You might have caught it in an obscure posting on some new sites, but the end of the world, as planned in 1959, has been declassified and revealed.
I have a morbid fascination with all things nuclear, primarily because I live within 70 kilometres of a first strike target, a Minuteman III nuclear missile silo southeast of Estevan, just across the border. A trip to Minot, N.D., means passing a half dozen or so similar silos along the highway, spaced so a hydrogen bomb dropped on one would not take out another. The radioactive fallout from all this would make life short for all those around.
The National Security Archive for George Washington University post states, “ 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.”
There are piles of designated ground zeros (DGZs) around Moscow and Leningrad. Warsaw and East Berlin would also be pummelled. Airfields throughout what is now Belarus, Ukraine and Estonia would be hit, as well as just a handful in Russia proper. More than 1,100 airfields were targeted on a prioritized list.
The doctrine was to hit airfields before they could be used to bomb NATO, and that makes a fair bit of sense. This was before intercontinental ballistic missiles were prevalent (like my neighbour to the south, each of which would be its own target).
Moscow and its suburbs had 179 targets, while Leningrad would have had 145. Now, considering H-bombs at the time ranged from 1.7 to 9 megatons each, and each of those has a blast radius of several miles, that’s more than a little overkill. I don’t know what follow up bombers were supposed to use to identify their targets, or if they were expected to fly into previous mushroom clouds to deliver their own bombs, but not even cockroaches would have survived.
There were 1,200 cities from East Germany to China targeted. If you lived in West Berlin, sucks to be you, since you would have been ringed by fireballs surrounding the city – with 68 in total in East Berlin and its suburbs. Among the target list were “optical equipment, caustic soda, anti-friction bearings, submarine diesel engines and abrasives, bonded (is that grinding disk factories?).” These lesser targets were assigned run-of-the-mill Mark 6 atomic bombs, eight times the size of the one that took out Nagasaki.
Populations themselves, beyond specific targets, were also targeted.
At the time the document was authored, the United States was ramping up production of B-52s strategic (i.e. nuclear) bombers, of which a total of 742 would be built. They already had 28 wings of B-47 bombers, more than 2,000 planes, in operation, along with a few hundred B-36s that had not yet been retired. Nuclear testing was happening at a fervent pace, with weapons design rapidly going from test to implementation. Big trumped accuracy, so they made these bombs massive.
I imagine the Soviet planning was similar even though they had far fewer nuclear weapons and the methods to deliver them than we thought they did at the time. Whoever was left would have glowed in the dark of the nuclear winter to follow. This was especially the case since American plans called for surface bursts (which produce massive fallout) instead of airbursts, for maximum damage.
Would Canada have been targeted? Would it have mattered? Most of our population lives in close proximity of the U.S. border, and many of their primary bomber bases were close to that border, to be as close to the USSR as possible via flying over the North Pole.
It’s amazing we’ve lived as long as we have with this threat over our heads. Instead of manned bombers, most of the warheads would now fly by missile, in minutes instead of hours. And due to arms limitations treaties, the number of warheads involved would be much, much lower now, and most bombs are somewhat smaller and more accurate than those in this planning document.
No matter. We’d be just as dead.
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
