What Eisenhower Accomplished, Part Six
Spy Satellites and the first SIOP
No mercy on Christmas? No mercy.
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” all from a somewhat different angle—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.
So my country’s purpose is to help us move out of the dark chamber of horrors into the light, to find a way by which the minds of men, the hopes of men, the souls of men everywhere, can move forward toward peace and happiness and well-being.
Eisenhower, Atoms for Peace speech, December 1953[T]he United States is piling up armaments which it well knows will never provide for its ultimate safety. We are piling up these armaments because we do not know what else to do.
Statement by Dwight Eisenhower according to a memo of a meeting with the National Security Council in 1956Like my contemporaries, I ... believed that superior technology brought strategic advantage, that greater numbers meant stronger security, and that the ends of containment justified whatever means were necessary to achieve them….
Throughout my professional and military career, I shared [these beliefs,] I professed them and I put them into operational practice. And now it is my burden to declare with all of the conviction I can muster that in my judgment they served us extremely ill.
General George Lee Butler (retired), former Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air and Strategic Commands, Uncommon Cause, vol. ii (2016)The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Albert Einstein 1946When wisdom speaks truth to power, either power kneels, which is extraordinarily rare…or wisdom is executed.
from The Joyous Struggle by Jonathan Rowson, quoting Traktun Khepa by Paul Norden, The Birth of Wisdom over Power, December 17, 2025
By 1960, the Soviets had figured out how to shoot down the U-2 spy planes we’d been flying over them for several years. They still weren’t be able to shoot down the new photoreconnaissance satellites we’d begun to put up at the end of President Eisenhower’s administration.
They themselves didn’t have any satellites up there to spy on us. Not yet anyway.
President Eisenhower had kept the existence of our spy satellites secret from us in the American public, I’m not sure why. He’d classified the spy satellite program, called Corona, at a level that was even above “Top Secret.” Our representatives in Congress and even most military officers in the Pentagon wouldn’t know we had these satellites up there unless they had been given a special “K clearance” which almost nobody had.
Why so secret?
I guess this was because President Eisenhower didn’t want the Soviets to know how much we knew. We members of the public couldn’t be allowed to know either because then the Soviets would know. And if the Soviets knew what we knew, then . . . what?
Maybe they’d try to hide what they had. That might not help. If they could do it well enough.
On the other hand, might it be a good thing if the Soviets knew how much we knew? Make it easier to conduct negotiations that weren’t based on mistaken assumptions? Or on bluffs?
By the end of his administration, President Eisenhower knew from the photographs by our spy satellites that the Soviets had nothing like the hundreds of ICBMs they had bluffed him and our CIA into believing they had.
They had maybe four. To our forty.
In 1960, during the presidential election, Ike who had served two terms and couldn’t run again, had been criticized for having allowed a “missile gap” to develop with the Soviets. His Vice-President, Richard Nixon, who was running for President and knew better, hadn’t revealed what he knew.
There was a “missile gap,” all right, 10 to 1 in our favor.
Is it possible that President Eisenhower wanted us and the members of Congress to continue to believe the Soviets were way ahead of us in numbers of bombs, bombers and ICBMs so Congress would keep voting for larger defense budgets?
One of President Eisenhower’s arguments for spending so much on nuclear weapons was that it would let us cut back what we were spending on our Army and Navy, our conventional forces. Conventional forces—soldiers and sailors and pilots and their equipment and bases—were more expensive than atomic bombs. Once you had the bombs anyway.
The allocations to defense had gone up, though, in every one of the last four years of President Eisenhower’s second term. By about a billion dollars a year. (In 2025, a billion dollars is the equivalent of twelve billion dollars.)
At the time, a billion dollars was about 3% of our total defense budget. Our defense budget was, all by itself, more than half of the total federal budget. So the total defense budget had gone up 12% over Eisenhower’s last four years. But for Eisenhower’s last year, it was still less than 9% of our Gross National Product.
In President Truman’s last year, with the Korean War still going on, the defense budget had been over 13% of our GNP. During World War II, the defense budget had been over 37% of our GNP. We’d had rationing, of all sorts of things. Rubber for tires. Butter.
There had been no rationing of anything during Eisenhower’s administration. In fact, The economy had done well, in fact, the whole time. Eisenhower often said how important a strong economy was to a strong defense. He’d had a strong economy during his two terms, for sure. I don’t think he’d had to do much to keep it that way.
We’d come out of World War II better than anybody, if a strong economy was what you wanted. We’d had a marginal tax rate of 91% or 92% during Eisenhower’s administration, and nobody blinked. Imagine that.
Was our government’s spending on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems at all responsible for the strength of our economy? Even if, as President Eisenhower had said in his Cross of Iron speech, it kept us from building schools and libraries and electrical plants and such?
The expenditures hadn’t kept us from building the Interstate Highway System Eisenhower had been behind. Continuing to build it, that is. It had been a work in progress since 1916 but it got finished, pretty much, in his second term.
Companies in the defense industries and the people who worked in them and had stock in them were doing well. Some of these companies were Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Corporation, North American Aviation, General Electric, United Aircraft Corporation, McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, Douglas Aircraft Company. They might be competing with each other for government contracts but for now there seemed to be enough for everybody.
My parents were doing pretty well, I think. At the end of Eisenhower’s administration, after I graduated from Tucson High School, they could afford to send me to Amherst College. I had gotten an Alfred P. Sloan scholarship that helped. Alfred P. Sloan was the head of General Motors. I don’t know what that has to do with anything.
As Eisenhower neared the end his second term, he did have one big question—how to get organized all we had now when it came to nuclear weapons—the knowledge, the weapons themselves and the delivery systems. It was a lot of stuff to get organized.
To get it organized, he had in 1959 approved the drafting of a SIOP for our Armed Forces. SIOP stood for “Single Integrated Operational Plan.” An “operational plan” is what the military goes to war with. A Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff was set up to draft the SIOP. They would meet in super secret circumstances underground at the Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha.
I’m not sure how it was decided who should be on the JSTPS. Since it was “joint,” there would be representatives from the different armed services, of course. But also, you had to think, people from the CIA. I don’t know who all else. Maybe even some representatives from the arms contractors.
I don’t think who should be on this group was ever discussed in public.
During a talk to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in November 1957, in a discussion about preparing for a nuclear attack, Eisenhower had said:
[P]lans are worthless—but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with a clean slate. The very definition of ‘emergency’ is that it is unexpected—therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.
So you did need a plan, he was saying, even if you knew things wouldn’t go as planned. Not ever, I guess he was saying. What you needed even more than planning though, it seemed, was adaptability? How would that be made part of the SIOP?
And how important would adaptability be in a general nuclear war? A war that might take the form of a spasm that would be over in an afternoon?
The SIOP planning would be greatly helped, in any case, by our photoreconnaissance. It had given us a much better sense of what should be the targets in the Soviet Union and where they were. The planners for the new SIOP would now be in a position to get our attacks directed to the right targets—specifying which nuclear warheads should go on which targets and how many and by what means of delivery and which service should deliver them and when. This would keep us from wasting nuclear bombs on targets that had been destroyed already. Though with the number of nuclear weapons we had now, wasting some really wasn’t a worry. The SIOP would also allow us to get the attacks properly scheduled so that airplanes from the different services wouldn’t run into each other at the targets.
Until now, this kind of planning hadn’t really been needed. Since October 1953, in the first year of Eisenhower’s administration, the “New Look” policy of his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had called simply for “massive retaliation.” If we were attacked, we would simply attack back, everything with everything.
That made planning relatively simple. That didn’t mean that when a war started, things would work out as planned though, did it? As Eisenhower had said.
The JSTPS got the first SIOP into final form in 1960 as President Eisenhower was about to leave office. Ike didn’t sign off on it himself. He left it for our newly elected President Kennedy to sign off on.
Before he was elected, President Kennedy, like the rest of us, wouldn’t have been able to know much about this kind of thing. Nuclear weapons and nuclear war, I mean. In his campaign, he’d criticized the “missile gap,” for example, that didn’t exist. He hadn’t been playing fast and loose with the truth. He just hadn’t known any better.
The rest of us didn’t know any better either. We still thought there was a missile gap, if we thought about it at all.
Our Constitution makes the President, who is supposed to be a civilian, the commander in chief of our armed forces. But even though Eisenhower had been a general before he became president, when he’d been a general, he’d never had to deal with anything like nuclear weapons.
In any case, imagine being a newly elected president who hadn’t known much about nuclear weapons before being elected, being given something like the first SIOP to digest and sign off on because you were now commander in chief of the armed forces.
The JSTPS saw to it that the details of the new SIOP were kept really, really secret. They would not be shared, except in the most general terms, even with the Secretary of Defense and the President, it turned out, unless they insisted.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon were okay with this.
In his first year in office, President Kennedy was briefed on the SIOP. After the briefing, he’d turned to his Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Rusk said, and said, “And they call us human beings.”
He’d signed off on SIOP though. He’d also directed his staff to consider some changes. Like focusing first of all on military targets, the targets that used to be called “strategic.” Attacking the cities later, if necessary.
Next: What Eisenhower Accomplished, Part Seven