page_title: Single Integrated Operational Plan
section_title: Presidential involvement and start of civilian policy direction
hierarchical_section_title: Single Integrated Operational Plan / History / Presidential involvement and start of civilian policy direction
context_page_description: The Single Integrated Operational Plan was the United States' general plan for nuclear war from 1961 to 2003. The SIOP gave the President of the United States a range of targeting options, and described launch procedures and target sets against which nuclear weapons would be launched. The plan integrated the capabilities of the nuclear triad of strategic bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and sea-based submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The SIOP was a highly classified document, and was one of the most secret and sensitive issues in U.S. national security policy.
  The first SIOP, titled SIOP-62, was finished on 14 December 1960 and implemented on 1 July 1961. The SIOP was updated annually until February 2003, when it was replaced by Operations Plan 8044. Since July 2012, the US nuclear war plan has been OPLAN 8010-12, Strategic Deterrence and Force Employment.
context_section_description: In 1958, George Kistiakowsky, a key Manhattan Project scientist and Science Advisor in the Eisenhower Administration, suggested to the President that inspection of foreign military facilities was not sufficient to control their nuclear weapons. Kistiakowsky was particularly concerned with the difficulty of verifying the number, type, and deployment of nuclear-armed missiles on missile submarines, and proposed that the arms control strategy focus on disarmament rather than inspections. He was also concerned with the short warning times available from intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launches, which took away the lengthy decision time available when the nuclear threat came exclusively from manned bombers.
  Eisenhower sent Kistiakowsky to Strategic Air Command headquarters where he was, at first, rebuffed. At the same time as the early nuclear arms control work, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Nathan F. Twining, USAF, sent a memorandum in August 1959, to the Secretary of Defense, Neil McElroy, which suggested that the Strategic Air Command be formally assigned responsibility to prepare the national nuclear target list, and a single plan for nuclear operations. Up to that point, the Army, Navy, and Air Force had done their own target planning. That had led to individual targets being multiply targeted by the different services. The separate service plans were not mutually supporting, as, for example, by the Navy destroying an air defense facility on the route of an Air Force bomber going to a target deeper inland. While Twining had sent the memo to McElroy, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff disagreed on the policy during early 1960. Thomas Gates, who succeeded McElroy, asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower to decide the policy.
  Eisenhower said he would not "leave his successor with the monstrosity" of the uncoordinated and non-integrated forces that then existed. When Kistiakowsky was not given access, Eisenhower sent him back with a much stronger set of orders giving SAC officers the choice to cooperate with Kistiakowsky, or resign.
  Kistiakowsky's report, presented on 29 November, described uncoordinated plans with huge numbers of targets, many of which would be attacked by multiple forces, resulting in overkill. Eisenhower was shocked by the plans, and focused not just on the creation of the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), but on the entire process of picking targets, generating requirements, and planning for nuclear war operations. Separate operational plans from the Air Force and the Navy were combined to form the foundation of the SIOP.
caption: Atlas, a first-generation ICBM
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