SO COULD YOU FIRST OF ALL DESCRIBE THIS EPISODE WHEN YOU WERE BRIEFED BY SAC AND GENERAL POWER ABOUT SOVIET MISSILE CAPABILITIES?

Well, I was serving on the committee that was charged with looking at all of the country's strategic programs at the time. And the big issue at that time was the fate of the B-70 program. The B-70 bomber. And we visited SAC headquarters. And General Power wanted to make the case that there were or would be a lot of targets in the Soviet Union that could best be dealt with with the B-70 bomber. Now at that time we were beginning to get photography from reconnaissance satellites, but the clearances in connection with that were very tightly held. Very few people knew about that or had access to the photography. There were only two of us on that committee who did. And to clear other people to see the photography was a pretty cumbersome procedure and required approval in Washington. But General Power decided that on his own initiative he would clear this committee while we were in Omaha so we could so he could show us the nature of the evidence about the emerging threat. He did this. I understand later he had his wrist slapped for doing so. But in any case we looked at the photography and there was no evidence there at all that really proved that there were Soviet missiles in the numbers that he suggested. Or that they were being built. What he was showing us were railroad spurs and roads in remote areas. And he would point to one of these and say, well, you see that. That's going to be a missile site. Or, that's the beginning of a missile complex. And and so he made his case.

AND DID YOU SAY, WELL HOW DO YOU KNOW?

Well, we asked him. We said, you know, "How do you know that?" Sure. Of course we asked. How do you know that's going to be a missile site? Maybe something else. Maybe but well he just believed that was the way it was going to be and that he had to be prepared for that. And the country therefore needed the B-70 bomber to deal with those kinds of targets. At that time, the B-70 was in competition with our missiles in a way and so... they were... the Air Force was arguing at that the bomber... actually they began to call it the RS-70 at the time. The Reconnaissance Strike aircraft because they claimed that with it you could go after time-urgent targets and you could pick up new targets using it as a reconnaissance vehicle.

MOVING ALONG TO YOUR PREVIOUS VISIT TO OMAHA IN THE FALL OF 1960. HOW DID THAT ARISE AS FAR AS YOU RECALL?

Well, it's hard for me to separate what I knew at the time, and what I've read about it since. As I understand it, the it was a Navy-instigated visit. That somehow the Navy was very suspicious of what was going on in Omaha in the development of the first Single Integrated Operations Plan for our nuclear forces. They feared that that show would be used to strengthen the Air Force position in the competition that was going on between the Navy and the Air Force at the time. And so apparently Admiral Burke -- Arleigh Burke was the Chief of Naval Operations at the time -- in one way and another managed to get this trip underway. He talked with George Kistiakowsky who was President Eisenhower's science adviser, and who was my superior. And through Burke and through the President's naval aid, Peter Rand, the trip was laid on. Eisenhower gave George Kistiakowsky instructions, written instructions to go out and take a look at the nature of the SIOP. And so George undertook this task. He claims to have done it with some reluctance. Actually, I think he secretly relished it. But for political reasons he had to claim he was reticent about doing it. And he sent me out there on the first instance to do sort of reconnaissance. And I went out and spent a couple of days looking at this planning operation which had to do with how we would allocate our weapons — both the Navy's weapons and the Air Force's to targets. And then I went back and reported to him. And then Kistiakowsky, myself, and Pete Scoville who was at the time Deputy Director of CIA went out. And and spent another two or three days reviewing those plans. And then we went back and reported to Kistiakowsky and I reported to the President on the nature of that planning operation.

AND WHAT WERE YOUR CONCLUSIONS, AND HOW WERE THEY ARRIVED AT?

Well, it was a it was an open ended kind of a an inquiry. The I didn't find anything terribly surprising in my own way at least initially as we went through this operation. The the target complex that they talked about striking included missile sites in the Soviet Union, airbases other military targets. Steel mills, oil refineries. And a number of other targets that were air defense targets. The plan was to strike those targets with missiles of various kinds to facilitate bomber penetration into the Soviet Union. And the... and the name of the game was to try to figure out exactly which kinds of weapons and how many should be allocated to each of these targets so that it would be a coordinated plan. And... and they did this. And there were — Oh, I suppose there must have been a couple of thousand targets and you know, several thousand weapons involved. In a sense it was a rational operation. They specified the levels of damage that had to be inflicted on each target to the extent they could. And then the would through a computer code allocate weapons to these targets to achieve a desired expectation of destruction. Now the thing that has struck in my mind -- two things struck in my mind most readily about that whole... that whole exercise. When I was through, and I forget whether it was the first trip or the second trip I made, I had some time left over. And so I decided just for, well just to use the time and to satisfy my own curiosity, it had seemed to me that they were attacking these targets very heavily. And so I asked for an atlas. And I looked through the atlas and I picked a city in the Soviet Union that I thought most resembled Hiroshima. Just to see how heavily they would attack that target compared with what we had done in 1945. And I must say, I was a bit taken a back. I had discovered that particular city had four weapons allocated to it. One of them, as I recollect was four and a half megatons. Three hundred times the size of the Hiroshima weapon. And and the I believe it had three back up weapons, each of over a megaton. So that gives I you some scale... some idea of the... of the of the intensity of destruction that we had in mind at the time. And of our capabilities. The other thing that struck me was when we reported back to the President. Now he had been concerned, apparently, about the way the planning was going and about the Air Force's desires to build up its capabilities to acquire more weapons, to strike the Soviet Union more heavily. And it was that concern on his part, and I guess, enforced by the Navy's concerns, that had led to this whole enterprise. And we came back to the White House and reported to him. And we essentially confirmed his worst fears. That indeed the level of destruction, the level of damage that would be envisaged would be enormous. That there was a lot of overkill. And he listened to all of this, and my recollection is that he was visibly upset about it. Indicated that he was concerned in his conversation with us. And expressed at least reservations or concern about General Power. About General Power having this position as commander of the Strategic Air Command. And the astonishing thing to me was that he didn't do anything about it. I would have expected that had he expressed the kinds of reservations he had, that there would be a new commander of SAC within a week.

THEY MUST HAVE BEEN PRETTY STRONG RESERVATIONS THEN?

I think he was very upset about this. And I couldn't understand it. Just couldn't understand why he didn't take action.

YOU HAVEN'T QUITE CONVEYED TO ME WHY, IN ANYTHING THAT YOU SAID OF WHAT YOU SAID THAT WOULD HAVE UPSET HIM. WHAT WAS UPSETTING HIM SO MUCH?

Well, the level of damage. I don't... the number of weapons that were allocated to various target complexes in the Soviet Union was extraordinary. I mean this one example I've given you this one small city the size of Hiroshima is just one. I mean we also, I'm sure I don't remember the numbers anymore, told him about how many weapons had been laid on Moscow and about the level of damage that would be inflicted there. As I recall it, the guidance that the people in Omaha were using internally generated guidance as far as I know is that they wanted to achieve a 97 percent expected destruction of many of the targets. Well, to do that, you know, any given weapon maybe has a 50, 60, 70 percent chance of getting through to its endpoint. If you want to have 97 percent expected level of destruction you just... you attack with a lot of weapons.

MEMBERS OF THE PLANNING STAFF HAVE ARGUED TO US THAT THE GUIDANCE THEY WERE WORKING ON WAS NOT INTERNALLY GENERATED. IT WAS GIVEN TO THEM BY THE JCS AND THEY WERE SAYING IF YOU HAVE CRITICISMS OF THE SIOP, THEN GO CHANGE THE GUIDANCE. SO IT'S NOT OUR FAULT.

Well, that may be. I'm sure there is some truth in that. There... was a guidance generated in the Pentagon for...

SO WE WERE TALKING ABOUT WHETHER THIS WAS INTERNALLY GENERATED GUIDANCE OR THE JCS GUIDANCE.

Well, the guidance was provided to the people in Omaha from the Pentagon, from the joint staff. And I don't remember what levels of destruction were suggested. I have a vague recollection that they talked about 90 percent levels of destruction. And the people in Omaha interpreted that to be a minimum level. And and wrote their programs to achieve higher levels of destruction. It's probably important to understand a little bit of the background here. If you were interested in deterring Soviet attack, you know, it hardly matters whether any given target would be destroyed with 50 percent or 80 percent or 90 percent level of destruction. But if you want to generate force requirements for a very large number of weapons and delivery vehicles, then you can drive those force requirements through the ceiling by specifying very high levels of destruction. And that kind of a competition, that kind of, those kinds of issues were floating around at the time as the Air Force was striving to build up its capabilities and to expand the target list. It was those kinds of issues that were troubling the Navy. Troubling the President. And that we found somewhat troublesome when we went out to Omaha.

IN A SENSE IT WAS LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO BLAME. IS IT FAR TO BLAME THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF SAC OR SAC AT ALL IF ESSENTIALLY THIS GUIDANCE AND THESE HIGH LEVELS OF PROBABILITY AND THESE HIGH LEVELS OF DESTRUCTION WOULD BEING HANDED DOWN FROM THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF. COULDN'T THE PRESIDENT SIMPLY HAVE INSISTED THAT THE GUIDANCE BE CHANGED...

Sure, the President could have changed it. Could have insisted on changing it. But I think it's a little ambiguous. Maybe somebody else can clarify this for you. My feeling was that the guidance that these people were getting from the Pentagon was unwise in that it specified a much higher level of destruction than was necessary and a much broader range of target than would have been necessary. But then, the people in Omaha were embellishing on that by interpreting the guidance they got from the joint staff as being minimum levels of destruction and striving for even higher levels. So it was a combination of..., I want to say, well it was a combination of decisions made both in Omaha and in the Pentagon. Could have been changed by the Secretary of Defense or the President.

SO YOUR OVERALL IMPRESSION AFTER THIS VISIT TO OMAHA — WHAT DID YOU FEEL YOURSELF ABOUT THE AMERICAN STRATEGIC ARSENAL?

Well, I couldn't separate this really from my other involvement in these matters. I'd been involved for quite some time in issues relating to all of our strategic weapons programs. That my job in the White House was to worry about all of those programs that were... that were entrained the Minuteman program, the Polaris program. And I had the feeling that we were building... we were going to build up forces that were going to be grossly excessive to any rational purpose. The Navy and the Air Force had been at logger heads for quite some time on the question of the role of the Polaris force and on what our strategy should be for dealing with the Soviet Union. The navy view had been one of minimum deterrence. Let's maintain a capability sufficient to destroy the Soviet Union as a going society and that's enough. And the Air Force view had been very much, well, we're going to fight a war very much as we fought World War II. Or we would destroy industrial facilities, ball bearing plants, steel mills, oil refineries, the whole works. In the Air Force view you could generate almost infinite force requirements. Now I happened to be more persuaded of the wisdom of minimum deterrence. That that was sufficient. So I was troubled, aside from that visit to Omaha, by the whole trend at the time in building up capabilities that would involve the kind of destruction the Air Force had in mind. And the guidance that people were getting in Omaha, to get back to the SIOP, really involved incorporating elements of both the Navy's view and the Air Force's view so that the target list that people in Omaha were considering did involve a lot of military targets, but a lot of urban industrial targets as well.

...AND ALSO IF THIS TIME YOU CAN GENERATE AS MUCH WITHOUT WANTING TO OVERDO IT, AS MUCH FORCEFULNESS AS YOU CAN ABOUT YOUR CONCLUSIONS SO THAT WE CAN UNDERSTAND WHY EISENHOWER WAS SO UPSET. SO HOW DID THAT MISSION COME ABOUT AND IN PARTICULAR, WHAT HAPPENED WHEN YOU CAME BACK?

Well George Kistiakowsky, the President's science adviser, was asked by the President to go out and look into the... to the development of the single integrated operations plan. And we had sort of an open ended charter. He sent me out on the first instance to take a quick look at it. And I did. Came back, reported to him, and then he and I and Pete Scoville Director of Deputy Director of CIA went out and spent some more time on it. The key points I suppose were these: that we found that the levels of destruction that were going to be inflicted on Soviet targets were extraordinarily high. The... the guidance these people had in which they were operating required that the levels of destruction of many targets be high, but I think they were interpreting those instructions as minimal. So that they specified levels of damage that virtually insured the destruction of the target. And in many instances that involved allocating a number of weapons to the same target complex. That happened in the case, of course, the larger cities like Leningrad and Moscow. A city that really the particular incidence that really sticks in my mind was one that occurred when at the end when at the end of the meeting I decided I would pick a city that looked like Hiroshima to compare the level of destruction that they had envisaged for that city with what had occurred in 1945. And when I did, I found that city in the Soviet Union had a one weapon of 4 megatons on it. About 300 times the yield of the Hiroshima weapon. And then in addition it had 3 other weapons each of over a megaton. Well that's an appalling level of destruction to compare it to what we, you know, considering what was... what was accomplished in Japan. We came back and we reported to the President. And he had been fearful that the whole exercise would be used, or was being used, to generate requirements for additional numbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. And I think our story confirmed his worst fears. He was appalled at the levels of destruction that we reported that would be achieved in this. I don't remember that I reported the Hiroshima example, but the President clearly expressed concern about all of this. And he had reservations about General Power who was the Commander of SAC about his role in all of this and the way he was interpreting his guidance. I was astonished that the President didn't do anything about that. I would have thought that considering the level of his concern that we would have had a new commander of the Strategic Air Command within about a week. But nothing happened.

DO YOU THINK PERHAPS EISENHOWER WAS JUST FEELING TIRED AND RESIGNED BY THIS TIME?

Well, I don't know. You know, this was very near the end of his term. But he was he was troubled by the... by the direction in which all of our military programs were going at the time. And I think that was reflected later on in his... in his farewell address. No I think, but I think it was more a matter of temperament that he expressed these concerns, but he just wasn't willing to relieve General Power.

DO YOU THINK THAT REALLY THAT WOULD HAVE DONE ANY GOOD? WAS THE PROBLEM JUST IN SAC OR THE PARTICULAR INDIVIDUAL IN CHARGE OF SAC?

No, of course it wasn't. It was in the guidance people v/ere getting from the Pentagon as well. The whole plan the basis for the... for the work that people out in Omaha were doing envisaged a attacking an extraordinary range of targets. And attacking them very heavily. One could have thought in terms of just having a deterrent capability... ability to destroy a number of Soviet cities. And that had been an earlier view of what should be done with our strategic forces. But as we were getting more and more weapons it became possible to do more and so the plans of what to do were expanded. And what really would have been required would be a change in planning specifying a different range of kinds of targets and probably more flexibility. The plan that was being generated at that time was a very inflexible plan leaving the President virtually no options. He could either say, "Yes, let's attack," or "let's not."

I WAS GOING TO COME TO THAT. IT'S BEEN ALLEGED THAT SO INFLEXIBLE WAS THE PLAN THAT FOR EXAMPLE EVEN IF A GENERAL WAR BETWEEN THE SOVIET UNION AND THE UNITED STATES HAD BROKEN OUT AND CHINA HAD SPECIFICALLY REMAINED NEUTRAL THAT IT WAS NOT IN FACT POSSIBLE UNDER THE FIRST SIOP TO WITHHOLD AN ATTACK ON CHINA OR ONLY WITH GREAT DIFFICULTY.

I'm not sure that's true. I have a vague recollection that there was that much flexibility and there were a few targets, as I recollect, where the burst height of the weapons could be varied depending on the way the wind was blowing. I remember we were concerned about weapons landing on Leningrad and producing heavy fallout over Helsinki. And there may have been a little flexibility to accommodated those kinds of problems. But an idea, if anybody had an idea, well we will... let's... let's go after the oil refineries and the air bases, but skip the steel mills, no possibility of anything like that.

WHAT WAS THE ATTITUDE TO A FIRST OR SECOND STRIKE? IT'S BEEN ARGUED THEY NEEDED THIS NUMBER OF WEAPONS, BUT THEY KNEW THEY WEREN'T GOING TO BE ABLE TO USE THEM, BECAUSE AFTER ALL THIS WAS GOING TO BE A SECOND STRIKE, THEY HAD TO ASSUME THAT A GOOD PROPORTION OF THE FORCE WOULD HAVE BEEN ALREADY DESTROYED BY A SOVIET FIRST STRIKE.

Well, I don't think that was assumed. You see, the planning in SAC had been

[REPEATS QUESTION]

Well, the question of whether or not we would be able to use all of our weapons was of course a real one. The possibility of surprise attack against us could destroy a large fraction of our forces. But by and large, I think SAC had been accustomed to thinking that one way or another they would have enough warning so that they would be able to execute their plan without very much interruption until they hit Soviet air defenses That they would be able to get their aircraft into the air. They had been...they weren't very accustomed to thinking of having missiles on our side. But that was a very curious thing about the whole business. That it... that there was one plan: a Single Integrated Operations Plan. Not two plans. You might have thought there would be two. One for the contingency of our going first, and the other for the contingency of their striking first. But we had this single plan. And the presumption was well, if they... if they do destroy some of our forces, we'll do the best we can. And with the level of the redundancy in targeting that was involved, we would have done pretty well. There were such things done as cross targeting. They would arrange for example that in attacking a single weapon...a single complex in the Soviet Union they would use weapons... use one weapon from a Polaris ship and another one from a Minuteman and another one from a bomber. So that if one of those... one of those vehicles were destroyed the other two weapons would presumably get through. So they did take account of that kind of a contingency. But to really think in terms of this being a second strike, no. This was a single plan which they expected to execute as best they could.

DID YOU GET THE IMPRESSION THAT THEY WERE EXPECTING WHEN THE CRUNCH CAME THAT THEY WOULD HAVE REALLY GOT IN FIRST?

I didn't get that so much from that particular planning operation, but in talking with SAC people on other occasions, and I guess perhaps on that occasion as well. Yeah, I think that just generally was the feeling that the possibility of the Soviet Union destroying a significant part of our capability for preemptive attack was downplayed very heavily.

WELL THEN IT WAS VERY MUCH PLAYED UP IN PUBLIC. ENORMOUSLY SO.

Well it... perhaps so. Certainly in later years it became a major issue, but going back to the... back to the mid-'50s...

WELL, I MEAN GENERAL POWER IN 1960 WAS GIVING EVIDENCE THAT THE WHOLE OF HIS FORCE COULD BE DESTROYED BY AS FEW AS 300 SOVIET MISSILES AND WAS GENERATING A GREAT DEAL OF ALARM AS A RESULT.

Well, it was a matter of concern, yes. In fact, I remember in '59 and in '60 we talked about putting aircraft on airborne alert to deal with that problem. And we had contingency plans developed. And I believe we even did a few experiments of that kind. But the planning that went on in SAC, it seemed to me and certainly in the Single Integrated Operations Plan, really didn't reflect that.

LASTLY, DID YOU GET THE FEELING THAT, I'VE SEEN THAT FIRST SIOP DESCRIBED ROUGHLY IN THE FOLLOWING TERMS: THAT IN ONE SINGLE ATTACK WITH NOTHING HELD IN RESERVE AS NEAR AS POSSIBLE WITH EVERYTHING HITTING THE SOVIET RADAR NETS AT THE SAME TIME, EVERY MAJOR CITY NOT ONLY IN THE SOVIET UNION, BUT IN EASTERN EUROPE AND CHINA WOULD HAVE BEEN DESTROYED AND THE CASUALTY LEVELS WOULD HAVE BEEN PERHAPS WITH MINIMUM OF SAY 350, 400 MILLION PEOPLE. WOULD YOU QUARREL WITH THAT?

Oh not at all. I think that... certainly every city would have been destroyed. And the great bulk of the population in the whole of what we used to call the Sino-Soviet block would have been destroyed.

COULD YOU DESCRIBE IN YOUR WORDS A SIMILAR KIND OF SUMMARY OF THE EFFECTS IF THE SIOP HAD BEEN PUT INTO EFFECT?

Well, I think all the cities would have been destroyed in the Soviet Union. I'm not sure about China. I don't remember looking at Chinese cities as carefully as the Soviet Union. The amount of fallout would have been enormous, because the weapons at that time averaged about maybe 3 megatons which is about eight times, what they do now. Weapons were very much larger in those days. And if they were used for surface bursts, they would have produced fallout all over Eurasia. And would have caused an enormous amount of destruction in not only in the countries attacked, but those around their periphery as well.

WOULD YOU LIKE OT HAZARD ANY IDEA AS TO THE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN CAUSED BY THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SUCH A PLAN?

Well, I'm not so sure about China. But I suppose that the population of the Soviet Union must have been about 200 million at the time. And I would have guessed 75 percent somewhere in that range. It would have been very, it was a very heavy attack. It really would have been the end of the whole... the whole show for the... for the Soviet Union. Total devastation.

HOW DID IT STRIKE YOU AT THIS VERY TIME WHEN YOU WERE MAKING THIS VISIT TO OMAHA, SENATOR KENNEDY CAMPAIGNING PARTLY ON THE GROUND THAT AMERICA WAS WEAK STRATEGICALLY?

Well that was... you're referring to the missile gap, or course. And

NOT ONLY THE MISSILE GAP, BUT THE GENERAL FEELING...

Well, I know, but my concern was with the missiles, I was concerned about strategic weapons and don't have recollections of the other areas. And I knew what... I knew what we had and what we had coming down the line. And I was privy to the U-2 photography and such satellite intelligence as we had and I must say until the middle of '59 I suppose I was persuaded he might have been right. And then as we began to get more photography, I guess I realized that there wasn't going to be any missile gap. And the real issue was simply going to be which of our programs, which of our missile programs we would...we should be turning off, because we need not, felt that we need not implement all of them. To tighten the Atlas in several versions. Minuteman, Polaris, B-70. We were going to build more than we needed and it was a question of which programs to cut back on. Well, while he was arguing, of course, just the reverse, that we needed more.

I JUST WONDERED WHETHER IT STRUCK YOU AS IRONIC THAT YOU WERE REPORTING TO THE PRESIDENT AND ESSENTIALLY SAYING, "WE'VE GOT FAR TOO MUCH," AT A TIME WHEN HE WAS UNDER CRITICISM FROM MOST OF THE REST OF THE DEFENSE ESTABLISHMENT AND THE POLITICAL ESTABLISHMENT FOR ALLEGEDLY UNDERPLAYING AMERICA'S SECURITY?

But they were all... but these critics were all talking about the future. You know, I don't think there was anybody that would have argued very much at the time with the amount of damage that we could have inflicted on the Soviet Union. The concern was with what they could do to us five or six years hence after their... after their missile program had produced the kinds of numbers that we were projecting. Which they were not going to do and of course, did not do until the '70s.