Mapping the US nuclear war plan for 1956 | Hacker News Reader

Mapping the US nuclear war plan for 1956

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

96 pointscaf45 comments

I 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.

The 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.

This is based on true story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Along with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov two of the people who did the most to not eliminate mankind.

I 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...

An "if things had gone slightly differently" version at one of the alternate history forums: http://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-cuban-miss... -> world annhiliation

Thanks, that was entertaining (I guess that's the right word?)

A decent novel set in a post Cuban war world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_Day

This comic has a pretty plausible explanation: http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3994

I 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.

Further, 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).

I wish I could upvote this comment more. The nuclear OOB really, really favors the US for about a decade after this.

My 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

There was definitely some of that. Kennedy using the "missile gap" as part of his campaign is a classic example. But I think a lot of it was legitimate misunderstanding too. This was before the age of satellites, so information was hard to come by, especially with the USSR being such a big place, and with the Soviets trying to make their forces look bigger than they were. For example, they'd fly the same airplanes past a crowd multiple times, to make it look like they had more than they did.

I imagine there was also a great desire to err on the side of caution. If they underestimated Soviet strength, they'd be risking the survival of the nation. If they overestimated Soviet strength, they'd just be in a great position if war broke out.

Modern humans are more culture than meat. Even a small nuclear war would be enough to extinguish human culture.

Considering it's taken more than 300,000 years to grow this one, there's no guarantee anything equivalent would appear again.

As long as we have access to high yield plants the climb would be a lot faster than you might think. Toss in just Highschool level math and germ theory could let us rebuild from a small surviving population (say 1 million) in under 1,000 years.

That cartoon is an unholy mishmash of all things anthropic and teleological.

"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.

There 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.

Every 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.

I'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 :)

Let'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).

There 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/

[2]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09...

[3]: http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Plutonium%20Mounta...

[4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4hh0h7/does_mod...

edit: formatting, one more link

There are many more documented efforts: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280486/

>I'm surprised that out of 50-60K USSR warheads no warhead got lost/stolen/sold during 199x.

Well, do we really know?

You should read "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy" by David Hoffman.

They basically had enriched uranium just hanging around in a drafty warehouse that had a simple padlock on the door, with an underpaid guard to keep an eye on things.

> Altogether, the team discovered 1,032 containers in the warehouse, and each had to be methodically unpacked, examined and repacked for transport into quart-sized cans that were then inserted into 448 shipping containers—55-gallon drums with foam inserts—for the flight. Laborious checking was necessary, each can compared with the Ulba handwritten logs. In the end, the Americans discovered several canisters lying in the warehouse without dog tags. Some of the uranium had to be heated in special ovens to remove water to facilitate the repacking.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002PXFYPQ

Some 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%...

The 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."

If 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. :|

First 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_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_retaliation

Reminded me of this Chris Burden installation I once saw:

http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhbur79.html

> 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).

I'm not sure how to reply to that.

Without deconstructing this too far, I would say that the Korean War began with North Korea invading South Korea. A U.N. resolution followed which authorized the use of force to respond.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War

My best understanding is how I described it.

I'm surprised anything I said was controversial.

The Korean War was the outcome of previous events -- it cannot be seen in isolation. How do you suppose the Koreans, as a people, saw the division of Korea imposed by both the US and the Soviet Union on them? What was the charismatic leader in the South that would have unified all of Korea in general elections? Say free elections were held -- true, non fraudulent elections -- and a communist government won... what do you suppose the US would have done?

What about this, from the same Wikipedia article you linked to?

> Appointed as military governor, General Hodge directly controlled South Korea as head of the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK 1945–48) [...] The USAMGIK refused to recognize the provisional government of the short-lived People's Republic of Korea (PRK) because it suspected it was communist.

The US and Western powers were totally unwilling to let Korea fall to communist hands, whether it was by force or otherwise, and were willing to use force to prevent it. What I'm saying is hardly controversial and was the US foreign policy for much of the Cold War.

For 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.

Funny how oil wasn't important not too long ago

Oil was still quite important. One random example:

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.

And many critical parts of the German military ran on synthetic fuel derived from coal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel#History

Oil 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-...

https://youtu.be/GIpm_8v80hw

Why destroy something one could use later?

When starting nuclear war you aren't expecting to use many things later.

Apparently this particular list covers all the targeted military airfields but only some of the industrial and government targets.

I 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.

What was the format of the dataset?

Did they have exact latitudes and longitudes, or just names of the places?

According to the screenshot, they are coordinate pairs.

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