My personal hope was that higher-level, civilian scrutiny of these plans could eliminate or at least greatly reduce the probability of the particular insanities that involved targeting China in all circumstances of war with the Soviet Union, and of automatically targeting cities en masse either in China or the USSR. By emphasizing the importance of withholding reserve forces (which meant mainly city-busting Polaris missiles) and withholding initial attacks on cities, I privately hoped to avert or minimize attacks on cities altogether, whether we struck preemptively or in retaliation.
Such an approach called for drastic changes in both plans and preparations from the posture that had developed since 1953, culminating in 1960. For that reason it seemed clear that the new BNSP should be drafted in considerable concrete detail, rather than being the brief and vague document which the military had come to expect in the years when it simply reaffirmed the existing New Look doctrine, which emphasized reliance on nuclear weapons, both strategic and tactical, largely for long-haul budgetary reasons. Moreover, although in principle the BNSP directive officially defined national policy, rather than arguing for it, some of these notions were so unfamiliar in classified strategic dialogue that it seemed desirable to smuggle in as much rationale as possible, both to undermine resistance and to introduce the planners to considerations that had not recently appeared in military writing.
For example, even a high civilian planner in the Defense Department—having been kept unfamiliar with the details of these plans and preparations by military bureaucratic secrecy—could have been expected to wonder why it was necessary to specify in the highest-level policy document something as obvious as the need for maintaining reserve forces. The answer, remarkably, was that the highest-level war plans for the United States at that time called for the immediate expenditure of all weapons as soon as they could be made operationally ready, under all circumstances of initiation of general war (“armed conflict with the Soviet Union”). In other words, these plans, and all supporting training and preparation, not only failed to provide for the maintaining and subsequent commitment of any tactical or strategic reserves—the core consideration in classical military planning—but they positively required that there should be no meaningful reserves.
Moreover, to avoid the previous ambiguity of the meaning of “general war,” Kaufmann and I agreed in our drafts to use the term “central war” (a RAND term), as distinguished from “local war” (instead of “limited war”). “Central war” was defined in my draft (later signed by McNamara) as “war involving deliberate nuclear attacks, instituted by government authority, upon the homelands of one or both of the two major powers, the United States and the Soviet Union.” That was in the spirit of the narrow definition of “general war” proposed by the Army and Navy in earlier disputes, rejected by the Air Force, Secretary of Defense Gates, and President Eisenhower. There was no longer in our guidance a concept of “general war” defined simply as “armed conflict with the Soviet Union.”
“Local war” was defined in our drafts as “any other armed conflict.” The previous JSCP concept of “limited war”—as distinct from war with the Soviet Union—was discarded because we proposed to aim at limiting, if possible, even hostilities with the Soviet Union, even in central war.
In the late afternoon of April 7, 1961, with a good deal of satisfaction, I wrote the last line of my first draft of the general war section of the BNSP.64 I remember looking up at the clock on the wall in the outer ISA office where I was typing and noticing that it was five P.M. For the first time that day, it occurred to me that it was my birthday. I was thirty. I remember thinking: for the rest of my life, I won’t have done anything more important than this. I told Harry that it was my birthday and I had finished a first draft. He said we should knock off (early!) and celebrate; he took me out to dinner.
Some days later I had a finished product. This took the form of a twelve-page discussion of goals, contingencies, and requirements, intended to make both the desired changes and the reasoning for them fully explicit to the military planners working on the JSCP and the subordinate plans.
To an uninformed reader—nearly everyone outside the actual nuclear planning process, including the secretary of defense and the president—these proposed policies would probably appear commonsensical. And so they were, except for the fact that almost every sentence constituted a radical challenge to and departure from some fundamental characteristic of the then-existing plans and preparations. For instance:
My proposal to retain a strategic reserve (particularly of the city-busting Polaris missiles) ran completely counter to the previous plan, in which all ready vehicles, including the Polaris missiles, were committed to preplanned targets as soon as possible.
My insistence on the importance of maintaining reliable command and control ran against the notion that unauthorized “initiative” might be necessary, either at high military levels of command or at low, an attitude that increased the possibility of unauthorized “initiative” in a time of crisis, under the stress of ambiguous indications or an outage of communications with higher command.
While there existed physical safeguards against accidents, there had been almost none against unauthorized action, either in connection with individual vehicles or in command post operations. I proposed that such safeguards could take the form of a combination lock on weapons, requiring a code sent by higher authority to unsafe or release the weapon (some form of PALs).
The rigid SIOP provided for no distinction between the USSR and China; it allowed for no avoidance or postponement of attacks on cities; it allowed for no option to minimize nonmilitary casualties; it offered no option for preserving enemy command and control capability. In contrast, I called for flexible contingency planning that allowed for all these options.
Existing planning allowed for no Stop order once an authenticated Execute order was received by SAC forces. Since this unleashed attacks on all major Sino-Soviet urban-industrial centers and governmental and military control centers, this policy maintained no plausible basis for inducing any Soviet commanders or units to terminate operations prior to expending all their weapons upon U.S. and allied cities. I proposed that a secure system of command and control was necessary to allow the option of limiting or terminating a conflict before all our forces were deployed, with reliable “stop” or “recall” orders.
All this was laid out in a memo for Harry Rowen, Paul Nitze, and Secretary of Defense McNamara, listing some of the limitations of the current plans that I intended to redress.
A second memo listed some of the changes my draft guidance called for:
elimination of the SIOP as a single, automatic response in central war;
elimination of the automatic inclusion of China and Soviet satellite states;
plans to withhold some survivable forces, and an initial avoidance of enemy cities and governmental and military controls;
the requirement of a survivable, flexible command and control system, headed by the president or as high an authoritative figure as possible;
an effort to induce the enemy to terminate war by not destroying all major urban-industrial areas at the outset;
plans and preparations to use conventional weapons in local conflict, up to large-scale conflict (in addition to plans to use nuclear weapons);
rejection of any single, inflexible plan to be adopted for use in a wide range of circumstances of central war (let alone the SIOP), or that any given set of targets should be marked for immediate, automatic destruction under all conditions of central war; and
rejection of the inevitability of central war in war with the Soviet Union.
On the basis of these memos, as well as an additional one that laid out steps that could be implemented in the short run, I got word from McNamara’s office that I should prepare a draft for the secretary to send to the JCS directing CINCSAC, as director of strategic target planning, to explore and make concrete recommendations for introducing command flexibility and a
lternative options to the war plans in the relatively short run. I had spent an afternoon with Alain Enthoven in his office of Systems Analysis roughing out “options” in line with my guidance,65 which were refined in specifics by his RAND consultants Frank Trinkl and Dave McGarvey (on whom both Alain and Bill Kaufmann had long relied for crucial calculations).
When I showed my first draft to Colonel Lukeman on the Joint Staff, he warned me that it wasn’t tactful enough to get a helpful response from General Power. In particular, Power would be offended by the implication that there weren’t any real alternative options in the current plan. They had, after all, what they called “options” in the plan (although they all involved attack by all ready forces—and eventually all forces, with none in reserve—against the same target list). He edited my draft to make it less provocative to SAC, posing “questions,” and adding a sentence beginning, “Recognizing that these plans already permit a variety of options keyed to duration of warning, geographic discretion, constraints, and specifics of weather and visibility …”
The final version,66 redrafted for Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric’s signature, was sent to the JCS chairman on May 5, 1961, with the heading “Policy Guidance on Plans for Central War,” along with my draft portion of the proposed BNSP.67† (For texts of all these memos and drafts, see ellsberg.net/BNSP.)
“My” revised guidance became the basis for the operational war plans under Kennedy—reviewed by me for Deputy Secretary Gilpatric in 1962, 1963, and again in the Johnson administration in 1964. It has been reported by insiders and scholars to have been a critical influence on U.S. strategic war planning68 ever since.†
Years later, when I mentioned to a friend that I had finished my first draft of the Top Secret guidance to planning for general nuclear war on my thirtieth birthday, his uncharitable reaction was, “That’s frightening.” I said, “True. But you should have seen the plan I was replacing.” In years to come, the memory of this accomplishment did not bring me the same satisfaction it brought when I was thirty.
CHAPTER 9
Questions for the Joint Chiefs
How Many Will Die?
In the spring of 1961, Harry Rowen told me that after my briefing to McGeorge Bundy in January, Bundy had called the director of the Joint Staff of the JCS and asked him to “send over a copy of the JSCP.”
The director told him, “Oh, we can’t release that.”
Bundy said, “The president wants to read it.”
The director said, “But we’ve never released that. I can’t.”
Bundy told him, “You don’t seem to be hearing me. It’s the president who wants it.”
“We’ll brief him on it.”
Bundy said, “The president is a great reader. He wants to read it.”
It was finally agreed, Harry told me, that the president would get the JSCP and a briefing by a member of the Joint Staff.
Soon after I had finished drafting the basic national security policy, Rowen and I were talking to Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric in his office in the Pentagon, and Gilpatric remarked to me, “By the way, we finally got the JSCP.” He said that instead of sending it over to the White House, the Joint Staff had finally negotiated that they would give a briefing on it in Gilpatric’s office. McNamara had attended, and McGeorge Bundy came over from the White House.
I asked him if they had seen an actual copy of the plan after all. He said yes, the briefer had left the plan with him. I asked if I could see it. Gilpatric led us into his safe. Instead of a safe with drawers, he had a long closet that had been converted into a bank-like vault with a heavy steel door. It had a tall ceiling and reinforced walls lined with library shelves filled with documents stamped “Top Secret” and higher. He found a document lying on one of the shelves near the front and handed it to me.
At a glance, it didn’t look to me like the JSCP, because it was typed on regular eight-by-ten-inch paper, not the heavier eleven-by-fourteen-inch legal-size pages of a finished JCS document. Well, I thought, they might have just retyped it on regular-size paper for the deputy secretary. I looked immediately for the key section that appeared nowhere else but in the JSCP, the part the JCS had taken such care to withhold from civilians, the definition of “general war.”
It wasn’t there. There was no definition section, no definition of “general war” or “limited war.” I looked back to the first page and read the heading. It didn’t say “Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan.” It said, “Briefing on the JSCP.” Even that went beyond the terms of the earlier JCS directive I had seen, which told the Joint Staff that “neither the title Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan nor the initials JSCP are to be used in correspondence with the Office of Secretary of Defense.” This heading broke that rule by using the forbidden initials “JSCP,” apparently because Bundy’s call to the director had revealed that that cat was out of the bag. Someone had leaked the acronym at least. But it wasn’t yet clear to the Joint Staff that the White House or the Office of the Secretary of Defense knew more than the acronym—knew the contents of the plan and their implications—and the JCS hadn’t yet given that up.
I told Gilpatric, “This isn’t the JSCP. Is this all they gave you?”
He looked taken aback, for once confused. He said, “Yes, it is. But I’m certain they told me it was the JSCP—they were leaving me a copy of the JSCP. Are you sure it isn’t?”
I showed him the title. “It’s not the JSCP. It’s a copy of the briefing they gave you.” I remarked on the size of the paper and told him about the crucial part that was missing. Evidently, they had left that out of the briefing. There might be more they had omitted.
Gilpatric seemed more embarrassed than angry. He said, “They told me they’d be glad to answer any questions we might have from the briefing and the paper. Would you take this and write out some questions for me to send to them?”
I took the briefing paper back to the room where I was working in Rowen’s suite of offices and put it in the safe. Then I walked down to an office in the Air Staff and asked Lieutenant Colonel Bob Lukeman, who had originally shown me the JSCP, if I could borrow a copy again. I didn’t tell him what it was for, and he gave it to me without any questions.
Within minutes I was back in my office with the paper that Bundy—speaking for the president—and the secretary of defense had been unable to get. There were, as before, some advantages to being from RAND. The Air Staff thought of us as one of them. That was why I’d been shown the JSCP the year before. But by this time, in 1961, Lukeman knew that I was a consultant to the secretary of defense, which would normally have meant (and did mean for the Air Force chief of staff) that I was working for “the enemy,” as formidable an adversary as the Navy or Congress.
He had to have gotten in advance the approval of his immediate boss, Brigadier General Glenn Kent, for him to be showing me anything. I gathered that what was true for my friend the colonel must also be true for his boss. They disagreed with the policy embraced by the highest levels of the Air Force, wanted to see it changed, and were using me as a channel to the civilian authorities to make an end run around their own superiors.
I put the JSCP on a table next to the copy of the briefing paper from Gilpatric and began to compare them line by line. I made a list of the discrepancies and then began to lay out issues to be put to the JCS. I have my rough notes on questions for them.69 It took me a week of long days to finish them.
Some of these probed for the rationale of attacking cities and population en masse, immediately (or ever) under all—or for that matter, any—circumstances of war initiation. That was an aspect of the “optimum mix” concept that was embodied in the SIOP. I asked:
Why are major urban-industrial centers, or government controls, to be attacked concurrently with nuclear delivery capabilities?
What national objectives require that urban-industrial centers be on the “minimum essential list” for initial attack? By what reasoning are these “essential”? What
would be the costs, in terms of U.S. objectives, to omitting attack on these targets, relying upon residual strength to achieve objectives listed above?
What is the distribution, by type, of targets in the satellite states? What contribution do they make to immediate Sino-Soviet bloc offensive capabilities?
What is the total megatonnage dropped in the alert case? In the strategic warning case [full force]? What is the total of fission products? How much is air-burst, how much ground-burst? What would worldwide fallout be? What worldwide casualties?
To what extent, and in what precise ways, does the planned attack upon urban-industrial centers and bonus targets differ from an attack intended to maximize population loss70 in the Soviet Union?† In Communist China? In what ways will the execution of such attacks, under the several conditions of war initiation, contribute to U.S. wartime or postwar objectives?
Does the plan proceed on the assumption that it is national policy to hold the population of the USSR and Communist China responsible for acts of their governments? Are Communist Chinese people held responsible for acts of the Soviet government?
Other questions pointed to the lack of flexibility in the planning, another aspect of the SIOP (“Annex C” of the JSCP, guidance for the operational plans of SAC and Polaris, not mentioned as such in the briefing):
The plan provides for “optimum employment … under the several conditions under which hostilities may be initiated.” What are examples of those several conditions, other than Soviet surprise [nuclear] attack? How does the planned response differ for the different conditions? Is a single, uniform response optimal for all?
The Doomsday Machine Page 16