On July 6, Gates met with Eisenhower to recommend the creation of a SIOP just as the SAC briefing of three weeks earlier had outlined. Present nuclear targeting plans, he told Eisenhower, were a mess. There was duplication, triplication of coverage on 200 or 300 targets in the Soviet Union. The Navy did not plan to deliver some of its nuclear weapons on board aircraft carriers until fifteen days into the war. Also like the briefing, Gates argued that SAC should serve as SIOP center. SAC had the resources, the methodology, the computers already at hand.
By early August, Admiral Arleigh Burke, Chief of Naval Operations, got wind of what the Air Force was up to. One of his aides happened to be over at the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group to transmit some technical data, at the group’s request. Two Air Force officers also happened to be there, and they started to tease him. “At last,” one of them said, “we’ve got control of the Polaris.”
“What are you talking about?” Burke’s man asked.
“We’ve got it in the bag. The decision’s been made,” the Air Force rep snickered. “All you have to do is find out about it.”
After hearing this report, Burke did some investigating and found out about the SIOP and the real purpose behind it. When it came to protecting the Navy, Arleigh Burke had no match. When it came to fending off threats from the other services, Burke was even more sensitive, protective, and paranoid than his Air Force counterpart, Tommy White. And when it came to the Polaris submarine, these sorts of dangers and threats made Burke’s blood boil. The Polaris was Burke’s conception: he had pushed it through an unwilling Navy bureaucracy, he had calculated the technical requirements, he had helped devise the doctrine that justified it strategically, he had led the assault on the Air Force, using the Polaris as the opening wedge of the attack. Burke knew he was in a bureaucratic shooting war, and he wasn’t about to let the Air Force get hold of his Polaris.
Arleigh Burke counted a few Air Force officers among his friends, but he hated the Air Force as an organization. “This is just like Communism being here in the country,” he said after catching on to the Air Force’s SIOP ambitions. “It needn’t have happened that Lumumba can take over a country, or that Castro, with a very few people and no following at the beginning, can take over a country, with a well-disciplined force, small but well-disciplined. It doesn’t have to happen that way. It just does.” To Burke’s mind, that was just what was happening now, with the Air Force doing to national security what Castro had done in Cuba. “They’re smart and they’re ruthless,” he warned Navy secretary William Franke. “It’s the same way as the Communists. It’s exactly the same techniques.”
When one of Burke’s aides remarked that the Air Force’s motives were decent, that “they think they are doing the best thing they know how for the country,” Burke replied, “You’re more generous than I am…. They’re dishonest. They’re dishonest and they know it.” In Burke’s mind, “they have no feeling at all that they are responsible for anything but the Air Force…. They have no responsibility for anything else, and they will wreck the United States. They are perfectly willing to wreck the JCS and they’re doing the best to wreck it.”
“This is the Communist thing,” said the aide, now doing his best to go along with the Chief.
“The Communist thing,” Burke chimed in, “to wreck it.”
Gates and Eisenhower certainly had a point in endorsing integration of the nuclear war plans. The Air Force and the Navy would soon be adding thousands of new weapons to their arsenals; operational planning was getting far too loose and way out of control. But Burke understood—and knew that White and Power also understood—the politics underlying war plans in a way that Gates and Eisenhower apparently did not. Burke knew that whichever service controlled the target list, made the rules and defined the criteria of what degree of damage must be inflicted on what targets with what probability, would in effect be the service that decided how those weapons would be used, how many weapons of what type the nation should buy, how much money should be spent on each service’s nuclear weapons.
Burke feared that if SAC were allowed to invent the definitions and criteria, “then our budget is going to be in a very sad way indeed. We’ll be buying B-70s.” He feared that SAC would invent “damage-expectancy” numbers that required SAC to build a lot more bombers. If, for example, they said that a certain target had to be destroyed with 90 percent probability and if the calculations showed that one bomb could destroy it with only 65 percent probability, then SAC would have a reason to drop more than one bomb on the target and, therefore, would “need” to buy another bomb for each target. He also feared that SAC would give the Polaris missiles such tasks as destroying Soviet air-defense sites, “paving the way for the B-52s,” or hitting highly blast-resistant targets, which the inaccurate Polaris missiles could not destroy, thus proving “that it takes sixty-seven of them to knock out this target.” In other words, if the Air Force had failed to eliminate the Polaris or to steal it away under the guise of a “unified Strategic Command,” then through the SIOP they would assign it to trivial targets or to targets that it could not hit, further reinforcing SAC’s domination in the strategic-warfare game.
Burke’s predictions and fears came close to the truth. From the first SIOP Planning Conference, chaired by Tommy Power on August 24, it was clear that SAC was very much in control and intended to remain there. Army and Navy officers were assigned to certain billets, but SAC had 1,300 men in Omaha who could work on SIOP, a presence with which the other services could not hope to compete.
Moreover, from day one, Power and his staff began to fiddle with the “damage-expectancy” numbers. On August 19, the JCS had issued a National Strategic Target and Attack Plan (NSTAP), commonly called the N-Stap, which laid down the criteria and definitions for the Target List and the SIOP. In one passage, the NSTAP stated that the National Strategic Target List (NSTL) “will consist of a minimum number of specific targets whose timely and assured destruction will accomplish the specific objectives….” It had been the Navy’s interpretation that the NSTAP meant for there to be a “minimum number” of targets specified on the Target List, just enough to “accomplish the specific objectives.” However, at the August 24 SIOP conference, General Bob Smith, SAC Intelligence chief, directed that the NSTAP would be interpreted to mean that there was a “minimum number” below which the SIOP committee could not go; that, in other words, the NSTAP specified no upper limit, that the list could specify as many targets as the U.S. had strategic weapons to hit.
It was a subtle distinction, but a critical one. By the Navy’s definition of “minimum number,” the SIOP would be a war plan that allocated just enough weapons to “accomplish the specific objectives,” and no more. Consistent with the Navy’s own doctrine of “finite deterrence,” it would suggest an upper limit to the number of nuclear weapons that SAC could build and deploy. By SAC’s definition, on the other hand, the SIOP would amount to firing off all the weapons at once, with no logical limits on how many targets the U.S. would have to destroy to accomplish those objectives and, therefore, no limit on the number of weapons needed. From the beginning, then, the most important definition of all tilted very much in SAC’s favor.