Single Integrated Operational Plan
The Single Integrated Operational Plan was the United States' general plan for nuclear war from 1961 to 2003. The SIOP gave the President of the United States a range of targeting options, and described launch procedures and target sets against which nuclear weapons would be launched. The plan integrated the capabilities of the nuclear triad of strategic bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and sea-based submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The SIOP was a highly classified document, and was one of the most secret and sensitive issues in U.S. national security policy.
Image:Trident C-4 montage.jpg|thumb|Montage of submerged submarine launch to the reentry of the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles of a Trident missile
The first SIOP, titled SIOP-62, was finished on 14 December 1960 and implemented on 1 July 1961. The SIOP was updated annually until February 2003, when it was replaced by Operations Plan 8044. As of April 2013, the U.S. nuclear war plan was OPLAN 8010-12, Strategic Deterrence and Force Employment.
Planning process
While much of the United States' nuclear war planning process remains classified, some information on the former SIOP planning process has been made public. The planning process began with the President issuing a presidential directive establishing the concepts, goal, and guidelines that provided guidance to the nuclear planners. The Secretary of Defense then used the President's guidance to produce the Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy that specified basic planning assumptions, attack options, targeting objectives, types of targets, targeting constraints, and coordination with combatant commanders. The NUWEP was then used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to create the "Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, Annex C." This document established a more detailed and elaborate set of goals and conditions that included targeting and damage criteria for the use of nuclear weapons. The final stage in the planning process occurred when the Strategic Air Command or the United States Strategic Command took the guidance from the JSCP and created the actual nuclear war plan that becomes the SIOP. Detailed planning was carried out by the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff co-located with SAC Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska.As part of SIOP planning, Strategic Air Command developed a set of plans and a series of options based on a target set known as the National Target Base. The number of targets in the NTB varied over time, from 16,000 in 1985 to 12,500 at the end of the Cold War in 1991, to 2,500 by 2001. The SIOP was primarily directed against targets in the Soviet Union but targets in the People's Republic of China, which had been part of the SIOP until the 1970s, were added back into the plan in 1997. In 1999, the NTB reportedly included targets in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
History
SIOP, and its renamed successors, is most importantly an "integrated" plan that uses both Air Force and Navy delivery systems; it is "single" only in the sense that it comes out of one planning group. The "plan" actually contains multiple "attack options" that are themselves complex plans.Early targeting after the Second World War
Truman
There is no evidence that the Soviet Union's contingency plans from the end of World War II to 1950 were anything but routine and defensive, and the substantial postwar demobilization of the Soviet military supports the view that the USSR did not view a new war in Europe as likely. Although Soviet doctrine incorporated an assumption of innate hostility of the capitalist powers to Communism, Soviet leader Josef Stalin apparently believed that neither the USSR nor the West could afford to fight another world war, and was skeptical of the Western ability to raise an army large enough to occupy Soviet territory. Soviet planning thus emphasized defenses against nuclear bombing, and attacks on Western European bomber bases. Plans in 1946 and 1948 assumed that during war with an unspecified enemy, Soviet forces in Germany would assume defensive positions within the Soviet occupation zone and wait for reinforcements before counterattacking.Soviet conventional forces greatly outnumbered the West's, however, and United States strategic nuclear strike plans were developed accordingly. While the United States was the only nation with the atomic bomb, in 1946 it had only 17 Silverplate B-29 bombers and 11 atomic bombs. Many early American war plans were based on using hundreds of nonexisting weapons; for example, an autumn 1945 plan envisioned using 196 atomic bombs on Soviet industrial targets, but SAC could not deliver such quantities until 1952. The bombs were of the Mark 3 type, weighing five tons and requiring 39 men two days to assemble. The press reported that "atomic-capable" B-29s were deployed to Britain in mid-1948 during the Berlin Blockade, by which time the US possessed about 50 atomic weapons. The Soviets likely knew through espionage, however, that none of the aircraft was a Silverplate; rather, they would have been used as part of plan DOUBLEQUICK, involving World War II-like sustained conventional bombing raids on Soviet air bases in Eastern Europe. Other than increasing its anti-aircraft defenses, the Soviets did not change its military preparations in any way during the blockade, unlike the reaction in the West. Although the Soviets launched an intensive public relations effort in 1949, aided by sympathetic Western European fellow travelers, to oppose the formation of NATO, the new alliance's military strength was so weak that the Politburo did not bother to discuss it for six months after its formation.
Strategic bombing during World War II of key transportation and energy sites was more effective than attacking cities, and early postwar non-nuclear war plans envisioned focusing on the Soviet petroleum industry. US war planners lacked updated maps of the USSR, however, and had to use pre-World War II maps—some older than the Russian Revolution—or perhaps German aerial photos from the war. Due in part to the lack of updated intelligence, nuclear planning increasingly focused on urban areas, which were easier to target and offered the potential for "bonus damage". The early Plan Totality targeted 20 cities with the 30 nuclear bombs then available. Plan BROILER envisioned 34 bombs on 24 Soviet cities. It and later plans such as HALFMOON and OFFTACKLE envisioned Western forces in Europe slowly retreating while the United Kingdom was reinforced as an air base for atomic attacks on the Soviet Union. President Harry S. Truman hoped for an international ban on atomic weapons and believed that the American people would not support their use for "aggressive purposes", and ordered JCS to devise a plan for conventional war; however, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in July 1948 ordered it to stop and resume atomic war planning due to the Berlin crisis.
Officials were pessimistic about the effectiveness of the atomic plans, however. Britain's December 1948 SPEEDWAY plan assumed that the Soviets would not have atomic weapons, but nonetheless forecast that the West could not "withstand a Russian advance in Western Europe, even with the full defence co-operation of the Western Powers", including 560 American and British atomic-capable bombers. The American TROJAN envisioned 133 bombs It supported those within the United States Navy and elsewhere who criticized the centrality of atomic bombs and mass attacks on cities in American war planning. 2) It led to a substantial rise in nuclear-weapons production. 3) It caused the Joint Chiefs of Staff to, in the fall of 1949, assign SAC with the duty of slowing a Soviet invasion of Western Europe as part of NATO. Erroneous US and British intelligence reports led to exaggerated NATO estimates of Soviet conventional forces. One 1951 estimate foresaw 175 combat divisions allegedly prepared to simultaneously attack Western Europe, the United Kingdom, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North America. The perceived imbalance in forces was so great that American planners feared that even Britain would have to be abandoned during the invasion, a possibility they did not discuss with their British counterparts.
Stalin did consider the possibility of war in Asia, as opposed to Europe. In January 1950, he approved Kim Il Sung's proposal to conquer South Korea in what became the Korean War that summer, believing that victory there would discredit NATO. The gambit backfired, however; despite their initial optimism the Communists were unable to defeat the US-led forces in Korea, and the war greatly increased Western military spending, for the first time making NATO a significant threat against the Soviets in Europe. By late 1950, the USSR notified its Eastern European satellites to prepare for war by the end of 1952, a date matching Western estimates. In early 1951, based on an alleged NATO plan to launch a European war that year from Western proxy Yugoslavia during the Informbiro period as a response to its defeat in Korea, he ordered a massive increase in Eastern European forces that hurt the weaker Communist economies. Based on the Korean precedent, the Soviets apparently expected that the West would not use atomic weapons in a European war. During Stalin's lifetime, Soviet doctrine foresaw the next war as a more destructive version of World War II similarly decided by giant armies supported by massive home fronts, a type of conflict which benefited from the Soviet Union's innate strengths.
The Soviet Union tested its first atomic weapon in 1949, but Stalin seems to have viewed possessing it as a political rather than military benefit, and he did not integrate atomic weapons into the Soviet military's equipment. A 1951 Warsaw Pact war plan for Poland was, Vojtech Mastny wrote, "unequivocally defensive" even while "NATO was haunted by the nightmare of armed communist hordes sweeping all but unopposed through Europe". The Soviets assumed that Western forces were ready to invade and that Eastern Europeans would see them as liberators; as in the West, the Soviets overestimated their enemies' strength.
By this time, Truman was pessimistic about international arms control and told his advisors "Since we can't obtain international control we must be strongest in atomic weapons." He approved the Harmon report's recommendation for increased weapons production, and approved another increase soon after the start of the Korean War. JCS decided to emphasize "the destruction of known targets affecting the Soviet capability to deliver atomic bombs", with refineries, chemical and power plants, and shipyards as secondary and tertiary targets. The three categories were codenamed BRAVO, ROMEO, and DELTA of the Soviet ability to fight, and formed the basis of American nuclear targeting for almost a decade.
When military theorist Bernard Brodie studied the resulting target list, however, he strongly criticized the planners' ignorance of actual Soviet military capacity and the resulting failure to estimate what effect the attacks would have. Brodie later recalled that "There was no calculated strategy for destroying Soviet capability to make war. The planners "simply expected the Soviet Union 'to collapse' as a result of the bombing campaign.... People kept talking about the 'Sunday punch'." He recommended that targets be chosen based on analysis of the results of their destruction, and that "city-avoidance" strategies be studied. Brodie presented his report in April 1951, but JCS found SAC head General Curtis LeMay more persuasive. LeMay objected to the list because of the difficulty of attacking isolated targets and the requirement for pre-attack reconnaissance for many of them. He preferred attacking industrial targets in urban areas so that even if a bomb missed, "a bonus will be derived from the use of the bomb". The target panel agreed to have SAC review future target lists before sending them to JCS.