Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

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.

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.

At first, Eisenhower told the Joint Chiefs that he was “very fearful of having written papers on this matter.” Later, he agreed to sign a predelegation order, insisting that its existence never be revealed. “It is in the U.S. interest to maintain the atmosphere that all authority [to use nuclear weapons] stays with the U.S. President without delegation,” he stressed. Eisenhower’s order was kept secret from Congress, the American people, and NATO allies. It made sense, as a military tactic. But it also introduced an element of uncertainty to the decision-making process. The SIOP was centralized, inflexible, and mechanistic. The predelegation order was exactly the opposite. It would rely on individual judgments, made in the heat of battle, thousands of miles from the White House. Under certain circumstances, a U.S. commander under attack with conventional weapons would be allowed to respond with nuclear weapons. Eisenhower knew all too well that delegating presidential authority could mean losing control of whether, how, and why a nuclear war would be fought. He understood the contradictions at the heart of America’s command-and-control system — but couldn’t find a way to resolve them during his last few weeks in office.

Colonel John T. Moser and his wife had just finished dinner, and they were getting ready to leave the house for a concert, when the phone rang.

There’s a problem at Launch Complex 374-7, the controller said. It could be a fire.

Moser told his wife to go without him, put on his uniform, got in his car, and headed to the command post. They lived on the base, and the drive didn’t take long. On the way, Moser radioed ahead, telling the controller to assemble the Missile Potential Hazard Team. It was six forty in the evening, about ten minutes after a mysterious white cloud had appeared in the silo.

The command post of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing resembled an executive boardroom, with a long conference table in the middle, communications equipment, and a chalkboard. It could accommodate twenty-five or thirty people. Moser was the wing commander, and when he arrived at the post, it was still largely empty, and the status of the missile, unclear. The sprays were on, dumping water into the silo. Stage 1 fuel pressure was falling, while the oxidizer pressure was rising. Flashing red lights in the control center at 4–7 warned there was a fuel leak, an oxidizer leak, a fire in the silo — three things that couldn’t be happening at once. Adding to the confusion, Captain Mazzaro and Lieutenant Childers, the crew commander and deputy commander at the site, had both called the command post, using separate lines, one mentioning a fuel leak, the other a fire. Now Mazzaro was on the speakerphone, reporting the missile’s tank pressures. His crew was going through checklists, trying to make sense of it all.