Interviewer: ADMIRAL, CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT THE CLIMATE WAS LIKE WHEN YOU GOT INTO THE NAVY STRATEGIC PLANNING AREA IN THE LATE '50S.
Interviewer: WHAT DID THE NAVY FEEL ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS AT THAT POINT?
Miller: Well in the late, in the late '50s, by that stage I had, I had been working as a delivery pilot.
Miller: I'd been flying airplanes, learning the structure of the weapons.
Miller: I had been to weapons effect school, to learn how you computed what a weapons, nuclear weapon could do in the way of damaging its various kinds of targets.
Miller: And it was my impression, particularly by the late '50s, when I started to really get into the policy side and the targeting side, OK.
Miller: OK.
Miller: Well it was really my impression, the impression I got at that time that the Navy had been scrambling pretty hard to get a capability.
Miller: The money in the defense budget was in nuclear warfare.
Miller: That's where all the dollars were going.
Miller: If you didn't have a role in that, you weren't going to be in the budget.
Miller: And we scrambled pretty hard, I know in the Navy, to get that capability.
Miller: I think we got a realistic capability in aircraft carriers and with the airplanes in the late '50s, like '59, '60, we really deployed a realistic capability.
Miller: But a lot of it up to that time was, I think marginal.
Miller: But it was, we could have delivered the weapon.
Miller: It would have gone off, but as far as being a real viable capability, I think that was highly questionable.
Miller: So we worked hard at it.
Miller: But starting in the late '50s, we started to get it with aircraft, and aircraft carriers, and then of course, Polaris came along, and that really gave the Navy a great capability, which has, of course, magnified since and gotten much better.
Interviewer: BECAUSE THERE HAD BEEN AN AGREEMENT WAY BACK IN THE LATE '40S THAT THE NAVY WAS NOT GOING TO GET INTO STRATEGIC BOMBING, THAT WAS GOING TO BE THE AIR FORCE'S BABY.
Interviewer: WHEN POLARIS CAME ALONG, DO YOU REMEMBER ADMIRAL BURKE OR OTHER PEOPLE DECIDING THAT WE WERE GOING TO GET INTO STRATEGIC BOMBING ANYWAY?
Miller: Well, I don't know so much about the strategic bombing.
Miller: The A-3 aircraft that we had, which is a twin engine Douglas aircraft, the Air Force had it and they called it a B-66.
Miller: The Navy had it and put a different engine in it.
Miller: And the Navy bird worked out well.
Miller: In fact there are still some of them flying today as electronic aircraft in 1986.
Miller: There are still some of them around.
Miller: It was a good aircraft.
Miller: And that gave us bombing capability.
Miller: Gave us the ability to tote a good-sized weapon with a good yield to it, or more than one if we wanted, a goodly distance, and deliver it with considerable accuracy.
Miller: So we really got into a realistic aircraft capability.
Miller: But the Polaris capability, the idea of that taking, merging the nuclear submarine with a weapon that came out of, out of the subsurface, and with a solid fuel propellant in it, rather than liquid which was in the ICBMs and others, that was a tremendous concept.
Miller: And of course, all of us who were around at that time, we give Admiral Burke just about 99 percent of the credit for going ahead with that.
Miller: He had to have the wisdom to say, that's the right way to go.
Miller: He was in that office of the chief naval operations for about six years.
Miller: So he was there long enough to see it and he picked the right people and he gave them the right kind of guidance.
Miller: And that gave the Navy a real, honest capability.
Miller: And...it was that capability that others in the system, particularly in the Strategic Air Command, they could see the value in that.
Miller: They could see what was going to happen.
Miller: And that's when they decided, at least in my impression, and by that time I'm really starting to get involved in the Strategic Air Command business a lot, it was my impression that they said, that's something that's going to be a winner.
Miller: We'd better get control of it.
Miller: We better have a lot to do with it.
Miller: And then the action was taken to create a strategic command.
Miller: A single command under which all of these strategic nuclear forces would function.
Miller: One commander.
Miller: And Thomas Power at that time was the head of the Strategic Air Command and I have heard him say many times on the podium, I've sat in the audience and listened to him on the podium argue this point, and say that he really didn't care who commanded this strategic command.
Miller: This single command that would combine all these forces, which would have included Polaris, but it seemed logical to him that since the strategic air command was going to deliver about 90 percent of the mega-tonnage, then it was just logical that an Air Force officer be the head of the strategic command.
Miller: And we all sat and listened and put our tongues in our cheek just as you might expect.
Miller: But that was a serious contest at that stage basically between the Strategic Air Command and the US Navy as to who was going to control Polaris.
Miller: And that, there were big arguments that came up at that stage.
Interviewer: WE'VE TALKED TO GENERAL KENT WHO WAS AN AIR FORCE COLONEL WORKING WITH THE AIR FORCE GENERALS WHO WERE TRYING TO GET THE JSTPS THROUGH.
Interviewer: GENERAL POWER, OF COURSE, AND GENERAL TWINING.
Interviewer: NOW HE SAID THAT AT NO STAGE DID HE EVER HEAR ANYONE SAYING THAT THEY WANTED A STRATEGIC COMMAND OR THAT THEY WANTED TO COMMAND POLARIS.
Interviewer: ALL THEY WANTED WAS COORDINATION OF THE TARGETING.
Interviewer: AND HE'S ABSOLUTELY ADAMANT ABOUT THAT.
Miller: OK.
Miller: It's quite possible that he never heard that.
Miller: I can believe that.
Miller: That he never heard anybody say that they wanted a strategic command.
Miller: That they wanted coordination of the targeting.
Miller: And I applaud the objective of coordination of the targeting.
Miller: There is no question that the targeting process before the creation of JSTPS was highly questionable particularly on the part of the Navy and the Army.
Miller: And maybe the rest of the Air Force, I'm not that familiar with all of theirs.
Miller: The strategic air command did a good job in the targeting process.
Miller: They had a mathematical process.
Miller: They computed probabilities.
Miller: They went about it in a very professional manner.
Miller: Far better than the other services.
Miller: And I can understand, knowing Glenn Kent and his analytic mind and his desire to do things in a mathematical and precise fashion, I would not be a bit surprised if that was the understanding he had.
Miller: I come from maybe the political side a little bit more and I heard other arguments and sought other ways.
Miller: But the objective of coordinating the plan,the targeting process was certainly one thing that had to be done.
Miller: And I think the creation of JSTPS was a step in that direction.
Miller: No question about it.
Miller: That it brought about the coordination I don't know whether your records show, whether you've come across the point, how we did this coordination before JSTPS was established.
Miller: But we had what we called world wide coordination conferences.
Miller: People would meet from all of the various commands that had nuclear weapons and delivery forces and they would go over their targeting processes and theoretically coordinate so that we didn't end up in the wrong, in the same place at the same time with a weapon, and then they'd go back and check that off.
Miller: Nothing was really done about it.
Miller: It was, and that would bother Glenn Kent.
Miller: It bothered me to some degree, except I wasn't as much in the detail of it as he was at that stage.
Miller: So I can understand that comment.
Interviewer: YOU, AND CERTAINLY MORE TO THE POINT ADMIRAL BURKE, WERE CONVINCED THAT WHAT THE AIR FORCE WAS REALLY AFTER, ALL THAT SAC WAS REALLY AFTER WAS CONTROL OF HIS SUBMARINE.
Miller: That certainly was the impression that existed in the Navy and that's one that was firmly engrained in my mind.
Miller: Yeah, well I really believed that Admiral Burke and those of us in the Navy thought that the objective certainly of the Strategic Air Command was to get control of Polaris.
Interviewer: I THINK WHEN ADMIRAL BURKE LOST ON THAT ONE AND THE JSTPS WAS FORMED, NOW YOU GOT TO HEAR ABOUT THAT FAIRLY SUDDENLY, CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THAT?
Miller: Well, the argument was made and Admiral Burke lost, as you indicated.
Miller: Went to the President Eisenhower a couple of times, as I recall, and was rejected both times.
Miller: And the next thing, you know, those of us who were working in this process and there were several of us in the Joint Staff at that time working for the Joint Chiefs.
Miller: We were in what we call the atomic ops division, operations division.
Miller: We got calls.
Miller: I got a call on a Thursday morning about 11 o'clock, said I would be in Omaha, Nebraska on a permanent change of station by Sunday afternoon at five.
Miller: And I was there.
Miller: I was in the first plane load.
Miller: And my Air Force contemporary, a wonderful guy named Bill Krum he kind of chuckled about it because he'd had a tour in Omaha, and we used to talk about the stockyards and all the great people in Omaha, which they are, it was a wonderful place to go.
Miller: But he kind of chuckled at me.
Miller: He got his call on Saturday morning to be there on Sunday afternoon at 5 o'clock.
Miller: So we went out there together and worked very closely together during the time that we were out there.
Miller: He was basically called the Air Force representative.
Miller: He represented the Air Force Headquarters.
Miller: I represented the Navy Headquarters.
Miller: And we had an Army representative and a Marine Corps representative, four of us.
Interviewer: IF YOU COULD JUST TELL THAT STORY ONCE MORE FOR ME, WHAT ARE, THE OTHER THING YOU COULD JUST THROW IN AND MAYBE LEAVE OUT THE AIR FORCE FRIEND...
Interviewer: IS THAT SAC HAD BEEN EXPECTING TEN NAVY GUARDS...
Miller: Well, I got this call about 11 o'clock on Thursday, and telling me that I was to be in Omaha on a permanent change of station by 5 o'clock on Sunday afternoon and an airplane would go on out that day.
Miller: And this was Admiral Burke in operation.
Miller: He had the detailer call me, the people were picked to go and it was obvious that General Power and the Strategic Air Command were expecting a small contingent, maybe five or six naval officers to show up.
Miller: But that was not Admiral Burke's approach to it.
Miller: I think the first airplane had about twenty five people in it, and we kept building it up till we had about forty officers out there before it was all over.
Miller: But he was not about to be represented out there by a little token force.
Miller: He was going to have people detailed into the planning business, into the intelligence part of it, selection of targets, the whole business.
Miller: He was going to have Navy representation in there.
Miller: Furthermore, I ended up being, as a Navy representative, I was kind of the personnel officer.
Miller: I was given authority to pick anybody in the United States Navy that I wanted to come out there as part of that team.
Miller: And that was, I picked a couple of officers out of war college.
Miller: They just checked into Newport War College two weeks and they left.
Miller: And they came to Omaha, Nebraska.
Miller: And it was a good team.
Miller: Many of them got promoted early and became admirals later on.
Miller: But it was a good team.
Miller: But that's the kind of approach that Admiral Burke took to that.
Miller: He thought it was terribly important that we be adequately represented in this important new process of targeting, particularly he wanted to make sure that Polaris stayed under Navy control.
Miller: That we knew what was going to happen to Polaris.
Interviewer: YOU MUST HAVE BEEN IN A FAIRLY AWKWARD POSITION THOUGH BEING SENT THERE BY THE ADMIRAL TO REPRESENT HIM AND FINDING YOURSELF UNDER THE COMMAND OF THE AIR FORCE COMMANDER OF STRATEGIC AIR COMMAND...
Miller: That's what.
Miller: I won't tell you I have scars in my back from that, but I certainly have some very vivid memories of it.
Miller: Admiral Burke is a, you know, a wonderful human being.
Miller: He's just one of the great Naval officers of all time.
Miller: Hates to lose.
Miller: And he had lost a battle And as frequently people who hate to lose do, they whip.
Miller: They take it out on whoever happens to be around.
Miller: And I was ostensibly his representative.
Miller: But he did not really believe that I was keeping him posted on what was going on.
Miller: He, you could tell his frustration.
Miller: I could feel it in Omaha all the time.
Miller: I could feel the frustration and he had a couple of people there that were watching what was going on and reporting back to him.
Miller: And I was busily involved with my Air Force contemporaries and others trying to figure out how we were going to get into this process.
Miller: We worked for a three-star admiral, a wonderful man named Ace Parker, Butch Parker rather, who was the deputy, but he was the Joint man and he couldn't get involved in some of the parochial details.
Miller: So, we worked at this very hard.
Miller: Admiral Burke had me back two different times to Washington to really pound on me tell me that I wasn't doing my job properly.
Miller: You could feel the frustrations, but I explained to him that my orders read to report to the director of the Strategic Target Planning Staff, who was CINCSAC, who was General Power.
Miller: That's what my orders read.
Miller: And that's what I was carrying out.
Miller: Now, how I, how I took care of the Navy role and Admiral Burke's part was kind of up to me, but it was, it was a difficult period.
Miller: And, but again, he shouted at me and I shouted back.
Miller: And we got along fine.
Miller: It turned out, it worked out very well.
Miller: But the initial days were hard on him.
Miller: They really were because he'd lost.
Miller: My approach was, OK, we've lost that, now let's get on and let's move on.
Miller: And I also was motivated by the fact I know that I'd really not been very happy with the planning process that had gone on before, and I could see that the creation of JSTPS could do a lot to straighten out our whole national program of how we applied the nuclear weapons.
Miller: So it made some sense.
Interviewer: ...WHAT WAS YOUR IMPRESSION ONCE YOU GOT THERE AND YOU GOT A LOOK AT THE RAW INTELLIGENCE, WHAT WAS YOUR IMPRESSION OF THE ESTIMATES OF SOVIET CAPABILITY THAT WERE COMING OUT OF SAC INTELLIGENCE AT THAT TIME IN 1960, 1961?
Miller: Well, even before that if you sat around the Navy Headquarters at all, you worked in this area, it was a pretty common complaint that the threat that was being generated was extreme.
Miller: And it was being generated by the Strategic Air Command.
Miller: Not necessarily by the Air Force or by any of the other intelligence agencies, but basically realized, by the Strategic Air Command.
Miller: And I have to compliment SAC, that command on their ability to get into the intelligence process.
Miller: They did a superb job.
Miller: They had a lot of people.
Miller: They put a lot of money in it.
Miller: Of course, they had a lot of money to put into it.
Miller: They put good people in it.
Miller: They had the right equipment.
Miller: They got the satellite photography when it existed.
Miller: They had the U-2 stuff.
Miller: They were the first to process it.
Miller: They generated their estimates and they got them out on the street in a hurry Now, the fact that many of us thought that they were a little over stressed, that they made the threat a little bigger than it really should have been, was a frustrating aspect.
Miller: And we...
Interviewer: THEY GOT IT WRONG BY ABOUT AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, TO SAY THE LEAST, IT WASN'T JUST A LITTLE WRONG...
Miller: Well...
Miller: that's correct.
Miller: In some instances, they SAC created the so-called bomber threat that we had which never materialized.
Miller: They created the missile threat that was such an issue in the Presidential campaign when Kennedy was running against Eisenhower and then when, I remember when McNamara came to Omaha to JSTPS Headquarters, very early in the new administration.
Miller: He asked to see the intelligence material.
Miller: That material that the lot of the rest of us had been seeing.
Miller: And he was very concerned about the threat and that's when he came back and said there is no missile gap.
Miller: He was, he reacted the way we had all been reacting.
Miller: But that was a great creation within the Strategic Air Command, but it was a tendency they had.
Miller: The kept building up the threat and building up the threat and there was a war game that we ran along in the Spring of, I guess that was 1961, which pitted three Polaris submarines against the threat that was generated by the Strategic Air Command intelligence organization.
Miller: There's an article coming out very soon on that particular war game.
Miller: But it was an astronomical threat.
Miller: It was nine surface action groups.
Miller: It was about 1,000 fishing trawlers, many of which had an anti-submarine warfare capability.
Miller: It was attack submarines.
Miller: Soviet attack submarines that had a better speed capability and an equal anti-submarine warfare capability to ours.
Miller: All of this.
Miller: It had Badger aircraft, it had ten kiloton depth charges.
Miller: It was unbelievable what we allowed them to put into this war game, and to go against three Polaris submarines.
Miller: But it continued this constant build up of threat.
Miller: And it's been tempered a great deal since, I think much more realistically now than it was then.
Miller: It's much more realistic now.
Interviewer: ...POSSIBLE TO COME TO SUCH RADICALLY DIFFERENT CONCLUSIONS.
Interviewer: HOW DID SAC CREATE THIS THREAT, AS YOU PUT IT?
Miller: Well, how an intelligence officer creates a threat, I suppose is one of the great mysteries of all time.
Miller: But you start with, in this instance, it was raw material that was either satellite photography or initially it was U-2 photography.
Miller: And then when the U-2 was shot down, why, we lost that.
Miller: But you put professional and photo interpreters on people with the right kind of equipment to generate it.
Miller: They see various things and then from that comes your threat.
Miller: You'll always get different interpretation from a photo interpreter.
Miller: And if somebody really wants to make something serious out of it, they can do that.
Miller: If you want to play it down, you can do that too.
Miller: It depends a lot on how you want to play the game.
Miller: And it is a game to some degree.
Miller: A good intelligence officer is invaluable when you're in combat.
Miller: But if you're playing a political game, he can maybe be even more valuable.
Miller: And I think we were playing more politics than we were really preparing for a combat situation in this.
Miller: It was not, it was not a happy subject.
Interviewer: SO ANYWAY, YOU FOUND YOURSELF INVOLVED IN THIS ARCANE SUBJECT OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS PLANNING.
Interviewer: WHAT WAS THE JOB AS YOU SAW IT? WHAT ACTUALLY WERE YOU THERE TO DO?
Miller: Well, the job of JSTPS was quite well laid out.
Miller: The task, the objective was quite well laid out in specific guidance that we were given.
Miller: And I remember that was one of the few pieces of paper that I took with me and some of the others took from the Joint Staff when we left Washington, D.C., was the guidance that was to be used in the preparation of this single integrated operation plan, the SIOP.
Miller: Exactly how we were to do it, was not defined.
Miller: And that was one of the first things that this group of people had to decide to do.
Miller: How are we going to go about interpreting the guidance? And then moving into the process.
Miller: Each unified, specified commander had a representative there, in addition to the four service reps that I've discussed, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.
Miller: The Alaskan command had a representative.
Miller: The Pacific command.
Miller: The Atlantic command.
Miller: All had representatives.
Miller: In addition, the NATO organization, because they had weapons, the US weapons that were committed to them, they targeted and we had to have them involved in the process as well.
Miller: And this was an interesting conflict of ideas about authority between General Norstad, who was the NATO Commander at the time and General Power, who was CINCSAC.
Miller: General Power felt he was to be the, as the director of this staff, he was to be the overall authority for all of the weapons that were going to be in the strategic planning process.
Miller: General Norstad said no, no US Commander has authority over the NATO weapons.
Miller: I am the NATO target here.
Miller: And so we got around and we would coordinate, we would really integrate the US commands, but we would coordinate with NATO.
Miller: And we made a big issue out of that.
Miller: I mean, there were lots of hours of debate went on on just that one point alone.
Miller: Coordination of all of the planning for the US commands and the US weapons integrated with those weapons that were US weapons that were in the hands of NATO.
Miller: And that's a relationship that is, as I understand it, still exists.
Miller: But it became no problem after we got over the initial question of who was in charge.
Miller: So that became the one of the things that we had to do.
Miller: And then we set up a policy committee, which was composed of the representatives of all of these various unified and specified commands, and the four service representatives, chaired by the deputy director, the three-star Navy admiral, and that policy committee then got into the business of interpreting the guidance, passing on the reliability factors for each individual weapon and kind of laying out the guidance, interpretation of the guidance that would be used.
Interviewer: CAN YOU GIVE ME AN IDEA OF WHAT THE GUIDANCE SAID?
Miller: The guidance, the guidance we received.
Miller: OK.
Miller: The guidance we received was kind of, was very interesting.
Miller: Of course, a very highly classified document.
Miller: But has been discussed in unclassified terms a great deal for at least the last twelve, fifteen years, depends on who you talk to.
Miller: It was one of the best pieces of guidance I'd ever seen, from the civil authority to the military command.
Miller: It identified the enemy.
Miller: Sometimes you don't get that.
Miller: But it identified in specific terms.
Miller: It told what the countries were.
Miller: A lot of people say, well, it's the Soviet Union.
Miller: But, you had to think in terms of other nations as well.
Miller: It might have been China.
Miller: It might be North Korea.
Miller: It might be other nations.
Miller: So it identified the enemy quite well.
Miller: It specified the objective, which was to defeat the enemy.
Miller: We haven't gotten that kind of military guidance that often either.
Miller: It said defeat the enemy, and it says you'll do it with the use of nuclear weapons.
Miller: Then it laid out priorities.
Miller: And this is one of the things that I think is most important, and misunderstood a great deal by the students of the subject.
Miller: But, it was very specific about what came first in the priority.
Miller: It, and this is where the word assured destruction came from.
Miller: The guidance says, you will assure destruction of the urban industrial base, a certain portion of the urban industrial base, and that will be the first priority.
Miller: And you will do that before you intend to take any other task.
Miller: You will assure a certain probability of destruction of a certain amount of the urban industrial floor space base of the opposition, before you attack or try anything else.
Miller: And that was the way it laid it out.
Miller: Then it says after you do that, you can go onto other types of targets.
Miller: Well the guidance, this was a 1960 guidance that we took with us.
Miller: We sat down and discussed it with this policy committee and it was very explicit as to what the objective would be to defeat the enemy using nuclear weapons and then it laid out the priorities.
Miller: The first priority being an urban industrial base.
Miller: It said 'thou shalt,' and this is where the words assured destruction came about.
Miller: This was 1960 time frame again, before anything else, before it was really discussed a lot.
Miller: Assured destruction of the urban industrial base.
Miller: A certain percentage of it with a certain degree of probability.
Miller: And then it said after you do that, then you can work on counterforce targets, other military targets, so forth and so on.
Miller: Nuclear targets.
Miller: But first, you will design a plan that assures destruction of a certain part of the urban industrial base.
Miller: And it said, you shall do this regardless of the amount of warning that you have before the attack is launched.
Miller: In other words, if you design this plan, take the weapons that you have, pick some targets and design a plan that will assure destruction of the urban industrial base, even if we have to absorb everything they throw at us first.
Miller: No warning.
Miller: You didn't anticipate the warning.
Miller: You absorbed the whole attack.
Miller: Now, come up with a plan that will assure the destruction.
Miller: And it was that specific.
Interviewer: IT WAS ALSO VERY SPECIFIC ABOUT THE AMOUNT OR THE DEGREE OF DESTRUCTION.
Miller: It got into the percentages, the probabilities, that were desired.
Miller: It was a very high level of damage that was specified.
Miller: In the nuclear effects business, we, I guess they still do it, we had percentage figures, but we also had agitative ratings.
Miller: Moderate damage is, to be a little facetious, is gravel.
Miller: Severe damage is dust.
Miller: They didn't want it reduced to gravel, they wanted it reduced to dust.
Miller: I mean this was severe guidance.
Miller: And what happens when you have guidance of that nature calling for high probabilities of reducing targets to kind of obliterating, what you've generated is a requirement for a lot of weapons of a very special capability.
Miller: And so this is how it got started.
Interviewer: THERE WERE CRITICISMS.
Interviewer: AND I'M GOING TO ASK YOU ABOUT THAT IN A MINUTE.
Interviewer: BUT THERE WERE CRITICISMS ALL ALONG ABOUT THE SAC PLAN, FROM THE ARMY AND THE NAVY IN THE '50S, AND VERY SPECIFICALLY FROM DR.
Interviewer: KISTIAKOWSKY AND HIS ASSISTANTS WHO CAME DOWN IN THE FALL OF 1960 TO LOOK AT THE DEVELOPING SIOP AT THAT POINT.
Interviewer: WHO WENT BACK TO PRESIDENT EISENHOWER AND WROTE A REPORT WHICH SAID IT WAS DRASTIC OVERKILL, THAT FAR TOO MUCH MEGA-TONNAGE WAS BEING EXPENDED, FAR TOO MANY WEAPONS.
Interviewer: AND ORDINARY PEOPLE NOW CANNOT UNDERSTAND HOW YOU COULD POSSIBLY USE THE THOUSANDS OF WEAPONS.
Interviewer: WHY DO YOU NEED SO MANY? EVEN TO DO THAT JOB?
Miller: Well, this question of why you needed so many weapons is a good one.
Miller: And I certainly think that the Navy people, and a lot of people were concerned about it.
Miller: It wasn't just the Navy alone.
Miller: The Army tactical air command people, a lot of people within the Strategic Air Command itself were always somewhat concerned about the numbers of weapons.
Miller: The first SIOP had about 3,500 weapons in it, which we thought was a lot of weapons.
Miller: But if you use the process that was developed, and it was a SAC process and I think it was a good process.
Miller: It was a mathematical process.
Miller: If you used that process in computing the probability of doing the damage, you could arrive at the number of weapons that were required and you could build it up.
Miller: The, as I indicated earlier, the thing that determines really the numbers of weapons to do the job, is the guidance, what kind of targets do you want to attack.
Miller: And what level of damage do you want done.
Miller: Then comes into play, the factors of capabilities of the weapons and the delivery systems.
Miller: Now, maybe I can lay it out for you here, simply on a piece of paper.
Miller: See if I can describe this.
Miller: And this was a SAC process, which was a good one.
Miller: They came up with a simple mathematic term called "damage expectancy", the damage that we expected to do.
Miller: The damage that we expected to do with a particular weapon.
Miller: D.E.
Miller: We always used to talk about the D.E.
Miller: What is the D.E.
Miller: of this particular weapon? Alright, to compute, the damage expectancy is a function of two things.
Miller: First, it would be the probability of the weapon arriving at the target, the probability of it arriving at the target.
Miller: And the second would be the probability of the weapon doing damage after it got to the target.
Miller: Now the probability of arrival is a function way back.
Miller: Let's say, the target is over here.
Miller: The probability of arrival starts way back here at the launch platform.
Miller: What is the probability of the launch platform surviving if it's under attack? If there's, you've got a lot of strategic warning.
Miller: If you preempt, for example, the survivability is very good.
Miller: It can be 1.0.
Miller: But if you had to sustain this under, had to sustain a bit attack, it probability might be much lower.
Miller: Now this where we started to get different factors.
Miller: For example, if you were an open target like SNARC, or something like that.
Miller: A cruise missile in Presque Isle in Maine, and you had to undergo an attack on that, or it was an Atlas missile out in Vandenberg Air Force Base sitting out in the sunshine of southern California, the probability under an attack of it's surviving would be pretty low, so it's probability of arrival would be rather low and therefore, it's damage expectancy would be very low.
Miller: If it was a weapons in a submarine, submerged below the ocean, it's probability of survival was pretty high, because anti-submarine warfare capability at that stage was pretty low and it still is to this day.
Miller: The survivability factor for that submarine that's carrying those weapons is still 1.0.
Miller: It's 100 percent.
Miller: So, you start off with a pretty high factor right there.
Miller: Now then, the next factor that's involved is the probability of the weapon leaving the launcher when you push the button.
Miller: They don't always work.
Miller: And this was one of the great things that McNamara did when he became Secretary of Defense.
Miller: Statistically oriented.
Miller: He had Alain Enthoven as OK.
Miller: Had one of his guys.
Miller: And so he went for more testing to get us better reliability factors.
Miller: But the probability of the thing leaving the launch pad could be 95 percent or something less.
Miller: Some of them it was down as low as 30 percent.
Miller: And so you have that in there.
Miller: Then there's the probability of it as it goes to the target of it malfunctioning.
Miller: Whether it was a bomber aircraft or anything else.
Miller: A certain number, every so many miles, a certain percentage of them are going to fail.
Miller: They're not going to go.
Miller: And then there is, when you got near the target area, where there was the penetration capability.
Miller: If you got to go by a big bomber base here, a big fighter base rather, and this is a bomber, the fighters are going to come up, the probability of knocking it down might be pretty high.
Miller: So, the first thing you've got to do is take out this base.
Miller: You take out a military target in order to get through to your urban industrial target.
Miller: Then finally, you arrive at the target itself, you've gotten it there, you're probability of arrival now say is 75 percent or something of that nature, cleared out all the way.
Miller: Now, the weapon goes off and it's probability of doing the damage is a function of how close does it land to the target point, the aim point.
Miller: And will it go off.
Miller: About five percent of them probably wouldn't go off.
Miller: So right away you've lost that.
Miller: And then if the weapon was not very accurate, its probability of doing the damage would be degraded by its lack of accuracy.
Miller: Now then, if you're given a high, a high, the guidance says you'll get a 90 percent confidence level that you're going to do 95 percent damage to this target.
Miller: And you start off over here, with a weapon that's only got a 50 percent probability of surviving under attack, and by the time it gets over here it's going to be less than that, you're a long way from meeting this factor.
Miller: And so you start adding weapons.
Miller: And you keep adding weapons and adding weapons to get to this damage level that's set up here, and you keep adding them on and adding them and pretty soon you get asymptotic on the curve.
Miller: And if it's a very hard target, like an ICBM, and you don't have great accuracy, you can keep adding weapons and adding weapons and you're never going to get there.
Miller: And this is why Schlesinger and all of us had said for years, you can't get a counterforce capability unless you have great accuracy.
Miller: And if you cannot attack the submarines and a lot of the weapons are in submarines, if you can't even target them, how are you going to get a counterforce capability? But this is how you got to so many weapons.
Miller: You had a high, a damage expectancy that was dictated to be very high.
Miller: That meant a lot of weapons had to go on a single aim point in order to guarantee the probabilities that were specified in the guidance.
Miller: You want to reduce the arsenal? You really want to do an arms reduction problem? Change the guidance.
Miller: Say just, all the guidance says is put a weapon on a target, and the number of weapons would go down.
Interviewer: CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHY IT TAKES SO MANY WEAPONS TO DO THE JOB?
Miller: That' a question that comes up a lot.
Miller: Let me try it as simply as I can.
Miller: Say we had a target over here that you want to attack.
Miller: The guidance says you want a high probability of destroying that target.
Miller: And that's a key factor.
Miller: A high probability of doing it.
Miller: You start with a launch site over here and a weapon.
Miller: And it's not necessarily always going to work 100 percent of the time, because the launch platform may not survive, it may not come off the pad.
Miller: There's lots of variables that are going to degrade the probability of arrival.
Miller: And as the weapon comes to the target, it's going to have other factors affecting its probability of arriving.
Miller: It's reliability.
Miller: Furthermore, to get it to that target, there may be other weapons that you have to use in order to clear the way.
Miller: The penetration capability.
Miller: Maybe it's a fighter airfield.
Miller: Maybe it's a radar site before that.
Miller: Maybe it's surface to air missile sites.
Miller: You have to take all of these out.
Miller: So you have lot of weapons coming down here in order to give a high probability of that weapon arriving there.
Miller: And of course, after it arrives, it may not go out so you have to put another one on.
Miller: You put all of these factors together you end up with a lot of weapons just to guarantee this high probability that you were given in your guidance.
Miller: Reduce the probability in the guidance, you don't have to do so much damage to so many targets or don't have to have it so severe, you reduce the number of weapons.
Interviewer: I'VE HEARD IT SAID THAT THE GUIDANCE THAT SAC WAS WORKING ON WAS ACTUALLY DIFFERENT, OR RATHER THEY UP-RATED THE PROBABILITIES FROM THAT WHICH WAS PROVIDED TO THEM BY THE JCS.
Interviewer: ARE YOU AWARE OF THAT?
Miller: Well, that might have happened before the SIOP was put together, but once the SIOP started in the fall of '60 we all worked from the same guidance, the same criteria, and the reliability factors for every system were decided by this policy committee, they were debated at great length.
Miller: And so we all worked, we all worked from the same guidance, the same criteria, and agreed upon reliability factors.
Interviewer: IN THE NEXT TEN YEARS THERE WAS A GREAT DEAL OF DEBATE ABOUT POLICY, ABOUT MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION, ABOUT COUNTERFORCE, NO-CITIES STRATEGIES, WAR FIGHTING STRATEGIES.
Interviewer: PRESUMABLY ALL THIS HAD A DRAMATIC EFFECT ON THE KIND OF TARGETS THAT YOU WERE AIMING AT AND THE WAY YOU WENT ABOUT YOUR JOB.
Miller: Well, that's there's a, there's a lot of stories about that and there were a lot of pieces of paper written, and I'm sure a lot of well meaning people thought they were changing the guidance, modifying things very much.
Miller: But I was surprised when I came back in 1973 to be the Deputy Director, the three-star Admiral of JSTPS when I called for the guidance, I wanted to see what the guidance was.
Miller: They brought me the guidance.
Miller: It was exactly the same piece of paper — not just the same guidance, it was the same piece of paper that I had put in the files in 1960, that I had worked with, that still had my pen and ink scratches on the side of it.
Miller: So despite all of the chatter and all of the talk, basically the guidance never changed, it stayed the same.
Miller: Uh, we still went for the same things.
Miller: And one of the reasons why is, there's just limited things that you can do with nuclear weapons.
Miller: They're a very poor military tool, and not very flexible, and they have great limitations on them.
Miller: They can do one thing very well, they can obliterate — cities.
Miller: From then on, they're not very useful.
Miller: So you could say all you want about modifying, make them flexible, limited responses and all of that.
Miller: But basically, when you get down to it, about all you can do with a nuclear weapon is create a lot of havoc and retaliate.
Miller: Now, maybe we'll someday get to the position where they're can do better than that.
Miller: But anybody who's ever targeted with them is stuck with massive retaliation pretty much as the thing that works.
Interviewer: WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE SAID TO, SAY, GEORGE RATHJENS OR GEORGE KISTIAKOWSKY WHEN THEY CAME DOWN IN THE FALL OF 1960 AND THEY PUT OUT THIS REPORT THAT REALLY THE SIOP WAS A MASSIVE OVERKILL?
Miller: I would have said if you think it's a massive overkill, go back and change the guidance.
Miller: Go get the guidance changed.
Miller: Get the President of the United States, you're advising the President, go get the President of the United States to change the guidance.
Miller: Reduce the level of damage that he desires, the high probability, and get off of some of that.
Miller: But if he...writes a guidance to demand what he wants, and these weapons only have a certain capability, then you're going to build the requirements for that number of weapons.
Interviewer: YOU DON'T THINK IT WAS GOING THE OTHER WAY AROUND, THAT SAC WAS DISCOVERING TARGETS...
Miller: Oh, the target list kept going up, but, and the biggest change in the target list as I recall occurred, excuse me, occurred later on in...
Interviewer: START AGAIN, THE BIGGEST CHANGE.
Miller: The biggest change in the target list that I recall occurred about 1974, uh-four, January, when Schlesinger came out with new guidance, this is much later.
Miller: But he wanted he changed it, modified it he incorporated in the guidance there an entirely new factor, and that...go out and study target lists, and the target lists really jumped that time.
Miller: And he thought probably that he was going to reduce it.
Miller: It just depends on how you word it, and what you say in the guidance.
Miller: But the number of weapons that came were available, would undoubtedly increase the target list, you know, from the first hundred cities, now you got a lot more weapons, you go to the next two hundred cities.
Miller: That job you could always do.
Miller: It was always a question of do I apply the weapons against the targets I can destroy, the urban-industrial base, or do I put them against the targets that I can't destroy, the counterforce targets, the hard military targets, the ICBM sites, the hardened command and control sites and so forth.
Miller: But after you've put down seven weapons and you haven't got any probability of doing damage against a hard target, why put any more there? See, we had this dichotomy going on all the time of people saying, hey, we've got to go counterforce, and you didn't have a weapon that could go counterforce.
Miller: So you end up with a, with a tremendous...
Miller: And this, let me make this one point.
Miller: There were a lot of people in the academic world that were very confused about this in the '70s, in the early '70s and particularly.
Miller: They thought that most of the weapons were going against counterforce target.
Miller: I mean, against urban-industrial targets.
Miller: And that very going against counterforce that we were just going to go for cities.
Miller: That was just as wrong as you could be.
Miller: The ratio, I'm not going to go into the details of the ratio, but it was so obvious, so much in the other direction that I was appalled that the academic community could be so naive in figuring that out.
Interviewer: WHAT ROUGHLY WAS THE RATIO OF WEAPONS THAT WERE, GIVEN WHAT YOU'VE JUST EXPLAINED THERE, WHAT WAS THE RATIO OF WEAPONS THAT WERE FINALLY TARGETED ON URBAN INDUSTRIAL TARGETS AS OPPOSED TO WHAT YOU MIGHT...
Miller: Oh I, I don't recall exactly, but it was a ratio of about one for an industrial target against four against military, a ratio of about 4-to-1, 5-to-1, something like that.
Miller: But that's only part of the story.
Miller: The probability of doing damage against the military targets, even though you were putting down four times as many was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.
Miller: You couldn't do it.
Miller: The weapon just didn't have the capability to attack those hard targets and destroy them.
Interviewer: YOU DIDN'T HAVE HARD TARGETS IN 1960 DID YOU?
Miller: Well, you had you had the ICBM sites starting to come along, and some of the, some of the submarine pens and things of that nature were pretty hard.
Miller: The nuclear storage sites were pretty hard, nuclear weapons storage sites.
Miller: Some of those were pretty hard targets.
Miller: Of course, the weapons weren't as accurate then either, so you didn't, you just couldn't do it.
Miller: It's always been a tough thing to do.
Miller: You got lots of talks about it now, we're going to have pinpoint the cruise missile's going to be pinpoint accuracy.
Miller: Fine.
Miller: Then I come back to the thing I've always pointed out on counterforce, the submarine.
Miller: Tell me how you're going to target that.
Miller: And with the United States having, you know, over 50 percent of the weapons in submarines and the Soviets about 30 percent, when they're at sea, how are you going to do it?
Interviewer: ONE OTHER QUESTION.
Interviewer: LOOKING BACK ON THE 1950S, FROM THE POSITION AS YOU SAW IT CULMINATE IN THAT SIOP OF 1960, DO YOU THINK THAT THE UNITED STATES COULD HAVE GOTTEN ALONG WITH FEWER ACTUAL WEAPONS, SMALLER MEGA-TONNAGE, AND STILL DONE THE JOB, AT THAT TIME?
Miller: No question about it.
Interviewer: JUST PUT THAT IN A STATEMENT FOR ME.
Miller: Yeah, I, I don't, I think that the numbers of weapons that have been involved in the, in the nuclear process, the amount of dollars that have been spent gross waste far more than we ever really required, dictated as much by political pressures as anything else.
Miller: Really one of the more, well, I almost say shameful aspects of our society, that we have focused on this so much, we have now built such a, a...
Miller: cult really of people that are wrapped up in it, that make their living on it, and it just keeps going out of control, all the time.
Miller: I think that's a big mistake.
Miller: I could take you to people around this town who were in on the initial plans of SAC, when we had right after the war, when we had 55 weapons, who wondered what we were going to do with them all.
Miller: Yeah, I thought 3,500 was a lot.
Miller: When it got to eight thousand when I was back there the second time, I couldn't believe it.
Miller: Now it's up to ten thousand.
Miller: And the Joint Chiefs of Staff go along with that.
Miller: You find them, they'll give 50 percent up, anytime they want.
Miller: You know, anytime you want, take any 50 percent.
Miller: The only thing is they want the Soviets to give up 50 percent, too.
Miller: That's where some of this the targeteer, a lot of the old targeteers that I've worked with, we don't care what the Soviets do.
Miller: Take 50 percent of them anyway.
Miller: And then after you do that take another 50 percent.
Miller: Just leave me alone a little bit and I'll give you a decent plan that will do as much as a nuclear weapon can do.
Miller: Which is not an awful lot, except destroy soft targets and cities.
Interviewer: AND DO YOU THINK THAT THE, I'LL ASK THE QUESTION AGAIN, AND I'LL REPHRASE IT ACTUALLY.
Interviewer: IT'S OFTEN SAID THAT PRESIDENT EISENHOWER DID HIS UTMOST TO HOLD BACK THE ARMS RACE IN A CLIMATE THAT BASICALLY WAS PUSHING HIM FOR MORE.
Interviewer: DO YOU THINK HE DID AS MUCH AS HE COULD HAVE DONE TO LIMIT THE ACQUISITION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS?
Miller: Well, I, that's a tough question for me to answer really.
Miller: But if he was gonna, if he was, as I think I indicated before, if the President of the United States really wanted to control the number of weapons that were going into the into the stockpile of the United States, the biggest thing to do was to change the guidance for the SIOP.
Miller: Just change the guidance and you've reduced the numbers a great deal.
Interviewer: LOOKING OVER, BACK AT THAT DECADE, AND YOU CAME IN AT THE END THERE WITH THREE AND A HALF THOUSAND WEAPONS OR WHATEVER IT WAS, DO YOU THINK THE UNITED STATES COULD HAVE GOTTEN ALONG AND COULD HAVE DONE THE JOB WITH FEWER WEAPONS?
Miller: No question about it.
Miller: The United States could have definitely could have definitely gotten along with far less weapons than the, than the 3,500 in the, in that first SIOP.
Miller: We had— we didn't need that many by any means.
Miller: We needed a few good ones, kind of like the Marines.
Interviewer: LET ME ASK YOU AGAIN, COULD YOU TELL THE THOUGHT THAT YOU HAD THAT SOME PEOPLE AROUND IN 1947 SAID 55 WAS TOO MANY?
Miller: To give you a feel about this subject, and there are people in this town, for example, who were involved in the first nuclear warfare plans that we had, who were delivery pilots.
Miller: When we had 55 weapons.
Miller: And they would wonder, what are we going to do with all of those weapons? This was the thinking that we had after the first two went off.
Miller: And it just kept escalating.
Miller: But we were appalled at 3,500.
Miller: It was an awful lot of weapons.
Miller: And, and you couldn't do much with many of them, because they didn't have the capabilities.
Miller: The weapons are, I repeat again, that nuclear weapons are very limited in what they can do.
Miller: And it doesn't take an awful lot of them to do what they can do.
Miller: You can add and add and add, never got anymore, get anymore capability out of it.
Interviewer: THAT'S FINE.
Interviewer: OK.
Interviewer: THANKS A LOT.
Interviewer: IF YOU GET, IF YOU HIT THE RADAR SCREEN FROM ALL SIDES...
Miller: That's David and Goliath.
Miller: That's any military campaign.
Miller: That's you against me.
Miller: That's anybody in conflict.
Miller: The most effective campaign I've got is to hit you when you're not looking, first, with all I can hit you with, get it over with in a hurry.
Miller: That's Ali, that's anybody.
Miller: This is the most effective plan.
Miller: Put it all down and do it first.
Miller: And you don't need a lot of weapons in that situation either.
Miller: But that's remember Schlesinger has said all along, we've never ruled out the preemption option.
Miller: Now, we never expect to use it.
Miller: And I've briefed the Naval War College on that point and others, in the '50s, that we had a pre-emption option in there.
Miller: We always had that plan.
Miller: That was an option that we should give the President of the United States.
Miller: Never going to use it.
Miller: But it's at least a plan.
Miller: Remember the SIOP is a plan, and that's a significant factor.
Interviewer: THE ALLEGATION BY PEOPLE LIKE DR.
Interviewer: KISTIAKOWSKY, WAS WHEN THEY CAME DOWN TO SEE IT IN NOVEMBER OF 1960, WAS THERE'S ONLY THE ONE OPTION, AND THAT'S THE ALL-OUT ATTACK WITH EVERYTHING THAT SAC HAS.
Interviewer: MAYBE A RETALIATORY OPTION, ALL THEY'VE GOT LEFT.
Interviewer: BUT JUST THE ONE, ALL-INCLUSIVE PLAN.
Miller: Well, I have great respect for Dr. Kistiakowsky and I talked to him, later on.
Miller: I know George Rathjens who was with him.
Miller: I've watched many people come through there, get briefed.
Miller: All I can say is, they're wrong.
Miller: They're wrong on that aspect.
Miller: The first SIOP had options in it.
Miller: Every SIOP has had options in it.
Miller: And it was not one massive, big retaliatory strike.
Miller: There were many options in there that could be used by the President of the United States.
Miller: Not as many as in some later plans but there were a considerable number in there.
Interviewer: IF THE PRESIDENT'S SCIENTIFIC ADVISER DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THOSE OPTIONS, DID THE PRESIDENT KNOW ABOUT THOSE OPTIONS? AND IF HE DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THEM, HOW COULD HE USE THEM?
Miller: Well, the way of course President Eisenhower never saw the plan.
Miller: See, really in any detail.
Miller: It wasn't until it was put together by the time he turned over, but I don't think he ever saw the plan.
Miller: I did the initial part of the briefing to most of the people in Washington, D.C., the Secretary of Defense and so forth, and the progress of it.
Miller: The initial part of it, I didn't do the whole briefing, but I did part of it, I participated in that.
Miller: We never got out of McNamara's office on that particular subject.
Miller: But I, I have my doubts that he was familiar with the details of the SIOP.
Miller: I have my doubts that many Presidents have been familiar with the real details of the SIOP.
Miller: There's a lot of books on that subject.
Miller: That talk about the football and the details of the plans.
Miller: Some Presidents spend more time on them than others.
Miller: I thought President Ford asked some of the best questions when he was the Vice President.
Miller: He certainly went into it...
Interviewer: COME BACK TO 1960.
Interviewer: THERE WERE OPTIONS AVAILABLE?
Miller: There were options available in 1960.
Miller: No question about it.
Miller: There were options in the first SIOP, a considerable number.
Miller: It's a misconception I think that's been circulated around which is entirely erroneous.
Miller: But there were, there were several options in the first SIOP.
Miller: You didn't go all out against everything with all of the weapons.
Miller: There were many options that you could, execute.
Interviewer: PRESUMABLY FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF PILOT SURVIVAL AND THE ABILITY TO GET THROUGH TO THE TARGETS, THE BEST THING IS TO HIT THE SOVIET RADAR SCREENS WITH AS MUCH AS YOU CAN AT ONCE.
Interviewer: I MEAN IN A MILITARY WAY.
Miller: Well, the problem with...
Miller: the problem with nuclear weapons against, again in an, there are limitations.
Miller: You got various delivery systems.
Miller: That some of them take a long time to get the weapon on the target.
Miller: Others, 15 minutes.
Miller: Some of them less.
Miller: Then there is the problem of the damage, the explosion, what happens in the atmosphere, so you have to be careful about not blowing other aircraft out of the sky, or yourself.
Miller: But you have that problem, what we call a separation problem.
Miller: You had to separate the weapons on the individual targets.
Miller: It took a lot of hours to put down the 3,500 weapons, a lot of hours to lay that whole thing out.
Miller: To have the separation and everything else.
Miller: We've been asked that question many times, wouldn't the best plan be simultaneous launch? No! Best plan would be simultaneous impact! Where they all go, you start it, and they all hit at exactly the same time.
Miller: Can't do it with 3,500 weapons.
Miller: Maybe with 55, but not with 3,500.
Miller: Now, that requires going into the details of the targeting a lot more than I certainly intend to and or that would be proper.
Miller: Or that would keep people interested...
Interviewer: THANKS A LOT.