The plan took shape at the start of the summer, when a Pentagon consultant named William W. Kaufmann, another Rand strategist, learned some startling news about the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Since the year before, the supersecret Discoverer spy satellites had been taking thousands of photographs over the Soviet Union. Kennedy had come into office railing about a "missile gap" that was giving the Soviets a dangerous edge over the West. The Discoverer photos revealed, however, that the gap went the other way: the United States was far ahead. The Soviets had no more than eight intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Their bombers sat out on open runways. Their air-defense batteries were virtually worthless.
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Kaysen and Rowen finished their first-strike study a few weeks later. On September 5 Kaysen, who had taken over the drafting of the plan, sent General Taylor the resulting thirty-three-page memo, titled "Strategic Air Planning and Berlin." It included a very detailed description of the existing U.S. nuclear-war plan. SIOP-62, as the plan was known, called for sending in the full arsenal of the Strategic Air Command—2,258 missiles and bombers carrying a total of 3,423 nuclear weapons—against 1,077 "military and urban-industrial targets" throughout the "Sino-Soviet Bloc." Kaysen reported that if the SIOP were executed, the attack would kill 54 percent of the USSR's population and destroy 82 percent of its buildings.
Kaysen asked, "Is this really an appropriate next step after the repulse of a three-division attack across the zonal border between East and West Germany? Will the President be ready to take it? ... Soviet retaliation is inevitable; and most probably, it will be directed against our cities and those of our European allies.
"What is required in these circumstances is something quite different. We should be prepared to initiate general war by our own first strike, but one planned for this occasion, rather than planned to implement a strategy of massive retaliation. We should seek the smallest possible list of targets, focussing on the long-range striking capacity of the Soviets, and avoiding, as much as possible, casualties and damage in Soviet civil society. We should maintain in reserve a considerable fraction of our own strategic striking power; this will deter the Soviets from using their surviving forces against our cities; our efforts to minimize Soviet civilian damage will also make such abstention more attractive to them, as well as minimizing the force of the irrational urge for revenge."
It was a plan straight out of the Rand Corporation, straight out of Dr. Strangelove (except that Stanley Kubrick didn't make that dark satire for another two years). It was a plan to wage rational nuclear war.