U.S. Planning for Pandemics and Large-Scale Nuclear War
Lynn Eden

A Working Paper presented to
The 75th Anniversary Nagasaki Nuclear-Pandemic Nexus Scenario Project
October 31-November 1, and November 14-15, 2020 (Japan Time)
Co-sponsored by Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University(RECNA), the Nautilus Institute, Asia Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament

About the Author
Lynn Eden is senior research scholar (emeritus), at Stanford University. Her Ph.D. is insociology from the University of Michigan; she works at the intersections of sociology, history,
and political science. For most of her career, Eden was senior research scholar at the Center forInternational Security & Cooperation (CISAC) in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International
Studies at Stanford University; she was also associate director for research at CISAC for many of
those years. Before that, Eden taught in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University.
Eden has written on how people in small communities do, or plan, harm to others. Her first book,Crisis in Watertown, was a finalist for a U.S. National Book Award. She also wrote on the 1964
Ku Klux Klan murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman in
Philadelphia, Mississippi. Most of Eden’s work, including articles, chapters, and co-edited
volumes, has been on U.S politics, nuclear arms control, and U.S. foreign and military policy.
Her book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation
won the American Sociological Association’s 2004 Robert K. Merton award for best book inscience and technology studies. Using historical documents and personal interviews, Lynn Edenis currently writing on how organizational routines, narratives of deterrence, and jokes andhumor make it possible for highly ethical U.S. military officers to revise and develop theoperational war plans to “prevail” in a nuclear war.

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Abstract
This paper focuses on the United States and examines how developing plans to understand,prevent, prepare for, and mitigate disasters that may occur infrequently—for example,
pandemics, is different from developing plans to fight and “prevail” in a large-scale nuclear war.
We could say that preparing for pandemics makes sense, but that developing—and implicitly
threatening to carry out—nuclear war plans only makes sense if such plans are not carried out.
Both kinds of plans involve anticipating large numbers of deaths—but at very different orders ofmagnitude. And, although the language of prevention and mitigation may be common to both,the probability of a pandemic depends to a considerable degree on human knowledge andsocial/political action. On the other hand, the reason for developing highly detailed “executable”
plans to fight and “prevail” in a nuclear war is to threaten an enemy so “he” will not attack youor your allies. One cannot threaten a pandemic in hopes of deterring it from attacking. But if
nuclear war plans do not deter an enemy, carrying out those plans in the hopes of destroying
enemy forces will almost certainly lead to the incomprehensible destruction of all.
It is puzzling that the Trump administration did not prepare for a pandemic. It is puzzling how
those who develop U.S. nuclear war plans understand what they are planning. I explore both
below.
Keywords: Pandemic, scenarios, government organization, U.S. nuclear war planning, planners,
outcomes, measurement, displacing emotion, humor

2Planning for the Possible
Planning for the future, especially calculating risk, is essential, and impossible to get just right.1
Preparing for pandemics, as well as floods, oil spills, very large forest fires, etc. requires funding
and serious scientific and human behavioral research; to know what plans have to be drawn up
and practiced before a disaster; what must be done immediately during, throughout, andimmediately after; and learning from experience how to mitigate the effects of future disasters.

Beginning in the George W. Bush administration—largely in response to the terror attacks of
September 11, 2001, and, the later catastrophic flooding of New Orleans and Houston caused by
Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005—the United States government developed new robust
preparedness programs of research, planning, and rehearsals of what could happen in a variety ofsituations, including pandemics.

Under the Department of Homeland Security, the National Exercise Program rehearsed what to
do in the event of various disasters and catastrophes. Exercises could be small or large. These
could be high-level, local-level, or multi-level “table-top” exercises, which are just what theysound like: a group of people more or less seated around a table, working through a scenario or
scenarios with the help of professional facilitators and pre-written scripts that are likely to be
unpredictably revised (these changes are termed “injects”) during the course of the exercise.

Much larger exercises use, or try to use, what is called a “whole of government” approach.
These are not “table-tops,” and can involve fire departments, police departments, military
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Risk comprises three things: first, the probability that an adverse event may be caused in a specified way;second, the vulnerability of an asset to the specified threat; and, third, the impact, particularly the loss, or cost, if
the threat were realized. For example, the risk of the 2019-2020 pandemic is, first, the probability that a specificcoronavirus would migrate to humans in a province in China in 2019; second, the high transmissivity of thiscoronavirus, especially if serious precautions are not taken; and, third, the spiraling economic and social costs ofineffective isolation of people with Covid-19.

1personnel, radiological teams, medical personnel, governors, federal department personnel, andlawyers expert in various areas, along with “subject matter experts” and, perhaps, a national
television news reporter playing him- or herself.

The whole of government approach is both vertical and horizontal. It is especially necessary inthe sprawling multi-level federal system that governs the United States of America. “Vertical”
means hierarchical communication and directives from presidential and federal department
levels to state and local levels of government. To do this well requires listening to and taking into
account the needs and demands of lower levels of government, and also not taking responsibility
for, or dictating, actions better taken at more local levels. “Horizontal” means communicationand coordination across government institutions, including a relatively clear division of laborand adherence to the law among the office of the president, executive departments, andCongress. This is an ideal that can be strengthened through practice, including participants
thrashing out sometimes competing historical prerogatives and powers, referred to as “equities,”to the specific laws and regulations (“authorities”) that apply or may apply, and even to thespecific people federal employees should call at the state and/or local levels, and vice versa.

Of course, the United States had developed numerous preparedness exercises at least since theend of World War II—think of “duck and cover” exercises as schoolchildren dived under theirdesks to prepare to survive an atomic attack.2 The wide-ranging whole of government exercises
became much more prominent early in the Bush administration,3 and they continued during thepresidency of Barack Obama.

2

The scholar Lee Clarke has insightfully explained how U.S. government publications on civil defense from nuclear
weapons, and other events such as nuclear reactor explosions and oil tanker accidents, are “fantasy documents.”
Lee Clarke, Mission Improbable: Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999); and see Lee Clarke and Charles Perrow, “Prosaic organizational failure,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol.
39, no. 8 (1996), pp. 1040-1056.
3
I participated as a member of a team from Stanford University that formally observed a large national exercise
called TOPOFF-2 (TOPOFF for Top Officials) in 2003. TOPOFF-2 involved simulating a deliberate attack using a large
radiological dispersal device in Seattle and a serious outbreak of plague in Chicago. The response to both was inlarge part coordinated by the federal government in Washington D.C.—in concert with its state and local partners.
I learned several things: Civilian exercise programs are largely modeled on military scenario planning and exercises.

2As the United States transitioned from the Obama administration to the Donald Trumpadministration, the U.S. government was quite well-prepared to deal with a possible future
pandemic. During the formal transition to the Trump administration, large packages of
documents across the government were put together for the incoming administration. One ofthose sets of transition documents was on how to prepare for a pandemic. One week before
Trump took office, a high-level exercise involving several dozen people from bothadministrations was carried out. According to one account,

The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages ofventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated,unified national response was “paramount”—warnings that seem eerily prescient given
the ongoing coronavirus crisis.4

Of course, as we know, the personnel turnover from the beginning of the Trump administration
was unprecedented. In addition, within the White House’s National Security Council staff, theScales of exercises vary, from “table-top,” where a dozen or more experts talk through a given hypotheticalsituation, to large multi-city exercises in which a number of groups and agencies at the municipal and regional
levels (for example, fire-fighters, police, medical personnel, mayors, local newscasters, and “subject matter”
experts) to state and federal government officials or stand-ins for such officials—for example, stand-ins for thepresident or very high-ranking officials. The value of such exercises generally is not in specific solutions, since what
is anticipated is very unlikely to be precisely what will occur. Rather, participants may discover the specific offices
and even personnel they should be interacting with at different levels of government, and more important,participants become sensitized to some of the issues that may be encountered. Analysis by participants is likely tooccur immediately after the exercise in what is called a “hot wash.” More in-depth analyses will also occur under
longer time frames. An example of how exercises can be helpful was one known as Hurricane Pam, which took
place in July 2004, just over a year before Hurricane Katrina. Participants worked out plans to change traffic fromtwo-way in and out of New Orleans and points further south to only one-way: north, out of the area. This
contraflow plan was implemented just before the hurricane hit, and it was highly successful. Other aspects of theexercise were not so successful. See the U.S. government report on exercise Hurricane Pam, “A failure of
Initiative,” https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/katrina/govdocs/109-377/pam.pdf.
4
Quoted in Nahal Toosi, Daniel Lippman and Dan Diamond, “Before Trump’s inauguration, a warning: ‘The worst
influenza pandemic since 1918,” Politico, March 16, 2020. And see Dan Diamond and Nahal Toosi, “Trump teamfailed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook,” Politico, March 25, 2020; and David E. Sanger, Eric Lipton, Eileen
Sullivan and Michael Crowley, “Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded,” New York Times,
March 22, 2020.

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specific suborganization responsible for preparing for a pandemic or deliberate biological attack
was dismantled by then National Security Advisor John Bolton. Discontinuities in staff and inorganization were not the only problems. In this situation, the Trump administration did not
believe in exercising the power of the federal government itself, for example, in directing or
mobilizing the public sector. The president did not believe his medical doctors and scientists.
The president saw political opportunity in discouraging the wearing of masks. Many in the
Republican party professed to believe that COVID-19 was a hoax. In certain parts of the country,
strongholds of support for President Trump, it became fashionable to resist public healthmeasures.

The tragic bungling of the ongoing pandemic was not inevitable. It is a case study of how not to
run a government.

Planning for the Impossible: Nuclear War
U.S. planning to fight and prevail in a nuclear war has been far less buffeted by changing
administrations. The question I ask here is not about incompetence, but rather is moral andsocial/psychological: what has enabled U.S. military officers to make highly detailed plans tofight and “prevail,” in President Ronald Reagan’s words, in “a nuclear war [that] cannot be won
and must never be fought”?5 Developing a plan, including various options, does not mean thatstate officials want or intend to go to war; it means that if a state goes to war, planning options
are already prepared for military use. We expect such plans to be developed for conventionalarmed conflict and war. Although hard to comprehend, such plans are also developed for nuclear
war.6

5

See Joint Soviet-United States Statement on the Summit Meeting in Geneva, November 21, 1985,
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/joint-soviet-united-states-statement-summit meeting-geneva
6See, for example, David Alan Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 19451960,” International Security, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1983), pp. 3-71; the concise synthesis on U.S. nuclear war planningfrom the late 1940s through the 1980s by Scott D. Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security

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Stated otherwise, what are the governmental and organizational processes that have made it
possible for dedicated, hard-working, and generally good people to plan actions that, if realized,
would cause calamity on an incomprehensibly vast scale? How are those involved in detailed
nuclear war planning able, to some degree, to avoid thinking, and having “some pretty strong
feelings” about the consequences of nuclear war, at least enough to get on with their work ofplanning it? What are the social, in this case, mostly organizational, mechanisms that enableofficers to plan the end of the world, at least the world as we know it?

For example, toward the end of the Cold War, a government official working in strategic
nuclear war planning told me that it was[an] emotional burden to read the war plans. You begin to lose sight that you're talking
about the end of civilization. You look at this and think you might actually have toemploy one of these [plans] some day and it's just mind boggling.... I thought, “My God,[it] isn't just an abstraction, it's real. This is what we intend to do in x, y, or z situation.”
So that was incredibly overwhelming and…. It was actually hard to work during the first
couple of weeks. Hard to take any of them seriously because I … wanted to shake themand say, “Are you fucking kidding me?.... Are you out of your mind? How can you
possibly consider an attack option that looks like that?”…. I think that when you work
long enough on targeting, you ... at a certain point [you] have to stop thinking about what
executing one of those options really means. Because I don't know how you could livewith yourself if you did.7(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 10-57; William Burr’s published work and his analysis andhistorical documents online in the National Security Archive’s Nuclear Vault—for example, Burr’s “To Have the
Only Option That of Killing 80 Million People is the Height of Immorality: The Nixon Administration, the SIOP, andthe Search for Limited Nuclear Options, 1969-1974,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 173,
posted November 23, 2005, at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB173/index.htm. For somewhat more
technical discussions see Theodore A. Postol, “Targeting,” in Ashton B. Carter, John D. Steinbruner, and Charles A.
Zraket, eds., Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987, pp. 373- 406; andGeorge J. Seiler, Captain, USAF, Strategic Nuclear Force Requirements and Issues (Maxwell Air Force Base,
Alabama: Air University Press, February 1983).
7
Anon, Eden conversation with, September 19, 1988. “At a certain point…”: emphasis added.

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How do people in an organization stop, or avoid, thinking about the results of the very thing
they are planning?

Below, I briefly describe the specific nuclear war planning organization to which I refer. I thendescribe five organizational processes that enable war planners to carry out their tasks.
Underlying most of these explanations is that as war planners do their jobs, they generally do not
focus on the human and civilizational consequences, that is, they “stop thinking about what
executing one of those options really means.” Does this make war planners different from others
who work in bureaucracies? We will see that, in general, the answer is no.

Organization. I focus here only on the most detailed tier of U.S. nuclear war planning, the place
where the actual detailed nuclear war plans are updated and revised. For most of the Cold War
these planners worked in a multi-service (“joint”) planning group called the Joint Strategic
Target Planning Staff (JSTPS). The group was joint, but it worked under the legendary militarycommand, the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command (SAC), located at Offutt Air Force Base,adjacent to Omaha, Nebraska. SAC personnel dominated nuclear war planning; they were “dualhatted,” SAC officers who also worked at JSTPS. There were officers at JSTPS from otherservices, particularly the Navy, but also from the Army, Marines, and NATO members. After theCold War more or less ended, in 1992 the name of the planning group changed, but the functions
did not. (JSTPS changed to the more generic J-5: J for Joint, 5 for planning, a standard
designation across all U.S. military services).

These planners use and must follow increasingly detailed guidance: first, broad presidential
guidance, then more detailed Department of Defense directives, and yet more detailed
instructions from Joint Chiefs of Staff planners on how to “build” war planning options. In
addition, planners developed their own translation of instructions, known as the “Blue Book,” formany years unknown at higher levels to even exist. As the Cold War ended, SAC was
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reconfigured as a joint command now known as the Strategic Command (STRATCOM). Fromthe mid-1950s, nuclear war planners have worked in the same set of offices in an undergroundannex to SAC/STRATCOM headquarters. This annex is located three stories below groundunder the front lawn of what for decades was the SAC/STRATCOM headquarters building. It
could be reached from inside headquarters by underground stairs and an industrial-style ramp. It
was known informally as the “basement,” or the “mole hole.” Most of the planners are active
military officers. Over time, some planners stayed on or came back as retired military working
for, or as, contractors. These former military may have considerable expertise, and, as well,provide important continuity.

What Enables? First, planners understood, and continue to understand, that the purpose of
nuclear weapons and nuclear war plans is, above all, to deter an opponent, or enemy, from taking
actions antithetical to American and America’s allies’ interests. How do plans, capabilities, andwillingness to act if necessary, deter? They demonstrate what would await an enemy should it
attack what it must not. However, should deterrence fail, and U.S. nuclear weapons use weredeemed both legal and necessary, under presidential order the war plans could be implemented to
get the best political-military results possible, whether through options based on first use,
retaliation, massive attack, or limited or “tailored” use. For most of the Cold War, Air Forceleaders generally thought nuclear war could be meaningfully won. Military leaders do not saythat today, though for some, depending on the circumstances, choosing some options over others
could, or even would, make a significant difference, a better outcome for the United States andits allies.

Second, nuclear war planners (and military officers who would launch weapons underauthenticated orders) do not intend to kill civilians. Planners do have options, measures, andprocedures to “withhold” attacks against major urban areas. Planners do know that many
civilians would be killed in nuclear war—but only when unavoidable. Civilians per se are not an
objective of war planning, or, as planners say, civilians are “not objective to” the plan.

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Third, military career paths can make dissent extremely costly. The criteria for career success inthe military is different from those in the civilian world. In the civilian world, one can move, and“move up the ladder,” by switching job sectors, or employers, possibly many times. Or if one isself-employed, one may have flexibility in what one does, where, and how. By contrast, a fullcareer in the military requires at least 20 years of service; a substantial number serve longer.
Every service member takes an oath of office to defend the U.S. Constitution, to act honorably,
and to obey legal orders, including the laws of war. Only rarely do service members formallyquestion the legality of orders given or of actions taken. Service members are obligated not to act
illegally; the issue is who decides what is legal, and what will questioning legality do to amilitary career?8

In addition, military careers will be greatly enhanced by serving honorably in armed conflict
and war. Few civilian careers require such bravery and/or excellence in command, at times underremarkably fast-paced and exceptionally dangerous conditions. (Emergency workers andmanagers, including those who work on oil derricks or explosion containment, police, firefighters, and medical personnel, are among such civilian careers—though they generally are not
as dangerous or soul-shattering as being in sustained combat.)

The continuity in career commitment requires that for those who are ambitious, as many are,excellence must be reflected in performance reviews. In addition to what I have discussed above,
sheer hard concentrated work is required, including serious study in the evenings; paying
attention to detail; repeated practice of what must be mastered, and successful performance invarious kinds of tests. One should be highly capable as a team player and leader. One has an
obligation to report poor compliance and bad conduct. At the same time, in some circumstances,
it is prudent not to express thoughts that go against widely accepted political or other views or to8

See General Russell E. Dougherty’s account of a major whom Dougherty forced to leave the Air Force because themajor insisted on the relevance of his own moral judgement, in Dougherty, “The Psychological Climate of Nuclear
Command,” in Carter, et al, eds., Managing Nuclear Operations, pp. 407-425; at pp. 413-414. See Alex
Wellerstein’s further research and comment on Colonel Harold Hering, the colonel referred to anonymously by
Dougherty, in Wellerstein’s blog, Restricted Data, The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, “The President and the Bomb, Part III,”
April 10th, 2017, at http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2017/04/10/president-bomb-iii/ .

8raise hard questions that really cannot be answered. In all, career service officers face moredifficult choices when assigned to do something one might rather not, such as planning nuclear
war. Officers have pledged loyalty. In most circumstances, they cannot modify the work they do.
And exit is a radical, career-changing, option.9

Fourth, to succeed at nuclear war planning, officers must focus on highly prescribed analytic
tasks. Mathematical abstraction—specifically, the process of optimization—provides theplanning framework. Within this framework, linear programming techniques are used to achievea goal optimally. The goal is termed the objective function and is expressed as a maximum or
minimum quantity, subject to constraints.10 For example, for an investor, the objective could be
to maximize expected return on a financial portfolio or to minimize tax payment on given
financial investments—subject to constraints of law and regulation. For a package delivery
company, the objective function could be to minimize the time of arrival of packages at specified
locations, subject to constraints of handling so that packages do not arrive with battered contents.

For nuclear targeting, the objective function is to maximize the achievement of specific damage
goals to classes or categories of targets. These goals are termed damage expectancy (DE).
Achieving damage expectancy requires most efficiently allocating several types of nuclear
warheads carried on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine launched ballistic
missiles (SLBMs), and aircraft to types of targets; assigning specific warheads to specific targets
and timing their launches for particular times of arrival and heights of burst, in order to achieve,with specified probabilities, designated damage goals. For example, for a specific class ofmassive industrial structures, the damage expectancy could be severe damage with 90 percent
probability. In other words, on average, for every 100 such targets, the goal would be to9

See Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, andStates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). These choices hold in the case of a non-declining
organization, the U.S. Air Force, as well as in most military organizations.
10
See Donald J. Albers, Constance Reid, George B. Danzig, “An Interview with George B. Danzig: The Father ofLinear Programming,” The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 17, No. 4 (September 1986, pp. 293-314). A very goodbrief historical overview and lightly technical explanation of optimization is Stephen J. Wright, “Optimization,”
Encyclopaedia Britannica (entry dated October 24, 2016).

9completely destroy no less than 90. To make such structures functional again, each would haveto be entirely rebuilt (a broad definition of severe damage). Using Monte Carlo methods,
targeteers then simulate these planned courses of action to assess, evaluate, the degree to which
they have succeeded in achieving their goals. Perhaps in the above example, once tested, on
average, “only” 70 targets would be severely damaged. This could require, for this class of
weapons, using different warheads, more warheads, or moving the locations above which theweapons would be detonated, that is, the Designated Ground Zeroes (DGZs).

The above hints at the level of abstraction and what is left out: images of people, a sense ofdaily and cultural life, places as they would be experienced by sight, sound, smell, andmovement beyond what is represented on navigation maps. Except for “withholds” against
certain urban areas, under specified conditions, there is no hint of the violence being planned, norwould we expect there to be. The purpose is seemingly pragmatic: to enable the United States
military to take specific actions to achieve specific damage effects, for example, “light,”“moderate,” or “severe” damage.11 Civilian deaths are not included in the categories andformulae used because, as noted above, civilians are “not objective” to the plan. In nuclear

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The damage criteria are regarded by some as grossly understated. For example, the standard handbook on
nuclear weapons effects defines “moderate” damage to a multistory reinforced concrete building, three to eightstories, as “exterior walls several cracked. Interior partitions severely cracked or blown down. Structural frame
permanently distorted….” (Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, Third Edition(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977, p. 214. Damage criteria are part of the larger damage
expectation formula, Damage Expectancy (DE). DE = Probability of Arrival (PA) x Probability of Damage (PD), which
is applied and calculated for broad categories of targets. PA includes the probabilities of arrival and detonation. In
other words, PA is “scenario dependent” and is composed of several probabilities. The most important is theprobability that the weapon is available to launch—that is, that it has not already been destroyed before being
launched. This probability is termed the pre-launch survivability (PLS), and it is particularly salient for the landbased ICBM force. Another part of Probability of Arrival is the weapon system reliability (WSR), and the probability
that the weapon will penetrate to its point of detonation, that is, the probability to penetrate (PTP). In otherwords, PA = PLS x WSR x PTP. The Probability of Damage (PD) has to do with the interaction of weapon types andtarget types. Weapon characteristics include yield, accuracy, and height of burst. Targets are characterized by thestrengths of their materials and structures to various forces produced by specific weapons effects. This encoding oftypes of targets and their vulnerabilities to particular effects is called the “Vulnerability to Kill,” or VNTK system. I
have drawn here particularly from Seiler, Strategic Nuclear Force Requirements and Issues, pp. 11-13; also see
Postol, “Targeting,” in Carter, et al, eds., Managing Nuclear Operations; and see Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire:
Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004) on thedevelopment of the VNTK system.

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targeting procedures and officers’ required focus, it is as if people, and civilization, do not exist.
They certainly do not count.

What me worry? Fifth and finally, one might think that people who plan nuclear war would be
an unusually sober bunch. What could be more catastrophic, more morally disturbing for anuclear war planner than having the government use, actually “employ,” a nuclear weapon or
nuclear weapons according to options he or she may have helped develop?

Yet It is precisely in situations of past, present, or possible destruction, injury, and death that“dark,” or “sick” humor flourishes—for example, among meat packers, accident and crime scene
investigators, pathologists, surgeons, and, of course, nuclear war planners. “Sick humor” is a slap
at euphemism. In humor and jokes, people with shared experiences can say what they cannot sayotherwise. Doing so unmasks the technical labelling and the abstract concepts required for thejob. Sick humor provides moral distance. From this perspective, joking restores a sense of self.

Planners may refer to targets as “ping pong balls,” “paddle manufacturers,” “shoe factories,”“tennis shoe factories,” “toy production,” “toy manufacturers,” and “makers of baby rattles.” Forexample, one officer said:

Let's say I want you to be able to hold at risk and attack, if necessary, the ability of theSoviet Union to hit ping pong balls. One target set will be the manufacturers of paddles.
There may be only one or two manufacturers of paddles. I'll have to hit them. So there's
no leeway there. But let's say the guidance says that you have to attack toy production.
There will be a lot of different toy manufacturers and a lot of leeway. We can say we canget the makers of baby rattles but not some other toy manufacturers.12

12Anon, Eden unattributed interview with, Washington, D.C., July 10, 1989.

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What do these substitutions mean? At first glance, installations such as paddle manufacturers or
tennis shoe factories, or toy manufacturers, appear trivial. On the one hand, this triviality
conveys that the speaker is not talking about real nuclear war planning, because there would be
no military purpose in trying to destroy toy factories. Thus, such terms allow both speaker andlistener to distance themselves from the enterprise of planning nuclear war by saying: This is not
real, this will not come to pass.

On the other hand, and much more important, the triviality implies that much more will be
destroyed than is officially acknowledged. A phrase not quoted above, “three and four holers,”
refers to outhouses and connotes a vast level of destruction throughout the land, including in
impoverished rural areas. These substitutions also point to the types of things that would bedestroyed: not only official categories of targets such as military assets and “war supporting”
industries, but activities related to leisure, to play, particularly by children—“ping pong ballmanufacturers,” "tennis shoe factories,” “toy production”—and even babies—“makers of baby
rattles.”

These terms connote “targets of opportunity,” targets of less than vital interest. According to
one officer: “In applying a weapon, you may see that you will damage an installation that you
had not intended to damage originally. But if it falls within the guidance, you include it” and saythings like “Oh, this will make Soviet [children] very unhappy.”13

Targeteers’ humor is a devil’s brew that says what cannot be said otherwise. Callousness, badtaste, wise guy, and sick humor acknowledge all that has been expunged and, with a straight
face, must not be said in “serious” situations.

13

Anon, Eden, unattributed interview with former targeting officer, January 17, 1990.

12In sum, I have tried to explain how decent and ordinary—if unusually committed and hardworking—people can plan the worst thing in the world, nuclear war. The answer is multi-fold,but the essence is that as they work, planners strip out the human meaning of the consequencesof the hypothetical actions they are planning. They do this because the complex and detailedtasks that command their attention have already removed vivid references to human society andappear to be about matching objects (warheads and bombs) to other highly coded objects(targets) to cause predesignated levels and types of damage—all of this to be done as efficiently
as possible using abstract mathematical techniques encoded in numerous computer programs.
Targeteers are constrained by the laws of physics, number of weapons, organizational rules, andtime pressure. They do not have time on the job to dwell on the human consequences ofexecution.

At the same time, they are aware that the specific and broad consequences would be horrific.
Through inappropriate labeling, exaggeration, and saying the opposite of what official words andphrases mean, they indicate to themselves and to others that they are (and this is generally true)
decent and good human beings.

13