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

by Fred Kaplan

One of the most blatant instances turned out to be the planning for Limited Nuclear Options. Miller asked an analyst in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s own intelligence bureaucracy, how many discrete objects the Soviets’ early warning systems could track—how many incoming missiles it could detect as individual missiles—before they all merged into a vague blob on the radar screens. The answer was 200. In other words, on the Soviets’ radar screens, 200 missiles and 2,000 missiles looked exactly the same. And yet in SIOP’s smallest “limited” attack option, the United States would launch nearly 1,000 missiles. To Soviet air defense officers, this would look like an all-out attack.