McNamara was fascinated by the briefing. The idea of restricting the initial attack to military targets and using a withheld reserve force to bargain with the enemy, of trying to rationalize conflict, made sense to McNamara, the anti-emotional economist. Still, there was something about it that bothered him. Kaufmann anticipated some of his doubts with a reservation of his own: while the counterforce/no-cities idea served as a good guide on how to play the first round or two of a nuclear war, it left the question of how to end the war very much open. This issue had recently begun to bother Kaufmann considerably. He had discussed it with one of his assistants, Frank Trinkl, and was frustrated that Trinkl didn’t even see the problem. Trinkl, ever the econometrician, reasoned that once the Soviets saw that launching more nuclear weapons would only hurt them more than it would help them, once they saw that the cost-benefit calculus went against them, they would stop. The notion of things in war getting out of hand, which Clausewitz had called “friction,” and of which Kaufmann the political scientist and historian was acutely aware, simply struck Trinkl as irrational and, therefore, nearly impossible.
Kaufmann had brought up the same point with his Air Force sponsor, General Noel Parrish, and had met the same resistance. Parrish was uninterested in attacking anything but military targets, no matter how the war progressed, and thought that would force the Soviets to surrender, automatically. Kaufmann and Parrish once had a big argument over this, with Kaufmann finally challenging, “Suppose we do knock out most of their counterforce targets. What do we do then—go buzzing about in bombers and shouting ‘Quit’?”
McNamara caught the significance of this problem right away, but he saw another that bothered him still more. McNamara had liked the WSEG-50 briefing not least because it specified a point at which he could justify telling the Joint Chiefs “No more nuclear weapons”—and that was the point at which all major Soviet cities could be devastated by an American retaliatory blow even after a fairly successful Soviet first-strike. But where was the cutoff point in Kaufmann’s scheme? It seemed to McNamara that as long as the other side kept building nuclear weapons, then the military’s “requirements” for more and more nuclear weapons for the U.S. could be endless.
Kaufmann responded with a chart that had been drawn by Norman Hanounian, a RAND specialist on nuclear weapons’ effects, which showed that after 8,000 to 10,000 megatons had dropped on the United States, the radioactive fallout would be so great that fatalities would be roughly the same no matter whether cities or military bases had been targeted. Kaufmann suggested that a cutoff point be drawn at 8,000 to 10,000 megatons. That didn’t satisfy McNamara. With that much megatonnage, an attack would kill nearly everyone. McNamara wanted something with which he could control much more tightly the appetites of the Joint Chiefs.
Meanwhile, once exposed to Kaufmann’s briefing, McNamara, for the time being anyway, could not help but accept its logic. True, he wanted to put a strap on the Joint Chiefs, hungry for more nuclear weapons, and the WSEG-50 solution nearly was an ideal way to do that. At the same time, Kaufmann’s briefing, with prodding assistance from the three key RAND analysts in the Pentagon, Enthoven, Rowen and Hitch, persuaded McNamara that if nuclear war did come, the U.S. should at least try to keep it from getting completely out of hand, that it was his responsibility as Secretary of Defense to provide the President with “options” from which to choose.
Everyone knew about how the inflexibility of each combatant’s war-mobilization plans had inexorably sparked the opening volleys of World War I, against the desires and better judgments of all political leaders concerned. “Options,” “flexible response,” “controlled escalation” became buzz words of the Kennedy Administration. It was only natural that Kaufmann’s counterforce briefing would have an irresistible, if somewhat desperate, appeal.
There was another reason why McNamara latched on to the counterforce/no-cities idea. Between the WSEG-50 and Kaufmann briefings, McNamara had journeyed to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command at Offutt Air Force Base, outside Omaha, Nebraska, to be briefed by General Tommy Power and his staff on the Single Integrated Operational Plan—the SIOP, the U.S. military’s general nuclear war plan. What he saw and heard in Omaha was so macabre, shallow and horrifying that by the time he got back to Washington, he was eager to find some way not only to control the Joint Chiefs’ appetite for more nuclear weapons, but also to control the pace and scope of a nuclear war. Some combination of WSEG-50’s weapons recommendations and William Kaufmann’s no-cities strategy seemed just the recipe.
18
THE SIOP AND THE ROAD TO ANN ARBOR
ON THE SURFACE, the SIOP was a creation of Thomas S. Gates, Jr., Secretary of Defense in the last year of the Eisenhower Administration. By mid-1960—Gates ordered the establishment of a SIOP on August 16—it was becoming all too clear that nuclear weapons were multiplying out of control. Each Air Force Command had control over the detailed war planning of its own nuclear arsenal, as did the Navy fleets and the Army units with their battlefield weapons. With the Navy’s Polaris submarine about to come on line, the confusion would worsen.
Gates believed it was dangerous, foolish and wasteful for the United States to have so many different plans for the straightforward and relatively inflexible mission of nuclear retaliation. As things stood, many targets in the Soviet Union would be struck by American weapons twice, three times, or more. All strategic nuclear weapons, Gates thought, should be integrated under a single planning command and targeted according to that command’s direction. Hence, the Single Integrated Operational Plan.
In fact, however, the idea of a SIOP originated not with Gates but with the Air Staff. While some Air Force officers too were worried about duplication of targeting in the war plans of the day, their main motivation in promoting the idea of a SIOP was the same as their reason for suddenly adopting Kaufmann’s counterforce/no-cities strategy—to fight off the Navy, to maintain SAC’s preeminent position in the strategic-nuclear business in the face of the challenge from Polaris. By 1960, it was clear that Polaris could not be stopped. So the strategy behind SIOP was to co-opt the Polaris, to take it out of the hands of the Navy and place it firmly under the wings of SAC.
The Air Staffs original position, ardently advocated by General Tommy White, Air Force Chief of Staff, was to create a unified “Strategic Command,” putting SAC in charge of all the strategic weapons of all the Air Force commands and of the Navy fleets, including the new Polaris missiles. By June 1960, White was convinced by his staff that the Strategic Command notion would not wash: resistance from the Army and the Navy in the working committees of the JCS was too heated, too adamant. White adopted what he had previously planned as a “fallback position” for the Air Force: creating a Joint Strategic Target Planning Agency, which would maintain the separate services but which would integrate the targeting of all their weapons and designate the Commander in Chief of SAC as the Director of Strategic Targeting. On June 14, SAC gave Tom Gates a briefing called “Unity in the Strategic Offensive.” It argued the case for such an agency, which would produce a National Strategic Target List (NSTL) and a Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) under the direction of the SAC Commander.
Gates was easily persuaded that military planning needed integration. In his brief tenure as Secretary of Defense, he was finding the behavior of the Joint Chiefs increasingly appalling. They seemed incapable of arriving at common decisions. Even their intelligence estimates of Soviet military strength wildly differed from one another’s, and were obviously geared to justify their own parochial interests at the expense of the nation’s. In August 1959, the Chairman of the JCS, General Nathan Twining, had asked the Chiefs for answers to eighteen basic questions—“The 18 Questions,” they came to be called—on nuclear targeting. By the time of the SAC briefing ten months later, the Chiefs had yet to agree on answers to any of them, which to Gates made the SAC presentation all the more compelling.