The Doomsday Machine

by Daniel Ellsberg

  John H. Rubel’s brief memoir provides a vivid account of the first high-level presentation on the completed SIOP-62 by one of the handful of civilians who was present on that historic occasion. I quote his description at length, because I don’t know of anything else like it in print from an insider. Rubel is the only person exposed to the SIOP who has recorded, in his comments toward the end, the same emotional reaction to it that I experienced a few months later in the White House when I saw the JCS estimate of the death toll from our own attacks.

  The meeting took place near mid-December 196057 at Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, attended by Secretary Gates, Deputy Secretary Jim Douglas, myself, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a multitude of general officers representing every unified and specified Command from all over the world.

  The SIOP briefing was held on the floor of the command center at SAC headquarters. The viewers faced a high wall along which enormous panels bearing maps and charts ran on tracks the entire length of the room, perhaps a hundred feet or so. Behind and over one floor up was a glass-enclosed balcony. The generals would run SAC’s part of the war from up there behind a long line of desks, glued to telephones, peering through the enclosing glass at the maps depicting the scene of wartime activity somewhere—indeed, anywhere and perhaps almost everywhere—in the world.…

  At a signal from General Power [the SAC commander] the briefer stepped on stage as it were, directly facing his audience, about fifteen or twenty feet in front of the first row.…

  After presenting a few charts he came to one defining the first wave of attacks to reach the Soviet Union. As I recall, these came from carrier-based fighter-bombers stationed near Okinawa. Having made this disclosure, he stepped aside.

  Thereupon two airmen appeared, one from each side of the long wall lined with maps, each carrying a tall stepladder. Each airman stopped at the edge of the large map which, we now observed, showed China and the Soviet Union and probably some other nearby features on a heroic scale. Each man climbed his tall ladder at the same brisk rate, reaching the top at the same instant as his counterpart. Each reached up toward a red ribbon which, we now noticed, encircled a large roll of clear plastic. With a single motion, each untied the bowknot securing the ribbon at his end of the roll, whereupon the plastic sheet unrolled with a whoosh!, flapped a bit and then dangled limply in front of the map. A bunch of little marks appeared, most of them over Moscow, representing nuclear explosions. The men descended the ladders, folded them, carried them off, and disappeared.

  The briefer repeated this performance several times as successive waves from B-52s already aloft on Headstart [airborne alert] missions and fighter-bombers from carriers in the Mediterranean and from U.S. bases in Germany and others from carriers and bases around Japan and B-47s and B-52s launched from bases in the United States and some from bases in Europe and a few ballistic missiles (many more would become part of the plan during the next few years) dropped their lethal loads over the USSR.

  Each time the briefer described an attack wave the ballet of the ladder masters would be re-enacted. They would untie another pair of red ribbons, a plastic roll would come whooshing down and Moscow would be even further obliterated beneath the little marks on those layers of plastic sheets. There were little marks in other places, too, but somebody noted that a third of Soviet industrial-military strength was concentrated in the greater Moscow area, hence the concentration of bombs dropped on that region. I recall that the plan called for a total of forty megatons—megatons—on Moscow, about four thousand times more than the bomb over Hiroshima and perhaps twenty to thirty times more than all the non-nuclear bombs dropped by the Allies in both theaters during more than four years of WWII …

  At the point in the briefing where some bombers were described flying northeast from the Mediterranean on their way to Moscow, General Power waved at the speaker, saying: “Just a minute. Just a minute.” He then turned in his front row chair to stare into the obscurity of uniforms and dusk stretching behind me and said, “I just hope none of you have any relatives in Albania, because they have a radar station there that is right on our flight path, and we take it out.” With that, to which the response was utter silence, Power turned to the speaker and with another wave of the hand, told him to “Go ahead.”

  A subsequent chart shown by the briefer displayed deaths on the vertical axis and time in hours, extending out to weeks, along the horizontal axis. He announced that there were about 175 million people in the USSR. This chart depicted the deaths from fallout alone—not from the direct effects of blast or radiation from a bomb going off, just from fallout subsequent to the attacks when radioactive dust propelled to high altitudes by the initial blast begins to fall back to earth. The curve of deaths, rising as time went by, leveled off at about 100 million, showing that more than half the population of the Soviet Union would be killed from radioactive fallout alone.…

  The briefing was soon concluded, to be followed by an identical one covering the attack on China given by a different speaker. Eventually, he too arrived at a chart showing deaths from fallout alone. “There are about 600 million Chinese in China,” he said. His chart went up to half that number, 300 million, on the vertical axis. It showed that deaths from fallout as time passed after the attack leveled out at that number, 300 million, half the population of China.

  A voice out of the gloom from somewhere behind me interrupted, saying, “May I ask a question?” General Power turned again in his front-row seat, stared into the darkness and said, “Yeah, what is it?” in a tone not likely to encourage the timid. “What if this isn’t China’s war?” the voice asked. “What if this is just a war with the Soviets? Can you change the plan?”

  “Well, yeah,” said General Power resignedly, “we can, but I hope nobody thinks of it, because it would really screw up the plan.”

  Rubel comments:

  That exchange did it. Already oppressed by the briefings up to that point, I shrank within, horrified. I thought of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, when an assemblage of German bureaucrats swiftly agreed on a program to exterminate every last Jew they could find anywhere in Europe, using methods of mass extermination more technologically efficient than the vans filled with exhaust gases, the mass shootings, or incineration in barns and synagogues used until then. I felt as if I were witnessing a comparable descent into the deep heart of darkness, a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface. Those feelings have not entirely abated, even though more than forty years have passed since that dark moment.

  The next morning, as Rubel relates, Secretary of Defense Gates called a meeting “to discuss the proceedings of the previous evening. The Chiefs were there, I was there, and the Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force joined the group.” Starting with the chairman of the JCS, General Lyman Lemnitzer, each of these discussants said much the same thing: “The men had done a very fine job, a very difficult job, and that they should be commended for their work.”

  Gates, thank Heaven, never turned to me. I had no idea what I would say if he did. I should have, but fear I would not have had the courage to say that this was the most barbaric, unthinkable, crazy so-called “plan” I had ever heard and could never have imagined.

  One person, alone, at the second session raised objections. It was the commandant of the Marine Corps, David M. Shoup, who had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for commanding from the beach the Marines who landed at Tarawa. Five years before this briefing I had heard him address my graduating class in the Infantry Basic School in the Marine Corps at Quantico. (From 1961 to the end of the war, he opposed vigorously our intervention in Vietnam.)

  “All I can say is,” [Shoup] said in a level voice, “any plan that murders three hundred million Chinese when it might not even be their war is not a good plan. That is not the American way.�
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  It was, however, the American plan. Though President Eisenhower was distressed when his science advisor George Kistiakowsky reported to him58 the tremendous amount of “overkill” in the plan, Eisenhower endorsed the plan and passed it on without any modification to John F. Kennedy a month later. It was my passion to change it.

  CHAPTER 7

  Briefing Bundy

  It wasn’t only the handful of civilians exposed to the Single Integrated Operational Plan (I actually knew no others at the time, such as Rubel) who felt that this insane plan must be radically changed. Through my contact with Air Force staff, I become aware that a number of Air Force planning officers were concerned about the madness of the planning process and current plans. But insofar as these plans were determined by their higher-level superiors, these men were unable to influence the plan through ordinary command channels.

  In principle, the same was true for me and for RAND. During this period, RAND did not work for the secretary of defense, but rather for the Air Force. Thus, only by going out of channels in a way that would directly threaten the budget and existence of their institution could RAND researchers and officers have made the secretary of defense aware of the situation.

  Yet, I came increasingly to feel it was essential that the president and the secretary of defense be made aware of the nature of the general war-planning system, with all its attendant risks of increasing the likelihood of war, and the likelihood that any sizable war involving Russian troops would trigger multi-genocidal effects on an almost unimaginable scale throughout the world. It seemed essential to me that the president himself have before his eyes, for the first time, the actual Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, so that he could read it in context with the SIOP and become aware of the extreme simplicity, not to mention rigidity, stupidity, and incredible bloody-mindedness of these plans. The extremity of these qualities, I felt, was impossible to convey without examining the written plans.

  For several years one of my highest objectives for my own personal influence on national defense was moving a few pieces of paper from one level of authority to a higher one, from a military to a civilian level. In particular, I wanted to move one document, the JSCP with its Annex C, from the offices of the Joint Staff or Air Staff to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and to the Oval Office, so that civilian authority could become aware of and then act to control and change the nature of our general war plans. (A decade later, my personal objective was very similar, with a different level of civilian authority in mind: I wanted to move seven thousand Top Secret pages—the Pentagon Papers—from the Pentagon and RAND to the Senate and the American public.) I also wanted to make civilian authority aware of the extreme degree of reliance on delegation, as well as all the other risks of unauthorized action I had discovered. Unfortunately, I had no direct line of access to Secretary Gates.

  In 1960, after returning from the Pacific command and control study, I came into contact with two people who were widely rumored to be future officials in the Kennedy administration. One was Paul Nitze, who took part in a RAND-sponsored conference on alternative military strategy at Asilomar in Monterey. During a break in the conference, I spent a long drive to and from visiting Big Sur in the backseat of a car with Nitze. He had been the drafter of the famous National Security Council Paper NSC-68, which had been the planning basis for our armament buildup in 1950. He was now head of the committee on foreign policy of the Democratic Advisory Council (DAC), the main Democratic figure on military-political planning. He was expected to become a high official.

  I spent the time in the car explaining to him how important it was that the president personally come to read, take an interest in, and insist on monitoring and supervising the general war plans, though I didn’t describe them to him in detail. He had Top Secret clearance—he had briefly served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under Eisenhower, and he remained a consultant. Nevertheless, according to the rules of the game, at that moment he had no “need to know” this sensitive information. Nor did I, technically speaking. The fact that some staff colonels had thought otherwise didn’t mean that I could go around telling others who weren’t officials. For the same reason, I hadn’t informed any of my RAND colleagues on these matters. To Nitze I simply emphasized at length the urgency of the problem, and that if he should become an official in the new administration, he should see to it that the president immediately inform himself on these matters.

  I gave the same message to Walt Rostow, who, like Nitze, was a member of the DAC committee on foreign policy and was also expected to be a national security official if Kennedy won the election. I met Rostow during the Kennedy campaign at a meeting of advisors on policy speeches convened at the Harvard Law School by Archibald Cox, a professor at the school. During a long break I spoke to Rostow in the law school’s parking lot, repeating what I had told Nitze. I urged that if Rostow were ever close to the future president (in 1961 he did become an aide to McGeorge Bundy in the White House), he must ensure that the president ask to see the JSCP and its Annex C.

  In January 1961, as a result of my help in arranging for RAND researchers to give input on speechwriting for Kennedy during the campaign, I was invited to the inaugural ball in Washington. On the Monday after the inauguration, I went to see Paul Nitze in his new office as (again) assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs (ISA).

  I reminded him of our conversation the previous fall in Monterey. “Now that you’re in office, I can tell you the details of these plans,” I said. The ISA assistant secretary was in charge of policy planning in the Defense Department, and he was the natural official to deal with any kinds of plans, although in practice the office had never dealt with operational military plans before.

  As a result of this conversation, Nitze asked to see the JSCP, through Harry Rowen, my close friend and former RAND colleague, who was now Nitze’s deputy assistant secretary for planning and policy. Harry passed the mission to me, as an ISA consultant from RAND.

  I went to see a military officer in charge of plans under Rowen, an Army general who had been in that office for some time in the previous administration. I asked him to get me the JSCP, for Rowen and Nitze. He curtly refused. He said bluntly, “You have no need to know.” More challengingly, when I reiterated that this was at the request of his boss, the assistant secretary, he said, “He has no need to know either.” I asked him if he himself had ever seen it, and he said that he had, but as an Army general, not in his capacity as an official within ISA. I reported this to Harry, his immediate superior. Nitze didn’t get the JSCP.

  Later that first month, Rowen arranged for me to see McGeorge Bundy, assistant to the president for national security, to brief him on the war plans and on the command and control problems I had discovered in the Pacific. I was ushered into Bundy’s office by Bob Komer, his deputy. I had never met Bundy, who had been dean of faculty at Harvard while I was a graduate student in the Society of Fellows (of which he had been a member a decade earlier). I had met Komer several times before when he had visited RAND.

  I had an hour scheduled with Bundy. As I walked in, I started to worry that he was likely to be skeptical or suspicious of the fact that, as a civilian, I seemed to know so much about war plans. I felt that I ought to begin by giving him some hints as to how I had acquired this information. I began to talk of my participation in the CINCPAC command and control project and my work with the Joint Staff. After two or three minutes of this, he interrupted me in a dry, frosty tone with the question: “Is this a briefing or a confessional?” He was famous for his arrogance with intellectual inferiors (most people) and for curtly cutting off subordinates who weren’t giving him information “crisply” enough.

  I thought to myself, “All right, wise guy, you asked for it.” I told him crisply that there was a lot about the war plans and nuclear operations that he probably didn’t know. I proceeded to tick off the characteristics of the JSCP—including its nature as
a first-strike plan and its city-busting targeting of the Sino-Soviet bloc under all circumstances—and the defects in the control system. I had the satisfaction, within a few minutes, of seeing his mouth drop open. He began to take furious notes, shaking his head and exclaiming under his breath.

  Throughout and at the end of my briefing—he kept me there nearly another hour—I gave him recommendations, all of which he noted down. The first was that he should assert his authority to get hold of the JSCP, then read it, familiarize himself with it, and begin to work on it with the help of military aides who could explain the underlying controversies and the operational implications.

  I told him of the LST with nuclear weapons at Iwakuni, the general violations of the two-man rule, and the universal lack of physical controls—any form of locks—on nuclear weapons. In particular, as a matter for urgent White House concern, I described the widespread belief—contrary not only to public declarations but also to assertions in Top Secret planning—that President Eisenhower had delegated authority to initiate nuclear attacks in a variety of circumstances. Bundy, who had been in office only a couple of weeks at this point, showed every sign of surprise and shock at this news, though not disbelief.

  I told him of the purported letters from President Eisenhower to the unified and specified commanders. I said I hadn’t seen them myself, but that I did know that important officers in the Pacific believed they existed, and that their belief had dangerous consequences. It had led to sub-delegation far below the level of the theater commanders, probably—I presumed—far more widely than President Eisenhower was aware or had intended.

  Some forty years later,59 I was to learn from newly declassified documents from the late 1950s that I had been mistaken about this. To my great surprise, it turned out that Eisenhower had actually foreseen and authorized this sub-delegation, dangerous as this seemed to me. But if I had known this at the time, it wouldn’t have changed my recommendations to Bundy. The risks of having so many subordinate commanders with both the ability and the presumed right to take nuclear initiatives in crisis conditions seemed so great that it was urgent for President Kennedy to bring his own judgment to bear and take steps to reestablish his control of the system.