TARGETED for DESTRUCTION
In the event of a nuclear war, the Pentagon in 1956 penned a report that listed 1,200 cities and 1,100 airfields spread across eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China that were prioritized for various levels of destruction, should the unthinkable happen. The goals were twofold: prevent the Communist bloc from fielding an effective air force and then destroy its ability to wage a protracted war. The details of the Pentagon’s plans were recently revealed in the 800-page Strategic Air Command (SAC) Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, “the most comprehensive and detailed list of nuclear targets and target systems that has ever been declassified,” according to the National Security Archive, an organization run by George Washington University.
KEY TARGETED AIRBASES
The SAC document makes air power the highest priority target. It lists more than 1,100 Soviet bloc airfields — with a priority number assigned to each. The goal was to destroy Soviet bombers before they could take o and head for targets in Europe and beyond. The first two airbases slotted for destruction, Bykhov and Orsha, are both located in Belarus. At both bases, the Soviet Air Force deployed medium-range Badger (TU-16) bombers.
TARGETED CITIES
Targets in urban centres such as Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) ranged from military command centres to “population centres” — residential areas on the outskirts of the cities. The goal was to destroy factories that made basic industrial equipment and medicine, communications infrastructure, railway repair yards and the electrical-distribution system. The report noted East Berlin was a target for “systematic destruction.” The targets are identified only generically, with code numbers that correspond to specific locations. The exact addresses and names of facilities from that period are in a still-classified “Bombing Encyclopedia.”
THE WEAPONS
Bombs would have ranged from 1.7 to nine megatons (by comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was about 0.013 megatons). 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. Information about specific nuclear weapons was excised from the report, making it impossible to know how many weapons SAC believed were necessary to destroy the various targets.
The attacks had to be quick, coordinated and as destructive as possible in order to blunt the effectiveness of any Soviet counterattack. To maximize destruction, the SAC reasoned, the bombs had to explode at ground level (as opposed to an air detonation). A ground-level detonation would maximize damage to buildings, trigger massive fire storms and create huge radiation clouds that would travel with the wind and disperse radioactivity over a wide area.