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

by Fred Kaplan

For all practical purposes, Ohlert told Miller, the war plan contained only one option that was thoroughly conceived and rehearsed: MAO-4, the ultimate Major Attack Option—the option to destroy as many targets, with as many nuclear weapons, as quickly as possible. To the extent some smaller attacks were written into the plan, they weren’t “limited” by any reasonable definition of the word: the Soviets would interpret it as an all-out attack and retaliate accordingly. Sometimes JSTPS would play word games to protect the plan. Since McNamara’s first revision to the SIOP, in 1962, every defense secretary had ordered an option that let the president refrain from attacking Soviet or Chinese cities. But, Ohlert told Miller, if a nuclear war happened and if the president selected that option, he would wind up bombing cities anyway. There were two reasons for this. First, the actual “no-cities” option, as devised by JSTPS, excluded just twenty-four “urban areas”—described as Soviet and Warsaw Pact “regional political centers”—from the target list. That meant lots of other, very large cities, besides those twenty-four, would still get hit. Second, even those exempted cities would get hit to some extent because the JSTPS defined an “urban area” as a circle within which 95 percent of a city’s population lived.