Eager to defend the civilian control of nuclear weapons from military encroachment, John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara had fought hard to ensure that only the president could make the ultimate decision. But they hadn’t considered the possibility that the president might be clinically depressed, emotionally unstable, and drinking heavily — like Richard Nixon, during his final weeks in office. Amid the deepening Watergate scandal, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger told the head of the Joint Chiefs to seek his approval before acting on “any emergency order coming from the president.” Although Schlesinger’s order raised questions about who was actually in command, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The Wrong Tape

One month after the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter, a member of his national security staff, General William E. Odom, attended briefings on the SIOP at the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. Odom was considered a staunch anti-Communist, one of the hard-liners in the new administration. He was a Soviet expert, fluent in Russian, who’d attended West Point and trained as a tactical nuclear targeting officer for the Army. His visit to SAC headquarters occurred in February 1977. Eight years had passed since Henry Kissinger began to push for more flexibility in the SIOP. Secretary of Defense Schlesinger had announced in 1974 that America’s war plans were being revised, that they would soon include “Limited Nuclear Options” and “Regional Nuclear Options” using fewer weapons. And yet General Odom could find no trace of those changes in the SIOP. Like others before him, nuclear initiates granted a secret knowledge, Odom was stunned by the SIOP:

At times I simply could not believe what I was being shown and told, causing me to doubt my own comprehension. It was an unnerving experience for me personally…. It was just a huge mechanical war plan aimed at creating maximum damage without regard to the political context. I concluded that the United States had surrendered political control over nuclear weapons to a deterministic theory of war that… ensured an unprecedented devastation of both the Soviet Union and the United States…. And the president would be left with two or three meaningless choices that he might have to make within 10 minutes after he was awakened after a deep sleep late some night.

A policy of launch on warning was “absurd and irresponsible,” and implementing the SIOP under any conditions would be “the height of folly.” The SIOP now called for the Soviet Union to be hit with about ten thousand nuclear weapons. But what disturbed Odom the most about the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff in Omaha was that they didn’t seem to have any postattack plans: “Things would just cease in their world about 6 to 10 hours after they received the order to execute the SIOP.”

President Carter was determined to end the arms race with the Soviet Union. And he knew more about nuclear weapons than any of his predecessors at the White House, except, perhaps, Eisenhower. Carter had attended the U.S. Naval Academy, served as an officer on submarines, and helped to design the first nuclear propulsion systems for the Navy. A few weeks before his inauguration, Carter had met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and asked them an unexpected question: How long would it take to reduce America’s nuclear arsenal to just one or two hundred ballistic missiles? The room fell silent — and no answer was given.

In that moment, President Carter had revealed himself to be an advocate of “minimum deterrence,” a strategy that the Navy had endorsed in the late 1950s, as the Polaris submarine was being developed. He thought that one or two hundred missiles might be sufficient to deter the Soviets. And if both superpowers reduced their strategic forces to those levels, neither could launch a successful first strike. During his inaugural address, Carter spoke about his ultimate goal: “the elimination of all nuclear weapons from this Earth.” To make sure the issue was never far from his mind, he kept wooden miniatures of Soviet and American missiles on his desk in the Oval Office.