Press Release: Eric Schlosser at The Progressive Forum September 24, 2013

For release: June 19, 2013

Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser will speak at The Progressive Forum on Tuesday, September 24, 2013, at the Wortham Center, Cullen Theater at 7:30. He will be discussing his new book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, The Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. He will sign books and greet fans at the end of the evening.

Tickets range from $19 to $79. Tickets are available at ProgressiveForumHouston.org or by calling 832-251-0706. There is no physical box office except at the theater on event night.

A decade after Fast Food Nation exposed the harms of our industrial food system, famed investigative journalist Eric Schlosser addresses the existential threat of nuclear weapons. Schlosser returns to The Progressive Forum to launch his latest book, Command and Control. He reports on missile explosions, bomber crashes, rogue officers and more. Unlike other books on the high-level diplomacy of arms control, Schlosser provides an unprecedented look at the everyday management of our weapons systems and the dangers routinely faced by those managing the arsenals— and what needs to be fixed.

Command and Control is a groundbreaking account of accidents, near misses, extraordinary heroism, and technological breakthroughs. It explores the dilemma that has existed since the dawn of the nuclear age: How to you deploy weapons of mass destruction without being destroyed by them? That question has never been resolved— and Schlosser reveals how the combination of human fallibility and technological complexity still poses a grave risk to humankind. Command and Control depicts the urgent effort by American scientists, policy makers, and military officers to ensure that nuclear weapons can’t be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. 

Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, from the ground up. He tells stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. At the heart of the book lies the struggle, amid the rolling hills and small farms of Damascus, Arkansas, to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile, written with the vibrancy of a first-rate thriller. 

Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with people who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes the reader into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view. 

Schlosser originally appeared at The Progressive Forum on September 30, 2010 to discuss his book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Fast Food Nation was on The New York Times bestseller list for over two years and translated into more than twenty languages. The book is a fierce indictment of our industrialized agricultural food system. It helped start a revolution on how American’s think about what they eat and earned Schlosser comparisons to Upton Sinclair.

Schlosser also served as executive producer and cowriter of the film Fast Food Nation and coproducer and cowriter of the celebrated documentary Food, Inc. His other books include the bestselling children’s book Chew on This, cowritten with Charles Wilson, and Reefer Madness. Schlosser began his career as a journalist with The Atlantic Monthly. His work has appeared in several publications, including Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Nation. He won the National Magazine Award as well as the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. He is also a playwright whose plays Americans and We the People were produced in London. Schlosser earned his graduate degree in British Imperial History from Oxford after studying American History at Princeton University. He lives in California with his wife and two children.

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