Command and Control

In August 1960, General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, resolved the dispute over how a nuclear war would be planned and controlled. A Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff would be formed. Most of the officers would be drawn from the Air Force, although the other services would be represented. The targeting staff would be based at SAC headquarters in Omaha and led by SAC’s commander. The Navy could keep its Polaris submarines, but the aiming points of their missiles would be chosen in Omaha. Twining ordered that a Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) be completed by the end of the year. The SIOP would serve as America’s nuclear war plan. The SIOP would spell out precisely when, how, and by whom every enemy target would be struck. And the SIOP would be inflexible. Twining had instructed that “atomic operations must be pre-planned for automatic execution to the maximum extent possible.”

The Navy was furious about the new arrangement. Admiral Burke thought it represented a power grab by the Air Force and later accused the Strategic Air Command of using “exactly the same techniques… the methods of control” favored by the Communists. And he warned that once the SIOP was adopted, it would be hard to change. “The systems will be laid,” Burke told William B. Franke, the secretary of the Navy:

The grooves will be dug. And the power will be there because the money will be there. The electronic industry and all of those things. We will wreck this country. If we are not careful.

President Eisenhower was unfazed by Burke’s critique of the SIOP, its underlying strategy, and its command-and-control machinery. “This whole thing has to be on a completely integrated basis,” Eisenhower said. “The initial strike must be simultaneous.”

The strategic planning staff gathered in Omaha to write the first SIOP, under tremendous pressure to complete it within four months. Their process would be as rational, impersonal, and automated as possible. The first step was to create a National Strategic Target List. They began by poring through the Air Force’s Bombing Encyclopedia, a compendium of more than eighty thousand potential targets located throughout the world. The book gave a brief description of each target, its longitude and latitude and elevation, its category — such as military or industrial, airfield or oil refinery — and its “B.E. number,” a unique, eight-digit identifier. From that lengthy inventory, twelve thousand candidates in the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc, and China were selected. A “target weighing system” was adopted to measure their relative importance. Every target was assigned a certain number of points; those with the most points were deemed the most essential to destroy; and the National Strategic Target List, as a whole, was given a total value of five million points. All of this data, the B.E. numbers, the target locations, and the numerical points were fed into SAC’s latest IBM computer. What emerged was a series of “desired ground zeros,” containing multiple targets, at which America’s nuclear weapons would be aimed.

Once the target list was complete and the ground zeros identified, the planners calculated the most efficient way to destroy them. A wide assortment of variables had to be taken into account, including: the accuracy and reliability of different weapon systems, the effectiveness of Soviet air defenses, the impact of darkness or poor weather, and the rate at which low-flying aircraft were likely to crash due to unknown causes, known as the “clobber factor.” The Joint Chiefs specified that the odds of a target being destroyed had to be at least 75 percent, and for some targets, the rate of damage assurance was put even higher. Achieving that level of assurance required cross-targeting — aiming more than one nuclear weapon at a single ground zero. After the numbers were crunched, the SIOP often demanded that a target be hit by multiple weapons, arriving from different directions, at different times. One high-value target in the Soviet Union would be hit by a Jupiter missile, a Titan missile, an Atlas missile, and hydrogen bombs dropped by three B-52s, simply to guarantee its destruction.

The SIOP would unfold in phases. The “alert force” would be launched within the first hour, the “full force” in waves over the course of twenty-eight hours. And then the SIOP ended. The Strategic Air Command was responsible for striking most of the ground zeros. “Tactics programmed for the SIOP are in two principal categories,” the head of the Joint Chiefs later explained, “the penetration phase and the delivery phase.” SAC would attack the Soviet Union “front-to-rear,” hitting air defenses along the border first, then penetrating more deeply into the nation’s interior and destroying targets along the way, a tactic called “bomb as you go.”