The official rationale for this upgrade is that the existing subs, bombers and ICBMs are approaching obsolescence. Even if this claim were true (more about that later), it begs the question of whether the arsenal needs to be as large as it is. A serious assessment of the arsenal must begin by asking “How much is enough?” and, its corollary query, “Enough to do what?”
Yet in the debate over America’s nuclear stockpile, to the extent there is debate, these questions are going unasked. It is hard to have an informed public debate, as many of the issues are classified, esoteric or both. But even the debates in Congress and inside the executive branch tend to be shallow. Almost nobody is asking those basic questions. In fact, in the 60-plus years of the nuclear arms race, almost nobody ever has. (...)
1100 Declassified U.S. nuclear targets, 1956From the national Security Archives
President Dwight Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general and WWII commander, was not at all bloodthirsty; once he understood the power of nuclear weapons, he feared and detested them. But he also believed, as did most officials and analysts, that if the U.S. and the USSR ever locked arms, even in a “small” war over a narrow strip of territory in Europe or Asia, it would soon escalate to nuclear exchanges. So the wise policy would be to deter the Soviets from attacking in the first place, and the best way to do that, he figured, was to warn them that we’d blow them to smithereens if they did. His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, called the policy “massive retaliation,” and the Joint Chiefs of Staff — composed of the top U.S. military officers — translated it into a war plan that italicized massive.
Few realized at the time, or in the years since, just how massive it was. By 1960, the U.S. war plan called for launching the entire nuclear arsenal — at the time, 3,423 weapons, exploding with the blast power of 7,847 megatons — against 1,043 targets in the Soviet Union, its satellite countries in Eastern Europe and Communist China. This was not a plan to strike back if the Soviets launched a nuclear attack on the U.S.; it was a plan to strike first if the Soviets mounted a non-nuclear invasion against U.S. allies.
Some in Washington asked how many people such an attack would kill. The answer that came back from those who devised the war plan at Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha was 275 million. Such a figure had previously been inconceivable. No one could imagine a war aim that required killing so many civilians.
What’s striking is that, even so, no one among the few officials privy to this plan questioned its validity or how the numbers were calculated. They never asked whether such a massive arsenal, or such a cataclysmic attack, was necessary for national security.
The plan was founded, in large part, on the basis of self-interest. SAC — the branch of the now-independent U.S. Air Force that controlled nuclear plans and operations — had set up a unit called the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS). Its job was to find every plausible target inside the Soviet empire, then assign U.S. nuclear weapons to destroy each one. As JSTPS found more targets, SAC had a rationale to request more weapons. As the Soviets matched the U.S. arms buildup, they created more targets — thus driving the rationale for still more U.S. bombs and warheads. (...)
In 1989, soon after George H.W. Bush was sworn in as president, his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, was briefed on the latest version of the nuclear war plan. Cheney asked his assistant on strategic issues, a civilian analyst named Franklin Miller, to sit in. Miller had perused the array of classified documents reciting the rationales for limited nuclear options. Yet, he noticed, the briefing said nothing about such options.
Cheney and Miller were also struck by one detail in the war plan: It called for hitting the Soviet transportation network with 725 nuclear weapons. Cheney asked the briefer, a SAC general, why. The general shrugged and said he’d get back to him on that. (He never did.) After the meeting, Cheney told Miller to go out to Strategic Air Command’s headquarters, in Omaha, and conduct a thorough review of the war plan; he alerted the officers at SAC that Miller should have full authority to look at everything.
What Miller discovered made the term “overkill” seem a gross understatement. For example, just outside Moscow, the Soviets had an ancient anti-ballistic missile system holding 68 interceptors. After the Cold War, U.S. inspectors discovered that the system was completely useless. But the war plan specified that the site had to be destroyed with near-total certainty. SAC intelligence estimated (incorrectly) that each of the Soviet interceptors had a high probability of shooting down an incoming American warhead. So, JSTPS — Omaha’s nuclear targeting agency — assigned 69 warheads to hit the site, to make absolutely certain that at least one of the warheads got through.
Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. Miller and his staff learned that some SAC analysts had already pointed out the excesses. A branch of math called nodal analysis suggested that, as long as the central links of a supply system were destroyed, there was no need to destroy every single piece; in many cases, just a few warheads, aimed at the right targets, would cripple the system. Gradually, Miller realized that the entire war plan was like this — a senseless aggregate of compartmentalized calculations.
Then came the key revelation. At this point the Bush administration was negotiating the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviets. During one of his trips, one of Miller’s assistants asked a JSTPS officer whether the treaty’s prospective cuts would affect SAC’s ability to fulfill its mission — whether the U.S. could continue to deter nuclear war and limit damage if deterrence failed. The officer replied that he didn’t do that sort of analysis. JSTPS, he went on, was prohibited from setting requirements or analyzing whether a certain kind of attack, with a certain number of weapons, would be militarily effective. When asked what the JSTPS actually did, the officer explained that they take all the weapons that are assigned to SAC and aim them at all the targets on the list.
The code was unlocked. It turned out that the war plan was based on supply, not demand — on how many weapons SAC happened to have, not on how many were needed.
Cheney and Miller were also struck by one detail in the war plan: It called for hitting the Soviet transportation network with 725 nuclear weapons. Cheney asked the briefer, a SAC general, why. The general shrugged and said he’d get back to him on that. (He never did.) After the meeting, Cheney told Miller to go out to Strategic Air Command’s headquarters, in Omaha, and conduct a thorough review of the war plan; he alerted the officers at SAC that Miller should have full authority to look at everything.
What Miller discovered made the term “overkill” seem a gross understatement. For example, just outside Moscow, the Soviets had an ancient anti-ballistic missile system holding 68 interceptors. After the Cold War, U.S. inspectors discovered that the system was completely useless. But the war plan specified that the site had to be destroyed with near-total certainty. SAC intelligence estimated (incorrectly) that each of the Soviet interceptors had a high probability of shooting down an incoming American warhead. So, JSTPS — Omaha’s nuclear targeting agency — assigned 69 warheads to hit the site, to make absolutely certain that at least one of the warheads got through.
Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. Miller and his staff learned that some SAC analysts had already pointed out the excesses. A branch of math called nodal analysis suggested that, as long as the central links of a supply system were destroyed, there was no need to destroy every single piece; in many cases, just a few warheads, aimed at the right targets, would cripple the system. Gradually, Miller realized that the entire war plan was like this — a senseless aggregate of compartmentalized calculations.
Then came the key revelation. At this point the Bush administration was negotiating the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviets. During one of his trips, one of Miller’s assistants asked a JSTPS officer whether the treaty’s prospective cuts would affect SAC’s ability to fulfill its mission — whether the U.S. could continue to deter nuclear war and limit damage if deterrence failed. The officer replied that he didn’t do that sort of analysis. JSTPS, he went on, was prohibited from setting requirements or analyzing whether a certain kind of attack, with a certain number of weapons, would be militarily effective. When asked what the JSTPS actually did, the officer explained that they take all the weapons that are assigned to SAC and aim them at all the targets on the list.
The code was unlocked. It turned out that the war plan was based on supply, not demand — on how many weapons SAC happened to have, not on how many were needed.
by Fred Kaplan, Asterisk Magazine | Read more:
Image: Future of Life Institute
