The Bomb by Fred Kaplan

Author:Fred Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

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George H. W. Bush didn’t pay a lot of attention to the nuclear war plan. For one thing, he trusted his national security team to do that. For another, he had more urgent tasks on his plate: maneuvering through the end of the Cold War and the crumbling of the Soviet Union without setting off new tensions; invading Panama and arresting its drug-dealing dictator, Manuel Noriega, while minimizing strife in its capital; and, perhaps most delicately and forcefully, mobilizing a half-million troops and an alliance of Western, Muslim, and Arab nations to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invading army from Kuwait.

On November 8, 1990, the day Bush announced a doubling of troops for that operation, he received a briefing on the new, more flexible options for the nuclear war plan. The top players were in the room—Cheney, Powell, and Vice President Dan Quayle—as were some staffers, including Miller and Klinger.

When the briefers displayed the chart showing the distinctions among the major attack options—MAO-1, MAO-2, MAO-3, and MAO-4—Bush turned to Cheney and asked, in a calm, no-nonsense tone, “Tell me the difference in the number of people I’m going to kill.”

Klinger was impressed but also shaken. He had never before heard that question asked in the first person. For more than a year, he’d been immersed in the bubble of the SIOP, thinking about nuclear war day and night, to the point where he’d honed it into an abstraction. That was the only way to stay sane while pondering megatons and megadeaths—to focus on the calculations and the scenarios, which, after a while, loomed in the mind as more palpable, certainly more controllable, than the catastrophic chaos that would ensue if the war games played out in real life. Mordant humor was another way of keeping sane: hence the special appeal of Dr. Strangelove to many nuclear strategists, doubly so to Klinger, a young man with a mordant streak, who, when asked at cocktail parties what he did for a living, would sometimes reply, “I plan the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens.” Yet here was Bush, the man who would actually make that decision—who would select the option and push the button—facing up to the consequences of his actions. Suddenly, nuclear war seemed not so abstract.

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