
Mapping the US nuclear war plan for 1956 - caf
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/05/09/mapping-us-nuclear-war-plan-1956/
======
rdl
I still don't understand how a major nuclear accident didn't happen (at
minimum), or really, a full nuclear exchange, given the game theoretic and
technical challenges of having multiple nuclear arsenals on hair trigger alert
for decades.

Given that many US weapons weren't even one-point safe until the 80s, and I
doubt Soviet weapons were better, and there were a fair number of routine
accidents with those weapons, there must have been some undisclosed policy of
secretly keeping the weapons even less ready than has ever been reported, or
we've been unbelievably lucky. (If I could have been completely certain it
would remain secret, deploying primarily inert weapons (just replace the HEU
with lower enriched uranium, or for plutonium weapons, even just screwing up
the lensing) would have been very tempting. If you believe in MAD, then really
only deterrence has any value; the retaliatory value in reality could be
forgone.)

It would also account for why weapons were never used intentionally post WW2
-- if you knew your arsenal actually was disabled, you'd bluster even more but
never use it.

~~~
trhway
I'm surprised that out of 50-60K USSR warheads no warhead got lost/stolen/sold
during 199x. It is like different kind of Russians were manning it :)

~~~
lambdadmitry
There was a serious undercover US effort to prevent this. For example, half a
ton of highly enriched, weapon-grade Uranium was transported from Kazakhstan
[1][2] in 199x; US also helped to prevent proliferation of weapon-grade
Plutonium from the former test site [3]. There is also a non-confirmed
suggestion that actual nuclear weapons become unusable if abandoned [4].

[1]:
[http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB491/](http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB491/)

[2]: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/09...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2009/09/20/AR2009092002881.html)

[3]:
[http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Plutonium%20Mounta...](http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Plutonium%20Mountain-
Web.pdf)

[4]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4hh0h7/does_mod...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4hh0h7/does_modern_nuclear_weapons_really_demand_active/)

edit: formatting, one more link

~~~
democracy
There are many more documented efforts:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280486/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280486/)

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ckozlowski
First off, this is a great piece of work.

There's a number of questions that were raised in this work that the author
mentions, and I'll list them here:

\- What was the rationale for picking targets? \- Why does it appear that U.S.
planners went for such amazing overkill?

The year provides a clue, and an important context: In the 50s, the strategy
was "Massive Retaliation". WWII ended 11 years prior. The Soviets had a
massive army in Eastern Europe, and the Korean War had ended only 3 years
earlier, confirming many people's fears that the Soviets were willing to
implement Communism by force. Given that the Western Powers had no hope of
conventionally halting a Soviet attack on Europe, the plan called for an
immediate escalation to nuclear weapons; which were the only credible threat
to Soviet ground forces at that time.

The other important context is that while this is a full target list, it isn't
a /plan/. And that was because there wasn't a plan yet. Air Force targets
overlapped Navy ones, and early doctrine called for simply attacking
everything should hostilities begin. This was changed in 1961 with the Single
Integrated Operations Plan, which for the first time was a single plan with no
only a target list, but different escalation options, assignments to various
services for who struck what and when, and a much clearer rationale. It was a
vast improvement over the "simply hit everything vital" days of Massive
Retalitation.

On the subject of overkill, it's also useful to point out that it was not
expected that all warheads would reach their targets. the ICBM was in it's
infancy, and SLBMs (submarine launched) did not yet exist. The B-52 had only
just entered service; the mainstay of SAC rode on the B-47. Nuclear Weapons
were large, sometimes unreliable, unwieldy things. In many ways, the target
list was wishful thinking.

Some good reading: If you read only one, read this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_Plan)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_retaliation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_retaliation)

~~~
the_af
> _the Korean War had ended only 3 years earlier, confirming many people 's
> fears that the Soviets were willing to implement Communism by force_

Can you elaborate? Wouldn't the Korean War confirm _the West_ was willing to
stop Communism by force, even against the will of the majority of the people
in the target country? (Of course, both things can be simultaneously true).

~~~
ckozlowski
I'm not sure how to reply to that.

Without deconstructing this too far, I would say that the Korean War began
with North Korea invading South Korea. A U.N. resolution followed which
authorized the use of force to respond.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War)

My best understanding is how I described it.

~~~
the_af
I'm surprised anything I said was controversial.

The Korean War was the _outcome_ of previous events -- it cannot be seen in
isolation. How do you suppose the Koreans, as a people, saw the division of
Korea imposed by both the US and the Soviet Union on them? What was the
charismatic leader in the South that would have unified _all_ of Korea in
general elections? Say free elections were held -- true, non fraudulent
elections -- and a communist government won... what do you suppose the US
would have done?

What about this, from the same Wikipedia article you linked to?

> _Appointed as military governor, General Hodge directly controlled South
> Korea as head of the United States Army Military Government in Korea
> (USAMGIK 1945–48) [...] The USAMGIK refused to recognize the provisional
> government of the short-lived People 's Republic of Korea (PRK) because it
> suspected it was communist._

The US and Western powers were totally unwilling to let Korea fall to
communist hands, whether it was by force or otherwise, and were willing to use
force to prevent it. What I'm saying is hardly controversial and was the US
foreign policy for much of the Cold War.

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guard-of-terra
For some reason they weren't planning on bombing Severodvinsk (submarine
building town), which I definitely would if I was them.

Also they weren't planning on bombing Tyumen (the oil capital). Probably
wasn't as important then. Still tt's funny how you can have several thousands
dots and miss some essential ones.

~~~
homero
Funny how oil wasn't important not too long ago

~~~
mikeash
Oil was still quite important. One random example:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tidal_Wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tidal_Wave)

For another example, a large part of the motivation behind Japan's attack in
December 1941 was the US embargo on oil exports to Japan. (The embargo in turn
was motivated by Japan's rampage in China; I don't mean to imply Japan was in
any way justified here, just that this was a major reason.)

As for why this particular target isn't included, I'd guess that either the
lists are incomplete, it was just missed by the planners, or perhaps oil
production wasn't considered to be worth targeting because the war would be
over so quickly.

~~~
jevinskie
And many critical parts of the German military ran on synthetic fuel derived
from coal:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel#History)

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jevinskie
I wonder how hard it would be to add these targets to the game DEFCON. At
least on my Mac Steam install, there is a main.dat resource file (really just
a RAR) that contains citites.dat TSV data. Latitude, longitude and a mystery
boolean value. I wonder if the mystery bool indicates that the location can
launch missiles? Either way, I think every city in the list is a potential
target, probably weighted by population.

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mysterypie
What was the format of the dataset?

Did they have exact latitudes and longitudes, or just names of the places?

~~~
iso-8859-1
According to the screenshot, they are coordinate pairs.

