Personally I've always been curious what the U.S.'s plan was for China in the event of a general nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Were they going to give them a pass and wait for them to make a move before hitting them or take them out along with the Soviets regardless of whether they provided any sort of Casus belli?
Of course the New York Times is NOT to be trusted... they write for liberal elites only.
“Counter-Value” versus “Counter-Force” targeting strategy.
As our weapons became more accurate, we moved away from counter-value (population) to counter-force (military and command and control).
The Soviets and China never were all that accurate with their nuclear delivery systems so they never really moved beyond counter-value.
IMO this sort of information should not be released into the public.
War is hell, and you do things you have to do. It shouldn’t be coffee table or water cooler talk subject matter.
The New York Times had no filter mechanism. This isn’t released to improve anything. It’s a precursor to trashing ‘our detestable’ actions during the cold war.
Hey, we won it NYT. Get over it!
I’m more curious about Russian and Chinese plans for US targets.
Can we have a new year’s resolution to stop writing the word “chilling” in every other headline?
The point of preparing to fight it was so that we’d never have to. Leftists, Soviet sympathizers, never understood that simple strategy.
I’m sure the Soviets target list was full of grain silos and swampland.
Do the Fellow Travellers at the Slimes think for a second that the Soviets didn’t have a similar map of the United States? With New York as a high-priority first-wave target?
All of the targets in europe, africa, and asia know who they are.
If the US decided to launch an all out nuclear assault, it would mean that we are in a no win situation, and would be reduced to a scorched earth policy.
Think about this. We could literally return the world to the stone age in thirty minutes or less.
“[Strangelove’s plan for post-nuclear war survival involves living underground with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio]
General “Buck” Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
Now is the time for every good man to come to the aid of their country.
The NYT barely mentions one of the main reasons behind the targeting choices: in 1959, our ICBM force was in its infancy, and it lacked the accuracy to effectively target the Russian missile force, which was also very small in size and capabilities.
In other words, much of our nuclear deterrence in that era rested with USAF strategic bombers (B-52s and B-47s) dropping gravity weapons. As with our ICBMs, accuracy was less-than-optimum, so a lot of our targets were in major population centers. Not surprisingly, the Russian target list looked a lot like our own, and the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction was born.
As the ICBM and SLBM forces matured and their accuracy improved, targeting shifted to missile silos, bases and other military targets. The number of weapons also decreased, along with their yield. One of our early ICBMs, the liquid-fueled Titan II, carried a 10-megaton warhead. The Minuteman III warhead has a yield of roughly 330kt, but it is far more accurate. The latest version of the Trident SLBM has a one-megaton warhead and is just as accurate as land-based weapons. The slightly larger warhead is more effective in targeting rail and road-based ICBMs, like those currently deployed by Russia and China.
As for your question: our options for China ran the spectrum. The riff between Beijing and Moscow had opened, and we didn’t want to do anything to close it. Additionally, China did not have nukes in the late 1950s, just a vast, conventional Army, so they posed no real threat to the U.S., except in places like Korea. Beijing would have probably been content to sit out the conflict, and try to dominate a post-nuclear world.
A nuclear exchange would be a good thing. Nuclear Winter would cancel out Global Warming. Somebody should mention this to the climate technicians in Paris. Get the yields right, and we can achieve a constant 75 degrees with a short rain shower every evening.
I believe that somehow we obtained the Rooskies target list at one time, and I noticed that I lived within the fireball of a one megaton targeted airburst in the 50’s and 60’s. It’s a good thing that we didn’t bother building fallout shelters - it would have been a waste of time and money!