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Cold War Nuclear Target Lists Declassified For First Time (gwu.edu)
HughPickens.com writes: Scott Shane writes in the NY Times that the National Archives and Records Administration has released a detailed list of the United States' potential targets for atomic bombers in the event of war with the Soviet Union, showing the number and the variety of targets on its territory, as well as in Eastern Europe and China. The Strategic Air Command study includes chilling details. According to its authors, their target priorities and nuclear bombing tactics would expose nearby civilians and "friendly forces and people" to high levels of deadly radioactive fallout. Moreover, the authors developed a plan for the "systematic destruction" of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted "population" in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw.
The target list was produced at a time before intercontinental or submarine-launched missiles, when piloted bombers were essentially the only means of delivering nuclear weapons. The United States then had a huge advantage over the Soviet Union, with a nuclear arsenal about 10 times as big. "We've known the general contours of nuclear war planning for a few decades," says Stephen I. Schwartz. "But it's great that the details are coming out. These are extraordinary weapons, capable of incredible destruction. And this document may be history, but unfortunately the weapons are not yet history."
The target list was produced at a time before intercontinental or submarine-launched missiles, when piloted bombers were essentially the only means of delivering nuclear weapons. The United States then had a huge advantage over the Soviet Union, with a nuclear arsenal about 10 times as big. "We've known the general contours of nuclear war planning for a few decades," says Stephen I. Schwartz. "But it's great that the details are coming out. These are extraordinary weapons, capable of incredible destruction. And this document may be history, but unfortunately the weapons are not yet history."
A nuclear weapon is an effective deterrent. Without them, you can be invaded or can be subject to total war, which is almost unthinkable if you have them. With them, invading you is a much, much bigger risk. The stockpile is too big--the sheer size creates a security nightmare--but you want at least some. Whether you need enough to make nuclear war unwinnable is a closer question.
Also, the world should probably always have a few, even if they're locked in a drawer somewhere. Because aliens.
And the US military posts in West Berlin were OK with that?
If a Cold War confrontation got to the point that nukes were needed, those soldiers stationed in West Berlin would probably all have been dead already anyway. In the event of a surprise attack, the soldiers station all along the border would be tasked with defensive actions, holding the line as best as possible while stateside troops were mobilized and linked up with prepositioned equipment. Given the standard Soviet style of attack, that role would most likely have been not much more than "try not to die for as long as possible", especially if you found yourself in the schwerpunkt. In any case, the war would have had to have ground to a WWI style war of attrition or gone so poorly that the front lines were knocking on the gates of Paris or Moscow before nukes would have been used, and they would have most likely been used in a tactical role first (which would have quickly escalated to a full on strategic exchange).
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Well I expect when things like this get published its all a little more real to some people. Maybe it checks their 'rah rah, lets turn them into glass' attitudes and forces them out of denial and to confront the very real potential consequences of nuclear war.
You are right though none of this is really a surprise. What did people think we going to raise some wheat fields in rural Ukraine? Obviously a finite number of super weapons would be deployed to where they would have the greatest negative impact on the enemies ability to make war.
While destroying low population bread basket targets might be effective those areas are two large and dispersed to be totally destroyed by a short-term strike even with nukes. Hitting them also might not immediate cripple the retaliatory strike capability, which is also very very important in a possible nuclear exchange.
The only reason to blast some field someplace is if you have intel there is missile silo or weapons facility under it. As these plans were largely pre-ICBM there would be no reason at all do that. As stomach turning an affair as it might be the only rational targets would have been enemy air bases and then high population cities where the factories, and distribution of goods occurred.
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Atrocities and genocides have been happening in war torn areas of the world right up to the present day; it's just that nobody reads the news anymore.
I am not aware of military atrocities even close to the scale of nuking cities committed by western nations, let alone the United States, in the past 50 years. And I do read the news.
If the West gets into a total war situation again, you'll see the same atrocities that happened in WWII and WWI re-enacted on a grand scale.
I guess my point is that the US of 1945 would have nuked Vietnam, but the US of 1960 did not. The US was not in total war against a country threatening invasion in either situation, but the tactics used were very different.
When the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, they were arguably no longer in a total war situation with Japan. They simply needed to get a crippled country to completely capitulate. Going after primarily civilian targets like Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not the type of tactics the western world uses anymore to get enemies to surrender. We don't even carpet bomb cities with standard munitions like we did in both Japan and Germany after the outcomes of both wars were decided.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
What was interesting is that the U.S. Military posts in West Berlin were not necessarily there to actually stop any real Soviet advance into the city, but to be used as effective human shields. That is, if the Soviets invaded West Berlin, the death of American troops (a certainty) would give America the justification it would need to go to war with the Soviets. Therefore, since the Soviets didn't want a full-scale war with America, they would not start a small-scale war against West Germany. It was the geopolitical equivalent of letting your opponent know that you'll go all-in if he tries to steal the pot.
And the US military posts in West Berlin were OK with that?
The entire point of this exercise was that we had so damn many of these weapons, even by that time that we needed to invent places to drop them all. The USSR was just as bad. The Japanese demonstrated quite effectively that you could drop any number of these things in an unoccupied place and no one will care. It wasn't until the demonstrated ability to continue hitting targets that the Japanese surrendered. The USSR would have been just as stubborn, if they weren't in fact crazy enough to strike first...
In the end, the only sure path to "victory" was to ensure that we could keep hitting targets until either the Russians surrendered, or there wasn't anyone left to fight, whichever came first. No doubt, their plan was identical.
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I am not aware of military atrocities even close to the scale of nuking cities committed by western nations, let alone the United States, in the past 50 years. And I do read the news.
Then you missed Vietnam. ...
You missed Angola.
You missed Algeria.
You missed Tunisia.
You missed Zimbabwe
To late here to count all the countries you missed.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So, do you want us to be the World Police or not? And, frankly, some of us know history well enough to know that the US contributed greatly to both of those wars. Less so in WWI than in WWII but that really wasn't our problem. We even left you alone to resolve it at the end and look at what you did. We didn't even partake in the whole League of Nations thing (though a lot of people really seem to think we did) and we even encouraged you to not go full retard with the treaties and reparations. You're mad that the baby sitter didn't spank you soon enough?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."