years later, in Command and Control, his take on the terrifying and surreal world of nuclear weapons. The past six of those years have been spent in what he describes as "all-out immersion" in the subject. The writer is notoriously meticulous about his research, wearing out more shoe leather per book than most journalists do in a lifetime.

For Fast Food Nation, his expose of what he called the "dark side of the all-American meal", he interviewed scores of labourers, meatpackers and ranchers, and visited countless abattoirs and factory farms. In a similar vein, he spent time with more than 100 bomber pilots, nuclear scientists and weapons designers for Command and Control, as well as reviewing thousands of pages of newly released official documents. "I really went down the rabbit hole into the nuclear madness," he says when we meet in a coffee bar in Soho, New York. He speaks languidly, elongating his vowels like a West Coast hippie, even though he was born in Manhattan and spent part of his youth here.

Shoe-leather aside, there's no instantly apparent theme that connects Schlosser's disparate subjects. From fast food he turned to the war on drugs in Reefer Madness (2003). His next book after Command and Control will be on America's prison system. Food-dope-nukes-slammers: where's the logic?

"Powerful systems of control that aren't being discussed and that work very hard to disguise how they operate," he answers. "It's not like I have a megalomaniacal 'I'm going to save the world' mentality, but what my work is designed to do is to provoke discussion. I want to produce not a diatribe or a rant but writing that is factually based and footnoted." (Command and Control certainly is footnoted – the notes and bibliography run to more than 100 pages.)

When he started on his nuclear researches, Schlosser conceived the book as something contained and compact. It would be the tale of one of the most serious accidents in the nuclear age, when, in September 1980, a Titan II missile, similar to the one he had witnessed taking off from Vandenberg, exploded in its silo in Arkansas following routine repair work that turned bad. The missile was carrying a thermonuclear warheadwith a yield 600 times that of "Little Boy", the bomb dropped over Hiroshima. The warhead was blasted hundreds of meters into a ditch, but failed to detonate.

As he started digging his way down into the rabbit hole, he began stumbling on other examples of mistakes and near-misses. One led to another until he found himself sitting on a mushroom cloud of disturbing nuclear accidents. When he requested under the Freedom of Information Act the release of an official record of all the incidents that had befallen the American nuclear arsenal in the 10 years to 1967, he was astounded to find it extending to 245 pages.

The stories he came across suggest that nothing but a miracle has prevented an accidental Hiroshima or Nagasaki taking place on US soil. In 1958 a Mark 6 atom bomb was accidentally dropped into the backyard of the Gregg family in Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Three years later, two hydrogen bombs, with a combined power of more than 500 Hiroshimas, were accidentally dropped over North Carolina after a B-52 broke up in mid air. Neither bomb detonated when they landed in a meadow, but a later secret investigation concluded that in the case of one of the devices only a single low-voltage switch stood between the US and catastrophe. In 1966 a hydrogen bomb was dropped inadvertently over the coast of Spain, also from a stricken B-52; it took six weeks of intensive searching before it was found and retrieved from the ocean bed.

As the mass of detail piles up, an important lesson emerges from the book. The way Schlosser explains it to me is that "our ability to create dangerous things exceeds our ability to control them. We are talking about hubris – our lack of understanding of our own flaws and lack of humility in the way we approach technology."

At this point in our conversation, that elusive link between Command and Control and Fast Food Nation – nukes and burgers– begins to reveal itself. The hydrogen bomb and the Chicken McNugget: two seemingly disparate creations that are both the product of brilliant engineering and human ingenuity, and which harnessed the power of nature. The hydrogen bomb unleashed the power of the atom to allow mankind to kill millions of people astonishingly quickly; the Chicken McNugget unleashed the power of animal protein to feed millions of people astonishingly quickly.

Yet in the process, both established systems of such centralised force and complexity that nobody – not even successive US presidents – was able to hold them back or even subject them to rational judgement. "In Britain," Schlosser reminds me, "for a while it was thought a good idea to feed cattle to other cattle – that was seen as efficient use of feed, until BSE came along."

In Command and Control he similarly reminds us that the United States, a country that prides itself in being the most rounded democracy in the world, devised an IBM computer programme called QUICK COUNT that allowed war planners to identify "desired ground zeros" in Soviet cities so as to maximise the number of civilians killed in a nuclear strike. In 1961, the Pentagon instigated a war plan that would be unstoppable once the nuclear button was pushed, killing 220 million people in the Soviet Union and China within the first three days.

"The nuclear command and control system was so huge and complex it was almost impossible for one man to fully comprehend. Henry Kissinger's career was founded on his knowledge of nuclear weapons, yet, when he got into the White House and saw the war plan for the first time, he was astounded. That happens again and again: we're brilliant at devising solutions to very immediate problems, but awful at seeing the consequences of those actions."

The strength of Schlosser's writing derives from his ability to carry a wealth of startling detail (did you know that security at Titan II missile bases was so lapse you could break into one with just a credit card?) on a confident narrative path. He admits that the demands he places on himself as a writer can drive him nuts at times. He sits for long hours in his study at home on the central Californian coast, grappling with enormous quantities of information. "I don't have any researchers, I don't have an assistant, not even a secretary. I just amass an insane amount of material and wade through it. In some ways my method is as crazy as the subjects I write about."

Do you factory farm yourself, I ask, forcefully chaining yourself to the desk? "No," he replies. "But a wonderful writer, a very-well known writer who I personally deeply respect, does tie himself to his chair. And not in a bondage creepy way, but literally to tie himself to his work."(If you're wondering who, forget it. Schlosser won't say.)

The other aspect of his approach to writing that stands out, apart from its masochistic attention to detail, is how unreconstructed it is. He is a beneficiary of the digital age, of course, able now, for instance, to search the Congressional Record in seconds when for Fast Food Nation he spent hours ploughing through paper volumes in the Library of Congress.

But he's also totally averse to social media, saying at one point, rather quaintly, "I do not Twitter". "I'm not seeking followers, I don't have a website. I'm not writing diatribes that have a 10-point political programme. I suppose it's an old-fashioned investigative goal of trying to expose."

To some extent, the subject of nuclear oblivion is itself retro. Hollywood no longer makes films like Dr Strangelove, American and British homeowners no longer build concrete bunkers in their gardens to withstand nuclear fallout, and since the end of the cold war, the issue has receded into its own silo. Iran and North Korea raise anxieties, of course, but the threat they pose seems distant rather than imminent and personal.

That, though, is one of the things that drove him on to write Command and Control, Schlosser says. He sees the decline of interest in the nuclear issue as a matter of high urgency.

"This is the scary thing for me," he says. "The people for whom this is still a threat, the people who are most anti-nuclear, the people who are most afraid about this, are the ones who know most about it."

And yet, the pool of knowledge posessed by that elite group of weapons designers and scientists is fast drying up. "It's very disturbing that the number of people who have seen a nuclear weapon detonate is dwindling. Half the American population was not yet born or were young children when the Soviet Union disappeared. The most anti-nuclear people in the US today are 75, 80 years old."

Without their expertise to keep us alert, Schlosser fears, the world will be allowed to slide into a form of collective madness founded on denial, a death wish that sees nuclear weapons as no longer a problem. Though both the US and Soviet Union have reduced their stockpiles dramatically, the US today still has 4,650 nuclear weapons, Russia about 3,500, China and France about 400 each and the UK 150. Should just one of those warheads go off, through an accident, or through systems infiltration by a hacker, the consequences would be unthinkable.

Despite that gloomy thought, Schlosser insists he is Pollyannaish about this, as about the subjects of all his books. Fast food still prevails in America, certainly, but there is a food movement now and Michelle Obama grows organic lettuces in the White House garden. The drug war persists, but Colorado and Washington state last November legalised marijuana.

"Social movements take a long time to have an effect," he says. "Change doesn't just happen. People have to make it happen, and the first thing they need before they can do anything is to be aware.

"I've spent six years in the most crazy nuclear shit imaginable, that at times made me question mankind. But I really do believe things can be done. I wouldn't have written this book if I thought we were doomed."