What You Should Know About That Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Hit List
Lily Rothman @lilyrothman
12:43 PM ET
Recently declassified documents shed light on top-secret Cold War plans
The recently declassified top-secret U.S. military document that was
published on Tuesday by the National Security Archive at the George
Washington University is shocking for a number of reasons.
Written in 1956, the Cold War-era report, titled the Strategic Air
Command (SAC) “Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959,” contains a
list of targets that would be priorities in the case of atomic war with
the Soviet Union and its allies.
As analyst William Burr points out in his extremely thorough
explanation of the document’s context and significance, the list of
airfields and industrial targets also included urban centers, indicating
that “
people as such, not specific industrial activities, were to be destroyed”
in the event the plan was carried out. Given today’s knowledge of the
long-term effects of atomic explosions, it’s clear that the plan so
dryly laid out by U.S. intelligence
would have resulted in death and destruction unlike anything the world had or has ever seen.
But lurking behind the frigid calculus of Cold War nuclear strategy
is a bit of context that the report’s authors might already have
suspected in 1956: by the time the plan would have been put into effect
in 1959, it would already have been pretty much obsolete.
As Burr explains, the priority targets listed in the plan are those
connected to Soviet air power, because the age of intercontinental
ballistic missiles (ICBMs) had not yet arrived. In other words, the U.S.
would use its own bombers to target Russian airfields because the only
way to drop a nuclear weapon at the time was to ferry it to its target
via plane.
Jan. 30, 1956
But even as the report was being drafted, it was public knowledge that
this technological limitation was changing. In fact, TIME devoted a
January 1956 cover story to the impending arrival of the missile on the
Cold War scene. Though official announcements remained “brief and vague”
it was known that such missiles were the “No. 1 crash program of the
U.S. armed services.”
Long-range guided missiles with nuclear capabilities weren’t a new
idea. Germany had used primitive versions of non-nuclear missiles in
World War II, and the advantage of combining missiles with atomic power
was obvious after 1945. It had taken a decade, however, for computer and
rocket technology to get to the point where such missiles were a
near-term possibility. Another necessary development was the shrinking
of nuclear weaponry. At a lighter weight, atomic bombs could be carried
by lighter missiles propelled to higher speeds by lighter motors. That
breakthrough “changed all the equations of scientific war,” TIME noted,
“and it forced on the Department of Defense a grave decision: to
concentrate intensively on the ICBM.”
So why was the Strategic Air Command spending its time coming up with
a plan for a 1959 attack that assumed a world without ICBMs? As TIME
explained, the military was simply covering all its bases:
Will the ICBMs work, and when will they be ready? Most missile
experts seem to believe that the task of developing them is not
impossible, but that the timetable is uncertain. It may be five or even
ten years, say the pessimists. Meanwhile, the U.S. must keep itself able
to ward off more conventional attacks on its territory, and also be
able to retaliate if an attack comes. Even high Air Force officers who
have most faith in the ICBM feel that the U.S. must push conventional
programs, both offensive and defensive, almost as if the ICBM were
impossible.
General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command, is emphatic
on this point. He is not against missiles, though sometimes quoted as
being so, but he feels that in air warfare it is always necessary to
keep one’s eye on the ball, not on the distant future. “We must put more
time and money,” he says, “into the development of these birds.
Missiles are another step in the evolution of war. We will use them as
we get them, and we will get them when they are effective and reliable.”
LeMay’s mission is to be ready for instant, effective action. He wants a
continuous supply of weapons that will make such action possible,
including lesser missiles than the ICBM.
The development of ICBMs was
especially important, not just because it would change the priorities
for an imaginary nuclear war but also because it removed an attacker’s
advantage. As TIME put it in July of 1956, the year the
now-declassified plan was written, the “fear of atomic war stems from
the fact that the aggressor still has an outside chance to profit from
attack. The ICBM will end all hope for such aggression, however
devastating, without sure and deadly retaliation.”
With the advent of assured second-strike capability, the entire
nuclear military calculus would change, rendering all non-ICBM plans for
future strategy—like the document just released—fairly useless.
By April 1957, TIME devoted another cover story to the topic of
missiles. Much had changed in the intervening year. “In the Convair
plant at San Diego one day last December,” the story began, “a
mysterious piece of hardware was carefully cantilevered down from a
vertical position inside a closely guarded seven-story shed. Draped in a
white canvas shroud, lashed to a yellow, tubular steel trailer, the
top-secret cargo was hauled out onto U.S. Highway 80 to begin a
2,500-mile trip across the southern U.S. … Under the shroud was Atlas,
the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile.”
By 1959, Atlas missiles were ready to use. The age of the nuclear bomber was over, and the age of the ICBM had begun.
