A Do-It-Yourself SIOP — “(R)esearchers at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have developed a

computer program, part of their ‘Nuclear War Simulation Project,’ that can mimic the” top secret

current U.S. nuclear war plan, the ‘SIOP’ or Single Integrated Operational Plan which dictates how our nuclear weapons would actually be used in a strategic exchange. “The NRDC team hopes that by using their software, anyone can visualize the outcome of

a nuclear attack scenario. Their goal is a deeper public understanding of what it really means

to target countries like Russia and China with thousands of nuclear weapons on a day-to-day

basis.”

Researchers at NRDC have been

studying the issue of nuclear weapons

targeting, nuclear force numbers, and

the mountains of other data surrounding

the support of the nuclear arsenal for

more than two decades. A confluence

of advances in computer technology, availability of commercial satellite data, and old-fashioned

ingenuity, allowed the NRDC team to create an interactive computer model of what they believe

the SIOP might look like.

NRDC claims that for the first time in unclassified literature people can view—with maps,

charts, images, and other visual representations—and better understand the cumulative effects

of the large-scale nuclear “counterforce” attacks that are part of U.S. and Russian nuclear war

planning. They hope their program will illustrate alternatives to the current arms control process

and eventually lead to more modest contingency war planning with far fewer weapons. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists