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

by Fred Kaplan

And so Obama ordered a detailed review of the SIOP. The idea was to delve into the nuclear war plan at least as deeply as Miller had—with one difference: this time, the civilians faced little resistance from the four-star general who led what was now called Strategic Command. The commander was Robert Kehler, and the difference between him and Jack Chain, the general who tried to block Frank Miller’s intrusions (and who said he needed ten thousand weapons because he had ten thousand targets), was enormous. They were a vast generation apart: Chain, rising through the ranks as a fighter pilot in Korea and Vietnam; Kehler, twenty years younger, coming up as a missile officer, then as a senior officer in the Air Force’s Space Command, and picking up political skills as a legislative liaison in the interim. More relevant, Kehler had served in the Joint Staff’s nuclear and chemical directorate when Frank Miller was waging his assault on the SIOP; and so he saw, in greater detail than most of his fellow officers, the full scope of bloat in the nuclear plan and thus in the nuclear arsenal. When he arrived as head of StratCom in 2011, two years into Obama’s term, he recognized that, while the bloat had thinned out considerably, there was still a lot of overkill; there was room for deeper cuts.