The U.S. included so many nuclear weapons in its first
missile-age plan for nuclear war that top military commanders called
it a "hazard to ourselves as well as our enemy," according
to newly declassified documents
posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington
University.
Under the first Single Integrated Operational Plan, prepared during
1960, a Russian city the size of Nagasaki--devastated in 1945 with
a twenty kiloton bomb--would receive three 80 kiloton weapons. President
Dwight D. Eisenhower, then leaving office, along with Navy leaders
and White House Science Adviser George Kistiakowsky, was deeply critical
of the SIOP's overkill. Eisenhower was later reported to have said
that the plan "frighten[ed] the devil out of me." Incoming
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara soon decried the "fantastic"
levels of fallout that attacks on a multitude of Soviet targets would
produce.
Ever since its creation, the SIOP has been one of the U.S. government's
deepest secrets. Even historical information about U.S. nuclear war
plans has been hard to come by and documents once available become
reclassified again. Today's posting includes never before published
as well as previously declassified key documents from 1959-1961 on
the history of SIOP-62 (for fiscal year 1962). Among the disclosures
in the documents:
- The SIOP included retaliatory and preemptive options; preemption
could occur if U.S. authorities had strategic warning of a Soviet
attack;
- A full nuclear SIOP strike launched on a preemptive basis would
have delivered over 3200 nuclear weapons to 1060 targets in the
Soviet Union, China, and allied countries in Asia and Europe;
- A full nuclear strike by SIOP forces on high alert, launched in
retaliation to a Soviet strike, would have delivered 1706 nuclear
weapons against a total of 725 targets in the Soviet Union, China,
and allied states;
- Targets would have included nuclear weapons, government and military
control centers, and at least 130 cities in the Soviet Union, China,
and allies;
- Alarmed White House scientists, Army and Navy leaders were concerned
that the SIOP would deliver too many nuclear weapons to Soviet and
Chinese territory and that the weapons that missed targets "will
kill a lot of Russians and Chinese" and that fallout from the
weapons "can be a hazard to ourselves as well as our enemy";
- According to the damage expectancy criteria of SIOP-62, it would
take three 80 kiloton weapons to destroy a city like Nagasaki--which
the U.S. had actually bombed with a 22 kiloton weapon;
- The Marine Corp commandant was concerned that the SIOP provides
for the "attack of a single list of Sino-Soviet countries"
and makes no "distinction" between Communist countries
that were at war with the United States and those that were not;
- The Defense Department has overclassified and inconsistently released
information about the SIOP.
Some evidence exists that after the Cold War ended, Strategic Air
Command commander-in-chief General Lee Butler tried to curb what he
saw as the SIOP's "grotesque excesses" by paring down the
huge target lists. Security classification, however, hides whether
General Butler's reforms took hold or whether the SIOP remains an
instrument of overkill.
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