Rene — U.S. planned use of 3,200 nukes in case of all-out war with
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.c Kyodo News Service
WASHINGTON, July 13 (Kyodo) – The United States planned in the 1960s
to use more than 3,200 nuclear weapons in preemptive strikes against
the Soviet Union, China and their allies in the event of an all-out
nuclear war, according to declassified U.S. documents made available
to Kyodo News on Monday.
The U.S. nuclear war plan, known as the Single Integrated Operational
Plan, consisted of ”retaliatory” and ”preemptive” options, and
preemption could occur if U.S. authorities had strategic warning of a
Soviet attack, the documents say.
As part of the preemptive options, the plan called for using more than
3,200 nuclear weapons to attack about 1,000 targets in the Soviet
Union, China and countries allied with them in Europe and Asia, they
say.
In retaliation to a Soviet attack, the United States planned to use
more than 1,700 nuclear weapons against a total of over 700 targets in
the Soviet Union, China and their allies, the documents say.
Nuclear weapons, government and military control centers, and at least
130 cities in the countries were targets for retaliatory attack,
according to the documents.
The Washington-based National Security Archive obtained the documents
and made them available to Kyodo News before making them public.
The U.S. nuclear war plan was drawn up mainly by the Strategic Air
Command, and the Army and Navy were concerned about the plan.
According to one of the declassified documents, Chief of Naval
Operations Arleigh Burke said in a memorandum to the Joint Chiefs of
Staff in 1960 that the plan’s damage assessment was based only on
blast damage and failed to take thermal and radiation effects into
account.
The Marine Corps was also concerned that the nuclear war plan provided
for the ”attack of a single list of Sino-Soviet countries” and made
no distinction between communist countries at war with the United
States and those not at war with it.
William Burr, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, said
a superpower nuclear conflict would have produced a ”global
cataclysm” by triggering an all-out attack involving thousands of
nuclear weapons.
”The SIOP and the corresponding Soviet war plan would have meant
death for hundreds of millions,” Burr said. ”No wonder President
(Dwight) Eisenhower was alarmed when he received an early briefing on
the SIOP.”
When Eisenhower received his first report on the nuclear war plan, he
commented that the large number of targets, the superfluous targeting
and the huge overkill ”frightened the devil out of me,” according to
the documents.