Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

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.

BY THE LATE 1950s, 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.