You Might Want to Know: III. What’s a SIOP? (Answer: A Nuclear War Plan) How Might Ours Have Turned Out to Be Different Than It Did?
Questions Addressed in Past Postings to November 28, 2021 and Some Forthcoming Items—Click Here
SIOP: Part III
As the first SIOP was being formulated in the last years of the Eisenhower administration, a very different plan was being proposed by Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, and his junior officers.
In the 50’s, the Navy had begun to develop an intermediate-range ballistic missile called Polaris that was capable of carrying nuclear warheads and could be launched from a submerged submarine. Imagine that. Seemed impossible, but they did it.
By 1961, the first year of President Kennedy’s administration, the Polaris was operational and on routine patrol in our first Polaris submarines, with sixteen missiles in each boat. Each missile carried a W-47 warhead. One model of the W-47, the Y1, was designed to yield 600 kilotons, 40 Hiroshimas. Another model, the Y2, was designed to yield 1.2 megatons, twice as much. The Y2 was also “dirtier,” meaning it would produce a whole lot more radioactive fallout.
The Polaris wouldn’t be as accurate as the Atlas ICBMs because it would be in a moving platform but because it was in a moving platform, it would be next to invulnerable. It could also, of course, be launched from closer to the Soviet Union. Its warhead yielded less than the warhead on the Atlas missiles (only 40 Hiroshimas in the Y1 model of the W-47 rather than the 100 Hiroshimas of the W49 in the Atlas), but the warhead would get there quicker.
As the Polaris was being born, the Air Force began to argue that our attack should begin with what they called a “counterforce” attack, an attack on the Soviets’ nuclear facilities. For an attack like that you’d need the missiles to be as accurate as possible and, to be sure of destroying hardened targets like missile silos, you’d need large warheads. You could spare the “soft” cities at first and attack them later if, after the destruction of their nuclear facilities, the Soviets still hadn’t surrendered.
The Navy argued that while a counterforce attack that spared cities, at first anyway, might seem to be more sensible and even more moral, such an attack--which would most sensibly be done as a “preventive” first strike--would have to target all nuclear and military facilities. Of which there were maybe a thousand. Many of these facilities were in or near cities. An attack on that scale would not, in fact, the Navy argued, spare the cities. It would instead produce a world-wide catastrophe.
Admiral Burke and the Navy argued that if “deterrence” was the justification for nuclear weapons, what was crucial was not the number or larger yields of the warheads but the invulnerability of the retaliatory forces, this is, whether they were certain to “stay alive” after an attack. They argued that if the weapons were as invulnerable as the Polaris missiles were, even ten nuclear warheads yielding forty Hiroshimas each would provide all the deterrence you’d need, if they were targeted on “the control structure of their government and the Communist Party and the industrial complex which is the foundation of their national power." They would also kill far fewer people than would a counterforce attack. Just ten of these warheads maintained on invulnerable platforms would do the trick, they argued. If deterrence was the goal. If the leaders were rational.
As a rational national leader, would you be deterred from an attack if you were certain it would result in ten thermonuclear bombs detonating on your cities? Would you be more deterred if the number were twenty? Less deterred if it were five? One?
Our Polaris fleet would be able to launch a whole lot more than ten, however. The fourteen Polaris submarines could carry 232 SLBMs. That would be enough, the Navy argued, to destroy all of Russia. You wouldn’t need the 3302 warheads delivered upon 1000 targets that the Air Force said would be needed for an effective counterforce attack.
If we relied on the Polaris, the Navy argued, we’d spend less money. We wouldn’t be making the United States itself a target because of the ICBMs we’d have placed in underground silos in our country. The SLBMs might be stationed almost anywhere in the tens of millions of square miles of ocean. We wouldn’t need either to launch missiles immediately after getting a warning that might have come from a false alarm. Instead we could wait to be sure it was an actual attack and then consider how best to respond. We could have, Admiral Burke pointed out, something other than “simple revenge” as our aim.
The name the Navy ended up with for the idea was “finite deterrence.” It would mean, of course, that the Navy, not the Air Force, would be the centerpiece of the “deterrent force.”
The Air Force thought finite deterrence was a terrible, foolish, dangerous idea. They fought it with everything they had. Admiral Burke said their methods were “worse than the Communists.”
In 1961, as the SIOP was being finalized, Admiral Burke made the argument for finite deterrence to Robert McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defense. McNamara was not persuaded. Not long afterwards, Admiral Burke retired.
The Air Force won this argument. Did we?
Coda
Our Navy’s Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles have been improved. The Trident D5 SLBMs that came into service shortly after the end of the Cold War had an ICBM range, could carry larger payloads, and were as accurate as our ground-based ICBMs. Each missile could carry eight Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicles with warheads yielding 475 kilotons—more than thirty Hiroshimas—each. Or fourteen warheads yielding 100 kilotons—more than six Hiroshimas—each. Today, in 2021, each of the fourteen Trident Submarines we have in service can carry twenty-four Trident D5 missiles. Each of the fourteen Trident submarines is, then, capable of delivering with great accuracy three-hundred thirty-six thermonuclear warheads.
In 1994, not long after the end of the Cold War and not long after the introduction of the Tridents, the argument for refocusing our deterrent force was revived. The new Clinton administration had undertaken something called a Nuclear Posture Review. It was supposed to determine what role nuclear weapons would play now in our security policy, our “nuclear posture.” President Clinton’s new Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, Ashton Carter, was assigned to work on this NPR. Carter, a theoretical physicist, had published a paper in the early 1980’s, while at the MIT Center for International Studies, that purported to show that President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could not protect us from a nuclear attack.
In his work on the NPR, Carter consulted with, among others, the Commander in Chief of the newly formed Strategic Command, Air Force General George Lee Butler. Since 1992, Butler had been driving the major strategic force reductions that had begun after the end of the Cold War.
Butler recommended reducing what had come to be called the “Nuclear Triad”—bombers, ICBMs, and Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles—to the new “stealthy” B-2 bombers that were now flying though not yet in service, and ten, not fourteen, Trident submarines. The ground-based ICBMs would be eliminated.
Carter ended up proposing a “Monad.” The Monad would be the ten Trident submarines. The number of nuclear warheads would be reduced to only, only, the 1550 for the Trident D5s.
As in Kennedy’s administration, the proposal to rely only on submarines was opposed by the Air Force. It was also opposed, interestingly, by Admiral Henry Chiles, the ex-submarine commander who in February 1994 had succeeded General Butler as Commander in Chief of the Strategic Command.
In September 1994, President Clinton accepted an NPR that retained the Triad.
The Triad is still in place. Along with the fourteen Trident submarines, we still have and taxpayers are still paying for a force of nuclear capable bombers and for the maintenance of three missile fields in the northwestern part of our country. These missile fields contain a total of 450 Minuteman III ICBMs on hair-trigger Cold War alert in vulnerable fixed sites. On hair-trigger Cold War alert because they are in vulnerable fixed sites.
In the towns around those missile fields, we also have civic leaders and Chambers of Commerce who may oppose “government spending” but can be relied on to argue, along with the Air Force, that our “Ground Based Missile Deterrent” is crucial to our national security.
What do you think?
A new Nuclear Posture Review is right now (December 2021) being formulated by President Joe Biden’s administration. You might want to get in touch with your Congressional representatives about it.
For documentation of the claims in this piece, see this collection of declassified documents from George Washington University’s National Security Archive and this collection from the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project.