The Creation of SIOP-62

by William Burr

Since it was first created in 1960, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)--the U.S. plan for nuclear war--has been one of the most secret and sensitive issues in U.S. national security policy. The essence of the first SIOP was a massive nuclear strike on military and urban-industrial targets in the Soviet Union, China, and their allies. To make such an attack possible, U.S. war planners developed a complex organizational scheme involving the interaction of targeting, weapons delivery systems and their flight paths, nuclear detonations over targets, measurements of devastation, and defensive measures, among other elements, and successive SIOPs would become even more complex. Much of this information remains highly secret and may never be declassified; it is even possible that no civilian official has actually seen the SIOP (which one author suggests amounts to a stack of computer print-outs). To ensure tight secrecy, when the first SIOP was created, its architects established a special information category--Extremely Sensitive Information (ESI)--to ensure that only those with a need-to-know would have access to the documents.

The SIOP's tremendous importance-its implementation would mean the death of millions---has made it a subject of acute interest among historians and social scientists, and, to be sure, the subject of many FOIA requests. To shed as much light as possible on how the United States would have waged war in the nuclear age, the National Security Archive has made many declassification requests on U.S. nuclear war planning, especially the early history of the SIOP. High security walls around the SIOP have made this a difficult task but significant information has nevertheless been declassified. To show how the SIOP came to be created and to show some of its basic features, as well as the problem of presidential control over nuclear planning, the Archive publishes on the Web for the first time documents recently released under appeal by the Defense Department as well as vintage material that was declassified and later reclassified in the early 1980s. This material makes it understandable why presidents, even those with deep knowledge of military affairs, have had difficulty grappling with nuclear war plans. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who tried to bring the war plans under control, received his first report on the SIOP 62 (for fiscal year 1962), he commented that it "frighten[ed] the devil out of me." Among the disclosures in these documents:

The SIOP included retaliatory and preemptive options; preemption could occur if U.S. authorities had strategic warning of a Soviet attack;

A full nuclear SIOP strike launched on a preemptive basis would have delivered over 3200 nuclear weapons to 1060 targets in the Soviet Union, China, and allied countries in Asia and Europe;

A full nuclear strike by SIOP forces on high alert, launched in retaliation to a Soviet strike, would have delivered 1706 nuclear weapons against a total of 725 targets in the Soviet Union, China, and allied states;

Targets would have included nuclear weapons, government and military control centers, and at least 130 cities in the Soviet Union, China, and allies;

Alarmed White House scientists, Army and Navy leaders were concerned that the SIOP would deliver too many nuclear weapons to Soviet and Chinese territory and that the weapons that missed targets "will kill a lot of Russians and Chinese" and that fallout from the weapons "can be a hazard to ourselves as well as our enemy";

According to the damage expectancy criteria of SIOP-62, it would take three 80 kiloton weapons to destroy a city like Nagasaki--which the U.S. had actually bombed with a 22 kiloton weapon;

The Marine Corp commandant was concerned that the SIOP provides for the "attack of a single list of Sino-Soviet countries" and makes no "distinction" between Communist countries that were at war with the United States and those that were not;

The Defense Department has overclassified and inconsistently released information about the SIOP.

In the late 1960, the Department of Defense leadership, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower's support, approved the Single Integrated Operational Plan-62 (for fiscal year 1962) agreeing that it should go into effect on 1 April 1961. SIOP-62 was the U.S. government's first comprehensive nuclear war plan; the first attempt to synchronize the nuclear forces of the U.S .Air Force, Navy, and Army so that they could be used in a massive attack on the Soviet Union, China, and their communist allies. The SIOP-62 plan for a combined attack by strategic bombers, Polaris submarine-launched missiles, and Atlas ICBMs, among other delivery vehicles was, according to historian David Rosenberg, a "technical triumph in the history of war planning." At the same time, however, it was also "an American Schlieffen Plan, an ultimate strategy for war winning … with an even less tenable basis in political and military realities than the German plan, infamous for its inflexibility, executed in 1914." (Note 2)

For many years, the SIOP's very existence was a closely guarded secret. So far as this writer knows, the first reference in the print media was by Seymour Hersh, in a 9 December 1973 New York Times article entitled "The President and the Plumbers." There Hersh reported on White House fears that Daniel Ellsberg had revealed "the most closely held nuclear targeting secrets of the United States, which were contained in a highly classified document known as the Single Integrated Operation Plans, or S.I.O.P." (Note 2a) A few years later, however, information on the SIOP and its early history became part of the public record. In June 1975, a Congressionally-mandated Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy--the "Murphy Commission" headed by career ambassador Robert Murphy--published its final report. Included was a multi-volume series of supporting studies including one by former RAND Corporation president Henry S. Rowen on "Formulating Strategic Doctrine." Drawing on years of government experience and consulting, Rowen provided a relatively detailed account of post-World War II nuclear planning. Besides a useful overview of changes in nuclear doctrine from the 1940s to the 1970s, Rowen's report included interesting and important details on the role of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, the production of the SIOP, and nuclear targeting issues. In light of the recently announced "Schlesinger Doctrine," Rowen gave special attention to the problem of developing workable "limited" alternatives to the massive attack options embodied in the first SIOP. (Note 2b)

In the wake of Rowen's seminal study, the mass media began to look more closely at U.S. nuclear war plans. On 10 May 1976, Aviation Week and Space Technology published a special report on "SAC [Strategic Air Command] in Transition", which included significant detail on the SIOP as it stood in 1976, when the Command was starting to move away from the concept of a "massive nuclear belch" toward concepts of strategic flexible response. On 5 September 1977, US News & World Report published an article by Orr Kelly, 'If the U.S. Comes Under Nuclear Assault", which also included more details on the SIOP. The Washington Post did not mention the SIOP until the next decade, when Thomas Powers published an article, "What's Worse Than the MX," in the 31 May 1985 issue of the Washington Post's "Outlook" section.

By the time that Power's article had appeared, the SIOP had become, if temporarily, a subject that scholars could research. In 1981, the Reagan Presidency had begun but Jimmy Carter's executive order on information security policy and declassification remained in effect. Under provisions for systematic review of documents that were over 20 years old, during the summer of 1981, the Navy's historical reviewers opened up files on the SIOP in former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Arleigh Burke's papers at the U.S. Navy Operational Archives. Burke had played a key role presiding over the creation of SIOP-62 so his documents included important data on the nature and scope of the attack plans as well as the internal Pentagon controversies over the plan. Two assiduous researchers quickly seized the opportunity and poured through the files. One was David A. Rosenberg, then a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Chicago; the other was Fred Kaplan, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at MIT who had worked as defense adviser to the late Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis). Owing to the Operational Archives' inordinately tight restrictions on copying documents, Kaplan and Rosenberg had to rely on their note taking abilities.

Within a few years, Rosenberg and Kaplan had published outstanding contributions to U.S. nuclear history. In the spring of 1983, International Security, an influential scholarly journal in the security studies field, published David Rosenberg's seminal article, "The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945-1960." (Note 3) Drawing on wide-ranging research in government archives, including the Burke files, Rosenberg provided the first detailed account of the complex interaction between presidential policy, military strategy, and operational planning. At the heart of Rosenberg's account is the growing power and independence of the Strategic Air Command, which gave the Air Force a decisive advantage in bureaucratic conflict over nuclear weapons strategy and planning. Thus, while the other military services had serious doubts about Air Force strategy and Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke offered an alterative strategy, they could not restrain their more powerful rival from developing war plans premised on massive attacks on long lists of targets. A key element in Rosenberg's narrative was intelligence estimating which encouraged the Air Force demands for weapons to strike a growing list of targets. Rosenberg shows that President Dwight D. Eisenhower shared the Army's and Navy's concerns about war plans based on unconstrained nuclear attacks but, in the end, he was unable to alter the course of events.

Also in 1983, Simon and Shuster published Fred Kaplan's highly praised book, The Wizards of Armageddon (since reissued in Stanford University Press's "Nuclear Age" series. Like Rosenberg, Kaplan was interested in the nuts and bolts of nuclear war planning, but the focus of his research and writing was the theorists of nuclear strategy and their difficult relationship with the military establishment. The heart of his book was the role of RAND Corporation strategic intellectuals, including Bernard Brodie, William Kaufmann, and Arnold Wohlstetter, who sought to deploy their ideas to impose "rational order" on U.S. nuclear weapons policy. Drawing on an amazingly wide range of interviews as well as extensive primary source research, Kaplan illuminated the impact of ideas on military policy but also expanded knowledge of the history of the SIOP and the interservice controversies over nuclear targeting.

Significantly, the window of opportunity that enabled Kaplan and Rosenberg to write about the origins of the SIOP closed before their publications appeared. Not long after they were opened in 1981, the Navy reclassified the Burke files altogether; in 1982, the Reagan administration imposed a tighter classification/declassification policy that would slow down the declassification of classified historical documents. It was not until 1996 that the Naval Operational Archives reopened some of the Burke files that Rosenberg and Kaplan had seen and which Rosenberg cited in his footnotes. Since then the files were closed once more awaiting further processing of the entire CNO Burke collection. Luckily, researchers at the National Security Archive were able to copy the most important documents for publication in the Archive's collection, U.S. Nuclear History: Nuclear Arms and Politics in the Missile Age, 1955-1968 making these documents more widely available to the interested public.

Another major breakthrough in knowledge of SIOP-62 was the declassification and publication of most of the text of a SIOP briefing to President Kennedy by JCS Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer in September 1961. Stanford University professor Scott Sagan successfully pushed for declassification of this document, which he published, with valuable commentary, inInternational Security in 1987. (Note 4) The declassified briefing provides useful detail on the lead-up to SIOP-62, operational concepts, targeting sequence, SIOP forces, launch times, and the plan's alleged "flexibility." After the strong criticism of the plan from Army, Navy, and Marine Corps leaders who saw the SIOP as too inflexible, the briefing included a justification of the plan. According to Lemnitzer, the "current SIOP effectively integrates in a well-planned and coordinated attack the forces committed" and "is well designed to meet the [NSTAP] objectives."

To expand knowledge of the SIOP's early history, but also to supplement and amplify the contributions of Rosenberg, Kaplan, and Sagan, the Archive's nuclear weapons documentation project filed a number of Freedom of Information requests with the National Archives and the Defense Department. During the 1990s, when it was still possible to file a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Archives and expect to see it processed in a reasonable period of time, a number of documents from a key JCS file on the creation of the SIOP---3205 (17 August 1959)--became available, but with excisions at significant and trivial points. For example, as will be noted on the marking on a number of documents in this collection, the declassification reviewers consistently excised references to the "Sino-Soviet Bloc" as the focal point of strategic targeting (for example, see document 10 below), as if it were a deep secret that China and the Soviet Union were targeted nations during the Cold War. Moreover, the reviewers withheld data which had been released in the past--for example, the assurance of delivery factor of 75 percent that the weapons necessary to destroy a given target would arrive at each bomb-release line (BRL). Also withheld were damage expectancy probabilities--that is, the probability that weapons would cause severe damage to a given target. A variety of other important, details were also withheld, for example, whether the SIOP included retaliatory and preemptive attack options, or significantly, the general types of targets that would be attacked.

When these documents were released in 1996, the National Security Archive quickly filed a FOIA appeal for the withheld portions. Earlier this year, eight years later, the Defense Department responded to the appeal by releasing more details. Details that should have been released before, the Sino-Soviet bloc, the 75 percent assurance factor, and references to preemption, were duly declassified. Some information on the damage expectancies was partly declassified but not enough to make sense of the issue. Moreover, the reviewers withheld even the most general information on target categories. As these are general policy documents, they do not mention specific targets, but rather the type of targets which would absorb nuclear strikes. Although the documents released from the Burke papers confirm that urban-industrial areas, nuclear weapons installations, and air defenses were targeted, the Defense Department's reviewers refuse to release this most obvious forty-year old information. There may be some uneasiness with acknowledging plans for nuclear strikes against urban-industrial targets and some at the Pentagon may believe that declassifying the fact that nuclear weapons were a prime target is giving something important away.

The Pentagon's declassification policy on nuclear weapons strategy has been inconsistent. Four years ago, when it released, on appeal, a less excised version of the History of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff: Background and Preparation of SIOP-62, it declassified information that it presently treats as classified. On the one hand, the Pentagon recently withheld some of the details of the NSTAP target objectives (see document 10 below); on the other hand, only a few years ago, it released the same information in the JSTPS history: "Specific objectives of [the NSTAP] were to destroy or neutralize Sino-Soviet strategic strike forces and major military and government control centers, and to strike urban-industrial centers to achieve the level of destruction indicated in study 2009." These conflicting policies on the release of information on the NSTAP is evidence of the subjectivity of declassification review and perhaps also of a Pentagon decision against releasing any information on SIOP targeting policy in spite of previous declassifications actions.

While newly and less recently released documents on SIOP-62 tell us much about the nature of the SIOP-62 and the forces that pushed it forward, much important information about the first SIOP remains classified. Some details, such as the targets on the NSTL, may never be declassified, at least not for many years. So far, no documents are presently available that detail the gross explosive yield or the fatality estimates associated with the SIOP-62 strikes. Based on their access to the Burke files, Kaplan and Rosenberg found that the megatonnnage for the alert force was 2164 or slightly lower (2100). According to Kaplan, a strike by the total SIOP force would produce an explosive yield of 7,847 megatons. 175 million Russians and Chinese would be killed by the alert force, while a strike by the committed force would kill an estimated 285 million with 40 million more injured. (Note 5) As suggested by a recent study, casualty estimates produced by the JSTPS need to be treated cautiously because target planners saw blast damage as the foremost destructive effect of nuclear weapons thereby seriously underestimating the destruction that mass-fires would cause. (Note 6)

SIOP-62 was the first of the succession of SIOPs. The Kennedy administration, looking for "flexible response" and more options for the president, pressed the military to make the SIOP less rigid. The Joint Chiefs were willing to introduce target withholds and create options to strike military targets only (counterforce), but they were reluctant to change the fundamental character of the plan. The next revision, SIOP-63, included some of those changes, but it posited such huge attack options that one insider later characterized as "five choices for massive retaliation." While the SIOP would go through more changes, the overall structure of attack options did not change in fundamental ways until the late 1970s, after the Nixon and Carter administrations had pressed for limited nuclear options that gave the president an alternative to catastrophically massive attacks. Nevertheless, even after attack options became more "flexible" and precise, they involved massive destruction. As studies by the Natural Resources Defense Council have shown, "Even the most precise counterforce attacks on Russian nuclear forces unavoidably causes widespread civilian deaths due to the fallout generated by numerous ground bursts." (Note 7) Moreover, the SIOP always included a preemptive option even though policymakers understood the dangers associated with preemptive attacks--the warning of the enemy attack being preempted might be inaccurate and preemptive attack on another nuclear power could not prevent tremendous destruction to the United States. While some argued that limited use of nuclear weapons might make nuclear war controllable and stave off a global catastrophe, fortunately such theories have never been tested. (Note 8)