The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

Similarly U.S. nuclear responses would be controlled, enemy cities would be excluded from an attack, and a secure reserve of weapons would be retained “to the degree practicable.” What “military necessity” permitted, or what was deemed “practicable,” were matters to be decided by SAC and the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, not by McNamara and his whiz kids or even by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And they decided that these notions were not remotely practicable or consistent with military necessities. Finally, the “damage-expectancy” numbers—the requirement that certain targets be damaged with 90 or 95 or even 97 percent probability, which provoked such agitation in the debates over the first nuclear war plan—remained the same in this revised plan. As in the first war plan, the Navy’s delegates to SAC led the protest against these requirements. The plan, they said, called for too much damage against too many targets, “far in excess” of the Joint Chiefs’ requirement. For all practical purposes, they concluded, SIOP-63 was not much different from SIOP-62. It was still, by and large, a Single Integrated Operational Plan—an only slightly less rigid blueprint for an all-out nuclear first strike that would kill hundreds of millions of people.