As the months transpired, there was more of the same. Everywhere SAC Intelligence looked, they found targets, thus justifying the need for more weapons. They thought the Soviets would have 700 ICBMs by 1962, the Navy thought there would be only 200; the Air Force won the battle, to the extent there was one, with the result of 500 extra targets, requiring more than 500 extra weapons. Similarly, SAC listed 1,115 airfields that should be targeted; the Navy analysts found only 770. SAC also assumed a very high attrition rate for their bombers that would be destroyed on the ground, those that would be shot down by Soviet missiles and interceptors, and those that would fail to perform or miss their targets. If, subsequently, the operational alert force were only one-third the size of the total force, then that meant that the total SAC bomber force would have to be tripled. Meanwhile, as Burke anticipated, most Polaris missiles were shunted off to hit surface-to-air missile sites or wasted on targets that they had scant chance of destroying alone.
The NSTAP had specified that there be at least a 75 percent chance of destroying certain targets. Power and his staff pounced on those magic words “at least.” They initially specified that the 202 most important targets be destroyed with 97 percent probability, the next 400 targets with 93 percent. Eventually, this was modified, but in the final result of the first SIOP, 7 targets had to be destroyed with 97 percent assurance, 213 with 95 percent assurance, 592 with at least 90 percent, and 715 with at least 80 percent. This meant, just as Burke had predicted, that a lot of targets would be hit with a lot of weapons. For example, nine weapons were to be “laid down” on four targets in Leningrad, twenty-three weapons on six target complexes in Moscow, eighteen on seven target areas in Kaliningrad. The average target would receive 2.2 weapons, almost all of them several megatons in explosive power.
Moreover, the calculations that produced these “requirements” took into account only the effects of blast, not the other effects of a nuclear explosion, such as heat, fire and radiation. Blast was much easier to calculate than the other effects; but omitting the others altogether drastically understated the damage done by a single bomb and, therefore, overstated the number of weapons needed to do the damage specified.
Meanwhile, naval analysts on the scene calculated that even if only one weapon were exploded over each target area in the SIOP, the radioactive fallout produced over Helsinki, Berlin, northern Japan and South Korea by such an attack would exceed the maximum safety limits established by the JCS. As one Navy officer put it, “our weapons can be a hazard to ourselves as well as to our enemy.”
From beginning to end, the SIOP sharply exaggerated the number and size of bombs needed to damage all types of targets. On November 3, George Kistiakowsky, chairman of Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee, traveled to SAC headquarters for three days, at the request of the President, to be briefed on the status of the SIOP. Arleigh Burke had planted suspicions about SAC’s manipulations through Eisenhower’s naval aide, E. P. Aurand, arousing Eisenhower to have Kistiakowsky check out the rumors. “Kisty” brought along one of his aides, a weapons scientist named George Rathjens, and the Deputy Director for Science and Technology of the CIA, Herbert “Pete” Scoville. In Omaha, Rathjens looked through SAC’s atlas of Soviet cities, searching for the town that most closely resembled Hiroshima in size and industrial concentration. When he found one that roughly matched, he asked how many bombs the SIOP “laid down” on that city. The reply: one 4.5 megaton bomb and three more 1.1 megaton weapons in case the big bomb was a dud. The explosive yield of the atomic bomb that destroyed one-third of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was a relatively puny 12.5 kilotons.
SAC—or its SIOP incarnation, the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, the JSTPS—finished the SIOP on December 14, 1960, just as Eisenhower had ordered. It was labeled SIOP-62, meaning that it was to go into effect in fiscal year 1962, which would begin June 1961. It called for shooting off, as quickly as possible, the entire portion of the U.S. strategic nuclear force that was on alert, 1,459 nuclear bombs, ranging from ten kilotons to twenty-three megatons, totaling 2,164 megatons in all, against 654 targets—military and urban-industrial, simultaneously, in accordance with SAC’s “optimum-mix” strategy—in the U.S.S.R., Red China and Eastern Europe. China was targeted because it was part of the “Sino-Soviet Bloc,” Eastern Europe because it hosted hundreds of Soviet air-defense radar and missile sites, which had to be “taken out” so that SAC bombers could fly safely through the corridors leading to the Russian heartland. JSTPS calculated that the U.S. alert force alone would kill 175 million Russians and Chinese.
If the entire force were launched—and this is what was called for if the U.S. fired a preemptive first-strike—the attack would involve 3,423 nuclear weapons, totaling 7,847 megatons; it would kill 285 million Russians and Chinese and severely injure 40 million more. None of these figures included the millions of casualties in Eastern Europe or the fallout victims in the free world.
In mid-December, Secretary of Defense Tom Gates, along with several Pentagon officials and the Joint Chiefs, listened to one of Tommy Power’s aides run down all the facts and figures of SIOP-62 in a lengthy briefing. They heard it two days in a row—the first by themselves, the second with a slightly broader audience including the service secretaries. After the second presentation, Gates asked the Chiefs what they thought. Tommy White of the Air Force, naturally, thought it was splendid. The Army and Navy Chiefs, George Decker and Arleigh Burke, privately thought it excessive, but they knew when they were outgunned and Burke personally was contemplating how to take over the SIOP when the new Kennedy Administration came into office; so they too, though less enthusiastically, expressed general approval.
Then General David Shoup, Commandant of the Marine Corps, spoke up. The Marines had virtually no involvement in the nuclear game, so Shoup could take a position as close as possible to that of an outsider while still sitting on the JCS. The day before, during the first JSTPS briefing, Shoup had been bothered by a graph that showed tens of millions of Chinese being killed by the U.S. attack. He had asked General Power what would happen if the Chinese were not fighting in the war. “Do we have any options so that we don’t have to hit China?” he inquired.
“Well, yeh, we could do that,” Power reluctantly replied, squirming in his front-row seat, “but I hope nobody thinks of it because it would really screw up the plan.”
As the nation’s military leaders endorsed SIOP-62 before the Secretary of Defense, David Shoup stood and said, “Sir, any plan that kills millions of Chinese when it isn’t even their war is not a good plan. This is not the American way.”
This was the SIOP on which Robert McNamara was briefed when he journeyed to SAC headquarters for the weekend of February 3, 1961, two weeks into the Kennedy Administration, one week after he had heard the WSEG-50 briefing, one week before he would hear the Kaufmann no-cities briefing. Traveling with McNamara were his Deputy Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatric; Chairman of the JCS, General Lyman Lemnitzer; Marvin Stern; and Herbert York, Eisenhower’s Director of Defense Research & Engineering who had agreed to stay on for the first two months of the Kennedy Administration.
If Tommy Power and his aides had hoped to faze or dazzle McNamara, as they had others, with their vast array of charts, detail, numbers and “computer science,” they came away from the briefing disappointed. McNamara knew numbers and statistics better than any of them, and his experiences in World War II had convinced him that the military hardly held a monopoly on military wisdom. He quickly grasped the connection between the extremely high “damage-expectancy” numbers and the “requirements” for an immense arsenal of strategic weapons, especially of SAC bombers. He realized, and pointed out, that firing four weapons on a single “designated-ground-zero” to ensure that at least one weapon would wreak the desired damage was wasteful, and that the fallout produced by such an attack would be “fantastic.” The whole way that the JSTPS had done the calculations, he said, was excessively conservative; the number of Soviet casualties and the destruction of Soviet industry would actually be much higher than SIOP-62 suggested. McNamara said all of this unabashedly.