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

by Fred Kaplan

The implication was stunning. Back in McNamara’s time, the whiz kids had famously asked, “How much is enough?” The chief whiz kid, Alain Enthoven, later coauthored a book, a combination treatise and memoir, with that question as its title. Now, it turned out that nobody had ever asked the question in a way, or from a position, that mattered. The authors of the Defense Department’s directives on how to use (and not use) nuclear weapons may have thought they were asking the question; but they’d lacked access to the machinery of the SIOP—they hadn’t known how to ask the question in a way that the JSTPS officers could translate into their operational plan. Meanwhile, the JSTPS officers were barred from asking, or trying to answer, the question on their own. Washington and Omaha were running on parallel, sometimes wildly divergent tracks—which had been Curtis LeMay’s intention all along: he didn’t want civilians, or even rival branches of the military, meddling with his war plan, and he designed SAC explicitly to keep them out.