7 ms·

1,100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets

113 points by throwup238 3y ago

082349872349872 3y ago
Having lived through MAD, I still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism. (upon reflection, having also lived through the pandemic, I can believe it)
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- nyokodo 3y ago
  > so bent out of shape over mere terrorism 9/11 was an attack on the greatest symbols of American power on American soil. Suffice to say, Americans are not accustomed to that and they went mad with rage and fear. Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America worked through that trauma. It wasn’t just mere terrorism but also the psychological result of American strategic isolation.
  - jameskilton 3y ago
    I like to put it slightly differently: 9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack in modern history. We are still running scared.
    - nyokodo 3y ago
      > We are still running scared. Not as compared to 9/11 through ~2017. America has largely returned to the geopolitical indifference it had in the 1990s but with much greater exhaustion for direct foreign military intervention and cynicism about strategic alliances.
      - asdff 3y ago
        Foreign policy wise the ship never was off course at all from the doctrine its had for decades. In terms of the American people though, its obvious how the event has severely damaged us both in terms of how we think about our fellow people, and the sort of restrictions and surveillance we have imposed on ourselves in the name of safety since.
    - pydry 3y ago
      It certainly fulfilled its objective of pulling the US into an unwinnable war in Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires".
  - bongodongobob 3y ago
    I don't think most people considered the WTC as a symbol of anything other than tall buildings. Or at the worst, a symbol of unfettered capitalism. It seems to me it was made into that symbol after the fact to get everyone's feathers rustled. In 2000, if you were to ask someone what building represented the success of the US, I'd bet the majority would say Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, or Sears Tower. Maybe that answer would be different for New Yorkers though, idk. The psychology that should be noted was the government and media whipping the populace into a psychotic frenzy which made us willing to murder a quarter million people in a country that had nothing to do with the attack. The fact that this isn't brought up every time 9/11 is mentioned is a travesty.
    - idiotsecant 3y ago
      I think you have the cause and the effect mixed up. The government didn't have to 'whip us up' we did that entirely on our own. The government was able to go places they never could because of that fervor, but they had at most a marginal role in creating it. You're wildly misremembering how much fear there was on day 0, before the government had a chance to do anything. We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability. The amount of energy required to destabilize the system, when applied in just the right way, is shockingly small.
      - nyokodo 3y ago
        > We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability. This is massively overstating the impact on the west, and America specifically. Obviously it massively disrupted life and civilization in the Middle East and elsewhere, and it lead to the death of 10s of 1000s of military personnel and degraded civil liberties in America and elsewhere. But it had no substantial impact on “civilization” in the west.
        TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
        Apart from seeding a culture of paranoia and xenophobia, and converting the Anglosphere from a mid-trust culture into a low-trust culture. See also, airport security theatre.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    3000 civilians were killed in a single attack. It's not about the buildings or any symbolism, it's about the tragic loss of life in first hand. Everything else second. If you're looking for symbolism, you have the January 6 insurrection.
  - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
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  - nathancahill 3y ago
    Fixed: Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America co-opted the trauma to start a generation of unjustifiable wars and massively reduce civil liberties.
  - latentcall 3y ago
    Yep. The world generally felt for us after 9/11, and then the wars started and that really affected public perception. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with it and destabilized an entire region and didn’t find the guy that orchestrated the whole thing for an entire decade. All that along with torturing prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib made us look even worse. Not to mention it really created an “us vs. them” environment in the American homeland which is still ever present if not getting worse. I think Bin Laden was counting on “death by a thousand cuts” aka creeping normality and I believe that was largely successful. Americans seem to have partly turned on each other over political differences. People now have an even larger distrust of the institutions in this country. Empathy seems to have taken a sideline. I’ve seen families broken up and almost experienced it myself. People now spend so much time online in their echo chambers and sometimes refuse to even converse with “the other side”. This goes both ways. With all of this happening I think of this part of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  "mere terrorism"? It was an attack on a civilian target. Pearl Harbor was a military installation. The USA had never faced anything approaching the scale of 9/11. The WTC 1993 attack and OK City bombing in 1995 didn't come close. It became very apparent how complacent the USA had become. Unlike a state attacking another state, pinning down where these people were getting their orders from was difficult. Considering what your age must be, I'm surprised you struggle to understand the difference between an openly militarized nation versus terrorist cells that could be anywhere and anybody. There's no coordinates to punch into a MAD system when it comes to terrorists. If it was so easy, years wouldn't have been spent searching for the likes of Bin Laden.
  - jbverschoor 3y ago
    Scale? Less than 3000 people died during 9/11. That is nothing compared to anything else that's happening in the world. With or without the US's involvement. Edit: he U.S. post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have taken a tremendous human toll on those countries. As of September 2021, an estimated 432,093 civilians in these countries have died violent deaths as a result of the wars 144 times as many CIVILIANS were killed by the US.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      It isn't about body count, it's about a handful of people taking control of aircraft and causing mass destruction with minimal effort, energy and resources expended. It also isn't about whether it is "nothing" compared to what is happening elsewhere, the topic at hand is the USA. The rest of the world isn't what is being discussed. There were weaknesses in the US national security threat model. It wasn't a major consideration that someone would hijack a plane and fly it into NYC, the major assumption was that an attack would come from another nation, and it would be military, and it would be detected as hostile in aerospace. Guise of a civilian aircraft? Yeah, that was a gaping hole. Come on, the fucking Pentagon had a plane flown into it on the same day. It's one thing for gov to get hacked by teens, it's another thing to have a terrorist org do all that in the space of a few hours.
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- scotty79 3y ago
  United States builds their identity through their enemy. It started in WWII and worked so good that they almost immediately adopted communists as their new enemy. When Soviet Union eventually surpisingly collapsed despite US constantly proping them up as credible enemy, they started losing identity. Fortunately, accidentally seeded terrorist groups cropped up and did significant enough damage. US eagerly elevated them to the position of the new main enemy providing all the necessary PR. Even the name Al Qaeda was pretty much invented by US trying to figure out who hit them. Before US started using this name it was a name of random training camp. As nice and safe the terrorists were as an enemy, everybody knew that it won't last long. It just wasn't convincing and terrorists, apart from few events, were pretty much worthless. So US naturally picked next solid enemy, China for their next hopefully long and prosperous cold war. Having an enemy is super important for US politics, their industry and social structure. It gives them excuses for protectionism. It gives them ability to have an alternative to increasingly impoverished civilian customers when it comes to stimulating innovation and industrial growth. It allowes them to give jobs to people that in purely civilian economy wouls just raise unemployment and unrest. All the culture of US is soaked in hero/villain dynamics that consolidates society and prevents from asking too many questions in the presence of a villain. The problem now is that US is starting to drop the ball. World caught up with their advantage of being the only major economy not damaged by WWII. Unfortunately the current US enemy is on more capable side. So this time, maybe for the first time, the US is in the real danger. Maybe isolationist tendencies of Trump and his fans are not such a bad thing. Maybe US should go back to pre-wwii state. Times when US could credibly pretend they are on top of things, not just bit ahead of the pack, are pretty much over.
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  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    Kind of right, kind of not. There are unarguably factions in the US that consider fascists like Putin to be friends, not enemies, and would happily consider an international alliance. And US force-projection has few defences against the kind of subversion of key figures that Putin has decided to specialise in. The US will continue in some form. But the post-Enlightenment liberal/rationalist/progressive current in the US and Europe is in deadly danger.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > Having lived through MAD It's still going on, and things are more unstable with Russia and the US Republicans opposed to treaties or disarmament and embracing aggression and violence on principle, and China adding a third nuclear force to balance.
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  > still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism. that would be because nukes are completely useless against anything assymetrical
- refurb 3y ago
  Terrorism has brought down governments, or nearly so. Shining Path in Peru is a great example. It doesn't take many bombings (that don't even kill people) to bring a system nearly to a halt. It's one reason why Singapore has very strict security rules targeting terrorism. Not because of mass casualties, but because of the instability it would bring, dragging down the economy, creating social unrest. Terrorists aren't stupid. They know terror works.
yieldcrv 3y ago
2016 too bad the detonate website is from an even earlier time because it doesnt work on iphone
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- ivan_gammel 3y ago
  Just use landscape orientation
surfingdino 3y ago
Could we also have lists of targets compiled by other nuclear powers?
- wrsh07 3y ago
  There's something deeply unsettling about an interaction where you pick a location (not in the US) and click "detonate" That might be intentional (and could make for an interesting art experience!) but I'm honestly more interested in understanding averages than individual examples. Eg ten warheads are randomly detonated at one of the locations, 100? 1000? It's important to note that there's no chance we have dozens of nuclear warheads flying without retaliatory strikes
- AniseAbyss 3y ago
  I remember reading that although France had a completely independent nuclear force they did secretly cooperate with NATO on targeting sites so that none of their nukes would be "wasted".
- justahuman74 3y ago
  https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/best-places-to-survive-a-nuclear-apocalypse/ https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/best-places-to-survive-... has a map of what would get hit in the US
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  I have just tidbit - that Vienna, the capital of a neutral country Austria, was one of the first Soviet targets for nuclear strike: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1364037/Vienna-was-top-of-Soviet-nuclear-targets-list.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/13...
  - surfingdino 3y ago
    I guess the Soviets' thinking was that if the nuclear war breaks out nobody needs their favourite spy city anymore.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
This can't be full list from 1956, since there's nothing in Mongolia.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  I doubt that there was any target of strategic importance in Mongolia, which would have justified the expense of an ICBM.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Mhmm that makes Mongolia the perfect place to put missile launchers ;)
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      It's a long way from the targets. The US has silos in the center of the country, but near the northern border; presumably they'd fly over the Arctic. The Soviets would put those launchers in Siberia, by that reasoning.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    But the map shows there were in Albania and Tajikistan? It doesn't seem likely there was zero things in Mongolia if the bar was that low.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
At least for 1956, we know that one side was only targeting its enemies. There's long been debate over if the nuclear powers would lob a few warheads in the direction of some of neutral countries to prevent them from becoming hegemons in the post nuclear war world.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  I wonder if south america would have been hit...
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  Totally plausible. Actually even more plausible as a way to draw neutral countries into the war because in all-out exchange there would be no way to be 100% sure whose warhead landed on your head.
- roywiggins 3y ago
  In the 60s the US contemplated nuking China in response to a Soviet strike on the US: "In 2012, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) declassified an important document on the pre-delegation instructions approved by President Lyndon Johnson in early 1964. Under the instructions, if the Soviet Union or China launched a nuclear attack on the United States that knocked the president or his successor out of action, making communication impossible, U.S. commanders-in-chief of unified or specified commands (such as Strategic Air Command or European Command) had the authority to retaliate against the entire Sino-Soviet bloc, even if some Soviet allies or China had not launched an attack." https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2018-08-15/us-nuclear-war-plan-option-sought-destruction-china-soviet-union-viable-societies https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2018-0...
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  Apparently Vienna was an early Soviet target: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1364037/Vienna-was-top-of-Soviet-nuclear-targets-list.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/13... But I don't think it was about the post-nuclear-war hegemony, it was more immediate. There was always the risk that e.g. Swedish airfields could be used by USA (with or without Swedish approval) to bomb e.g. St. Petersburg.
ivan_gammel 3y ago
It is interesting to see that in Southern Urals the major nuclear manufacturing sites Chelyabinsk-40 and Zlatoust-20 (as they were named in 1956) are not targets and would not be affected, but their civilian doppelgängers would be hit. The secrecy of the Soviet nuclear program was probably quite good.
- LgWoodenBadger 3y ago
  You’re only looking at the declassified sites though
- asdff 3y ago
  It was probably so much easier (and still is) to integrate as a spy in the U.S. than the other way around.
  - takinola 3y ago
    My understanding is spies are mostly compromised nationals as opposed to foreigners trying to blend in.
    - sgjohnson 3y ago
      Yes, but you still need local handlers for them, and they would be “foreigners trying to blend in”
      - takinola 3y ago
        Handlers don't need to blend it nearly as much. They just need a plausible reason to be in the vicinity of their assets. A lot of diplomatic staff are spy handlers. Also, businessmen, military attaches, etc. Every country has some contact with foreigners. Any of those foreigners can be handlers.
  - ivan_gammel 3y ago
    Dragon Ladies flew over Soviet Union from 1955 until 1960, when Powers was shot down near Sverdlovsk, i.e. a bit farther to the north from interesting locations. Those spy planes could make a photo of the sites.
jgilias 3y ago
This is pretty fascinating when living in an ex-USSR country. There’s a target between two major cities in the forest at a non-descript village. I know what’s there though. In the Soviet times there used to be a large facility hosting hundreds of tanks. At the same time, I know of a place that used to be a rocket launch base. There were around 10 across my country alone. I don’t see any of those being targeted.
- cornholio 3y ago
  It seems the non-USSR eastern Europe would have been completely reduced to nuclear ash, unlike most of the USSR, which is much less covered due to its size and sparse population. In my city alone there were three targets.
  - jgilias 3y ago
    But that’s not really surprising. There’s a lot of targets in the Baltics. But the reason is that the Soviets put a lot of military objects there because it’s just closer to the potential frontline, as well as targets further west. I’m just happy we got out of that nightmare. If for some reason we were still part of Russia, chances are I’d be sent off to kill Ukrainians right as we speak. Given that people from ethnic minorities are 200x more likely to be drafted than Russians from Moscow or St Petersburg.
    - ativzzz 3y ago
      > If for some reason we were still part of Russia, chances are I’d be sent off to kill Ukrainians right as we speak To be fair, if you were still part of the USSR then so would Ukraine, and you wouldn't be fighting a war due to MAD with the US (maybe a proxy war in Myanmar or something), you'd most likely die of alcoholism or heart disease
  - scotty79 3y ago
    I'd be dead. Along with quarter of million people in my city. Just because there's a very small civilian airport with one runway that serves about 12 planes per day, on the outskirts. Screw the coldwar US.
xg15 3y ago
A bit sobering that there is a target right in the center of Berlin with several other targets in close vicinity - a mere 7 years after the Berlin Airlift. I guess the US compassion for Berliners did have limits after all.
- hnu234 3y ago
  > I guess the US compassion for Berliners did have limits after all. I think the indiscriminate firebombing and targeting of german civilians in ww2 showed there is no such thing as 'US compassion'. It was calculated propaganda.
- ivan_gammel 3y ago
  That would include US citizen too. They probably just realistically looked at the survival chances of West Berlin in case of full scale war. Soviets were confident that with conventional warfare they would reach the Channel in mere weeks, nuclear was really the only deterrent.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  The war was going to be there. Should NATO not attack invading Soviet forces? Then they'd be in a safe zone all the way to the Atlantic.
The_Colonel 3y ago
An interesting choice of (non)targets. Bratislava, the second-largest city of Czechoslovakia (and capital of Slovakia) would have been spared. I get that the military targets got priority, but I would have expected that large population centers would get hit as overall strategic targets too. Another thing I noticed is how many targets there are in the Baltics given the small population. It has like triple the amount of targets in comparison to Czechoslovakia even though it has/had only about half of the population. I don't know how to explain that, it's not like Czechoslovakia had less strategic position or smaller weapon industry.
- treprinum 3y ago
  It's likely due to being close to Vienna that would take an indirect hit in that case. Also, it seems to be covered in the follow up fallout so it would be severely damaged anyway.
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    "Likely" based on what? I'm not sure how much consideration NATO gave to neutral countries. Vienna is about 50 kilometers from Bratislava, it shouldn't receive that much damage. Compare that with West Berlin (a NATO city) which is getting 5 nukes all around its borders, not farther than 10 kilometers. (with some more nukes in a slightly larger distance, but still less than 50)
  - klohto 3y ago
    If that was the case, they would not target Brno.
runlevel1 3y ago
To my knowledge, no Russian targeting plans have ever been declassified, but an open source project called OPEN-RISOP[^1] has a few hypothetical attack plans that give some idea of what would be targeted. Its creator, David Teter, is a former advisor to USSTRATCOM, DIA, and DTRA on strategic plans (SIOP/OPLANs 8044/8010), kinetic and non-kinetic weapon effects, vulnerability analysis, and targeting. It's raw data, so to get a visualization you need to use something like Nuclear War Simulator[^2]†. Here's a video showing one such plan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF0mEOCK2KE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF0mEOCK2KE [^1]: https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP [^2]: https://nuclearwarsimulator.com https://nuclearwarsimulator.com † NWS is on Steam, but don't go into it expecting a game-like experience. It's more of a rather technical "what-if" simulator.
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  There exist at least one declassified plan of the Warsaw Pact showing all the targets the Soviets would strike with nuclear weapons but also showing expected nuclear strikes by NATO forces. It also shows extensive use of chemical weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine A very detailed map was declassified, unfortunately it's not included in the wiki article. But you can google it
- treprinum 3y ago
  There was some documentary about a Ukrainian silo with dampened launchers and they mentioned they targeted China among others.
hasoleju 3y ago
The number of targets in an area resemble the population density of that area. It feels very strange to see the targets in the former GDR. A lot of them close to Berlin. Part of that city was not part of the USSR, but would still be affected heavily by the attacks of the targets nearby.
sneed_chucker 3y ago
> Even though today’s nuclear targets list is classified, it probably doesn’t look dramatically different. Uh I'm pretty sure it does look dramatically different in Europe at least because a huge proportion of the targeted Warsaw pact and Soviet Socialist Republic countries in 1956 are now part of NATO. Seems like a very ignorant statement to make.
- Tommstein 3y ago
  Reminds me of seeing Putin bragging a few months ago about how Russia has more nukes than the US/NATO/whatever. Well yes, you better hope so, because if shit hits the fan, you have to take on basically the entire free world by yourself, whereas the entire free world is aiming everything they've got at just you.
gattr 3y ago
On a related note: Cold War-era Polish military maps of the British Isles, in case of a Warsaw Pact invasion thereof: https://earthlymission.com/map-of-britain-teach-invading-polish-pronounce-english-place-names/ https://earthlymission.com/map-of-britain-teach-invading-pol... > This Cold War era map was created to teach Polish troops how to pronounce English place names in the event of an invasion against Britain (click to enlarge). Towns and cities in Essex and Kent are spelled out phonetically – resulting in interesting transformations such as Southend-On-Sea into Saufend-On-Sji.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
"Level 7" by Mordecai Roshwald, is a sobering take on this whole nuclear dick wrangling debacle.
maxglute 3y ago
Rarely mentioned context whenever this declassification make the rounds: this was pre MAD. Before reliable ICBMs or triad. In 50s, Only US had large bomber based atomic stockpile. Hence planners could go wild and seriously concievable nuke all communist assets and expect minimal retaliatory losses, including non nuclear states at the time like PRC for shits and giggles.

113 points by throwup238 3y ago

Having lived through MAD, I still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism. (upon reflection, having also lived through the pandemic, I can believe it)

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nyokodo 3y ago
> so bent out of shape over mere terrorism 9/11 was an attack on the greatest symbols of American power on American soil. Suffice to say, Americans are not accustomed to that and they went mad with rage and fear. Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America worked through that trauma. It wasn’t just mere terrorism but also the psychological result of American strategic isolation.
- jameskilton 3y ago
  I like to put it slightly differently: 9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack in modern history. We are still running scared.
  - nyokodo 3y ago
    > We are still running scared. Not as compared to 9/11 through ~2017. America has largely returned to the geopolitical indifference it had in the 1990s but with much greater exhaustion for direct foreign military intervention and cynicism about strategic alliances.
    - asdff 3y ago
      Foreign policy wise the ship never was off course at all from the doctrine its had for decades. In terms of the American people though, its obvious how the event has severely damaged us both in terms of how we think about our fellow people, and the sort of restrictions and surveillance we have imposed on ourselves in the name of safety since.
  - pydry 3y ago
    It certainly fulfilled its objective of pulling the US into an unwinnable war in Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires".
- bongodongobob 3y ago
  I don't think most people considered the WTC as a symbol of anything other than tall buildings. Or at the worst, a symbol of unfettered capitalism. It seems to me it was made into that symbol after the fact to get everyone's feathers rustled. In 2000, if you were to ask someone what building represented the success of the US, I'd bet the majority would say Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, or Sears Tower. Maybe that answer would be different for New Yorkers though, idk. The psychology that should be noted was the government and media whipping the populace into a psychotic frenzy which made us willing to murder a quarter million people in a country that had nothing to do with the attack. The fact that this isn't brought up every time 9/11 is mentioned is a travesty.
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    I think you have the cause and the effect mixed up. The government didn't have to 'whip us up' we did that entirely on our own. The government was able to go places they never could because of that fervor, but they had at most a marginal role in creating it. You're wildly misremembering how much fear there was on day 0, before the government had a chance to do anything. We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability. The amount of energy required to destabilize the system, when applied in just the right way, is shockingly small.
    - nyokodo 3y ago
      > We, as a civilization, are riding the razors edge of stability. This is massively overstating the impact on the west, and America specifically. Obviously it massively disrupted life and civilization in the Middle East and elsewhere, and it lead to the death of 10s of 1000s of military personnel and degraded civil liberties in America and elsewhere. But it had no substantial impact on “civilization” in the west.
      - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
        Apart from seeding a culture of paranoia and xenophobia, and converting the Anglosphere from a mid-trust culture into a low-trust culture. See also, airport security theatre.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  3000 civilians were killed in a single attack. It's not about the buildings or any symbolism, it's about the tragic loss of life in first hand. Everything else second. If you're looking for symbolism, you have the January 6 insurrection.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
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- nathancahill 3y ago
  Fixed: Cue a generation of death, destruction, and the reshaping of the world as America co-opted the trauma to start a generation of unjustifiable wars and massively reduce civil liberties.
- latentcall 3y ago
  Yep. The world generally felt for us after 9/11, and then the wars started and that really affected public perception. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with it and destabilized an entire region and didn’t find the guy that orchestrated the whole thing for an entire decade. All that along with torturing prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib made us look even worse. Not to mention it really created an “us vs. them” environment in the American homeland which is still ever present if not getting worse. I think Bin Laden was counting on “death by a thousand cuts” aka creeping normality and I believe that was largely successful. Americans seem to have partly turned on each other over political differences. People now have an even larger distrust of the institutions in this country. Empathy seems to have taken a sideline. I’ve seen families broken up and almost experienced it myself. People now spend so much time online in their echo chambers and sometimes refuse to even converse with “the other side”. This goes both ways. With all of this happening I think of this part of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
hammyhavoc 3y ago
"mere terrorism"? It was an attack on a civilian target. Pearl Harbor was a military installation. The USA had never faced anything approaching the scale of 9/11. The WTC 1993 attack and OK City bombing in 1995 didn't come close. It became very apparent how complacent the USA had become. Unlike a state attacking another state, pinning down where these people were getting their orders from was difficult. Considering what your age must be, I'm surprised you struggle to understand the difference between an openly militarized nation versus terrorist cells that could be anywhere and anybody. There's no coordinates to punch into a MAD system when it comes to terrorists. If it was so easy, years wouldn't have been spent searching for the likes of Bin Laden.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  Scale? Less than 3000 people died during 9/11. That is nothing compared to anything else that's happening in the world. With or without the US's involvement. Edit: he U.S. post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have taken a tremendous human toll on those countries. As of September 2021, an estimated 432,093 civilians in these countries have died violent deaths as a result of the wars 144 times as many CIVILIANS were killed by the US.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    It isn't about body count, it's about a handful of people taking control of aircraft and causing mass destruction with minimal effort, energy and resources expended. It also isn't about whether it is "nothing" compared to what is happening elsewhere, the topic at hand is the USA. The rest of the world isn't what is being discussed. There were weaknesses in the US national security threat model. It wasn't a major consideration that someone would hijack a plane and fly it into NYC, the major assumption was that an attack would come from another nation, and it would be military, and it would be detected as hostile in aerospace. Guise of a civilian aircraft? Yeah, that was a gaping hole. Come on, the fucking Pentagon had a plane flown into it on the same day. It's one thing for gov to get hacked by teens, it's another thing to have a terrorist org do all that in the space of a few hours.
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scotty79 3y ago
United States builds their identity through their enemy. It started in WWII and worked so good that they almost immediately adopted communists as their new enemy. When Soviet Union eventually surpisingly collapsed despite US constantly proping them up as credible enemy, they started losing identity. Fortunately, accidentally seeded terrorist groups cropped up and did significant enough damage. US eagerly elevated them to the position of the new main enemy providing all the necessary PR. Even the name Al Qaeda was pretty much invented by US trying to figure out who hit them. Before US started using this name it was a name of random training camp. As nice and safe the terrorists were as an enemy, everybody knew that it won't last long. It just wasn't convincing and terrorists, apart from few events, were pretty much worthless. So US naturally picked next solid enemy, China for their next hopefully long and prosperous cold war. Having an enemy is super important for US politics, their industry and social structure. It gives them excuses for protectionism. It gives them ability to have an alternative to increasingly impoverished civilian customers when it comes to stimulating innovation and industrial growth. It allowes them to give jobs to people that in purely civilian economy wouls just raise unemployment and unrest. All the culture of US is soaked in hero/villain dynamics that consolidates society and prevents from asking too many questions in the presence of a villain. The problem now is that US is starting to drop the ball. World caught up with their advantage of being the only major economy not damaged by WWII. Unfortunately the current US enemy is on more capable side. So this time, maybe for the first time, the US is in the real danger. Maybe isolationist tendencies of Trump and his fans are not such a bad thing. Maybe US should go back to pre-wwii state. Times when US could credibly pretend they are on top of things, not just bit ahead of the pack, are pretty much over.
- deleted 3y ago
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- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Kind of right, kind of not. There are unarguably factions in the US that consider fascists like Putin to be friends, not enemies, and would happily consider an international alliance. And US force-projection has few defences against the kind of subversion of key figures that Putin has decided to specialise in. The US will continue in some form. But the post-Enlightenment liberal/rationalist/progressive current in the US and Europe is in deadly danger.
wolverine876 3y ago
> Having lived through MAD It's still going on, and things are more unstable with Russia and the US Republicans opposed to treaties or disarmament and embracing aggression and violence on principle, and China adding a third nuclear force to balance.
sgjohnson 3y ago
> still can't believe this century got off to a start so bent out of shape over mere terrorism. that would be because nukes are completely useless against anything assymetrical
refurb 3y ago
Terrorism has brought down governments, or nearly so. Shining Path in Peru is a great example. It doesn't take many bombings (that don't even kill people) to bring a system nearly to a halt. It's one reason why Singapore has very strict security rules targeting terrorism. Not because of mass casualties, but because of the instability it would bring, dragging down the economy, creating social unrest. Terrorists aren't stupid. They know terror works.

yieldcrv 3y ago

2016 too bad the detonate website is from an even earlier time because it doesnt work on iphone

deleted 3y ago
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ivan_gammel 3y ago
Just use landscape orientation

surfingdino 3y ago

Could we also have lists of targets compiled by other nuclear powers?

wrsh07 3y ago
There's something deeply unsettling about an interaction where you pick a location (not in the US) and click "detonate" That might be intentional (and could make for an interesting art experience!) but I'm honestly more interested in understanding averages than individual examples. Eg ten warheads are randomly detonated at one of the locations, 100? 1000? It's important to note that there's no chance we have dozens of nuclear warheads flying without retaliatory strikes
AniseAbyss 3y ago
I remember reading that although France had a completely independent nuclear force they did secretly cooperate with NATO on targeting sites so that none of their nukes would be "wasted".
justahuman74 3y ago
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/best-places-to-survive-a-nuclear-apocalypse/ https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/best-places-to-survive-... has a map of what would get hit in the US
The_Colonel 3y ago
I have just tidbit - that Vienna, the capital of a neutral country Austria, was one of the first Soviet targets for nuclear strike: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1364037/Vienna-was-top-of-Soviet-nuclear-targets-list.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/13...
- surfingdino 3y ago
  I guess the Soviets' thinking was that if the nuclear war breaks out nobody needs their favourite spy city anymore.

MichaelZuo 3y ago

This can't be full list from 1956, since there's nothing in Mongolia.

adrian_b 3y ago
I doubt that there was any target of strategic importance in Mongolia, which would have justified the expense of an ICBM.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Mhmm that makes Mongolia the perfect place to put missile launchers ;)
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    It's a long way from the targets. The US has silos in the center of the country, but near the northern border; presumably they'd fly over the Arctic. The Soviets would put those launchers in Siberia, by that reasoning.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  But the map shows there were in Albania and Tajikistan? It doesn't seem likely there was zero things in Mongolia if the bar was that low.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago

At least for 1956, we know that one side was only targeting its enemies. There's long been debate over if the nuclear powers would lob a few warheads in the direction of some of neutral countries to prevent them from becoming hegemons in the post nuclear war world.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
I wonder if south america would have been hit...
pi-e-sigma 3y ago
Totally plausible. Actually even more plausible as a way to draw neutral countries into the war because in all-out exchange there would be no way to be 100% sure whose warhead landed on your head.
roywiggins 3y ago
In the 60s the US contemplated nuking China in response to a Soviet strike on the US: "In 2012, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) declassified an important document on the pre-delegation instructions approved by President Lyndon Johnson in early 1964. Under the instructions, if the Soviet Union or China launched a nuclear attack on the United States that knocked the president or his successor out of action, making communication impossible, U.S. commanders-in-chief of unified or specified commands (such as Strategic Air Command or European Command) had the authority to retaliate against the entire Sino-Soviet bloc, even if some Soviet allies or China had not launched an attack." https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2018-08-15/us-nuclear-war-plan-option-sought-destruction-china-soviet-union-viable-societies https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2018-0...
The_Colonel 3y ago
Apparently Vienna was an early Soviet target: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/1364037/Vienna-was-top-of-Soviet-nuclear-targets-list.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/13... But I don't think it was about the post-nuclear-war hegemony, it was more immediate. There was always the risk that e.g. Swedish airfields could be used by USA (with or without Swedish approval) to bomb e.g. St. Petersburg.

ivan_gammel 3y ago

It is interesting to see that in Southern Urals the major nuclear manufacturing sites Chelyabinsk-40 and Zlatoust-20 (as they were named in 1956) are not targets and would not be affected, but their civilian doppelgängers would be hit. The secrecy of the Soviet nuclear program was probably quite good.

LgWoodenBadger 3y ago
You’re only looking at the declassified sites though
asdff 3y ago
It was probably so much easier (and still is) to integrate as a spy in the U.S. than the other way around.
- takinola 3y ago
  My understanding is spies are mostly compromised nationals as opposed to foreigners trying to blend in.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    Yes, but you still need local handlers for them, and they would be “foreigners trying to blend in”
    - takinola 3y ago
      Handlers don't need to blend it nearly as much. They just need a plausible reason to be in the vicinity of their assets. A lot of diplomatic staff are spy handlers. Also, businessmen, military attaches, etc. Every country has some contact with foreigners. Any of those foreigners can be handlers.
- ivan_gammel 3y ago
  Dragon Ladies flew over Soviet Union from 1955 until 1960, when Powers was shot down near Sverdlovsk, i.e. a bit farther to the north from interesting locations. Those spy planes could make a photo of the sites.

jgilias 3y ago

This is pretty fascinating when living in an ex-USSR country. There’s a target between two major cities in the forest at a non-descript village. I know what’s there though. In the Soviet times there used to be a large facility hosting hundreds of tanks. At the same time, I know of a place that used to be a rocket launch base. There were around 10 across my country alone. I don’t see any of those being targeted.

cornholio 3y ago
It seems the non-USSR eastern Europe would have been completely reduced to nuclear ash, unlike most of the USSR, which is much less covered due to its size and sparse population. In my city alone there were three targets.
- jgilias 3y ago
  But that’s not really surprising. There’s a lot of targets in the Baltics. But the reason is that the Soviets put a lot of military objects there because it’s just closer to the potential frontline, as well as targets further west. I’m just happy we got out of that nightmare. If for some reason we were still part of Russia, chances are I’d be sent off to kill Ukrainians right as we speak. Given that people from ethnic minorities are 200x more likely to be drafted than Russians from Moscow or St Petersburg.
  - ativzzz 3y ago
    > If for some reason we were still part of Russia, chances are I’d be sent off to kill Ukrainians right as we speak To be fair, if you were still part of the USSR then so would Ukraine, and you wouldn't be fighting a war due to MAD with the US (maybe a proxy war in Myanmar or something), you'd most likely die of alcoholism or heart disease
- scotty79 3y ago
  I'd be dead. Along with quarter of million people in my city. Just because there's a very small civilian airport with one runway that serves about 12 planes per day, on the outskirts. Screw the coldwar US.

xg15 3y ago

A bit sobering that there is a target right in the center of Berlin with several other targets in close vicinity - a mere 7 years after the Berlin Airlift. I guess the US compassion for Berliners did have limits after all.

hnu234 3y ago
> I guess the US compassion for Berliners did have limits after all. I think the indiscriminate firebombing and targeting of german civilians in ww2 showed there is no such thing as 'US compassion'. It was calculated propaganda.
ivan_gammel 3y ago
That would include US citizen too. They probably just realistically looked at the survival chances of West Berlin in case of full scale war. Soviets were confident that with conventional warfare they would reach the Channel in mere weeks, nuclear was really the only deterrent.
wolverine876 3y ago
The war was going to be there. Should NATO not attack invading Soviet forces? Then they'd be in a safe zone all the way to the Atlantic.

The_Colonel 3y ago

An interesting choice of (non)targets. Bratislava, the second-largest city of Czechoslovakia (and capital of Slovakia) would have been spared. I get that the military targets got priority, but I would have expected that large population centers would get hit as overall strategic targets too. Another thing I noticed is how many targets there are in the Baltics given the small population. It has like triple the amount of targets in comparison to Czechoslovakia even though it has/had only about half of the population. I don't know how to explain that, it's not like Czechoslovakia had less strategic position or smaller weapon industry.

treprinum 3y ago
It's likely due to being close to Vienna that would take an indirect hit in that case. Also, it seems to be covered in the follow up fallout so it would be severely damaged anyway.
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  "Likely" based on what? I'm not sure how much consideration NATO gave to neutral countries. Vienna is about 50 kilometers from Bratislava, it shouldn't receive that much damage. Compare that with West Berlin (a NATO city) which is getting 5 nukes all around its borders, not farther than 10 kilometers. (with some more nukes in a slightly larger distance, but still less than 50)
- klohto 3y ago
  If that was the case, they would not target Brno.

runlevel1 3y ago

To my knowledge, no Russian targeting plans have ever been declassified, but an open source project called OPEN-RISOP[^1] has a few hypothetical attack plans that give some idea of what would be targeted. Its creator, David Teter, is a former advisor to USSTRATCOM, DIA, and DTRA on strategic plans (SIOP/OPLANs 8044/8010), kinetic and non-kinetic weapon effects, vulnerability analysis, and targeting. It's raw data, so to get a visualization you need to use something like Nuclear War Simulator[^2]†. Here's a video showing one such plan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF0mEOCK2KE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF0mEOCK2KE [^1]: https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP https://github.com/davidteter/OPEN-RISOP [^2]: https://nuclearwarsimulator.com https://nuclearwarsimulator.com † NWS is on Steam, but don't go into it expecting a game-like experience. It's more of a rather technical "what-if" simulator.

pi-e-sigma 3y ago
There exist at least one declassified plan of the Warsaw Pact showing all the targets the Soviets would strike with nuclear weapons but also showing expected nuclear strikes by NATO forces. It also shows extensive use of chemical weapons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_to_the_River_Rhine A very detailed map was declassified, unfortunately it's not included in the wiki article. But you can google it
treprinum 3y ago
There was some documentary about a Ukrainian silo with dampened launchers and they mentioned they targeted China among others.

hasoleju 3y ago

The number of targets in an area resemble the population density of that area. It feels very strange to see the targets in the former GDR. A lot of them close to Berlin. Part of that city was not part of the USSR, but would still be affected heavily by the attacks of the targets nearby.

sneed_chucker 3y ago

> Even though today’s nuclear targets list is classified, it probably doesn’t look dramatically different. Uh I'm pretty sure it does look dramatically different in Europe at least because a huge proportion of the targeted Warsaw pact and Soviet Socialist Republic countries in 1956 are now part of NATO. Seems like a very ignorant statement to make.

Tommstein 3y ago
Reminds me of seeing Putin bragging a few months ago about how Russia has more nukes than the US/NATO/whatever. Well yes, you better hope so, because if shit hits the fan, you have to take on basically the entire free world by yourself, whereas the entire free world is aiming everything they've got at just you.

gattr 3y ago

On a related note: Cold War-era Polish military maps of the British Isles, in case of a Warsaw Pact invasion thereof: https://earthlymission.com/map-of-britain-teach-invading-polish-pronounce-english-place-names/ https://earthlymission.com/map-of-britain-teach-invading-pol... > This Cold War era map was created to teach Polish troops how to pronounce English place names in the event of an invasion against Britain (click to enlarge). Towns and cities in Essex and Kent are spelled out phonetically – resulting in interesting transformations such as Southend-On-Sea into Saufend-On-Sji.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

"Level 7" by Mordecai Roshwald, is a sobering take on this whole nuclear dick wrangling debacle.

maxglute 3y ago

Rarely mentioned context whenever this declassification make the rounds: this was pre MAD. Before reliable ICBMs or triad. In 50s, Only US had large bomber based atomic stockpile. Hence planners could go wild and seriously concievable nuke all communist assets and expect minimal retaliatory losses, including non nuclear states at the time like PRC for shits and giggles.