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

by Fred Kaplan

At the first SIOP Planning Conference, chaired by General Power on August 24, the main topic on the agenda was the creation of a National Strategic Target List, abbreviated as the NSTL. The Navy officers at the meeting tried to cap how many targets the United States needed to hit with nuclear weapons in the event of war. But Power noted that the NSTL wasn’t about military requirements. The point was simply to list all the objects, all the possible targets in the USSR, the Warsaw Pact nations, and China that had some strategic value—air bases, naval ports, missile sites, radar stations, command-control facilities, military factories, civilian factories. It didn’t necessarily mean that the SIOP would call for all those targets to be attacked. The Navy backed down. As it turned out, the list identified about 4,000 points on the map as “targets.” All told, the Air Force and Navy combined had 3,423 nuclear weapons with the range to hit those targets. It was no coincidence that those two numbers weren’t far apart—or that the number of targets slightly exceeded the number of weapons. If anyone argued that SAC had too many nuclear weapons, General Power could respond that, to the contrary, he didn’t have enough weapons to hit all of the enemy’s targets. The NSTL became a device to justify the arsenal’s expansion.