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Washington, D.C., December 22, 2015 - The SAC [Strategic Air Command] Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, produced in June 1956 and published today for the first time by the National Security Archive www.nsarchive.org, provides the most comprehensive and detailed list of nuclear targets and target systems that has ever been declassified. As far as can be told, no comparable document has ever been declassified for any period of Cold War history.
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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. Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).
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The SAC document includes lists of more than 1100 airfields in the Soviet bloc, with a priority number assigned to each base. With the Soviet bomber force as the highest priority for nuclear targeting (this was before the age of ICBMs), SAC assigned priority one and two to Bykhov and Orsha airfields, both located in Belorussia. At both bases, the Soviet Air Force deployed medium-range Badger (TU-16) bombers, which would have posed a threat to NATO allies and U.S. forces in Western Europe. A second list was of urban-industrial areas identified for “systematic destruction.” SAC listed over 1200 cities in the Soviet bloc, from East Germany to China, also with priorities established. Moscow and Leningrad were priority one and two respectively. Moscow included 179 Designated Ground Zeros (DGZs) while Leningrad had 145, including “population” targets. In both cities, SAC identified air power installations, such as Soviet Air Force command centers, which it would have devastated with thermonuclear weapons early in the war. According to the study, SAC would have targeted Air Power targets with bombs ranging from 1.7 to 9 megatons. Exploding them at ground level, as planned, would have produced significant fallout hazards to nearby civilians. SAC also wanted a 60 megaton weapon which it believed necessary for deterrence, but also because it would produce “significant results” in the event of a Soviet surprise attack.
Reagan’s Nuclear War Briefing Declassified
On 26 February 1982, one of the most nuclear-averse of Cold War presidents, Ronald Reagan, received his first full briefing on U.S. plans for waging nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Reagan would be told that primary targets for the war plans would be “nuclear threat, conventional threat, and economic/industrial targets,” but also “leadership,” indicating that Soviet political and military leaders and their offices and bomb shelters would be major targets. The detailed outline of the briefing, recently declassified from the files of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman David Jones, is published today for the first time by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University.
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Reflecting the Cold War tensions of the time, the briefing outline, originally classified Top Secret, posited possible Soviet acts of aggression, “what the Russians could do to us,” with a possible conflict escalating to nuclear strikes on the United States. According to the briefing, without civil defense a massive Soviet attack could kill 80 million Americans. Whether Washington could quickly respond, Reagan would be told, would depend on the state of “current relocation facilities in the ‘National Arc’ (the alternate Military Command Center, Special Facility [at Mount Weather, VA] and some of your own emergency locations.” Those installations were likely to be targeted. Reagan and his advisers were not yet aware that the Soviets had similar fears of a surprise attack and were searching for intelligence that could warn them of a U.S. attack.
Members of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command monitor systems and networks in the NORAD and Northcom Command Center on Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 29, 2014.
What does this exercise tell us? Two things, in my mind. One, this 1956 target list is pretty nuts, especially given the high-yield characteristics of the US nuclear stockpile in 1956. This strikes me as going a bit beyond mere deterrence, the consequence of letting military planners have just a little bit too much freedom in determining what absolutely had to have a nuclear weapon placed on it.
The second is to reiterate how amazing it is that this got declassified in the first place. When I had heard about it originally, I was pretty surprised. The US government usually considered target information to be pretty classified, even when it is kind of obvious (we target Russian nuclear missile silos? You don’t say…). The reason, of course, is that if you can go very closely over a target list, you can “debug” the mind of the nuclear strategist who made it — what they thought was important, what they knew, and what they would do about their knowledge. Though times have changed a lot since 1956, a lot of those assumptions are probably still at least partially valid today, so they tend to keep that sort of thing under wraps.
Ten bells, and not seven trumpets, announced the apocalypse on February 20, 1971. It was 10:33AM, and teletypes in every single radio and TV station across the country rang those bells to announce an incoming message that nobody had received before.
It was a message that announced the end of the world, sent by the North American Aerospace Defense Command—NORAD.
It was the teletype you are seeing above. It told everyone that any broadcast had to be interrupted and emergency protocols had to be activated—a non-descriptive way of saying that, from that moment, the United States of America was at war with the Soviet Union.
The American Government’s Secret Plan for Surviving the End of the World
Among the greatest foreign-policy dilemmas faced by former President Jimmy Carter is one that has never been publicly aired but is gaining new relevance. It concerns nuclear war, and how the U.S. government would survive it. Carter’s decisions remain classified, but documents newly declassified by the CIA, along with the archives at several presidential libraries, provide a new window into the White House’s preparations for an imminent apocalypse.
Soviet air defense officer who saved the world dies at age 77
Former Soviet Air Defense Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the man known for preventing an accidental nuclear launch by the Soviet Union at the height of Cold War tensions, has passed away. Karl Schumacher, a German political activist who first met Petrov in 1998 and helped him visit Germany a year later, published news of Petrov’s death after learning from Petrov’s son that he had died in May. Petrov was 77.
A Million People Live in These Underground Nuclear Bunkers
In the late ’60s and ‘70s, anticipating the devastation of a Cold War-nuclear fallout, Chairman Mao directed Chinese cities to construct apartments with bomb shelters capable of withstanding the blast of a nuclear bomb. In Beijing alone, roughly 10,000 bunkers were promptly constructed.
But when China opened its door to the broader world in the early ’80s, Beijing’s defense department seized the opportunity to lease the shelters to private landlords, eager to profit from converting the erstwhile fallout hideaways into tiny residential units.
Now when night falls, more than a million people—mostly migrant workers and students from rural areas—vanish from Beijing’s bustling streets into the underground universe, little known to the world above.
US Preparing to Put Nuclear Bombers Back on 24-Hour Alert
BARKSDALE AIR FORCE BASE, La. — The U.S. Air Force is preparing to put nuclear-armed bombers back on 24-hour ready alert, a status not seen since the Cold War ended in 1991.
That means the long-dormant concrete pads at the ends of this base’s 11,000-foot runway — dubbed the “Christmas tree” for their angular markings — could once again find several B-52s parked on them, laden with nuclear weapons and set to take off at a moment’s notice.
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Goldfein and other senior defense officials stressed that the alert order had not been given, but that preparations were under way in anticipation that it might come. That decision would be made by Gen. John Hyten, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, or Gen. Lori Robinson, the head of U.S. Northern Command.
Strategic Air Command, Offutt AFB - 1980s
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