New Evidence on the Origins of Overkill
First Substantive Release of Early SIOP Histories
National Security Archive
Electronic Briefing Book No. 236
Edited by William Burr
Posted - November 22, 2007
Washington DC, November 22, 2007 - The first comprehensive U.S. nuclear war plan, produced in 1960, was controversial within the U.S. government because top commanders and White House scientists objected to its massive destructiveness—the “high level of damage and population casualties”—according to newly declassified histories published today by the National Security Archive. The war plan also appalled Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who wanted to find ways to curb its overkill, but the first nuclear plan revised on his watch remained massively destructive.
The nuclear war plan, the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), has been among the U.S. government’s most sensitive secrets. No SIOP has ever been declassified and details about the making of U.S. nuclear war plans have been hard to pry loose.
Declassified histories from the early 1960s of SIOP-62 (for fiscal year) and SIOP-63 provide an acute sense of the way that the U.S. government planned to wage nuclear war, as well as how the plans were made and the inter-service conflicts over them.
....
Electronic Briefing Book
New Evidence on the Origins of Overkill
First Substantive Release of Early SIOP Histories
By William Burr
“The SAC people never seemed to be satisfied that to kill once was enough. They want to kill, overkill, overkill, because all of this has built up the prestige of SAC, it created the need for more forces, for a larger budget. …. [T]hat’s the way their thinking went.”
- Admiral Roy L. Johnson, USN (ret’d), Deputy Director of Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (1961-1963) 6 December 1980 (Note 1)
...
