U.s. nuclear targets during the cold war

This is the first time that Washington reveals a possible nuclear war targets.

The document of ' Strategic Air Command ', with about of 800 pages, is based on the premise that the first attack could decide the fate of a possible war and therefore would have to be massive.

As at the time the missiles launched from land or sea were still in the early days of its evolution, many of the identified targets are military bases where the Soviet Union could launch attacks against the United States or NATO countries.

Indifferent to the collateral damage that a nuclear bomb could cause to the civilian population, many targets to drop a nuclear bomb are in large cities.

In the list of more than 1200 cities, Moscow (179 potential targets) and Leningrad (145 targets) are naturally the two priority objectives, but there is also room for metropolises like Beijing, East Berlin or Warsaw. The military objective was the "systematic destruction" of the industrial infrastructure. In violation of international conventions, the populations were also identified as targets.

The nuclear bombs to be used in the main targets were substantially more powerful than those dropped on Japan and is even applied for the creation of a 60-megaton bomb, 4200 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

In 1959, the United States had about 12000 of nuclear weapons. Two years later they were almost double: 22229.

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