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

by Fred Kaplan

The plan called for launching nearly 200 nuclear weapons at military targets—air bases, bivouacs, and so forth—in the southern region of the USSR, near the Iranian border. Kissinger exploded. “Are you out of your minds?” he screamed. “This is a limited option?” He told them to go back and come up with a smaller plan. A few weeks later, the generals returned. There were two roads leading into Iran from the USSR. The revised plan called for exploding an atomic demolition mine on one of the roads and dropping two nuclear bombs on the other. Kissinger’s eyes rolled. “What kind of nuclear attack is this?” he scoffed. The president of the United States takes the horrible risk of firing nuclear arms in anger for the first time since the end of the Second World War—and he uses only three weapons? Kissinger later told Aaron and Lodal that if the president carried out this plan, Brezhnev would think he was “chicken.” It was the dilemma faced by every policymaker trying to make sense of nuclear weapons and Cold War politics: how to plan a nuclear attack that was large enough to terrify the enemy but small enough to be recognized unambiguously as a limited strike, so that, if the enemy retaliated, he’d keep his strike limited too.