Washington, D.C., May 31, 2024 - On 6 October 1977, President Jimmy Carter and top U.S. national security officials dialed into a secret “Missile Attack Conference” (MAC) to coordinate a response to a simulated surprise nuclear strike on the United States. Organized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), the mock war scenario was the first to involve the U.S. President and may have prompted Carter to authorize a retaliatory nuclear missile launch, according to documents posted today by the National Security Archive.
Using the code name Ivory Item, the JCS developed the simulation to familiarize the President with the procedures of the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), the ultra-secret list of U.S. strategic nuclear targeting options. Today’s posting consists of declassified archival records that document President Carter’s personal interest in strategic war plans and the conduct of nuclear war in “short warning” situations.
Carter was uniquely positioned to become the first president to participate in a nuclear war simulation. As the only president with an advanced physics education and firsthand experience with nuclear submarines, the threat of nuclear weapons, nuclear war, and nuclear proliferation deeply concerned Carter, who favored deep cuts in strategic forces by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Yet, as commander-in-chief, President Carter felt that he had a responsibility to familiarize himself with emergency procedures for worst-case situations.
Carter’s interest in nuclear command procedures led Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop the top secret Ivory Item program to give decisionmakers practical experience in addressing surprise attack and other nuclear-use scenarios through the simulation of “a Missile Attack Conference procedure.”After some practice runs, President Carter was invited to participate in the 6 October 1977 exercise.
While many of the details surrounding Ivory Item remain classified, declassified documents and the recollections of a former official indicate that Carter provided useful feedback about MAC procedures and targeting alternatives that led to changes in the SIOP Execution Handbook, strict limitations on the number of people who could participate, and instructions to destroy any records of the President’s participation in the mock nuclear war scenario.
When Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and his aides at the National Security Council (NSC) looked into the problem of nuclear surprise attack, they found that they had “inherited” crisis management procedures that were “neglected, rusty, and out of date.” Concerning “White House Emergency Procedures” (WHEP), the NSC Crisis Management Staff told Brzezinski that “there was concern in the JCS that the NCA [National Command Authority] might not be able to respond effectively in the event of a surprise attack.” They had started to stage Operation Alert (OPAL) drills involving helicopter evacuations, and the 9 July OPAL III drill “went off with precision and speed.” The “first goal” for U.S. “crisis management doctrine,” according to the NSC, “was to put the WHEP in good order,” while “the second goal was to help the President become familiar with the U.S. doctrine for nuclear ‘crisis management’ as it relates to the WHEP and the National Command Authority.”[1] [See Document 24]
As part of the process to support the President’s nuclear education, on 31 March 1977, Brzezinski sent Secretary of Defense Brown a memorandum asking, among other things, for a “brief statement of the procedures for actually conducting a nuclear war, limited or total, beyond the initial phase.” The statement would include information on the “command procedures for the conduct of such a war, including such operational aspects as the location and procedures for effective exercise of control.” Brzezinski asked that JCS Chairman General George S. Brown play a role in providing information to the extent appropriate.[2] [See Document 2]
In response to White House interest, during the following weeks and months, Secretary Brown and the Joint Chiefs developed the top secret Ivory Item program to give decision makers practical experience in addressing surprise attack and other nuclear-use scenarios. During earlier years of Cold War nuclear competition, national security planners had devised organizational frameworks for making decisions in a military emergency, notably the “Missile Attack Conference,” which would be initiated by the Commander-in-Chief of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), presumably when there was unmistakable evidence of incoming missiles. The most “senior conferee” participant would decide whether the situation required presidential involvement. The purpose of the Ivory Item exercises was to “simulate a Missile Attack Conference procedure” conceived of as occurring on a “no-notice” basis.
Before they were ready to bring in the President, the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of Defense Brown developed and staged Ivory Item exercises beginning in May 1977. The preparations involved drafting presentations on early warning systems and the SIOP that could be shown to the Secretary of Defense and the President. [See Documents 5 and 6] Much of that material is heavily excised, but the SIOP material indicated that there were three possible responses to a surprise intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. At least two involved “Major Attack Options,” probably incuding hundreds, possibly well over a thousand nuclear warheads delivered by bombers and missiles. One was the “minimum execution” of Major Attack Option (MAO) 1; another was the “complete execution” of MAO 1. The purpose of the “minimum” MAO 1 option was to “minimize economic damage and fatalities” and to avoid attacks on the Soviet Government structure so as to permit negotiations. Implicitly, the second option involved even more massive attacks, including Soviet Government installations. Details on the third option are unavailable but possibly involved retaliation by Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers and ICBMs on “day to day” alert along with submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM).
According to the briefing documents, the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (the SIOP designers) used the Comprehensive Blast and Radiation Assessment (COBRA) computer program to estimate fatalities for the surprise attack alternative responses. Apparently developed during the 1960s, COBRA was used to predict “the expected fatalities from both prompt effects (blast and initial radiation) and delayed effects (fallout for a six-month period) for the specific attack option executed.” Pending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests may shed light on the origins and development of the COBRA program.
By late September 1977, the Pentagon was ready to involve the President directly in a nuclear crisis simulation. Aside from President Carter, other participants in the 6 October 1977 Ivory Item exercise included Secretary of Defense Brown, JCS Chairman Gen. Brown (and other JCS members), Vice President Walter Mondale, and Brzezinski, along with his deputy, David Aaron.
Most of the details surrounding Carter’s participation in Ivory Item remain shrouded in secrecy, but it is clear that the mock scenario involved an ICBM attack on the United States. Some details have also emerged about the President’s reaction, including his belief that too many people were on the line during the exercise. “[E]verybody’s ex[ecutive]/asst[assistant]” was there, according to Brzezinski’s military aide, William Odom. In an e-mail message to the National Security Archive, Deputy National Security Adviser David Aaron recently described some of his recollections about the simulation:
[W]hen the President got on the phone there were over 20 people on the line. He had no idea who most of them were. The SecDef, Chairman and Joint Chiefs, CIA Chief, yes, but almost all the rest he had never met. I remember that it was a cacophony of voices and Carter saying how can I take advice from these people, if I don't even know who they are?[3]
Not long after Ivory Item, Brzezinski instructed the Secretary of Defense to keep the number of participants to a minimum in future exercises. Moreover, JCS Chairman Brown instructed the other Chiefs and Commanders-in-Chief who had participated in Ivory Item to destroy any tapes or transcripts of the exercise.[4] “All personnel having access to the discussions during that conference must be briefed that presidential participation in the exercise is highly sensitive and the president’s Comments are even more so.”
The 6 October 1977 Ivory Item scenario involved a Soviet ICBM attack on the U.S., as indicated in Deputy Secretary Duncan’s memorandum to President Carter on 14 October. [See Document 14] The ICBM attack had been posited because it “would give time for dialogue,” according to Duncan, unlike an SLBM attack, which would leave decision makers with only minutes of warning time. While Duncan explained some of the technological issues involved in an ICBM launch decision, such as launch time and the “implementing message,” left unsaid is what Carter had decided during the exercise. Although it is likely that he made a retaliatory decision, it is possible that he only informed Secretary of Defense Brown, the other duly constituted member of the National Command Authority, and possibly JCS Chairman Brown, who would have transmitted SIOP execution orders.[5]
That President Carter approved retaliatory ICBM launches during the Ivory Item exercise is likely, but at what point did he order them? Did he decide to “ride out” the attack, or did he authorize launch-on-warning? “Riding out” would mean ordering a retaliatory strike only after receiving confirmation that Soviet ICBMs had detonated on U.S. soil. If that was the President’s initial inclination, the Joint Chiefs might have advised him against it, since command-and-control sites, ICBM silos, and bomber bases were highly vulnerable, and the initial blow could disrupt the U.S. ability to respond. If the Ivory Item scenario posited high confidence in NORAD’s indications of a Soviet ICBM attack, they might have advised a launch-on-warning, in which the President would order a retaliatory attack even before the Soviet missiles had hit their targets. The perils of launch-on-warning notwithstanding, SAC had already adopted it as a modus operandi and trained Minuteman launch officers to implement it. If President Carter agreed, he may have authorized immediate launch, possibly approving one of the MAO alternatives. Future declassification decisions on Ivory Item documents already under appeal may shed light on this point.[6]
It would also be worth knowing more details about the scenario developed for Ivory Item. The available documentation suggests that the exercise posited a mock crisis so far gone that the Soviet leadership had already made the terrible error of ordering ICBM attacks against the United States, apparently precipitating a U.S. decision to retaliate. Whether President Carter wrote a personal diary entry about Ivory Item is unknown, but it would be interesting to know how he reflected on it, not least the enormous responsibility of making decisions, even if simulated, that would produce millions of casualties on both sides.
In addition to the number of participants, President Carter also commented on the SIOP “Decision Handbook” that is among the contents included in the nuclear “Football,” the special case that travels with the President and enables him to make nuclear command decisions during a military crisis. Preferring a “more succinct checklist,” Carter apparently saw the presentation of the attack and retaliatory options as too complicated. According to a National Security Council (NSC) staff document recently published in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series, Carter’s participation “triggered revisions and changes in the SIOP based on Presidential guidance for the first time” ever. Before the simulation, “SIOP designers have had to imagine what the President would want to see and know in an emergency” [italics in original]. “Without a single clue from the President,” they had produced a “thick ‘Decision Handbook’” that was “the product of years of speculating in J–3 about the President’s needs.” That would begin to change. [See Document 24]
The NSC Staff’s somewhat overwrought statement listed several “monumental” implications for strategic planning doctrine derived from Ivory Item, including the “refinement” of SIOP options, greater presidential awareness of the limitations of the escalation control concept, and an additional point that remains classified. Some of the “refinements” may have been a “revised Surprise Attack Response procedure” depicting “key elements” of U.S. decision-making, including “decision time” against “strategic forces launched.” A “less complex presentation of the three alternative responses” to surprise attack had also been developed. [See Document 16]
Some details about the process by which the SIOP “Decision Handbook” was modified to suit President Carter show up in primary sources. The SIOP, emergency procedures, and problems with the “decision handbook” were discussed at a 17 November 1977 meeting involving Carter, Mondale, Brzezinski, JCS Chairman Brown, and Secretary of Defense Brown. [See Document 22] President Carter’s personal diary entry for 28 November suggests that the meeting had resolved the problems, noting that they “went through the SIOP procedures, walking through several drills.” “We’ve tried to simplify the process greatly since I’ve been in office,” he added, without mentioning that it was his own participation in Ivory Item that had led to the changes in the SIOP presentation.[7] While Carter raised questions about the presentation of SIOP options, so far as can be told, he did not question the targeting arrangements themselves or the high damage expectancies built into the SIOP.
President Carter’s participation in the Ivory Item exercise on 6 October 1977 is clear enough, but it is difficult to document his involvement in subsequent exercises, although he is on record discussing scenarios with the Joint Chiefs. [See Document 24] Declassified documents further indicate that Secretary of Defense Brown proposed an Ivory Item scenario involving an SLBM attack and the “loss of sensors.” The Joint Staff developed another scenario called “Ivory Item Hotel” in which the Soviets had disabled the Defense Support Program’s (DSP) ground links with sabotage attacks on Buckley Air Force Base and on the site of a then-important AT&T facility in Lamar, Colorado.
There are so many excisions in these documents that references to President Carter’s participation may have been withheld from release. It is also possible and even likely that because of edicts concerning “the privacy requirement for Ivory Item [that] has been imposed by highest authority” that the information was not preserved in the records of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nevertheless, the circ*mstances remained in the memory of observers and participants, such as General Robert Rosenberg, a former NSC staffer, who recalled the scenario of one exercise where the “Red planners” destroyed U.S. command and control and intelligence “nodes,” and “the exercise ground to a halt.”[8]
The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library maintains many classified files and records that will one day shed additional light on the President’s role in these exercises, such as the Ivory Item file in the records of Hugh Carter’s Office of Administration. That file has been requested, but the huge backlog of pending requests for presidential records at the National Archives means that declassification is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Whether President Carter wrote observations about the Ivory Item exercises for unpublished portions of his private diaries also remains to be learned.
President Carter’s advisers saw the Ivory Item missile attack simulations as important for nuclear planning but also as a challenging complication. According to Odom, their impact was “far-reaching” in that they forced “the CINCs at SAC and NORAD to take a very close look at the short warning situation, C3, and Soviet doctrine.” For example, SAC generals had “new concerns” over C3I (command, control, communications and intelligence) vulnerabilities but were “nervous about how far to go because of the enormous doctrinal, forces structure, and budget implications.” They wanted the lead to come from the NSC and the Secretary of Defense. Odom wanted the Ivory Item scenarios to extend to limited nuclear conflicts because they “can teach the President, you, Brown, and the Joint Chiefs a great deal about our present predicament.”[9] Whether that ever happened remains unclear.
What the Joint Chiefs pioneered in the late 1970s had predecessors in far more elaborate war games that the Pentagon and U.S. government consultants such as Thomas Schelling had organized beginning in the early 1960s, if not earlier. Such games involved detailed simulations of politico-military crisis scenarios and the steps taken by Blue and Red Team participants to play them out one step at a time.[10] Whether war games prior to Ivory Item focused on approximations of specific missile attack scenarios is an interesting question, as is whether any U.S. presidents after Jimmy Carter ever participated in Ivory Item-type simulations. To bring such an intense and high-pressure experience out into the wider world, two researchers, Sharon K. Weiner (American University) and Moritz Kütt (University of Hamburg), have created a virtual reality simulation of missile attack decision-making called “The Nuclear Biscuit.” Requiring participants to “make decisions in situations of high stress and uncertainty,” their project analyzes the “retaliatory options [that] people consider valid, plus the information, advice, and other variables” involved. The final study that Kütt and Weiner are preparing should be a stimulating contribution to the study of crisis decision-making.
Note: Thanks to John Tobin Fratis for research assistance, and, for last minute aid, to Stephen Schwartz, and Scott F. Thompson, Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Notes
[1] . For the Carter administration’s early efforts to update emergency procedures, among other issues, see William E. Odom, “The Origins and Design of Presidential Decision-59: A Memoir,” in Henry D. Sokolski, ed., Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2004).
[2] . Brzezinski to Brown, 31 March 1977, document 10 in U.S. State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977-1980, Volume IV, National Security Policy [FRUS 1977-80 Vol. 4] (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 2024).
[3] . Ambassador David Aaron, e-mail to editor, 2 April 2024.
[4] . In those days, the Commanders of various unified and specified commands were routinely known as Commanders-in-Chief or CINCs. That remained so until October 2002, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that they would be designated as Commanders. The Commander-in-Chief title would be “used to connote or indicate the President of the United States of America.” Apparently Rumsfeld told the Joint Chief’s general counsel, “There is only one CINC under the Constitution and law, and that is POTUS.”
[5] . According to a former Pentagon official, during nuclear exercises and simulations, President Carter was “careful.” He would “make a decision but not tell anyone what it was except, perhaps, Harold Brown.” Carter would say “I’ve made my decision.’ He didn’t want the whole system to be anticipating the President.” Daniel Ford, The Button – The Pentagon’s Command and Control System Does It Work? (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1985), 91-92. Fred Kaplan in The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War (Simon & Shuster, 2020), at page 123, draws on recollections of Jimmy Carter and the Ivory Item exercise.
[6] . Bruce Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution, 1993) is the first detailed publicly available exposition and analysis of launch-on-warning. It is worth quoting a statement made by former NSC staffer Robert Rosenberg, who witnessed at least one SIOP practice: “I know of no other President who actually participated in SIOP exercises.” Carter “participated in in a series of what we call CPXs [command post exercises], communications, command and control exercises, where the Commander in Chief is in communication with the [commanders] responsible for executing the SIOP.” See Ford, The Button, at 27.
[7] . Jimmy Carter, White House Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 141.
[8] . According to a history of Cold War war games, military officials have considered information on presidential participation in war games to be sacrosanct and never to be disclosed. See Thomas B. Allen, War Games: The Secret World of the Creators, Players, and Policy Maker Rehearsing World War III Today (New York: Berkley Books, 1989), 213. For the Rosenberg quote, see Ford, The Button, at 27.
[9] . See documents 65 and 82 in FRUS 1977-80 Vol. 4.
[10] . For war games and simulations during the Cold War, see Allen, War Games; Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, “Simulating the Unthinkable: Gaming Future War in the 1950s and 1960s,” Social Studies of Science 30 (2000): 163-223; and Reid B.C. Pauley, “Would U.S. Leaders Push the Button? Wargames and the Sources of Nuclear Restraint,” International Security 43 (2018): 151-192.
[11] . Don Oberdorfer and Edward Walsh, “Carter to Press Liberalizing of Korea, Withdrawal of GIs,” Washington Post, 13 January 1977.
[12] . For details on SAC alert forces during the Cold War, see Strategic Air Command, Office of the Historian, Alert Operations and the Strategic Air Command, 1957-1991 (Offutt Air Force Base, 1991), 93 and 97.
[13] . Carter, White House Diary, 115.
[14] . Carter, White House Diary, 141.
