Wonklife

3 notes

For another (and this is an astonishing thing), for the first decade of the nuclear age, the people in charge—from the White House to the Pentagon to the Strategic Air Command on down—had no interest in limiting the damage. As late as 1960, this was the official U.S. war plan: If the Soviets launched an attack on Western Europe or some other part of the Free World, even if they did so only with conventional armies, even if they didn’t fire a single atomic weapon, the United States was to unleash its entire arsenal of nuclear weapons against every target—civilian and military—in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. This amounted to 3,423 nuclear bombs and warheads, totaling 7,847 megatons (or 7.8 billion tons) of explosive power, against 654 targets (a mix of military bases and urban-industrial factories), killing an estimated 285 million people and injuring 40 million more in the Soviet Union alone.