II. You Might Want to Know: What’s a SIOP? (Answer: A nuclear war plan.) How did ours change during the Cold War?
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Part Two
President Kennedy decided he wanted a SIOP that was more flexible than the one President Eisenhower had left him. One that, for one thing, wouldn’t require us to hit all Communist countries all at once with everything we had. If China or the satellite states hadn’t attacked us, JFK wanted to be able to leave them out of our retaliatory attack. He also, he decided, wanted a plan for a first strike that would start with “counterforce” attacks on military facilities. Only later, if necessary, would cities and the people in them be destroyed. A benefit: a counterforce attack might leave some leaders and command and control facilities in place over there in the Soviet Union so they could surrender.
President Kennedy’s SIOP and any SIOPs that followed it would be expected to follow general guidelines that had been laid out each year by whoever was President. President Kennedy’s general guidelines would be delivered to the Joint Chiefs of Staff of our armed forces by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. They were drafted in Spring 1961 by Daniel Ellsberg, an employee of the RAND Corporation then serving as an assistant to the Secretary of Defense. After some revision, they were delivered to the Joint Chiefs in May.
When the first SIOP was being developed during Eisenhower’s administration, a group called the Joint Strategic Targeting Planning Staff had been established. They and not the Joint Chiefs would be charged to draw up the actual operational plan that would achieve the President’s goals. The JSTPS did its work in the underground headquarters of our Strategic Air Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, but its director might not be the Commander in Chief of SAC. On paper the JSTPS was separate from SAC. It was a “joint” staff because it included some staff from the Navy and the Army.
To be sure the operational plan the JSTPS devised followed the President’s general guidelines, someone on the staff of the Secretary of Defense would need to read it. But the JSTPS didn’t like the idea of anyone seeing their operational plans, especially any civilians. Senior military leaders in the Pentagon supported them in this. According to George Lee Butler, the last Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, until the late 1980’s, the Secretary of Defense received only a cursory briefing on the operational plans.
In the 60’s and 70’s, as the satellites we had up there now for photoreconnaissance got better and made more orbits, our National Strategic Target List, established when the first SIOP was being developed, had gotten longer and longer. By 1975, we had fourteen-thousand targets on it, more targets than we had strategic warheads for (In 1975, we had ten-thousand two-hundred strategic warheads). By 1990, we had fifteen-thousand three-hundred targets on the list. That would turn out to be our peak for targets.
In November 1989, Frank Miller, a civilian staff member in the office of the Secretary of Defense, was given the authority by Secretary Cheney and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, to examine the actual targeting plan. It took a while but Miller finally was able to get a copy to examine. He was horrified by what he found. He found “both the target base and the weapons allocation process [was] incoherent and riddled with errors.” (Miller’s account appears in Volume 2 of General George Lee Butler’s memoir, Uncommon Cause: a life at odds with convention, published in 2016.)
Some of what Miller might have seen is reported by Fred Kaplan in his book The Bomb: presidents, generals, and the secret history of nuclear war. In 1989, reports Kaplan, the SIOP called for six-hundred eighty-nine nuclear weapons to be delivered within a fifty-mile circle around Moscow. Many of these weapons would have had sixty times the blast yield of the Hiroshima bomb. Six-hundred eighty-nine of these huge warheads on Moscow alone.
Miller and his staff summoned the JSTPS and got to work.
Two years later, in 1991, General George Lee Butler became the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command as well as Director of the JSTPS. In his review of the SIOP, Butler was shocked to discover that changes that had been directed by the Department of Defense after the work of Frank Miller’s group had not yet been implemented. Among other significant changes to the plan, Butler then drove the elimination of 75% of the targets in the SIOP and helped reduce the number of targeted warheads from over ten thousand to the five-thousand eight-hundred eighty-eight Miller’s group had ended up calling for.
The number of targeted warheads has to be even lower today. After all, we have now in our stockpile only three-thousand eight-hundred warheads. That’s all. Only three-thousand eight-hundred.
In his remarkable memoir, published in 2016, General Butler wrote that he came to see the SIOP as “the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life. …I came to fully appreciate the truth…[that] we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”
In 1982, we were told that targets in China had been removed from the SIOP, and in 1992, at the end of the Cold War, Presidents George H. W. Bush and the Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed not to target each other’s countries any more. Not to worry. Any targets that might have been removed could quickly have been reloaded into the software that commanded each missiles’ flight.
According to former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, there was no nuclear war-plan for Russia from 1992 until 2013. Now, in 2021, we again have one.
It’s not called a SIOP. In 2003, the SIOP was renamed OPLAN, which stands for Operations Plan. I wonder who knows what’s in it. Who do you think should know?
Might you want to know?
Named Sources:
Butler, George Lee. Uncommon Cause: a life at odds with convention, 2 vols. (Outskirts Press, 2016)
Ellsberg, Daniel. The Doomsday Machine: confessions of a nuclear war planner (Bloomsbury, 2017)
Kaplan, Fred. The Bomb: presidents, generals, and the secret history of nuclear war (Simon and Schuster, 2020)