The National Security Archive on Wednesday for the first time
declassified a list of potential Cold War nuclear targets, and the
picture is chilling.
Among the industrial infrastructure and military sites that analysts
concluded would achieve "high levels of damage" for the Soviet Union is
one particularly troubling type of target: "population."
"It’s disturbing, for sure, to see the population centers targeted,"
William Burr, a nuclear historian and senior analyst at the National
Security Archive, told the New York Times.
The SAC [Strategic Air Command] Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959 is
broken into two lists: "Air Power," referring to airfields and other
military sites, and "Systematic Destruction," which referred to targets
in urban-industrial areas including "population" targets. The study
lists 1,200 cities total, from East Germany to China, with established
priorities.
While it was not a final list for military targets, the SAC file
shows that analysts "developed a plan for the 'systematic destruction'
of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly
targeted 'population' in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow,
Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw," the archive notes.
In an essay that accompanied the SAC study, Burr writes, "In other
words, people as such, not specific industrial activities, were to be
destroyed." [...]
