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Did the US Plan a Nuclear First Strike Against Russia in the Early 1960s?

87 pointsby yurisagalovalmost 9 years ago

14 comments

ufmaceover 8 years ago
I sure hope we did. &quot;Plan&quot; in the context of national militaries has a very different meaning from making a &quot;plan&quot; with your buddies. Any national military planners wouldn&#x27;t be doing their job if they didn&#x27;t have a plan for attacking any country they could conceivably reach. It&#x27;s their job to have plans available and ready for the political leaders, and it&#x27;s those leaders&#x27; jobs to decide which plans to actually execute and when.<p>Consider: If you&#x27;re, say, the Secretary of Defense, at any meeting, the President might tell you &quot;Country X just went nuts! We have to deal with this now! What can we do?&quot;. You don&#x27;t wanna tell the President &quot;Umm, I dunno, let us look into it&quot;. You wanna be able to say something more like &quot;We could go with a nuclear strike, using units A, B, and C. Expected casualties in country X are Y military and Z civilian, and we estimate a possible retaliatory nuclear strike against at least 10 US cities, with casualty estimates as described. Or we could launch a conventional strike with Carrier Group D, attacking these government and infrastructure targets, optionally following up with a land invasion with these units or special forces attacks, with enemy and friendly casualty estimates.&quot;<p>Clearly, we want to have plans for every possible way of attacking every country we would be capable of attacking, all continuously updated to reflect our forces and their readiness, as well as estimated enemy forces and their readiness. We also want to be able to talk intelligently about possible force level changes. If the President wants to, say, dissolve one or more Army divisions, raise another one, buy or sell aircraft, retire nukes or build more, etc, we want to be able to describe how that would affect our ability to attack and defend against attacks from various countries.
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Jtsummersalmost 9 years ago
Military plans such as these are rarely intended to be acted upon. They&#x27;re plans from a strategic perspective. A question is posed: What if we executed a first strike? Related questions come up: When should we do it, what would be the retaliation, what would be the economic impact, etc. These get put together into a report, and it&#x27;s set aside.<p>Military plans are not statements of intent on their own.
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karma_vaccum123almost 9 years ago
At the very least, Nixon at one point decided a good tactic would be for the Soviets to believe he was unstable and was willing to embrace the idea of conflict, so as to scare them off of aggression.<p>His quote was &quot;I want them to think I am nuts&quot;.<p>During this period of his presidency, Nixon was known to become so drunk that Kissinger effectively took over many of his duties in private<p>To reinforce the idea that he was &quot;nuts&quot;, Nixon ordered at least one bomber-wing approach of Soviet airspace. I don&#x27;t recall if the planes actually carried nuclear weapons, but IIRC, it was Nixon&#x27;s intent that they should.<p>Not sure if this qualifies as a &quot;plan&quot;, but it was rehearsed.<p>A neighbor who was once was stationed in a Titan ICBM silo also recounted a story that seemed extremely scary: during the Arab&#x2F;Israeli war there was apparently a report by US intelligence of a Russian missile launch, and in his silo he claims they had their hands on the keys ready to turn (weapon was armed, fueled, they were literally waiting for the launch order)...although they were later informed to stand down when the missile was confirmed as a test. I asked him if he would have turned the key, and he said absolutely.
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hollerithover 8 years ago
&gt;the motivation [for building fallout shelters] had never made much sense to me, since in most cases the supplies would only have been sufficient to last a few weeks or so, while the deadly radioactive fallout from numerous Soviet thermonuclear strikes on our urban centers would have been long-lasting.<p>Uh, fallout <i>is</i> only deadly for a few weeks or so even after thousands of nuclear weapons are used on a country.<p>The radioactive elements produced in a nuclear explosion are very different from those produced in a nuclear power plant: the latter <i>can</i> stay deadly for years.<p>The reason fallout shelters were so popular during the Cold War is that they&#x27;re a cost effective way of avoiding a major cause of death during a nuclear war.
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mmcconnell1618almost 9 years ago
I&#x27;m pretty sure we (the United States) have plans in place for an invasion of Canada. That doesn&#x27;t mean Canada should be worried. It means our planners want to cover every scenario they can think of so that should the need arise, we have put some thought into how to handle that situation.
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bifrostalmost 9 years ago
I always imagined we had, interesting to find some details. We planned, and still do to some extent, for every eventuality.
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emeralddalmost 9 years ago
A military that does not plan to eliminate everyone else in the &quot;room&quot;, no mater who they are, is remiss in it&#x27;s duties. It doesn&#x27;t take much for a former &quot;friend&quot; to turn into a countries worst nightmare.
finidalmost 9 years ago
There were knuckleheads on both sides who thought they could get away with a first strike. During the Russian-Georgian war, the Bush administration actually toyed with the idea of striking Russia. Bush was given the option, but he declined.<p>Edit: The option was not nuclear, though.
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piyushpr134over 8 years ago
Is it even surprising ? USA is the only country in the world to have used nuclear weapons. You have already used it in first strike mode which did not even have nukes. Why is it surprising that it would not happen again ?
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gtrubetskoyover 8 years ago
It is not a secret that Von Neumann&#x27;s work on Game Theory at RAND corporation in the 50&#x27;s was precisely commissioned by the US government to answer the first strike question.<p>Here is a quote from Wikipedia: &quot;In 1950, the first mathematical discussion of the prisoner&#x27;s dilemma appeared, and an experiment was undertaken by notable mathematicians Merrill M. Flood and Melvin Dresher, as part of the RAND Corporation&#x27;s investigations into game theory. RAND pursued the studies because of possible applications to global nuclear strategy.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Game_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Game_theory</a><p>And another on RAND corp: &quot;Its most visible contribution may be the doctrine of nuclear deterrence by mutually assured destruction (MAD), developed under the guidance of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and based upon their work with game theory.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;RAND_Corporation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;RAND_Corporation</a><p>A great fun and entertaining book on the subject: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Prisoners-Dilemma-William-Poundstone&#x2F;dp&#x2F;038541580X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Prisoners-Dilemma-William-Poundstone&#x2F;...</a>
WalterBrightover 8 years ago
The military has plans for everything, because plans take time to prepare, and they don&#x27;t want to be winging it should a need suddenly arise.
douchealmost 9 years ago
It would be almost criminal if the DOD didn&#x27;t prepare a plan for that contingency. It is their job to be prepared for every possibility.
jomamaxxover 8 years ago
The US military has <i>definitely</i> planned &#x27;first strike&#x27; ops, as well as every other conceivable option they could possibly face.<p>It&#x27;s called &#x27;preparation&#x27;. It&#x27;s their job to prepare for any circumstances that they can possibly foresee.<p>Example: every bridge in Europe is &#x27;pre-prepared&#x27; for demolition. Normally, a combat engineering team has to scout the bridge, plan, then figure out how to disable it. In the event of ww3 - the plans are already done. A combat engineer need only draw the plan for the database and execute one of the options.<p>It goes much further than that.
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king_magicalmost 9 years ago
&quot;I quickly read the article and was stunned.&quot; ... &quot;Could such a momentous historical discovery have been so totally ignored by our mainstream journalists and historians that I’d never heard of it during the previous twenty years?&quot;<p>Ugh, come on, enough, Internet, enough with the over-sensationalization of everything. Is the author really that naive? Of course we planned a nuclear first strike against Russia. And China. And likely the entire Eastern Bloc. It would have been irresponsible for our war planners to do otherwise, as it&#x27;s one of many contingencies that may ultimately arise.<p>The United States is <i>not</i> a &quot;no first use&quot; country. So it absolutely, 100% stands to reason we would have planned out first strikes against many countries.
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