Abstract
This chapter addresses the “optimum mix” targeting study and the 1959 annual report that turned its attention to “paralyzing” the USSR, foreshadowing the counterrecovery targeting of the Nixon administration. Looking forward to a notional 1963, NESC 2009 started by laying out the problem as comparing the “relative merits from [the] point of view of effective deterrence of retaliatory efforts” with the three target systems pushed for by the navy: mostly military, mostly urban-industrial, and an “optimum mix” of the two. The optimum-mix target set became the basis for the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), which merged Strategic Air Command's (SAC) Emergency War Plans with the Navy's Polaris. The SIOP became the basis for US nuclear war planning through the end of the Cold War and beyond. It established that nuclear war fighting (and targeting) was a national affair, not a service or theater one. In doing so, the SIOP placed nuclear weapons and planning in a novel position.
Published Version
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