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

by Fred Kaplan

From talking with these analysts and perusing the Blue Book, Klinger unraveled the mystery of why the SIOP laid down 725 nuclear weapons on the Soviet transportation network. It turned out that JSTPS had decided, for unclear reasons, to launch nuclear weapons against all railroad yards above a certain metric capacity and all railway bridges that stretched for longer than a certain distance. But, as the Defense Intelligence Agency’s logistics specialists told them, this standard was completely arbitrary; it had no bearing on the military value of a target. Some long bridges and large railroad yards weren’t used by the military at all; some very short bridges and small rail yards were militarily vital. There were other absurdities. For instance, the loading zones on the Russia-Poland border were clearly vital military targets: Russian and Polish rail tracks had different gauges; the loading zones were where Soviet armored vehicles would be switched from one track to the other before proceeding to the front lines of a war with NATO. The SIOP did target those loading zones—but it left unscathed some road bridges a couple miles up the river, because the JSTPS had called for attacking the Soviet “rail system,” not the “transportation system.” Bridges on roads weren’t targeted at all.