KWB-FB – Book: Doomsday Delayed. USAF Strategic Weapons Doctrine and SIOP-62, 1959-1962. Two Cautionary Tales.

by John H. Rubel, former Assistant Secretary of Defense( Research and Engineering), p. 33.

Why not a first strike?

In early September( 1961) Kaysen and Rowen finished their first strike study.

On September 5, Kaysen, who had taken over the drafting of the plan, sent General Taylor the resulting thirty-three page memo, titled “Stratetic Air Planning and Berlin.” It included a very detailed description of … SIOP-62, [which] called for sending in the full arsenal of the Stratetic Air Command – 2,258 missiles and bombers carrying 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 building.

Whether these figures are exactly – whether some other source may claim there were fewer of this or more of that – is immaterial. There were more than enough weapons programmed to put Kaysen’s conclusions right in the ballpark.

He went on however, to propose that the U.S. should be prepared to initiate general war by our own first strike in a manner designed for this particular confrontation. He argued further that we should target Soviet forces, avoid civilian casualties and damage as much as possible, and withhold large forces to dissuade the USSR from “the irrational urge for revenge.” In short: he proposed a RAND war-fighting( not nuclear deterrence) approach “straight out of Dr. Strangelove,” (except that Stanley Kubrick didn’t make that dark satire for another two years).

Kaysen went on to detail the types and numbers of targets to be destroyed in the first wave, the number of our bombers needed to hit the USSR, and the key assumptions on which the plan was based. He thought the assumptions were pretty good, and estimated that somewhere between “only” 500,000 and 1,000,000 Soviet civilians would be killed. U.S. casualties in case of a Soviet response would range from a “negligible” number to as much as 75 percent of the U.S. population in the worst case!

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September 7, 2025
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