Office of the Historian

123. Memorandum From Victor Utgoff, William Odom, and Fritz Ermarth of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski) and the President’s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs (Aaron)1

Washington, April 24, 1979

SUBJECT

  • Targeting Study SCC

Tomorrow’s SCC is largely an education for State and ACDA. It involves Defense briefings on SIOP, RISOP, and C3I vulnerabilities. You should seek the following objectives in the meeting:

—
Greater awareness that we can no longer ride out an attack and then retaliate in a coordinated fashion. More explicitly, the land-based ICBM vulnerability problem has its analogy in NCA vulnerability. Both need a new basing mode.
—
Greater awareness that the 1960s assured destruction doctrine has given us a “1914 war plan” posture in the 1970s and 1980s.
—
Greater awareness of what the Soviets can do to us as a result of our present capabilities to only fight a spasm war.

These three objectives illustrate the importance of your three conceptual questions in the last SCC: (1) what does it take to deter today? (2) to maintain crisis bargaining stability? (3) to manage the battle if deterrence fails?

The following additional comments will prepare you for the separate briefings.

The SIOP Briefing

This is standard information, nothing you have not seen before. A critical point is hidden in the category “political leadership.” The SIOP purports to provide a selective attack on the leadership which might be understood as a counter-C3I attack. In fact, it is based on target data that omits hundreds of leadership bunkers and C3I facilities because we have not located them.

[Page 569]

The RISOP

This is fairly standard information which you saw at SAC last summer.2 The key point for you is what it shows about our C3I vulnerability.

JCS Connectivity Study

This is the study that General Ellis has hounded Odom and Hugh Carter about. The recommendations should be viewed as SAC’s wish list. Some are ridiculous, e.g. putting the helicopter near the White House (South Lawn or on top of the OEOB were the SAC suggestions!!). SAC wants to believe that the President can escape under any Soviet attack. It is not possible in the SLBM scenario, but SAC will not admit that. Instead, they claim the White House (i.e. Hugh Carter) is preventing a solution. Some of the suggestions have already been implemented. Listen to them and do not respond.

The Navy Connectivity Study

This briefing shows a number of SSBN connectivity problems not fully spelled out to you before. Listen for the information, but treat the conclusions and recommendations as a major problem area to be kept in mind as further SCC deliberations occur. You may want to underscore the obsession in this briefing and the JCS (SAC) study with a spasm response. Enduring C3I is only briefly dealt with in the end of the Navy study when concern over transattack and post-attack C3I management arises. In a word, the studies do not give us effective recommendations on how to ride out an attack and respond intelligently later on. Nor do they deal with “battle management” of escalation control in a nuclear campaign.

  1. Source: Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, Defense/Security, Utgoff, Box 202, Targeting: Strategic Nuclear Forces: 1–6/79. Top Secret; Outside the System. Sent for action.↩
  2. See Documents 80–82.↩