CHAPTER 8 
Pulling Back the Curtain
The pivotal moment in the arms race arrived—the ceaseless, forty-year buildup of the U.S. nuclear arsenal took a turn, then drew down sharply—when a civil servant named Franklin Miller took a close look at the SIOP.
Miller, a Phi Beta Kappa from Williams with a graduate degree from Princeton, came to the Pentagon in 1979 after a two-year stint in the State Department’s politico-military bureau. When he first arrived, he worked on policy toward nuclear weapons based in Europe. In October 1981, he was promoted to director of strategic forces policy, just as President Reagan signed his national security directive, NSDD-13, ordering the rapid modernization of all three legs of the Triad—the land-based ICBMs, the submarine-launched missiles, and the bombers—a milestone that coincided with Miller’s thirty-first birthday. Owing to a bureaucratic quirk, Miller’s job gave him a role in coordinating policy on nuclear doctrine and arms control, but not on nuclear targeting—not on how many weapons the Strategic Air Command should have or how it should use them in a nuclear war.
Still, Miller detected a serious anomaly. When he took the job, he read all the Top Secret nuclear guidance documents signed not only by Caspar Weinberger, the current secretary of defense, but also by his predecessors under all the presidents dating back to John F. Kennedy. Miller knew about the Limited Nuclear Options and Selective Attack Options, the orders to hold back a reserve force in the early phase of a war, the policies of controlling escalation and limiting damage in case deterrence failed. And yet, when he sat in on the annual SIOP briefing, which the SAC commander delivered at the Pentagon, he heard nothing about these options or policies.
A Navy friend introduced him to a young commander named Ed Ohlert, who was working in OP-65, the Navy’s nuclear policy shop. Ohlert confirmed Miller’s concerns about the disconnect between Washington’s directives and Omaha’s plans. Essentially, he said, all those interesting documents that Miller had been reading—the directives on strategic doctrine by Harold Brown, James Schlesinger, Robert McNamara, and their aides—were fiction; the officers in the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, the branch of SAC that actually wrote the war plans, ignored the documents. Sometimes the Joint Chiefs helped the officers cover their tracks: in negotiations with the defense secretary, they inserted caveats—noting, for instance, that the JSTPS would execute a limited attack, or spare Soviet cities from destruction, “to the extent that military necessity permits” or “to the degree practicable.” The Chiefs understood that, in drawing up the war plan, JSTPS would decide that these ideas were not practicable or consistent with military necessity. But none of the earlier defense secretaries had noticed the fine print; they’d never followed up to make sure their directives were reflected in the war plan’s final draft
For all practical purposes, Ohlert told Miller, the war plan contained only one option that was thoroughly conceived and rehearsed: MAO-4, the ultimate Major Attack Option—the option to destroy as many targets, with as many nuclear weapons, as quickly as possible. To the extent some smaller attacks were written into the plan, they weren’t “limited” by any reasonable definition of the word: the Soviets would interpret it as an all-out attack and retaliate accordingly.
Sometimes JSTPS would play word games to protect the plan. Since McNamara’s first revision to the SIOP, in 1962, every defense secretary had ordered an option that let the president refrain from attacking Soviet or Chinese cities. But, Ohlert told Miller, if a nuclear war happened and if the president selected that option, he would wind up bombing cities anyway. There were two reasons for this. First, the actual “no-cities” option, as devised by JSTPS, excluded just twenty-four “urban areas”—described as Soviet and Warsaw Pact “regional political centers”—from the target list. That meant lots of other, very large cities, besides those twenty-four, would still get hit. Second, even those exempted cities would get hit to some extent because the JSTPS defined an “urban area” as a circle within which 95 percent of a city’s population lived. However, in many cities, the factories, military facilities, and government buildings—the prime targets—were located away from most residences; so the bombs and warheads could pummel those targets without hitting “urban areas.”
There was another semantic sleight of hand that allowed the JSTPS to understate the damage done by the war plan. When the officers calculated how many people would be killed and how many buildings would be destroyed, they took into account only the blast of the bombs. They ignored the other effects of a nuclear explosion—heat, fire, smoke, radioactive fallout—rationalizing that those effects couldn’t be measured precisely, since they depended on wind, weather, and other variables. Tens of millions of civilians would die from those effects, even if the president had expressly ordered that their lives be spared.
In the course of gathering evidence of these massive discrepancies, Miller came across Wayne Lumsden, a computer whiz in the Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, the successor to the Office of Systems Analysis created by McNamara’s whiz kids. Lumsden was as low-profile as they came: he worked literally in the Pentagon’s basement, monitoring the JSTPS database for software errors and mishaps, a purely technical task—but it gave him full access to the database itself, including all the targets in the SIOP and a rundown of which U.S. weapons would hit them. Miller had Lumsden transferred to his directorate, thus giving him the same access without Omaha’s knowledge.
The database revealed that the disparity between Washington’s orders and Omaha’s plans was even wider than Miller had thought. One of the most blatant instances turned out to be the planning for Limited Nuclear Options. Miller asked an analyst in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s own intelligence bureaucracy, how many discrete objects the Soviets’ early warning systems could track—how many incoming missiles it could detect as individual missiles—before they all merged into a vague blob on the radar screens. The answer was 200. In other words, on the Soviets’ radar screens, 200 missiles and 2,000 missiles looked exactly the same. And yet in SIOP’s smallest “limited” attack option, the United States would launch nearly 1,000 missiles. To Soviet air defense officers, this would look like an all-out attack.
Worse still, in every limited option, SAC would launch weapons from all three legs of the Triad—ICBMs, submarine-launched missiles, and bombs dropped by B-52 airplanes. It was a case of bureaucratic politics run amuck: the missile commanders, the submariners, and the bombardiers had all demanded a piece of every attack option—and they each got their piece. As a result, if there were a war, the missiles would land a half-hour after the president’s order, while the much slower airplanes wouldn’t start dropping bombs until several hours later. Even if the Soviet leaders were inclined and able to distinguish between a limited and an all-out attack, they would interpret such a prolonged series of strikes—from the air, land, and sea, over a stretch of many hours—as an all-out campaign.
After compiling several similar examples of this trait, Miller put together a briefing to present to his superiors. By this time, Ed Ohlert had been called back to the Navy. To replace him, Miller hired a brash, bright twenty-eight-year-old named Gil Klinger. The two had met in 1983, when Klinger, still a graduate student at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, had a summer job working for the Navy on the highly accurate warhead for the Trident II missile. Two years later, he won a slot in the Presidential Management Internship Program, and Miller arranged for him to intern in his office, working with Ohlert on the strategy-mismatch project. After earning his degree at Harvard, Klinger spent six months working in the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, reviewing Annex C of the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, the JCS guidance for the SIOP—perfect preparation for returning to Miller’s office in 1987.
Miller was not a dove or an advocate of disarmament. He agreed with the idea of Limited Nuclear Options laid down by Kaufmann, McNamara, Kissinger, Schlesinger, and the others. His goal was to translate their abstract idea into actual policy and plans—to make limited options truly limited.
With Weinberger’s full backing, he and Klinger rewrote the guidance for the war plan. They redefined “urban areas” so the phrase meant what most people thought it meant; they inserted an option allowing the president to “ride out” a Soviet first strike rather than launching on warning of an attack; and they cut down all the nuclear options in size and intensity.
The Selective Attack Options, which had once involved launching thousands of weapons against all sorts of targets across the entire Soviet Union, were now limited to no more than 100 weapons for each option, and they would be aimed only at Soviet military targets. A new category, called Basic Attack Options, would launch fewer than twenty nuclear weapons—again, only at military targets—in a single, compact geographical area. Even the Major Attack Options were not quite as destructive as they had once been. As in previous war plans, MAO-1 involved hitting only Soviet nuclear sites, MAO-2 added conventional military targets, MAO-3 combined the first two options as well as “leadership” targets, and MAO-4 included all of those sites plus “war-supporting industries”—but those industries, many of them in cities, could be hit only by bombers, not by ballistic missiles, which is to say they couldn’t be hit right away. The point was to let some time pass, to see if the war could be halted and the bombers called back to their base, before inflicting the most devastating damage. The old all-out attack option, which unleashed every weapon against every target, was removed from the SIOP. Nor were factories and other structures to be destroyed per se, unless they directly supported the Soviet war effort.
The key phrase, of course, was “per se.” Nuclear weapons were so powerful—the effects of blast, fire, smoke, and radiation would spread so widely—that many millions of people would die, and many thousands of buildings would collapse, regardless of the fine-tuning.
Miller and Klinger sometimes talked about this fact. They knew that, if a nuclear war broke out, the pressures to escalate would be immense. Klinger once told Miller, “If (God forbid) there’s a nuclear war, and if (God forbid) you and I survive it, and if (God forbid) the Russians win, we’re going to be put on trial at Nuremberg.”
Miller was not amused at the thought of being tagged a war criminal.
Still, both of them also thought—as did the nuclear strategists before them—that, if there was a chance, even a small one, that all-out war could be averted and the damage even somewhat limited, then they were obligated to give it a try; and that meant devising war plans—giving the president options—that made the aversion possible.
In November 1988, Reagan’s number two, George H. W. Bush, won the presidential election, and at first it seemed as if Miller would soon be on the outs. Some of the generals who were fed up with Miller’s intrusions on their turf advised some of Bush’s incoming advisers—especially Paul Wolfowitz, who would be the undersecretary of defense for policy—to take him down a few notches. But then Bush chose Dick Cheney to be secretary of defense, and Miller was in the clear.
Miller was on friendly terms with Cheney. Each year, as part of a program created during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, a group of officials from the State Department, the Pentagon, and the intelligence agencies, as well as select members of Congress, took part in a beyond-Top-Secret exercise testing the procedures for “continuity of government” in case of a nuclear attack. The team was flown all over the country, from one obscure military base to another, where they actually would be taken during a nuclear war, and rehearsed running a regime under emergency powers. Cheney was chairman of the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives, and he’d been the White House chief of staff under President Ford, so he was seen as an ideal pick for the group’s chief of staff. Miller was one of the Pentagon staffers on the team, and, during their leisure hours, he got to know Cheney and told him about his work on the SIOP. Cheney was interested.
The two kept talking periodically, so, by the time he was sworn in as defense secretary, Cheney was up to speed on what Miller had been doing. In the fall, the SAC commander, General John Chain, brought his aides in to brief him and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Tank—the Chiefs’ conference room on the third floor of the Pentagon—on the latest revisions to the SIOP. Cheney asked Miller to sit in.
Conversations with Miller had primed Cheney to notice peculiarities in the war plan, and he was particularly struck by one slide showing that the SIOP’s main attack plan hit the Soviet transportation network with 725 nuclear weapons.
Cheney asked Chain why.
Chain looked at the colonel who had been running the briefing’s slideshow and reading the script. The colonel shrugged. Chain told Cheney he’d get back to him on that.
Afterward, Cheney brought Miller into his office and asked him what was going on. Miller said he didn’t know: Weinberger and Carlucci had given him a mandate to investigate whether the SIOP reflected the president’s policies, but the Joint Staff had barred him from examining targets—either the individual targets themselves or the way JSTPS calculated how many weapons to hit them with.
Cheney told Miller that the bar was hereby lifted and had him write a memo, which Cheney then signed, ordering the SAC commander to give Miller and his staff access to all documents that they requested. Cheney also promoted Miller to the rank of deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear forces and arms control policy and stated explicitly that one of his jobs was to lead a “SIOP Review,” which would be conducted jointly by Miller (acting on Cheney’s behalf), the Joint Staff, and the JSTPS. Miller in turn promoted Gil Klinger to take over his old job as director for strategic forces—and made him his agent in the review’s sessions at SAC’s Omaha headquarters.
Then came a moment of serendipity. A lieutenant colonel from JSTPS, who’d been given a two-year assignment to Miller’s office (as much, it was suspected, to keep an eye on Miller as to assist him in his work), handed him a copy of the Blue Book. The Blue Book was very different from the Black Book, the thin binder that the president would use to review his attack options in case of nuclear war. The Blue Book, which was as thick as an epic Russian novel, was essentially the owners’ manual for the SIOP, laying out the formulas and the premises of the calculations for what kinds of weapons would be aimed at which targets, how many were needed to inflict various levels of damage—everything that SAC’s war planners needed to know and, more to the point, everything that Cheney wanted Miller to find out. This was SAC’s secret treasure map, shown to no one outside SAC’s inner sanctum, not even to the Joint Chiefs or the secretary of defense, and certainly not to some deputy assistant secretary.
At this point in their study, the Blue Book only confirmed and fleshed out what Miller and Klinger had discovered. More illuminating was the process that the book revealed—the specific way that a group of colonels in Omaha had been calculating how to allocate SAC’s nuclear weapons to Soviet targets. Through the SIOP Review, Miller and Klinger would be commandeering the jobs of those colonels.
Armed with Cheney’s mandate and the Blue Book’s insights, they could now do what no one outside SAC—and no civilians anywhere—had ever done. They would conduct a zero-based, bottom-up, target-by-target review of the SIOP—then construct an all-new SIOP, indicating which targets really needed to be destroyed, and how many weapons were really needed to destroy them, under the guidelines set in the nuclear policy documents signed by the secretary of defense and approved by the president.
In December 1989, Miller sent Klinger and a few other aides to Omaha to begin the deconstruction. On their first day, they walked into the Air Room—the workspace of the JSTPS, a vast open auditorium three stories beneath Building 500 of SAC headquarters, filled with whiteboards, mainframe computers, and big maps of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China—and they could feel the gust of hostility. Klinger was barely thirty years old; everyone in the room was older and more senior. Officers who had been around for a while were wearily reminded of McNamara’s whiz kids; those too young to recall those days had heard the stories and absorbed the resentments. Klinger was tempted to say something snide but knew that he needed these officers’ help, so he pumped his capacity for politeness to unprecedented levels, telling them that he looked forward to working with them, so he could better understand the important work they were doing.
An Air Force colonel, who was having a hard time restraining himself from committing violence, growled at Klinger, “What difference does your review make?”
Klinger replied, with as mature a calm as he could muster, “If you’re telling me that it doesn’t matter how much the official nuclear war plan differs from what the president thinks it is, then I don’t think anything matters.”
The colonel said nothing in return, and the frost receded, a bit.
Work began the next morning. Klinger and his aides asked to see a few targets. One of the first, which they’d noticed ahead of time in the SIOP’s National Strategic Target List, was a Soviet bomber base in Tiksi, inside the Arctic Circle. It wasn’t even a primary base; it was a dispersal base, where Soviet planes would land after dropping their bombs on American targets, and the climate was so forbiddingly cold and windy that the base couldn’t be used for more than half the year. And yet, it turned out, the SIOP called for firing seventeen nuclear weapons at a five-mile radius around the base—regardless of the season—including three Minuteman II ICBMs, each carrying a 1.2-megaton warhead.
Klinger noticed redundancy throughout the calculations in the Blue Book, and, now that he was in the belly of the beast, he searched for more examples. He had no trouble finding them.
He was especially struck by the way the plan went after the Soviet army’s tanks. The SIOP aimed a lot of weapons not only at the tanks themselves, but also at the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore.
Klinger asked why they needed to destroy the entire production chain. His liaison officer told him that, if they left any part of the chain intact, the Soviets could reconstruct the factory and rebuild tanks. Though Klinger didn’t know it, this was the same unfathomable frame of mind that, back in the early 1960s, led General Curtis LeMay to insist on destroying not just the repair depot at a Soviet air base but also the factory that built the spare parts supplying the repair depot because, otherwise, the Soviets could reconstruct their air force—never mind that thousands of American bombs and warheads would have just reduced the entire country to a smoldering radioactive ruin. Much at SAC had changed in the thirty years since LeMay’s command; but in the bowels of the building, in its most mechanical and secretive compartment, where the flight paths of doom were plotted, the old cylinders were roaring full blast on autopilot.
Back at the Pentagon, specialists at the Defense Intelligence Agency had briefed Klinger and Miller on the art and science of “nodal analysis.” As applied to warfare, nodal analysis examined a system or network with an eye toward identifying the central links—the nodes—so that the commanders could allocate their weapons most cost-effectively: destroy the nodes, which in some cases would take only a few weapons, and the whole system falls apart. There were some officers in the SAC Air Room who specialized in this sort of analysis; they were among the few people who welcomed Klinger’s visits, since, as he discovered when he came across them one day, the leadership of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff had never paid attention to their advice.
One of these analysts told Klinger, when they first met, “We’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”
From talking with these analysts and perusing the Blue Book, Klinger unraveled the mystery of why the SIOP laid down 725 nuclear weapons on the Soviet transportation network. It turned out that JSTPS had decided, for unclear reasons, to launch nuclear weapons against all railroad yards above a certain metric capacity and all railway bridges that stretched for longer than a certain distance. But, as the Defense Intelligence Agency’s logistics specialists told them, this standard was completely arbitrary; it had no bearing on the military value of a target. Some long bridges and large railroad yards weren’t used by the military at all; some very short bridges and small rail yards were militarily vital. There were other absurdities. For instance, the loading zones on the Russia-Poland border were clearly vital military targets: Russian and Polish rail tracks had different gauges; the loading zones were where Soviet armored vehicles would be switched from one track to the other before proceeding to the front lines of a war with NATO. The SIOP did target those loading zones—but it left unscathed some road bridges a couple miles up the river, because the JSTPS had called for attacking the Soviet “rail system,” not the “transportation system.” Bridges on roads weren’t targeted at all.
Klinger pointed this out at one of his sessions with the target planning staff at SAC headquarters. “You’re throwing all these weapons, and you’re not even destroying the transit system,” he told them. “What’s going on?”
Silence filled the room for a few seconds. Then a major spoke up. “Sir, I’ve got to tell you,” he said, “we’ve got nothing.” A few of his fellow officers laughed.
“Okay, then,” Klinger said, taking advantage of the opening, “let’s fix this problem.” It was at this point that some of the officers with JSTPS realized that they had a problem.
Another source of excess was the complicity of SAC’s Intelligence office, whose job was to justify as many weapons for SAC as possible. The poster child for this phenomenon was the Soviets’ anti-ballistic-missile site near Sheremetyevo Airport on the outskirts of Moscow. The SIOP called for pummeling all the elements of the site—the control center, the radars, and the interceptors—with a total of sixty-nine nuclear warheads and bombs.
The rationale, it turned out, was that the guidance called for destroying the site with near-total certainty. SAC Intelligence estimated that each of the Soviet interceptors had a high probability of shooting down an incoming warhead. Therefore, SAC had to send in sixty-nine warheads to make sure that at least one of them got through.
This was insane. No defensive system in the history of warfare had been so effective. But Klinger couldn’t press his challenge very far. He and Miller had no authority to challenge intelligence estimates. So at the end of their work, after drastically paring down the SIOP’s requirements, there were still sixty-nine warheads aimed at this complex. (After the Cold War was over and Western inspectors got a look, they discovered that the ABM system at Sheremetyevo was worthless; it couldn’t have shot down a single warhead coming straight at it.)
As he delved more deeply into the war plan, Klinger saw that much of it made no sense on any grounds. At one point, he had Wayne Lumsden print out the latitude and longitude of all the targets in the SIOP database. He then asked the graphics department to plot all those points on a huge map of the Soviet Union and draw circles around each point, signifying the area that would be destroyed by the specific weapon aimed at each target.
The result was a vivid, color-coded display of massive death and destruction. It showed a staggering number of bombs and warheads hitting nearly every city in overlapping density. Hundreds of targets were so close to one another that, in many cases, one weapon would hit more than one target, and one target would get hit by three, five, as many as seven nuclear weapons.
Klinger wondered how many weapons were aimed at Moscow and its environs. On the map, he drew a fifty-mile circle around the capital and counted the number of weapons that were aimed at targets within the circle. There were 689 of them, many releasing more than a megaton of explosive power.
“Overkill” was a severe understatement for what had gone on for decades.
The SIOP was a broken machine, the discombobulated aggregate of compartmentalized calculations. One analyst was instructed to aim a missile at a ball-bearing factory; another plotted the flight path for a bomber to destroy the Ministry of Defense headquarters; still another programmed a cruise missile to ravage a major railroad yard. Nobody took the broader look; nobody saw that the three targets were within a short hike of one another—and that, therefore, just one of those weapons would be enough to demolish them all. And, because the Blue Book specified that those targets had to be destroyed with high confidence, more than one weapon had to be aimed at each, meaning that all these structures would get clobbered by a half-dozen weapons, in some cases more.
Moscow was hardly unique. The same thing would happen in Leningrad, Vladivostok, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Tomsk—any city that housed military targets or war-supporting industries or political-relocation sites.
Few officers, even inside JSTPS, had known the full scope of their war plan’s bloat. The colonels and generals in the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, who had so fiercely resisted Miller’s intrusions, were stunned; they hadn’t realized how much they didn’t know—how much their brother officers at SAC, whose shroud they’d been protecting, had misled them.
Then came a revelation that put everything in perspective. By this time, the Bush administration and the Soviet Union were negotiating the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. During one of his early trips to Omaha, Klinger asked one of the officers at JSTPS to analyze whether the treaty’s prospective cuts would affect their ability to fulfill their mission—whether they could continue to deter nuclear war and limit damage if deterrence failed.
The officer replied that he didn’t do that sort of analysis.
Klinger, thinking he wasn’t making himself clear, rephrased the question.
The officer said that he understood the question perfectly well. He explained that JSTPS was prohibited from setting requirements or analyzing whether a certain kind of attack, with a certain number of weapons, would be militarily effective. This prohibition had been laid down in 1960, with the first SIOP, when Navy admirals feared that Air Force generals would use the war plan as a tool for controlling the Navy’s arsenal and budget.
Klinger was astonished. The officers who drew up the war plan didn’t know—weren’t allowed to figure out—how many weapons they needed to protect the nation? What did they do then?
The officer replied that they take all the weapons that are assigned to SAC and aim them at all the targets on their list.
Finally, after all these months of trying to unscramble the oddities of the SIOP, Klinger decoded the mystery: the United States’ nuclear war plan was based on supply, not demand—on how many weapons the warriors happened to have, not on how many they needed.
SAC’s commander, General Jack Chain, had recently testified before Congress that he needed 10,000 nuclear weapons because he had 10,000 targets. Many people, including Klinger, had thought that Chain was joking or that he was cynical or stupid. But no, this was the mentality of the nuclear targeteers; this was what they did.
The implication was stunning. Back in McNamara’s time, the whiz kids had famously asked, “How much is enough?” The chief whiz kid, Alain Enthoven, later coauthored a book, a combination treatise and memoir, with that question as its title. Now, it turned out that nobody had ever asked the question in a way, or from a position, that mattered. The authors of the Defense Department’s directives on how to use (and not use) nuclear weapons may have thought they were asking the question; but they’d lacked access to the machinery of the SIOP—they hadn’t known how to ask the question in a way that the JSTPS officers could translate into their operational plan. Meanwhile, the JSTPS officers were barred from asking, or trying to answer, the question on their own. Washington and Omaha were running on parallel, sometimes wildly divergent tracks—which had been Curtis LeMay’s intention all along: he didn’t want civilians, or even rival branches of the military, meddling with his war plan, and he designed SAC explicitly to keep them out.
Back in Washington, Cheney and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Colin Powell, were about to meet with Vice Admiral Ron Eytchison, the vice director of JSTPS. Miller prepped Cheney to ask the three-star admiral the same question that Klinger had asked the aide out in Omaha: Would the limits negotiated at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks affect SAC’s ability to execute U.S. policy? Eytchison supplied the same answer: he didn’t know; that’s not a question that JSTPS asks or answers.
The reaction from Powell and Cheney was the same as Klinger’s had been when the reality hit him: a disbelieving stare, eyes unblinking, jaw slightly agape. The problem, they all realized, was deeper than they’d ever suspected; the pathologies were embedded in the organization—the very existence—of the SAC bureaucracy.
From that point on, roughly every two months over the course of their review, usually on a Friday afternoon from three o’clock until five, Miller and Klinger briefed their latest findings to Cheney and Powell in the secretary’s third-floor conference room.
Powell had risen through the Army’s ranks as an infantry soldier, a grunt fighting in the rice paddies of Vietnam—and, like most grunts of his generation, he had little interest in the nuclear enterprise. In the mid-1980s, as commander of the Army’s V Corps in Europe, Powell took part in a tabletop war game, in which the Soviets invade West Germany. His armored divisions shot up the invaders, but then the Soviets sent in reinforcements, overwhelming the corps. At that point, under the rules of the game, he was supposed to ask permission to fire nuclear weapons. But Powell thought that made no sense: the Soviet troops were in West German territory; clobbering them with nukes would kill millions of West German citizens.
Powell pointed this out to the game manager, who assured him that the civilians had all been evacuated.
Oh? Powell asked. Where did they go?
The manager replied that he didn’t know, he was only reciting what was in the plan.
Powell then asked what the Soviets were likely to do after he launched the nuclear weapons.
They’ll probably fire their nuclear weapons, the manager responded.
“Does this make any sense at all?” Powell asked the manager, who didn’t know what to say.
Powell concluded from the exercise that war with the Soviet Union probably would trigger nuclear war; that nuclear weapons, once used, couldn’t be controlled; and that, therefore, war had to be prevented at all cost.
This was one problem Powell had with the whole business of Limited Nuclear Options. He told Miller, during one of their sessions, that there was nothing to support the idea that we could drop a few nukes on Soviet territory and say, “Let’s stop here.” There was nothing in the intelligence reports to suggest that the Soviets would play the same game—that they would do anything but retaliate, and with more than just a few nukes of their own.
Still, Powell thought that, as long as we had nuclear weapons, and as long as there was a chance they might be used, there might as well be some way of controlling the damage, if at all possible. And so he supported Miller and Klinger in their work—and ordered the officers of the Joint Staff to support the work too.
By the early spring of 1991, Miller, Klinger, and their increasingly sympathetic—though, in some cases, still resistant—collaborators in JSTPS and the Joint Staff were finishing up the SIOP Review. They’d gone back over every target, debating whether it needed to be a target and, if it did, whether just one weapon should be launched at it or whether it was a sufficiently important target to justify two or more weapons, and what kinds of weapons: did the target need to be destroyed right away, in which case a missile should cover it; or was the need less urgent, in which case a bomber, taking several hours to reach its goal, would be sufficient.
Miller and Klinger, with the support of Cheney and Powell, were the first two outsiders to breach the wall. At the end of the process, their team wound up cutting the “required” number of U.S. strategic nuclear weapons by half—from about 12,000 to 5,888—and even that was after several compromises; a more stringent review could have cut more. Even so, it was the steepest reduction in Cold War history, and it stemmed not from an arms control treaty or the relaxation of international tensions, but rather from a purely technical, deep-dive analysis of how many weapons U.S. policy required. (In a bit of whimsy, Klinger considered getting a custom license plate for his car reading “5888,” but decided that his superiors wouldn’t be amused seeing it on display in the Pentagon parking lot, much less tooling around the nation’s capital.)
In the fall of 1991, SAC’s commander, General George Lee Butler, who had replaced Jack Chain at the start of the year, came to Washington and briefed Cheney, Powell, and their staffs on the new SIOP—the first SIOP to reflect all of the Miller-Klinger changes. Butler had been the Joint Staff’s director of strategic plans and policy during the final phase of their work and had thoroughly absorbed its lessons. In his first months at SAC, he’d conducted his own review of the SIOP, while it was still in transition, and came away appalled by the degree of overkill. During his briefing in the Pentagon, Butler not only presented the new plan, he took credit for it. Miller and Klinger smiled at each other. Success in bureaucratic politics comes when those in charge claim a once-unpopular idea as their own. By this measure, the two civil servants had achieved a remarkable success.
Finally, around the same time Miller and Klinger were breaching walls in Omaha, another, literal wall was toppled—the Berlin Wall separating East and West Berlin—followed quickly by the collapse of the border between East and West Germany and, with that, the end of the Cold War. Miller and Klinger leapt back into the SIOP and—with Cheney’s orders, Powell’s endorsement, and cooperation from the JSTPS—removed all the targets that lay inside Eastern Europe. Those countries, once under Soviet rule but now independent, had housed hundreds of targets—mainly air defense sites, which American nuclear missiles would destroy in order to pave a “corridor,” allowing American bombers to fly toward their targets inside the USSR without getting shot down on the way. While they were at it, Miller and Klinger examined how many targets should be removed if, as seemed possible, the Soviet Union fell apart and, therefore, only the republics possessing nuclear weapons—Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus—remained on the list.
In the end, they cut the requirements for another couple thousand bombs and warheads, leaving the number of strategic weapons at 3,500—the lowest number since 1962, when the nuclear arms race began.
George H. W. Bush didn’t pay a lot of attention to the nuclear war plan. For one thing, he trusted his national security team to do that. For another, he had more urgent tasks on his plate: maneuvering through the end of the Cold War and the crumbling of the Soviet Union without setting off new tensions; invading Panama and arresting its drug-dealing dictator, Manuel Noriega, while minimizing strife in its capital; and, perhaps most delicately and forcefully, mobilizing a half-million troops and an alliance of Western, Muslim, and Arab nations to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invading army from Kuwait.
On November 8, 1990, the day Bush announced a doubling of troops for that operation, he received a briefing on the new, more flexible options for the nuclear war plan. The top players were in the room—Cheney, Powell, and Vice President Dan Quayle—as were some staffers, including Miller and Klinger.
When the briefers displayed the chart showing the distinctions among the major attack options—MAO-1, MAO-2, MAO-3, and MAO-4—Bush turned to Cheney and asked, in a calm, no-nonsense tone, “Tell me the difference in the number of people I’m going to kill.”
Klinger was impressed but also shaken. He had never before heard that question asked in the first person. For more than a year, he’d been immersed in the bubble of the SIOP, thinking about nuclear war day and night, to the point where he’d honed it into an abstraction. That was the only way to stay sane while pondering megatons and megadeaths—to focus on the calculations and the scenarios, which, after a while, loomed in the mind as more palpable, certainly more controllable, than the catastrophic chaos that would ensue if the war games played out in real life. Mordant humor was another way of keeping sane: hence the special appeal of Dr. Strangelove to many nuclear strategists, doubly so to Klinger, a young man with a mordant streak, who, when asked at cocktail parties what he did for a living, would sometimes reply, “I plan the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens.” Yet here was Bush, the man who would actually make that decision—who would select the option and push the button—facing up to the consequences of his actions. Suddenly, nuclear war seemed not so abstract.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, its empire, the raison d’être for the SIOP and the Cold War, was falling apart. On March 31, 1991, the Warsaw Pact formally dissolved. On August 18, a cabal of hard-liners in the Kremlin arrested Mikhail Gorbachev, held him captive in Crimea, and seized power. Boris Yeltsin, who had been elected president of the Russian Federation a few months earlier, led protests outside the White House, the stately headquarters of the parliament. On August 21, the military took the protesters’ side, the coup ended, and Gorbachev returned—but to a very different Moscow. The Communist Party, to which he still pledged fealty, was kaput. On the last day of the year, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved, replaced by a confederation of independent states, and Yeltsin took Gorbachev’s place in the Kremlin, which was now the governing center of a new democratic Russian Republic.
It had taken nearly a year for Bush and his security advisers to drop their skepticism about Gorbachev’s reforms and intentions. They were even more leery of Yeltsin when he first mounted his challenge to Gorbachev; but after he led the revolt against the coup plotters, Bush aligned himself completely with the new Russian leader and sought ways to signal America’s support for this new revolution. He saw clearly that Russia posed no threat to the West, and he wanted the Russians to know that the West posed no threat to them. The whole premise of the nuclear standoff was now shattered; having been briefed on the revised SIOP, Bush knew that massive cuts in nuclear weapons were not merely feasible but under way, and he wanted to make deeper cuts still. But he was frustrated with the bureaucratized arms control process; the latest round of negotiations, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, had been going on for nine years, since Reagan’s second year in office.
So, on Friday night, September 27, in a televised speech, he announced that he was taking a series of unilateral steps, which would “make the world a less dangerous place than ever before in the nuclear age.” For thirty-six years, SAC had kept some of its bomber aircraft on runway alert, fully loaded, pilots in or near the cockpit, ready to take off in minutes; Bush was now ordering them to stand down and to taxi off the runways. He also ordered all nuclear weapons to be removed from surface ships, conventional subs, and tactical aircraft.
Four months later, in his State of the Union Address, he went further and announced the withdrawal of all short-range nuclear weapons from Europe (and from South Korea, while he was at it). In the September 27 speech, he’d said that, in the face of all these cuts, the United States must “vigorously” continue the “strategic modernization program,” including the B-2 bomber and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Now, he announced the shutdown of SAC itself, renaming it the U.S. Strategic Command and rotating its chiefs between Air Force generals and Navy admirals, so it would no longer be dominated by the vested interests of one service.
In outlining each step, Bush invited the Russians to reciprocate—which they did, in some cases, at least for a while—but he stressed that, even if they didn’t, his actions were in America’s interests.
Bush had planned his actions and written his speech in consultation with only a handful of officials and aides in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department, alerting his wider cabinet and U.S. allies, as well as Yeltsin, just hours before the broadcast. Cheney made the case that Bush should put more emphasis on urging the Russians to reciprocate. Ultimately, though, he too had no complaints, and neither did anyone else in a position of power. Navy surface ship commanders had long been weary of carrying nuclear weapons on board, telling their superiors that the bombs and missiles hindered their mobility—made them think twice about entering contested waters—and barred them from docking at the ports of several allies. Army commanders in Europe had long despaired of having to maintain nuclear missiles and artillery rockets, seeing them as security burdens in peacetime and useless weapons of terror—sure to incite retaliation—in a conflict. Colin Powell, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs would expedite Bush’s commands, felt that way more than most.
By this time, in a separate series of moves, the United States had started to dismantle the MIRV’ed ICBMs unilaterally, canceling the ten-warhead MX missile and stripping the three-warhead Minuteman III so that its nosecone carried just one. The officers of Strategic Command assented to these moves, in part because Miller’s SIOP Review revealed that they had far more weapons than they needed.
Without the SIOP Review and its drawdown of “required” U.S. weapons, the commanders in Omaha might not have adjusted to the end of the Cold War, or followed Bush’s orders, as unperturbedly as they did.
Bush proved to be a victim of his own success. He’d made his reputation as a manager of international crises, but with the Cold War won and the nuclear arms race over, at least for now, this specialty seemed unimportant to a majority of American voters, and he lost his bid for reelection to the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, who promised to rev up the sagging domestic economy. Across the river, in the Pentagon, shortly before his retirement ceremony, Cheney turned to Frank Miller, exchanged a few words over the demise of the Soviet Union, the unanticipated evaporation of the era’s existential foe, and said, “Just when we got the SIOP right, the bastards gave up on us.”
But in fact the SIOP wasn’t quite right yet: it would still make the Russian rubble bounce; and “the bastards”—the Russians—weren’t quite yet ready to give up. This became clear when the twin ghosts of Ronald Reagan’s fantasy and the Russians’ paranoia came back to haunt this brief respite from history.
On January 3, 1993, two and a half weeks before the end of Bush’s presidency, he and Boris Yeltsin signed the START II treaty, which prohibited land-based ICBMs from carrying more than one warhead apiece. The accord reversed the most destabilizing action in the history of the arms race. ICBMs loaded with MIRVs—multiple warheads, each of which could strike widely separated targets—were at once the most potent and the most vulnerable weapons in both sides’ arsenals. In a crisis, a desperate or risk-prone leader might be tempted to launch a first strike, if just to preempt the enemy from launching a first strike. In short, the very existence of MIRVs on ICBMs created a hair-trigger situation, in which both sides might feel an incentive to strike first. START II would remove that incentive.
Cheney advised Bush that he could make this deal without any sacrifice in U.S. power because the MIRVs on the Trident II missiles were accurate enough to destroy hardened targets, such as Russian missile silos; and, since the Trident IIs were on submarines, prowling beneath the ocean’s surface, undetectable, they were not vulnerable to a first strike. If the Russians ever again believed an American president wanted to launch a first strike, the Trident IIs would bolster their fear; but the chances of a first strike, to preempt the other side’s first strike, would dim to zero; there would be no hair trigger, no incentive to make such a desperate move.
But this dream was not to be. Some Russians, it turned out, were still distrustful. After several years of debate and delay, the Russian parliament ratified the treaty only on the condition that the United States formally reaffirm its adherence to the ABM Treaty—in short, only if Washington promised not to move ahead with the Strategic Defense Initiative. By this time, support for SDI had hardened as a shibboleth among Republicans and some hawkish Democrats as well. They refused the Russians’ demand, and the treaty—along with the ban on MIRV’ed ICBMs—collapsed.
The nuclear arms race was not over after all.