Strategic Air Command (USAF)
Strategic Air Command declassifies nuclear target list from the 1950s
Briefing book · written June 1956 · released 22 December 2015
Why this matters
SAC's 'Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959', the most detailed list of Cold War nuclear targets ever declassified: more than a thousand airfields and industrial sites across the Soviet bloc and China, with 'population' itself listed as a target in cities such as Moscow, Leningrad and East Berlin. It makes nuclear planning concrete in a way few documents do.
Read the original
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear-Target-List-Declassified-First-Ever/
Hosted by National Security Archive (GWU)
Tags
Part of a collection · step 4 of 15
The Nuclear Paper Trail
What the bombs were for: SAC's 1959 target list.
Cite
Strategic Air Command (USAF). "Strategic Air Command declassifies nuclear target list from the 1950s." June 1956. Released 22 December 2015. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear-Target-List-Declassified-First-Ever/ (accessed via The Quiet Archive, QA-0052).
Shelved nearby
- 1960 QA-0024Eisenhower Library · Collection
U-2 Spy Plane Incident (Eisenhower Library online documents)
Declassified memos, cover-story drafts and meeting notes from May 1960, when the Soviets shot down Francis Gary Powers' U-2 and exposed the cover story that it was a NASA weather plane.
- 1969 QA-0128SAC · Official history
Project Crested Ice: The Thule Nuclear Accident, Vol. 1 (SAC Historical Study #113, 1969)
Strategic Air Command's official history of the January 1968 crash of a B-52 carrying four hydrogen bombs near Thule Air Base, Greenland, and of the cleanup of contaminated sea ice in the Arctic winter.