Doomsday Delayed: USAF Strategic Weapons Doctrine and SIOP-62, 1959–1962: Two Cautionary Tales (review)

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when crises over Berlin and Cuba threatened U.S.-Soviet military confrontations and the possibility of nuclear war, the U.S. government sought, in the name of deterrence, to improve its capabilities to wage war with the Soviet Union. Nuclear-armed B-52 bombers went on airborne alert, the Pentagon requested hundreds of Minuteman rapid-reaction intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and U.S. policymakers approved war plans based on enormously destructive nuclear strikes against the Soviet bloc. The title of this brief but fascinating and thoughtful memoir by former defense official John H. Rubel conveys the danger that he saw at the time, with some of the threat coming from the home front. His account of the early Minuteman ICBM program and the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) plan for nuclear war with the Soviet bloc shows how the preferences of military commanders for preemptive nuclear options helped create a risk for accidental nuclear war that Rubel tried to reduce.

From a position as a senior scientist at Hughes Aircraft in California, Rubel went to work as a high-level official in the Office of the Director, Defense Research and Engineering (DDRE), serving under both Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. At DDRE, Rubel oversaw the fledgling Minuteman program, which, to his dismay, had a launch system requiring that 50 missiles be fired at once, something that could be done “without the least prior notice.” The two-person crew in the launch-control center could even manipulate a clock-operated switch and fire the missiles. Worse yet, flaws in the electrical system made an accidental launch possible. The Strategic Air Command’s desire for “go/no-go” arrangements that would allow Minuteman to be launched quickly helps to explain why the U.S. Air Force sought technologies conducive to rapid action. Rubel later saw this as a potential “Doomsday Machine,” but Air Force leaders resisted any changes in Minuteman launch procedures until senior Defense Department officials forced solutions. Rubel was confronting the risk of accidental nuclear war that, analysts like Bruce Blair later argued, inhered in the highly sophisticated warning systems and rapid-reaction missile deployments that characterized U.S. and Russian nuclear postures.

Rubel’s extraordinary account of the first SIOP briefing to senior civilian defense officials—he was among them—will be familiar to readers of Fred Kaplan’s 1983 book Wizards of Armageddon (Rubel was one of Kaplan’s sources) and the work of David Alan Rosenberg. The SIOP, which could be enacted preemptively, involved strikes against Soviet-bloc territory with thousands of nuclear weapons that would produce hundreds of millions of fatalities. The strikes would target China and other Communist countries even if they were not in the war, prompting Marine Corps Commandant General David Shoup to make a memorable comment: “Any plan that murdered three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way” (p. 29).

The absurd features of SIOP-62 sparked demands by senior Kennedy administration officials for changes that would give the president more plausible options than all-or-nothing. This was more difficult than Rubel suggests; many years passed before a U.S. president had less than “all-out” options, although it was not long before an option existed to exclude China and other countries from the attack plans. Nevertheless, by forcing a restructuring of the Minuteman launch mechanism to permit a “controlled response,” Rubel and like-minded Pentagon officials may have reduced the threat of accidental SIOP execution.

Citing Eisenhower’s farewell address warning of the threat posed by a “scientific technological elite,” Rubel shows that elements of the elite could undo the damage caused by peers who more willingly acquiesced in military preferences. Nevertheless, vestiges of the first SIOP inhere in the hundreds of high-alert Minuteman ICBMs deployed in the Northern Plains...