Command and Control

Great Britain’s strategic weapons were controlled by the SIOP, as well. The Royal Air Force showed little interest in SAC’s ideas about counterforce. The British philosophy of strategic bombing had changed little since the Second World War, and the RAF’s Bomber Command wanted to use its nuclear weapons solely for city busting. The SIOP respected the British preference, asking Bomber Command to destroy three air bases, six air defense targets, and forty-eight cities.

George Kistiakowsky, the president’s science adviser, visited SAC headquarters in November 1960 to get a sense of how work was proceeding on the SIOP. Kistiakowsky was hardly a peacenik. He’d fled the Soviet Union as a young man, designed the high-explosive lenses for the Trinity device, and later shared the Air Force’s concerns about a missile gap. But he was shocked by the destructiveness of the SIOP. The damage levels caused by the alert force alone would be so great that any additional nuclear strikes seemed like “unnecessary and undesirable overkill.” Kistiakowsky thought that the full force would deliver enough “megatons to kill 4 and 5 times over somebody who is already dead” and that SAC should be allowed to take “just one whack — not ten whacks” at each Soviet target. Nevertheless, he told Eisenhower, “I believe that the presently developed SIOP is the best that could be expected under the circumstances and that it should be put into effect.”

At the beginning of the effort to devise a new war plan, Eisenhower had expressed opposition to any strategy that required “a 100 percent pulverization of the Soviet Union.” He could still remember when the Pentagon said the Soviets had no more than seventy targets worth destroying. “There was obviously a limit,” he told his national security staff, “a human limit — to the devastation which human beings could endure.” On December 2, 1960, Eisenhower approved the SIOP, without requesting any changes.

The SIOP would take effect the following April. It featured 3,729 targets, grouped into more than 1,000 ground zeros, that would be struck by 3,423 nuclear weapons. The targets were located in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Eastern Europe. About 80 percent were military targets, and the rest were civilian. Of the “urban-industrial complexes” scheduled for destruction, 295 were in the Soviet Union and 78 in China. The SIOP’s damage and casualty estimates were conservative. They were based solely on blast effects. They excluded the harm that might be caused by thermal radiation, fires, or fallout, which were difficult to calculate with precision. Within three days of the initial attack, the full force of the SIOP would kill about 54 percent of the Soviet Union’s population and about 16 percent of China’s population — roughly 220 million people. Millions more would subsequently die from burns, radiation poisoning, exposure. The SIOP was designed for a national emergency, when the survival of the United States was at stake, and the decision to launch the SIOP would carry an almost unbearable weight. Once the SIOP was set in motion, it could not be altered, slowed, or stopped.

The SIOP soon became one of the most closely guarded secrets in the United States. But the procedures for authorizing a nuclear strike were kept even more secret. For years the Joint Chiefs had asked not only for custody of America’s nuclear weapons but also for the authority to use them. In December 1956 the military had gained permission to use nuclear weapons in air defense. In February 1959 the military had gained custody of all the thermonuclear weapons stored at Army, Navy, and Air Force facilities. The Atomic Energy Commission retained custody of only those kept at its own storage sites. And in December 1959 the military had finally won the kind of control that it had sought since the end of the Second World War. Eisenhower agreed to let high-ranking commanders decide whether to use nuclear weapons, during an emergency, when the president couldn’t be reached. He had wrestled with the decision, well aware that such advance authorization could allow someone to do “something foolish down the chain of command” and start an all-out nuclear war. But the alternative would be to let American and NATO forces be overrun and destroyed, if communications with Washington were disrupted.