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

by Fred Kaplan

As he delved more deeply into the war plan, Klinger saw that much of it made no sense on any grounds. At one point, he had Wayne Lumsden print out the latitude and longitude of all the targets in the SIOP database. He then asked the graphics department to plot all those points on a huge map of the Soviet Union and draw circles around each point, signifying the area that would be destroyed by the specific weapon aimed at each target. The result was a vivid, color-coded display of massive death and destruction. It showed a staggering number of bombs and warheads hitting nearly every city in overlapping density. Hundreds of targets were so close to one another that, in many cases, one weapon would hit more than one target, and one target would get hit by three, five, as many as seven nuclear weapons. Klinger wondered how many weapons were aimed at Moscow and its environs. On the map, he drew a fifty-mile circle around the capital and counted the number of weapons that were aimed at targets within the circle. There were 689 of them, many releasing more than a megaton of explosive power. “Overkill” was a severe understatement for what had gone on for decades.