Command and Control (29 page)

The Navy had also begun to question the thinking behind massive retaliation. It was about to introduce a new weapon system, the Polaris submarine, that might revolutionize how nuclear wars would be fought.
The sixteen missiles carried by each Polaris were too inaccurate to be aimed at military targets, such as airfields. But their 1-megaton warheads were ideal for destroying “soft” targets, like cities. The Polaris would serve best as
a retaliatory, second-strike weapon—leading the Navy to challenge the whole notion of striking the Soviet Union first.

Admiral Arleigh Burke, the chief of naval operations, became an outspoken proponent of “
finite deterrence.” Instead of maintaining thousands of strategic weapons on Air Force bombers and land-based missiles to destroy every Soviet military target—a seemingly impossible task—Burke suggested that the United States needed hundreds, not thousands, of nuclear warheads. They could be carried by the Navy's Polaris submarines, hidden beneath the seas, invulnerable to a surprise attack. And they would be aimed at the Soviet Union's major cities, in order to deter an attack. Placing the nation's nuclear arsenal on submarines would eliminate the need for split-second decision making during a crisis. It would give the president time to think, permit the United States to apply force incrementally, and reduce the threat of all-out nuclear war. Burke argued that a strategy of massive retaliation no longer made sense: “
Nobody wins a suicide pact.” A decade earlier the Navy had criticized the Air Force for targeting Soviet cities, calling the policy “ruthless and barbaric.” Now the Navy claimed that was the only sane and ethical way to ensure world peace.

As the debate over nuclear strategy grew more heated within the Eisenhower administration and in the press, General Curtis LeMay showed absolutely no interest in limited war, graduated deterrence, finite deterrence—or anything short of total victory. The United States should never enter a war, LeMay felt, unless it intended to win. And a counterforce policy that targeted the Soviet Union's nuclear assets was far more likely to prevent a war than a strategy that threatened its cities. Unlike “
the public mind” that feared a nuclear holocaust, he argued, “the professional military mind” in both nations worried more about preserving the ability to fight, about losing airfields, missile bases, command centers. SAC claimed that a counterforce strategy was also “
the most humane method of waging war . . . since there was no necessity to bomb cities.” But that argument was somewhat disingenuous. In order to hit military targets, LeMay acknowledged,
“
weapons must be delivered with either very high accuracy or very high yield, or both.” Because the accuracy of a bomb was less predictable than its yield, he favored the use of powerful weapons. They could miss a target and still destroy it, or destroy multiple targets at once. They would also, unavoidably, kill millions of civilians. LeMay wanted SAC to deploy
a hydrogen bomb with a yield of 60 megatons, a bomb more than four thousand times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

•   •   •

B
Y
THE
LATE
1950
S
, the absence of a clear targeting policy and the size of America's stockpile had created serious command-and-control problems. The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force all planned to attack the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons but had done little to coordinate their efforts.
Until 1957 the Strategic Air Command refused to share its target list with the other armed services. When the services finally met to compare war plans,
hundreds of “time over target” conflicts were discovered—cases in which, for example, the Air Force and the Navy unwittingly planned to bomb the same target at the same time. These conflicts promised to cause unnecessary “overkill” and threaten the lives of American aircrews. The Joint Chiefs of Staff soon recognized that the chaos of war would be bad enough, without competing nuclear war plans to make it worse. They decided that the United States had to develop “
atomic coordination machinery”—an administrative system to control what targets would be attacked, who would attack them, which weapons would be used, and how those attacks would be timed. The decision prompted the Army, Navy, and Air Force to battle even more fiercely over who would control that system.

The Air Force wanted a single atomic war plan, run by a centralized command. SAC would head that command—and take over the Navy's Polaris submarines. The Navy was outraged by that idea and joined the other services in offering a counterproposal: the Navy, the Air Force, and NATO should retain separate war plans but coordinate them more efficiently. The issues at stake were fundamental, and basic questions needed to be addressed—should the command structure be centralized or decentralized, should the attack be all out or incremental, should the strategy be
counterforce or city busting? The president of the United States, once again, had to decide the best way not only to fight the Soviet Union but also to settle a dispute over nuclear weapons at the Pentagon.

During a meeting at the White House in 1956, President Eisenhower had listened patiently to General Taylor's arguments on behalf of a flexible response. Eisenhower wasn't persuaded that a war could be won without hydrogen bombs. “
It was fatuous to think that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. would be locked into a life and death struggle,” he told Taylor, “without using such weapons.” Eisenhower thought both sides would use them at once. Four years later, his views remained largely unchanged. If NATO forces were attacked, he said during another White House discussion of limited war, “
an all-out strike on the Soviet Union” would be the only “practical” choice. Pausing to negotiate a diplomatic settlement seemed unrealistic; that sort of thing happened only in novels like
Red Alert.
Confronted with the choice between destroying Soviet military targets or cities, Eisenhower decided that the United States should destroy both. The new targeting philosophy combined elements of Air Force and Navy doctrine. It was called
the “optimum mix.”

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.”

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.