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

by Fred Kaplan

Klinger noticed redundancy throughout the calculations in the Blue Book, and, now that he was in the belly of the beast, he searched for more examples. He had no trouble finding them. He was especially struck by the way the plan went after the Soviet army’s tanks. The SIOP aimed a lot of weapons not only at the tanks themselves, but also at 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. Klinger asked why they needed to destroy the entire production chain. His liaison officer told him that, if they left any part of the chain intact, the Soviets could reconstruct the factory and rebuild tanks. Though Klinger didn’t know it, this was the same unfathomable frame of mind that, back in the early 1960s, led General Curtis LeMay to insist on destroying not just the repair depot at a Soviet air base but also the factory that built the spare parts supplying the repair depot because, otherwise, the Soviets could reconstruct their air force—never mind that thousands of American bombs and warheads would have just reduced the entire country to a smoldering radioactive ruin.