I’m trying to write a short story about a nuclear war and I’m doing a wee bit of background research. Is there somewhere I can find a global map of potential targets. I’ve found one that identifies possible targets in the US but not internationally.
First off, I don’t think you’ll find any sort of official list, since that would classified.
Back in college, around 1991, I took a sociology class on nuclear war, and as part of our end of class project, I wound up in charge of coming up with a targeting list (actually a list of what US cities got hit), based on the rough number of warheads the USSR possessed at the time.
There were two lists: counterforce and countervalue (and I just checked Wiki, which echoes that). I started with the counterforce and went through every major Air Force Base, Naval Base, every military compound I could find that wasn’t already in the vicinity of another target, and still had tons of warheads left over. So I moved on to the large cities, over 100k, for the countervalue. Still had lots left over. Proceeded on to the smaller cities and finally ran out. The large map I had made of the US was completely riddled with the little round stickers I had.
I’d suppose in this day and age, with less nukes out there, the lists for both Russia and the US would be narrowed, but I’d think they’d still both contain military and civilian targets.
The funny part of the targeting process was that I was assuming the nuclear attack was in response to our setting up an SDI net, which had an impressive success rate–around 80%, IIRC. The remaining 20% is what I was working with for my list.
There’s a FEMA map from 1990 that I found and it shows how much devastation there would be in the USA but I was looking for targets specifically in Western Europe. I suppose the specifics wouldn’t matter. I’m curious whether the Soviets planned to nuke every country in Western Europe or only NATO ones in the event of a general nuclear conflict.
I really can’t see the logic in nuking all of NATO, especially since all that fallout is going to start drifting eastward toward them. I’d guess if there was that large of a threat from a European NATO country, they’d surgically strike it. I mean, you really have to let your mind drift away from reality when you start thinking of scenarios where Russia would bypass conventional weapons and go nuke, or have an escalating conventional conflict with such a country, with non-US intervention, which results in nukes… I’m not sure what exactly constitutes a “general nuclear conflict” when it comes to NATO countries.
Anyway, simply start picking military bases, both native and American-shared (depending upon how fast you think the Russians want to draw us into the fray), and that’s a good start. Then you have power plants, industry and other softer targets. You’d have to figure out where those things are.
At the point of a general nuclear exchange in Europe, the Soviet Union wouldn’t have been nearly as worried about fallout from their weapons landing in Western Europe as American, British, and possibly French weapons directly striking Mother Russia, the Ukraine and the inner members of the Warsaw Pact, especially the intermediate range Persing II, the BGM-109G Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM or “Glick-'Em!”), and the AGM-86 ALCM. Of course, odds are good that a general regional nuclear exchange between NATO and the East Bloc (or even a use of tactical battlefield weapons) would have lead to a general ICBM/SLBM exchange that would have been devastating to all parties in the Northern Hemisphere. A nuclear “surgical strike” is a misnomer; nuclear weapons are so destructive and incapable of defense that even a casual analysis game shows that it is to the defending player’s advantage to respond with equivalent or superior force, especially if one’s own assets are threatened, i.e. “use 'em or lose 'em”.
Be aware that while US nuclear assets were deployed in a number of countries in Southern and Western Europe (and the British had Polaris A-3 subs doing deterrence patrols in launch distance of most of the Warsaw Pact), no other member of NATO had any measure of control over nuclear weapons. A strike on, say, U.S. nuclear emplacements in West Germany would be effectively considered a strike on the US. The French maintenance of their Force de frappe made them nominally militarily independent of NATO, but in a general conflict I believe that Soviets would have targeted them preemptively to eliminate a post-conflict dominance of Europe by France. (The Russians have very long memories when it comes to invasion, and they’ve been at odds with France on a number of occasions.) I’m morally certain that given an exchange the Soviets would have leveled every military installation, communications center, transportation hub, and industrial zone in Europe to create a buffer zone between them and any potential invaders. Given Russian institutional paranoia I kind of suspect they might have even had weapons pointed at some nominally aligned client states like East Germany, Poland, and Hungary, and almost certainly at Communist but unaligned Albania and Yugoslavia.
As for the likelihood of a conventional war going nuclear, that’s hard to estimate. The problem with a nuclear exchange is that from any rational standpoint it is a lose-lose proposition; even a limited exchange as detailed by Herman Kahn in On Thermonuclear War and Thinking About The Unthinkable these costs are tremendous and the payoff is essentially bragging rights, (“Yeah, it looks bad, but you shouda seen the other guy!”). So rational parties won’t engage in nuclear war; just nuclear posturing. But then, if you know that the other guy isn’t going to use weapons (unless you do) what’s the point? They’re no longer intimidating, as you can get away with practically anything short of murder. The analysis then becomes a degenerate cycle from there.
The problem with relying on that sort of analysis is that players are not always rational, either because they lack perspective, or because they lack good information. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, the United States lacked the perspective of the Soviets, i.e. that Khrushchev was just looking for a way to placate the military and get US Jupiter missiles out of Southern Europe. Had we understood that, it would have been a trivial exercise to negotiate a staged withdrawal that would have benefited both sides and been in no way a strategic loss for the United States, since these missiles were due to be withdrawn once the Atlas and Titan ICBMs were deployed, anyway. Instead, we have a massive faceoff that would have resulted in devastating losses to the USSR and the US and the annihilation of Cuba, averted almost entirely because of the recommendation of a minor cabinet secretary encouraging Kennedy to empathize with Khrushchev. The reverse happened during the Able Archer '83 NATO exercise, where the Soviets took a lack of information about a conspiracy to launch an attack on the East Bloc to be evidence of said hypothetical conspiracy, and went on high alert to defend against a simulation exercise that was never intended to threaten the USSR.
Today, officially nobody is pointing weapons at anybody. However, you can bet good money that integrated operational plans are being maintained and revised, and targeting data is at hand ready to be loaded into missile navigation systems literally at a moment’s notice. The number of weapons is fewer but the effectiveness, reliability, and accuracy of the extant weapons is as good as it has ever been.
As for the specifics of the o.p.‘s request, I don’t know, but I’d start looking at Janes’ Information Group and Soviet open archives (here are some USSR military and tactical maps).
Stranger
I remember an article in Scientific American in the late '80s - early '90s which had a map of the presumed targets in the USSR and their fallout plumes.
Thanks for your reply Stranger. The vague premise of the story is that it is set around Able Archer 83 but that the Soviets actually launched a strike. I’m curious whether there would have been anywhere in Western Europe where people would have been safe in a large scale conflict. Would every major city in Ireland have been nuked? The Shetlands? Iceland? etc.
Primary targets in West Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy would have been hit (i.e. all the staging areas for GLCM and Pershing II) as well as transportation centers. I think NATO military installations in Iceland and Greenland (i.e. those supporting the USN 2nd Fleet and the Royal Navy, and the air forces of both nations) would likely have been targets, though the nations. It’s quite possible that Norway, Sweden, and Finland might have been targeted for preemptive strikes. I don’t think Ireland, being neutral and having only a nominal defense force and no strategic assets, would have been a primary or secondary target; only Shannon would be a staging point for NATO forces, and I think the benefit to having a neutral, unattacked party to act as an intermediary would have been seen by the Soviets. For the same reason, I think they would have left Switzerland alone. They may or may not strike Austria or other small nations; I think the major thrust of a conventional war with limited tactical exchange would be through Poland, Germany, and Belgium.
There’s no guarantee that a single, limited strike would have expanded into a larger exchange–cooler heads may have prevailed, especially if the Soviets could claim it was unauthorized, or that the leader who commanded it had been deposed–but that would be a tricky strategy to rely upon. Safe is a relative term; there might be areas that are relatively uncontaminated (especially up in the Alpine countries where prevailing winds take fallout to the south) depending on the level of exchange, but nobody is going to be not dramatically affected.
Stranger
No expert, but rememmber that a nuclear strike is still planned as a military operation - there is always a rationale behind the targetting. I can see no reason why the Soviet Union in 1983 would have wasted missiles and warheads on the bulk of European cities, and certainly not cities in the Republic. What would be the point?
ETA What Stranger said!
You may find this webpage interesting. Slight warning though: it leans toward the “crackpot nuclear survivalist” bent. I didn’t see any nuke maps for Russia through there tho. . .
Tripler
Crackpot nuclear survivalist.
Yeah I found that one already. It’s great but I would love similar maps for Europe. I love maps.
Probably the smallest city that was (supposedly) on the Soviet target list was Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. That was on the second level list of national assets, after the purely military/government targets.
It was more accurately the Seymour Cray warhead, rather than the Chippewa Falls one.
Cray later relocated his lab to Colorado Springs, CO, within driving distance of the NORAD headquarters under Cheyenne Mountain.
On the Google Earth Map of the Netherlands, things like army bases, royal palaces, etc are marked over with white-out. This is done so terrorists can’t see the lay-out in detail. But IMHO, the’ve provided any would be terrorists with a map of anything worth bombing.
Apart from direct nuclear attacks I believe that the Warsaw pact also had indirect attacks planned as in exploding nuclear depth mines off shore to innundate naval bases and strategic cities such as London and Southampton that were on the coast with artifical(and radioactive) Tsunamis .
I can give you no cite for this.
I’d loan you mine, but I’m fixing to use it.