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Mapping the US nuclear war plan for 1956
- rdl 10y agoI 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.
- rjsw 10y agoSome of the early weapons were really primitive [1], I have read a suggestion that it wouldn't have been possible to land a plane with an armed bomb aboard and there was no way to disarm it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Danube_%28nuclear_weapon%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Danube_%28nuclear_weapon%...
- homero 10y agoThe Americans show just had a scene where a Russian thought a nuke was coming from America but didn't launch back. The equipment was detecting something else but did he just not launch because he couldn't see the world burn? We were 1 key press away from Armageddon. The article talks about why the USA declassified this. Well Russia stole a lot of info and they probably had it already so might as well release it. It looks doable to citizens so they feel patriotic.
- golergka 10y agoThis is based on true story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
- rdl 10y agoAlong with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov two of the people who did the most to not eliminate mankind.
- arethuza 10y agoI can strongly recommend One Minute to Midnight for a minute by minute account of the Cuban missile crisis - it is incredibly tense even though we know it worked out OK! http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy-Khrushchev/dp/1400078911 http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy-Khrushchev...
- amatix 10y agoAn "if things had gone slightly differently" version at one of the alternate history forums: http://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-cuban-missile-war-timeline.65071/ http://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-cuban-miss... -> world annhiliation
- mseebach 10y agoThis comic has a pretty plausible explanation: http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3994 http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3994
- emiliobumachar 10y agoI don't think even total nuclear war would actually estinguish humans down to the last one. Especially since a few people were prepared, with multi decade shelters.
- mikeash 10y agoFurther, a nuclear war in 1956 would have been far from total. The balance of nuclear forces was absurdly lopsided until maybe the late 1960s. For example, if the Cuban Missile Crisis had gone hot, the USSR would have been utterly destroyed, while the US might have lost a few major cities. Not something you ever want to happen, obviously, but it wouldn't even destroy the country, let alone the species. 1956 would have been even more lopsided. Hard information was difficult to come by, and it didn't help that the USSR worked hard to inflate perceptions of its own capabilities (e.g. Khrushchev saying that they were pumping out ICBMs like sausages, when they had almost none).
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoI wish I could upvote this comment more. The nuclear OOB really, really favors the US for about a decade after this.
- arethuza 10y agoMy understanding is that the US government and intelligence agencies had a pretty good understanding of the strategic capabilities of the Soviets but chose to overstate the threat for domestic political reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
- mikeash 10y ago
- arethuza 10y ago"we've been unbelievably lucky" That and the courage of many people at all levels who chose not to escalate incidents into situations where war would be inevitable.
- ekianjo 10y agoThere were actually very serious close calls on both sides (but we only know of the US side for the most part) and some are detailed in the book "Command and Control". Excellent read by the way.
- rdl 10y agoEvery one of the close calls somehow didn't result in a criticality even on weapons which were fundamentally likely to detonate in an accident. That itself is highly suspect.
- trhway 10y agoI'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 :)
- ptaipale 10y ago>I'm surprised that out of 50-60K USSR warheads no warhead got lost/stolen/sold during 199x. Well, do we really know?
- pavlov 10y agoLet's assume a Soviet warhead did get stolen in 1993 and was recovered somewhere in Kazakhstan with the help of a US special operation. Would any involved party want to publish the event? Russians wouldn't want to advertise their weakness. Kazaks (in this scenario) wouldn't want to advertise that they cooperated with Americans. And USA wouldn't want to advertise how easy it was to steal a warhead and sell it for a relative pittance. In a few decades, I think we're going to hear some interesting horror stories of the post-Soviet years, similar to the early '80s near-Armageddon scenario of the Soviet false alarm that wasn't published at the time (the Stanislav Petrov incident).
- lambdadmitry 10y agoThere 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/2009/09/20/AR2009092002881.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09... [3]: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Plutonium%20Mountain-Web.pdf http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Plutonium%20Mounta... [4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4hh0h7/does_modern_nuclear_weapons_really_demand_active/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4hh0h7/does_mod... edit: formatting, one more link
- 10y ago
- caf 10y agoThe last head of Strategic Air Command said, after retiring, that "We escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and, I suspect, the latter in greatest proportion."
- alphapapa 10y agoIf a general said something like that today, he'd probably be written about in the newspapers, have a twitter mob after him, and be forced into early retirement. :|
- guard-of-terra 10y agoFor 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- homero 10y agoFunny how oil wasn't important not too long ago
- mikeash 10y agoOil 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 10y agoAnd 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
- dredmorbius 10y agoOil has been an explicit primary strategic concern since the start of the 20th century, if not before. It was a fundamental objective of both world wars, and many other conflicts. It strikes me as quite possible that the relative successes of capitalist and communist blocs had far more to do with resource and oil than ideology. See Daniel Yergin's The Prize, or Robert Newman's "A Brief History of Oil". https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-money-and-power/oclc/22381448 https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-... https://youtu.be/GIpm_8v80hw https://youtu.be/GIpm_8v80hw
- ckozlowski 10y agoFirst 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_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_retaliation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_retaliation
- utexaspunk 10y agoReminded me of this Chris Burden installation I once saw: http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhbur79.html http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhbur79.html
- the_af 10y ago> 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).
- mlvljr 10y ago"An example of an area where a lot of “double-counting” is taking place — St. Petersburg." Cheers from the place, and an obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo Kinda glad, we have them nukes, too, you know :)
- mysterypie 10y agoWhat was the format of the dataset? Did they have exact latitudes and longitudes, or just names of the places?
- iso-8859-1 10y agoAccording to the screenshot, they are coordinate pairs.
- jevinskie 10y agoI 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.