So I just watched this show and I will say it was quite good, well done and interesting. If I were to change one thing I would have eliminated the interviews with the non-DoD personnel who spouted a bunch of hyperbole, especially the Schlosser dude. He must have written his book with sensationalism in mind. Without knowing a thing about him, I'll bet anything he is a journalist, probably of the #fakenews variety. His creditability died at his first appearance with that urban legend story of the Trinity scientists not sure if they would blow up the world. None of them thought that, but yes they did look into the possibility. At the end he gives that "dumb luck" saved the military from a nuclear detonation and all I got to say is BS, by his own count there were thousands of incidents and not one detonation, so BS.
As a SAC crew dog on alert that day (I always seemed to be on alert whenever something happened big in the world between 1980 and 1984), I found the references and uses of checklists throughout the incident quite interesting. One of the strengths and weaknesses of SAC was the checklist, the checklists almost always addressed any situation you faced, however there were some times it did not and so you either were indecisive or if you were decisive, you better get it right, because as they said in the show and we always spouted as a mantra, "To err is human, to forgive is not a SAC policy." I guess the best story I know of rigidity to checklist and SAC was one my father told me from his days of being an engineer on Atlas ICBMs. As a young EE out of A&M in the late 50s he got called to an ICBM site due to a propulsion problem they were having on one of the missiles. Every time they tanked the missile, which they did twice a day to test the system, they were burning up a $10,000 part (and that is in 1950s dollars). My dad and one other engineer were sent to solve the problem. When my dad got to the base he put his suitcase down in his hotel room and did not come back for three days, he also did not sleep, at all, during those three days. After they tanked the missile the first time he was on-site and they burned up the part, he told them they should stop running that checklist until they found the problem, they shot that up to the Wing Commander and he said no, for national security they had to run the checklist. So now in addition to finding the problem, they had to remove and replace the $10,000 part every 12 hours and that was about a three hour job in itself, completely ridiculous. After three days they finally fixed the problem but not before my dad said both he and his fellow engineer started hallucinating from fatigue and lack of sleep. He said it was the craziest thing he ever had to do. How easy would it have been for them to drop a wrench and puncture a tank while so fatigued?
The thing that blows me away about that incident is that with all the people on the radio, why did no one question the order to turn on the exhaust fan, that was really dumb but I suppose at 3 a.m. most of the participants where probably stressed and exhausted by that time. Certainly points out the need to always try to have some of your people rested and on the ball during a crisis.