Before the trip, Rathjens asked a CIA liaison for the name of the Soviet city that most resembled Hiroshima in size and industrial concentration. When he got to SAC headquarters, he asked a staff officer how many weapons the SIOP laid down on that city. The answer: one 4.5-megaton bomb, followed by three 1.1-megaton bombs, in case the first one was a dud. The A-bomb that destroyed one third of Hiroshima, at the end of World War II, had released an explosive force of 12.5 kilotons. In other words, SIOP-62 would hit that Soviet town with more than six hundred times the blast power of the
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