7 ms·

Declassified US nuclear targets – interactive map

51 points by dotsam 4y ago

gonzo41 4y ago
Glad I live in the very south of Australia.
- Normille 4y ago
  > Glad I live in the very south of Australia. Don't get too complacent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Playing around with https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ a bit, it seems it would take a lot of very powerful nukes before any nuclear fallout would reach the south of Australia. Even with a fictional maximum kilotons (max for nukemap) nuke dropped in Darwin (north Australia) with maximum wind force south wouldn't make the fallout reach the south.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    The scenario in that novel can't actually happen. Even widespread radioactive contamination from a full-scale nuclear war at the height of the Cold War couldn't throw enough radioactive material into the atmosphere to cause acute radiation poisoning across the entire planet. "The Silent Spring" has always been poetic license when it comes to nuclear weapons. We could cause a civilizational setback on an unimaginable, possibly unrecoverable scale for the human race...but we couldn't make ourselves extinct that way (for one thing: kind of a lot of people in Africa and South America, land of nobody's nuclear target). But the long term effects would be a slightly increased incidence of cancer and birth defects across the globe, but more people will die in the resultant famine from the collapse of global food production then will die due to direct or indirect effects of nuclear weapons. Make no mistake: it would be the end of the comfortable 1st world lifestyle we know, possibly for good. But humans have existed on this planet for tens of thousands of years in circumstances far worse then now, and we have endured and continued reproducing regardless.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
"it probably doesn’t look dramatically different" Living in East Germany I hope it does!
- yellowapple 4y ago
  "West Germany Best Germany" -- some military staffer while planning Eastern Europe's nuclear obliteration
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    Nukes in E. Germany wouldn’t be healthy for the W. G. ;)
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  It's interesting how it's mostly scattered small towns in East Germany, not large cities (with the exception of the Berlin city center). For instance Altenburg, which is closest to the village I grew up, so naturally I checked that first. It's a completely unremarkable little district town today with an airfield for hobby pilots, but apparently this airfield was a Soviet military base during the Cold War: https://www.mil-airfields.de/deutschland/flugplatz-altenburg.htm https://www.mil-airfields.de/deutschland/flugplatz-altenburg...
  - jotm 4y ago
    Some of the most specialized companies in Germany have their production in small unremarkable towns (that still have a huge Edeka or Lidl lol). If you want to stop the production of nuclear warheads, you cripple the factories that make high pressure, special alloy cooling pipes for example.
    - flohofwoe 4y ago
      That's more true for West Germany than East Germany during the Cold War era though, East German industry was more centralized or at least in the process of being centralized after WW2. It actually looks like most targets in East Germany were military infrastructure (which is interesting on its own, because I would rather have assumed that the goal was to inflict maximum human casualties, e.g. same as Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
chaosbolt 4y ago
>Because you invaded a country for no reason (like we did to Iraq), (except the one you invaded is at your borders and we put our guy at its head a couple years ago, and the one we invaded is half a planet from us), we will bring forth the apocalypse. Humans are crazy, seeing how we're speaking about a nuclear war now vs how people spoke about it in the 60s, it's like a mass psychosis, we don't care anymore, or maybe we're too dumb to think about the horrors of something before living through it. Now bring in the downvotes because somehow what I said hurts your (allegiance to the flag since elementary school) sense of nat.. patriotism.
- eecc 4y ago
  mostly agreeable except for the premise that Ukrainians should be a passive lot that either should’ve resigned themselves to remain an impoverished, looted, vassal state like Belarus or Russia itself, or are acting as a pawn in US geopolitical hands. They — seemingly — aspire to more than that.
  - rjzzleep 4y ago
    There was nothing passive about this. There was a clear peace plan and Ukraine refused to implement any of it[1][2]. December 2020 there was to be a discussion on the matter in the UNSC but Germany and France refused it, which were actual guarantors of the peace plan. [1] https://www.ibtimes.com/minsk-ceasefire-deal-full-text-agreement-between-russia-ukraine-germany-france-1814468 https://www.ibtimes.com/minsk-ceasefire-deal-full-text-agree... [2] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/09/13/what-are-the-minsk-agreements https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/09/13/...
    - _visgean 4y ago
      lol are you saying that UA is reponsible for breaking the peace? You mean the country that got invaded? By the country that guaranteed its territorial sovereignty.
  - avgcorrection 4y ago
    > mostly agreeable except for the premise that Ukrainians should be a passive lot that either should’ve resigned themselves How did you divine this? Actually never mind: the OP is working off of either a quote from somewhere else (not the submission) or a mock-statement which is supposed to be said by people he/she disagrees with. What a confusing subthread.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
XorNot 4y ago
This site doesn't seem great - their methodology doesn't explain how they reach the conclusions they did. For example, does radioactive fallout scale linearly with bomb size? I have no idea! But given that most weapons are hydrogen-bombs now, that doesn't seem intuitively obvious that it does - the amount of radioactive material per warhead plateaus while yield goes up and up. Which is to say, it seems big on the "panic and horror" and low on actual information. I have no idea how to follow whether their conclusions seem reasonable or not.
- thombat 4y ago
  For low-altitude detonations much of the fallout comes from irradiated dirt. For example the Baker nuclear test was the first sub-surface nuke and resulted in heavy radioactive contamination of the test ships. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads
avgcorrection 4y ago
The theory of deterrence is kind of like the idea that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun.
- darthrupert 4y ago
  ... completely valid?
  - Rygian 4y ago
    Rather than thinking in blurry terms like "valid," I would see it more useful to think in terms of how many innocent people will lose their lives when good guy and bad guy use their guns. Any arrangement that makes the number grow is worse than the others.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      yeah more like two people holding grenades with the pins out in a crowd saying "don't make me drop this!"
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    It's not a great analogy. At the level of states, you have anarchy. This is the key insight of realism. There is no authority that places guardrails on how each state treats each other. So each state needs to arm themselves. At the level of people, you do not have anarchy. You have police which acts as the hegemon.
    - darthrupert 4y ago
      I mean... on an individual level it's obviously true: if there's a determined active shooter, there's probably not much more you can do than try to shoot them first. On society level it's indeed a bit more complicated matter. Every additional gun in the society is potentially one more gun in the hands of a bad person.
  - einpoklum 4y ago
RagnarD 4y ago
The list includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland (!), Ukraine (!), (east) Germany (!!!), and so forth. To state that this 1956 target list "probably doesn't look dramatically different [from today's]" is one of the most moronic things I've read in a long time.
- _visgean 4y ago
  don't worry, we will get bombed from russia so it wont be that different.
- kolinko 4y ago
  As someone living in Warsaw, Poland right now - my assumption was that the list looks the same, just the nukes would fly from the other direction. Also, it is surprisingly uplifting - I always assumed nukes would hit the city centre - especially since we have the government officials stationed here. But it looks like the only two targets were airports.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- redkugvvddr 4y ago
  If you think the US doesn't have military plans on how to best invade it's allies in the event that they go to war, you are a moron. I guarantee they have a plan on best places to nuke in all countries.
Normille 4y ago
Tsk! Tsk! USA! --94 nukes targetted on brave little Ukraine. And yet you love them so much!
- kolinko 4y ago
  Ukraine was a part of Russia then. Just as a Pole I am not surprised a bunch of nukes was targetting my home country - we were a vassal state to Russia back then, so that was to be expected. The real problem was that Russia’s military plans didn’t exclude nuking Poland if it came to it. At least that’s what Kuklinski - our general from the period said.
  - Normille 4y ago
    >Ukraine was a part of Russia then. Just as a Pole I am not surprised a bunch of nukes was targetting my home country - we were a vassal state to Russia back then, so that was to be expected. So you hate Russia for saving you from Hitler but you suck America's arse even though they were quite prepared to completley annihilate your country and all your people [including all your friends and family and everyone you knew] because you were a 'vassal state to Russia'? Wow! --the Stockholm Syndrome really is strong in Eastern Europe these days.
    - flohofwoe 4y ago
      Are you even aware that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were essentially allies at the start of WW2 who planned to divide Poland among themselves until Hitler turned around and broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact?
      - rjzzleep 4y ago
        It was a non aggression pact. They had one with Poland long before that. And another with Estonia and Latvia. Germany annexed Austria and both Germany and Italy marched into other places before Germany signed the non aggression pact with the Soviets and amassed troops at the polish border before anything happened. I don't really understand why the German/Soviet agreement was considered the start of world war II and not the other annexations and aggressions Germany did before that. There was also the Japanese Invasion of China that happened 2 years before that treaty and yet that doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact on WWII.
lordofgibbons 4y ago
Is there anything similar available from the Warsaw pact?
- kolinko 4y ago
  Ryszard Kuklinski - one of the military generals in Poland, switched sides and began secretly delivering intel to USA after he found out the Russian strategies. If I remember correctly, he said that Russia’s plans assumed hitting Poland and East Germany as well, to make it impossible for western forces to march through our grounds. (Of course most nukes were still directed at the western countries).
jotm 4y ago
> Just how many nuclear weapons do we actually need? As many as you can maintain, really.
TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Looking on the map, not really a surprise. Most of those are either Air Force Bases (or used to be during cold war) or industrially significant cities.
adastra22 4y ago
(1956)
dandanua 4y ago
Giving up to the nuclear blackmail of genocidal terrorists may lower a nuclear threat in the immediate future, but raises the nuclear threat 1000 times more in the distant future. Though, it seems it's completely OK for people who live the current day like Trump.
mrjin 4y ago
Why so many Germany cities on the list? Wondering if any British and French cities on the list but not declassified yet?
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  This list is from the Cold War and all targets on German territory are in former socialist East Germany. West and East Germany was where World War 3 would have started, and it was kinda expected that all of Germany would essentially be turned into glass about 30 minutes after the war started. Both the Warsaw Pact and NATO had absolutely humongous military forces concentrated on both sides of the border (compared to today's European armies). I really hope the US could be bothered in the meantime to clean up their target list though ;)
- blibble 4y ago
  why would the US attack its allies cities? East Germany was soviet
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    To nitpick: Not "soviet" (as in "member of the Soviet Union"), but a souvereign socialist country^H^H^HSoviet puppet with Soviet military bases as well as its own armed forces, and founding member of the Warsaw Pact.
dirtyid 4y ago
Reminder that nuclear MAD is not just about destroying your adversaries but entire alliance network that could help your adversary recover.
donclark 4y ago
Great. Do we have a current declassified list of what our enemies targets would be in the U.S.?

51 points by dotsam 4y ago

gonzo41 4y ago

Glad I live in the very south of Australia.

Normille 4y ago
> Glad I live in the very south of Australia. Don't get too complacent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel)
- capableweb 4y ago
  Playing around with https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ a bit, it seems it would take a lot of very powerful nukes before any nuclear fallout would reach the south of Australia. Even with a fictional maximum kilotons (max for nukemap) nuke dropped in Darwin (north Australia) with maximum wind force south wouldn't make the fallout reach the south.
- XorNot 4y ago
  The scenario in that novel can't actually happen. Even widespread radioactive contamination from a full-scale nuclear war at the height of the Cold War couldn't throw enough radioactive material into the atmosphere to cause acute radiation poisoning across the entire planet. "The Silent Spring" has always been poetic license when it comes to nuclear weapons. We could cause a civilizational setback on an unimaginable, possibly unrecoverable scale for the human race...but we couldn't make ourselves extinct that way (for one thing: kind of a lot of people in Africa and South America, land of nobody's nuclear target). But the long term effects would be a slightly increased incidence of cancer and birth defects across the globe, but more people will die in the resultant famine from the collapse of global food production then will die due to direct or indirect effects of nuclear weapons. Make no mistake: it would be the end of the comfortable 1st world lifestyle we know, possibly for good. But humans have existed on this planet for tens of thousands of years in circumstances far worse then now, and we have endured and continued reproducing regardless.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

"it probably doesn’t look dramatically different" Living in East Germany I hope it does!

yellowapple 4y ago
"West Germany Best Germany" -- some military staffer while planning Eastern Europe's nuclear obliteration
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  Nukes in E. Germany wouldn’t be healthy for the W. G. ;)
flohofwoe 4y ago
It's interesting how it's mostly scattered small towns in East Germany, not large cities (with the exception of the Berlin city center). For instance Altenburg, which is closest to the village I grew up, so naturally I checked that first. It's a completely unremarkable little district town today with an airfield for hobby pilots, but apparently this airfield was a Soviet military base during the Cold War: https://www.mil-airfields.de/deutschland/flugplatz-altenburg.htm https://www.mil-airfields.de/deutschland/flugplatz-altenburg...
- jotm 4y ago
  Some of the most specialized companies in Germany have their production in small unremarkable towns (that still have a huge Edeka or Lidl lol). If you want to stop the production of nuclear warheads, you cripple the factories that make high pressure, special alloy cooling pipes for example.
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    That's more true for West Germany than East Germany during the Cold War era though, East German industry was more centralized or at least in the process of being centralized after WW2. It actually looks like most targets in East Germany were military infrastructure (which is interesting on its own, because I would rather have assumed that the goal was to inflict maximum human casualties, e.g. same as Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

chaosbolt 4y ago

>Because you invaded a country for no reason (like we did to Iraq), (except the one you invaded is at your borders and we put our guy at its head a couple years ago, and the one we invaded is half a planet from us), we will bring forth the apocalypse. Humans are crazy, seeing how we're speaking about a nuclear war now vs how people spoke about it in the 60s, it's like a mass psychosis, we don't care anymore, or maybe we're too dumb to think about the horrors of something before living through it. Now bring in the downvotes because somehow what I said hurts your (allegiance to the flag since elementary school) sense of nat.. patriotism.

eecc 4y ago
mostly agreeable except for the premise that Ukrainians should be a passive lot that either should’ve resigned themselves to remain an impoverished, looted, vassal state like Belarus or Russia itself, or are acting as a pawn in US geopolitical hands. They — seemingly — aspire to more than that.
- rjzzleep 4y ago
  There was nothing passive about this. There was a clear peace plan and Ukraine refused to implement any of it[1][2]. December 2020 there was to be a discussion on the matter in the UNSC but Germany and France refused it, which were actual guarantors of the peace plan. [1] https://www.ibtimes.com/minsk-ceasefire-deal-full-text-agreement-between-russia-ukraine-germany-france-1814468 https://www.ibtimes.com/minsk-ceasefire-deal-full-text-agree... [2] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/09/13/what-are-the-minsk-agreements https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/09/13/...
  - _visgean 4y ago
    lol are you saying that UA is reponsible for breaking the peace? You mean the country that got invaded? By the country that guaranteed its territorial sovereignty.
- avgcorrection 4y ago
  > mostly agreeable except for the premise that Ukrainians should be a passive lot that either should’ve resigned themselves How did you divine this? Actually never mind: the OP is working off of either a quote from somewhere else (not the submission) or a mock-statement which is supposed to be said by people he/she disagrees with. What a confusing subthread.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

XorNot 4y ago

This site doesn't seem great - their methodology doesn't explain how they reach the conclusions they did. For example, does radioactive fallout scale linearly with bomb size? I have no idea! But given that most weapons are hydrogen-bombs now, that doesn't seem intuitively obvious that it does - the amount of radioactive material per warhead plateaus while yield goes up and up. Which is to say, it seems big on the "panic and horror" and low on actual information. I have no idea how to follow whether their conclusions seem reasonable or not.

thombat 4y ago
For low-altitude detonations much of the fallout comes from irradiated dirt. For example the Baker nuclear test was the first sub-surface nuke and resulted in heavy radioactive contamination of the test ships. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads

avgcorrection 4y ago

The theory of deterrence is kind of like the idea that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun.

darthrupert 4y ago
... completely valid?
- Rygian 4y ago
  Rather than thinking in blurry terms like "valid," I would see it more useful to think in terms of how many innocent people will lose their lives when good guy and bad guy use their guns. Any arrangement that makes the number grow is worse than the others.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    yeah more like two people holding grenades with the pins out in a crowd saying "don't make me drop this!"
- hackerlight 4y ago
  It's not a great analogy. At the level of states, you have anarchy. This is the key insight of realism. There is no authority that places guardrails on how each state treats each other. So each state needs to arm themselves. At the level of people, you do not have anarchy. You have police which acts as the hegemon.
  - darthrupert 4y ago
    I mean... on an individual level it's obviously true: if there's a determined active shooter, there's probably not much more you can do than try to shoot them first. On society level it's indeed a bit more complicated matter. Every additional gun in the society is potentially one more gun in the hands of a bad person.
- einpoklum 4y ago

RagnarD 4y ago

The list includes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland (!), Ukraine (!), (east) Germany (!!!), and so forth. To state that this 1956 target list "probably doesn't look dramatically different [from today's]" is one of the most moronic things I've read in a long time.

_visgean 4y ago
don't worry, we will get bombed from russia so it wont be that different.
kolinko 4y ago
As someone living in Warsaw, Poland right now - my assumption was that the list looks the same, just the nukes would fly from the other direction. Also, it is surprisingly uplifting - I always assumed nukes would hit the city centre - especially since we have the government officials stationed here. But it looks like the only two targets were airports.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
redkugvvddr 4y ago
If you think the US doesn't have military plans on how to best invade it's allies in the event that they go to war, you are a moron. I guarantee they have a plan on best places to nuke in all countries.

Normille 4y ago

Tsk! Tsk! USA! --94 nukes targetted on brave little Ukraine. And yet you love them so much!

kolinko 4y ago
Ukraine was a part of Russia then. Just as a Pole I am not surprised a bunch of nukes was targetting my home country - we were a vassal state to Russia back then, so that was to be expected. The real problem was that Russia’s military plans didn’t exclude nuking Poland if it came to it. At least that’s what Kuklinski - our general from the period said.
- Normille 4y ago
  >Ukraine was a part of Russia then. Just as a Pole I am not surprised a bunch of nukes was targetting my home country - we were a vassal state to Russia back then, so that was to be expected. So you hate Russia for saving you from Hitler but you suck America's arse even though they were quite prepared to completley annihilate your country and all your people [including all your friends and family and everyone you knew] because you were a 'vassal state to Russia'? Wow! --the Stockholm Syndrome really is strong in Eastern Europe these days.
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
    Are you even aware that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were essentially allies at the start of WW2 who planned to divide Poland among themselves until Hitler turned around and broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact?
    - rjzzleep 4y ago
      It was a non aggression pact. They had one with Poland long before that. And another with Estonia and Latvia. Germany annexed Austria and both Germany and Italy marched into other places before Germany signed the non aggression pact with the Soviets and amassed troops at the polish border before anything happened. I don't really understand why the German/Soviet agreement was considered the start of world war II and not the other annexations and aggressions Germany did before that. There was also the Japanese Invasion of China that happened 2 years before that treaty and yet that doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact on WWII.

lordofgibbons 4y ago

Is there anything similar available from the Warsaw pact?

kolinko 4y ago
Ryszard Kuklinski - one of the military generals in Poland, switched sides and began secretly delivering intel to USA after he found out the Russian strategies. If I remember correctly, he said that Russia’s plans assumed hitting Poland and East Germany as well, to make it impossible for western forces to march through our grounds. (Of course most nukes were still directed at the western countries).

jotm 4y ago

> Just how many nuclear weapons do we actually need? As many as you can maintain, really.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

Looking on the map, not really a surprise. Most of those are either Air Force Bases (or used to be during cold war) or industrially significant cities.

adastra22 4y ago

(1956)

dandanua 4y ago

Giving up to the nuclear blackmail of genocidal terrorists may lower a nuclear threat in the immediate future, but raises the nuclear threat 1000 times more in the distant future. Though, it seems it's completely OK for people who live the current day like Trump.

mrjin 4y ago

Why so many Germany cities on the list? Wondering if any British and French cities on the list but not declassified yet?

flohofwoe 4y ago
This list is from the Cold War and all targets on German territory are in former socialist East Germany. West and East Germany was where World War 3 would have started, and it was kinda expected that all of Germany would essentially be turned into glass about 30 minutes after the war started. Both the Warsaw Pact and NATO had absolutely humongous military forces concentrated on both sides of the border (compared to today's European armies). I really hope the US could be bothered in the meantime to clean up their target list though ;)
blibble 4y ago
why would the US attack its allies cities? East Germany was soviet
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  To nitpick: Not "soviet" (as in "member of the Soviet Union"), but a souvereign socialist country^H^H^HSoviet puppet with Soviet military bases as well as its own armed forces, and founding member of the Warsaw Pact.

dirtyid 4y ago

Reminder that nuclear MAD is not just about destroying your adversaries but entire alliance network that could help your adversary recover.

donclark 4y ago

Great. Do we have a current declassified list of what our enemies targets would be in the U.S.?