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The launch of Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bombs It was a turning point. Practically, marked the end of the Second World War while starting a Cold war in which the United States and Russia were carried away by nuclear ecstasy. The two powers engaged in a nuclear career without controlbut it is not that they developed the crazy bombs: there were also lists of enemy objectives.
And on an interactive map prepared by Future of Life We can see about 1,000 objectives to which the United States would launch a nuclear bomb. But there were many more.
The map. In 2015, a study of the United States Strategic Air Command was declared – SAC – that showed a thousand potential objectives in the case of nuclear war. If this possibility flew over the heads of some with the recent Ukraine War, imagine the stage in a cold war in which you could have the feeling that the enemy could squeeze the “button” at any time.
There are more than 800 pages in which the objectives of these strategic bombings with nuclear weapons are detailed to erase any enemy presence. In it map From the George Washington University we can not only appreciate some of the main objectives, but the secondary objectives of each of them.
For example, if we select Berlin, we can see the objective list And consequences of that study of 1956. Beyond the cities, another priority was the aerodromes, keys to a Soviet counterattack, specifically those located in Belarus.
Easting east. Apart from military objectives such as strategic points and aerodromes, the listIt includes more than 1,200 cities of the Soviet block. It is where we can see that more dots are gathered on the map of Future of Life and range from cities of Eastern Germany to China. Moscow would fall into the Red Square, directly (and on this map we can see the Impact of different bombs in any city).
The Asian giant, will fight or not next to the Soviet block in case of war, was something that did not matter to SAC. He treated them as hostile, selecting military objectives, but also the Beijing capital. And something that several of the bombed cities have in common is that the SAC already assumed objectives of “population.”
The bombs. The plan was well mounted because there was not only a list of objectives, but also the type of weapons that would be used. They would use a combination of atomic and thermonuclear weapons with yields between 1.6 to 15 megatons. Far from the 50 megatons of the Soviet Zar pump, but much more than the 16 kilotons of Little Boy and the 21 kilotons of Fat Man, which wreaked havoc in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively.
The megabomba. We have talked about the tsar pump, or tsar bomb, and in the United States there was also talk of it in 1956. It is not only the bomb that has caused the largest nuclear explosion so far, but it was 3,000 times more powerful than ‘Little boy’.
The Russians had that bomb and the United States wanted an equal. In the declassified material, it is detailed how the SAC wanted a 60 megatones bomb. Not only did they identify him as something key in order to be tremendously deterrent but, in case of Soviet surprise attack, they could launch it at a strategic point to “ensure significant results even with a very small force.”
In that nuclear ecstasy, the nuclear physicist Edward Teller (“Father” of the bomb H) proposed 1,000 metatones dissositive and up to 10 gigatons. 10 gigatons equals explosive power 670,000 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb. Luckily they did not do it, since affirmed that “would contaminate the earth”In the end, the US did not develop such a monstrous bomb. Nor the 60 megatones that the SAC wanted.
And the media. And, within the plan, it also specified how the pumps would be launched. There were two systems: for the delivery of B-47 bombers, the United States would use its bases in the United Kingdom, Morocco and Spain. They would also use the B-52 from the US, although they were starting their journey.
For the missile system, the eyelets would be loaded in the Snark, Rascal, Cross Bow and IRBM missiles. The first was a failure in the evidence and the great priority of President Eisenhower were the IRBM. These intermediate -reach ballistic missiles projected scope of up to 2,700 kilometers and the idea was to deploy them and throw them from the United Kingdom.
Insured mutual destruction. But well, the United States had its Soviet axis attack plan, but the USSR also had its own. In the Soviet plans the Western military infrastructure, the industrial centers and large cities in both the US and its allies entered. They would do it by hydrogen pumps, tactical pumps that could mount on torpedoes and missiles released from mobile platforms.
But although the logic could not reign in the massive development of weapons, the fear and that position of both ‘Mad’ countries did, or ‘insured mutual destruction’ that marked that, if a country launched a nuclear attack, automatically the other would respond with a proportional force. This led to threats over the years (such as the deployment of American missiles in Türkiye and Italy or the subsequent crisis of Cuba missiles, but fortunately it did not reach more.
And what happens today. In 1986, the two countries reached the zenith of their nuclear arsenal and, from that moment, they dismantled much of their arsenal. The USSR came to have more than 40,000 heads while the United States reached 23,317, but as we say, different pacts and that tension that dissipated with the fall of the Berlin wall caused them to get rid of much of its arsenal.
The problem is that other countries -china- have developed and are found enhancing its own nuclear arsenaland in recent years there is a kind of new nuclear career. One of the treaties is the START III that limits the number of strategic weapons that each nation can deploy, something that Russia is It came out Just after the invasion of Ukraine, and that treaty will expire in 2026 and we will have to see if something similar is signed.
Meanwhile, The one who asks for head To the nations with nuclear arsenal is … China.
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