Single Integrated Operational Plan - Planning Process

Planning Process

While much of the United States' nuclear war planning process remains classified, some information on the former SIOP planning process has been made public. The planning process began with the President issuing a presidential directive establishing the concepts, goal, and guidelines that provided guidance to the nuclear planners. The Secretary of Defense then used the President's guidance to produce the Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy (NUWEP) that specified basic planning assumptions, attack options, targeting objectives, types of targets, targeting constraints, and coordination with combatant commanders. The NUWEP was then used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to create the "Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan (JSCP), Annex C (Nuclear)." This document established a more detailed and elaborate set of goals and conditions that included targeting and damage criteria for the use of nuclear weapons. The final stage in the planning process occurred when the Strategic Air Command (SAC) (from 1961 to 1992) or the United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) (from 1992 to 2003) took the guidance from the JSCP and created the actual nuclear war plan that becomes the SIOP.

As part of SIOP planning, Strategic Air Command (SAC, later USSTRATCOM) developed a set of plans and a series of options based on a target set known as the National Target Base (NTB). The number of targets in the NTB varied over time, from 16,000 in 1985 to 12,500 at the end of the Cold War in 1992, to 2,500 by 2001. The SIOP was primarily directed against targets in the Soviet Union (later Russia) but targets in the People's Republic of China, which had been part of the SIOP until the 1970s, were added back into the plan in 1997. In 1999, the NTB reportedly included targets in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.