Living with Mega-Death

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"soft" ones, such as army bases, airfields, factories, ports and transportation centers.

Whatever the Soviets do, or threaten to do, the U.S. must be in a position to do something worse, and to do it with such speed, precision and force that the Kremlin will not escalate the conflict to a higher and wider level of destruction. Ideally, the very existence of the American capability is supposed to deter the Soviets from seriously considering an attack, much less attempting one.

If deterrence were to fail and the Soviets fired the first shot, the SIOP is intended to give the President an elaborate array of carefully calibrated choices for retaliation. The task would be twofold and exquisitely difficult: on the one hand, to react in a way that would both punish the Soviets for what they had done and limit their ability to do more, while at the same time to avoid overreacting, so as not to provoke an all-out follow-up attack in which the Soviets throw everything they have at the U.S.

There would not be much time for deliberation and decision making. The Pentagon's Defense Support Program operates three Code 647 satellites in geostationary orbits that are outfitted with infra-red sensors to detect the firing of Soviet rockets. The single satellite over the Eastern Hemisphere would give the U.S. about half an hour's warning if the Soviets were to launch their land-based missiles; the two others, hovering high above the Western Hemisphere—one over the Atlantic, the other over the Pacific—would provide less than 15 minutes' warning of an attack from missile-launching submarines.

All the brainpower and hardware in the world could not prepare the President, or any council of wise men, to cope adequately with the pressures of those few moments. Nor could they be sure that the commanders down the line, to say nothing of their machines, would behave in a way that fits the anodyne, abstract concept of a limited strike, aimed exclusively at Soviet military targets.

Even if the U.S. missiles hit their targets accurately, an American "counterforce strike" directed solely against Soviet ICBM silos would nonetheless mean raining down some 2,000 warheads from one end of the U.S.S.R. to the other, including the most heavily populated and industrialized areas west of the Ural Mountains. It is doubtful that the Soviets would consider such a strike, which would leave from 4 million to 30 million dead, as a "limited" action requiring a "limited" response. In fact, Brezhnev has repeatedly warned that any use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. would lead to a no-holds-barred fight to the finish. The Soviets publicly disavow a first-strike option and chastise the U.S. for having one, but there is little doubt that their righteous-sounding doctrine would count for nothing in a crisis.

Mirror-image uncertainties apply on the Soviet side. The men in the Kremlin, for all their energetic deployment and testing of weapons, are no more sure of what would happen in a nuclear war than is anyone in the U.S. Despite their willingness to rely on brute force, the Soviet leaders have shown no inclination to risk nuclear war with the U.S. By nature, they tend to assume the worst and prepare for the worst, which is one reason why they arm as much as they do. America's land-based iCBMs are supposedly vulnerable to a Soviet