You Might Want to Know: What’s a SIOP? (Answer: A nuclear war plan.) How did ours change during the Cold War? I
Part One
You Might Want to Know: What’s a SIOP? (Answer: A nuclear war plan.) How did ours change during the Cold War?
Part One
SIOP stands for Single Integrated Operational Plan. An “operational plan” is a war-plan for actual military operations. General Eisenhower said that in war nothing ever goes according to plan, but you have to have one anyway. That would be true of the SIOP, for sure.
The SIOP was the plan that our Joint Chiefs of Staff approved in 1961 for attacking Communist countries with nuclear weapons. Nearing the end of his presidency, President Eisenhower had ordered this first SIOP to be drawn up. He left it to be finally approved by President Kennedy.
This first SIOP wasn’t the first plan we’d had for attacking the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. In 1949, soon after the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb, our military had drawn up a plan for an operation called Dropshot. Dropshot would have had us use the World War II bombers we had at the time to deliver the maybe three-hundred atomic bombs we hoped to have by the next year, along with thousands of conventional bombs, to two-hundred selected targets in the Soviet Union. The goal, the plan said, would be to destroy in this one attack eighty-five percent of the Soviet Union’s industrial capacity, though of course more than industrial capacity would be destroyed. The Dropshot planners chose 1957 as the year the plan might need to be executed. I’d be a junior in high school.
By 1957, the plan would have had to be reformulated. For one thing, we had in service now wonderful new jet bombers—the B-47 and the B-52. We also had many thousands of nuclear weapons in our stockpile by then. Among them the big, megaton-range “strategic” thermonuclear bombs that were many hundreds of time more powerful than the bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima.
By 1960, the last year of Eisenhower’s presidency, we would also have been able to deliver nuclear warheads to Moscow in very short order on the new intermediate range ballistic missiles—the Thor and the Jupiter--we had installed in England and Italy with more Jupiters to come in Turkey.
We also had in place by 1957 President Eisenhower’s New Look policy. It promised “massive retaliation” if we or our NATO allies were attacked. “Massive retaliation” meant hitting all Communist countries—the Soviet Union, but also China now and all the countries in Eastern Europe--the Baltic States, Yugoslavia, Albania, all of them--with everything we had. What we had, by the end of 1957, was nine-thousand eight-hundred twenty-two nuclear weapons with a total yield of sixteen-billion one-hundred forty-two million tons of TNT equivalent. Another part of the yield would be a huge amount of ionizing radiation and radioactive fallout, but the effect of that radiation was hard to predict with precision so it was rarely included in the figures for the “yield” of nuclear weapons, or even mentioned.
In his second term, President Eisenhower had noticed that our Army, Navy, and Air Force each had its own plans for attacking Communists with nuclear weapons. Under New Look, some targets could end up being attacked by all three services. Maybe even simultaneously. Our bombers might even collide with each other, for heaven’s sake. The last attacks would do nothing, it was said in the Pentagon, but “make the rubble bounce.”
A SIOP was needed, President Eisenhower decided, to integrate and coordinate the operations. It might also, you could think, give whoever was President more control over military budgets. President Eisenhower had begun to worry that military budgets had gotten out of control. At the end of his administration, in his Farewell Address, he warned us about the “unwarranted influence” of what he called “the military-industrial complex.”
The only defense against the effects of the military-industrial complex, he told us, was “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.” “Alert” was do-able. He didn’t say how we were supposed to become “knowledgeable” about such matters under the regime of secrecy that was in place and had been since 1946. We all knew there was a whole lot we didn’t know about these things. And couldn’t even ask about.
At the beginning of President Eisenhower’s administration in 1953, we’d had one-thousand nuclear weapons with a total yield of maybe one-hundred fifty megatons. Eight years later, at the end of his administration, the count was twenty-thousand warheads, maybe three-thousand of them the large thermonuclear (aka “strategic”) ones. The total yield was nineteen-thousand megatons, one hundred fifty times more than we’d had in 1953 .
The Soviet Union had about two-hundred strategic warheads in 1953, we thought, two-thousand warheads if you included their smaller “tactical” ones. [On the confused and confusing usage of the terms “strategic” and “tactical,” see the earlier entry on these concepts in You Might Want to Know.]
President Kennedy did go along with the SIOP Eisenhower left him. He maintained, for now, the New Look strategy of “massive retaliation.” If we were attacked, we would use all, or almost all, of our “strategic” warheads on whatever targets our military leaders had chosen. We now had over the two-thousand targets on the National Strategic Target List we’d begun to develop for the SIOP. We didn’t have enough strategic weapons to bomb them all with strategic weapons.
In the mid-1950’s, we had started flying high altitude reconnaissance airplanes called U-2s over the Soviet Union. They helped us see what the Soviets were up to. They’d also helped us develop our National Strategic Target List. At the end of Eisenhower’s administration, our new spy satellites had begun to provide even more useful information.
In 1961, at the beginning of Kennedy’s administration, our military leaders were asked to say how many people would be killed if the new SIOP were executed. As reported by Daniel Ellsberg in his book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, their estimates were that at least two-hundred fifty million people would be killed in the Communist countries, with millions more dying from radiation later, in Europe and neutral countries as well as the Soviet Union. Six hundred million people in all. Ten times the number of people who had been killed on all sides in all of World War II.
Our military leaders couldn’t say how many would be killed in the United States as a result of what the Soviet Union might do when they attacked us back. Fewer. Maybe only twenty million. Only as many as the Soviets had lost in World War II. Which was more than four times what we had lost.
Those numbers were for a “first strike” by us. If we were retaliating to a first strike by them, our numbers of dead would be higher, their numbers would be lower. Still many millions on both sides.
When President-elect Kennedy was briefed on the SIOP in December 1960, before he took office, he is reported to have said to Dean Rusk, “And they call us human beings.”
But for now he did approve the SIOP Eisenhower had left him. It became “operational” on July 1, 1961. All that was needed now was his order to execute it. Our military almost certainly would have executed it if he ordered them to. His order would probably have been “lawful.” Our military is supposed to execute lawful orders, whether or not they make sense.