Abstract
The siop (the Single Integrated Operational Plan), the central nuclear war plan, is offered as the holy text that explains why the Clinton administration cannot reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to less than 2,000-2,500 warheads.
Nonetheless, Washington is now debating whether lower numbers are feasible or desirable, and various proposals are being floated that would permit reductions—easing the targeting rules, lowering levels of alert, eliminating one or another leg of the “triad” of bombers, submarines, and missiles, or opening up the plan to congressional oversight.
These are all fine ideas, but none addresses the basic problem, which is counterforce doctrine—the requirement of a force sufficient to precisely attack and destroy Russian nuclear forces and capabilities under the most challenging “war fighting” scenarios.
It would be different if nuclear deterrence were based instead on the ability to incinerate Russian cities and kill Russian civilians.
For decades, the United States has rejected the idea of a “countervalue” strategy based on the destruction of a certain percentage of industry and the death of a certain number of civilians. The nuclear priesthood and arms control elite long ago rejected that strategy as immoral. Nuclear war fighters also argued that it is not credible, because no president would order the sure incineration of American citizens (which would be the Soviet strategy in a countervalue regime).
And so the siop was born. More accurate weapons were deployed, targets “hardened,” elaborate models developed to predict the “consequences of execution”—all with the objective of being selective while minimizing civilian effects. The siop was an insatiable choreographer demanding more warheads with finer skills to cover targets with precise timing, levels of damage, and overlap.
Bruce Blair, the newly installed president of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information and the leading expert outside government on nuclear war plans, says deterrence “requirements” can be adequately met with 1,500 warheads. That number would be sufficient to destroy 250 targets “of any choice” under the most trying circumstances.
What would those targets be? And how do you measure adequacy? As Blair—a former Minute-man missile launch officer—well knows, there are no easy answers. Blair's recent revelations about the SIOP—that it includes 2,260 “vital” installations (1,100 nuclear, 500 other military, 500 industry, and 160 leadership targets)—shows that, with its redundancies and emphasis (500 targets associated with “a Russian army on the verge of a nervous breakdown”), the list makes no sense.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (nrdc), to which I am a long-time consultant, has spent more than a year building an accurate database of real targets, populations, forces, and weapons effects. It is working toward the ability to simulate the effects of various counterforce and coun-tervalue nuclear exchanges.
It is a daunting task, but thanks to affordable computing power permitting enormous calculations, as well as new information about Russian forces and infrastructure, nrdc thinks it can open up the debate about the requirement for nuclear weapons, offering a publicly accessible basis for examining different alternatives.
And what are their initial calculations? A coun-terforce strike against the Russian nuclear target base would—incidentally—kill 15 million civilians. An attack on just the Kozelsk missile field near Moscow, says Matthew McKinzie, chief scientist on the project, would kill 2.7 million civilians.
So much for the morality of counterforce. Of course, we've always known that there was deception involved, given the number of weapons. Now, however, we can more precisely calculate the loathsome inhumanity.
If a president had the courage to decide that 1,500 warheads were “sufficient,” the list would simply be reduced. But presidents rely on experts, and the keepers of the siop argue that the target list has been dramatically cut (it has), and that this or that weapon is needed to guarantee survivability and levels of damage. Six administrations, Republican and Democrat, have gone along.
But they have deceived themselves and the public that a counterforce strategy avoids massive civilian deaths and destruction. Abandoning counter-force is the only way to break the siop hammerlock. Deterrence should be based on the threat of massive Russian civilian damage should a nuclear attack ever be mounted.
No, it has no “credibility,” and no, it isn't moral. But it would be honest. And sufficient.