During the Cold War, America and the Soviets were paranoid that their countries would be taken out. Those fears were not all made up, as America had planned on wiping out several hundred cities with atomic bombs. If America would have followed through with these plans, it most likely would have sparked a major, all-nuclear Armageddon.
How do we know this? New Cold War documents have recently been revealed showing a map of the Soviet cities marked by the Americans as targets.
There are many kinds of targets – hundreds of military sites, factories and air fields, and the creepiest of them all, population centers. This would suggest that President Eisenhower was ready to make the terrible decision of wiping out millions of the Soviet population.
Cities that would’ve been taken out with the atomic bombs would have been Moscow, East Berlin, Saint Petersburg, Beijing, and Warsaw. There would be nothing left of these cities if the United States had decided to carry out the plan in the 1950s.
Other documents show that the Air Force would have used bombs up to nine megatons in power. That is 630 times stronger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II.
American would have taken out the military and industrial installations before hitting some of the civilian populations if they had gone through with the plan.
The top two major targets on the list were air bases in Belarus. This could have been due to the fear of reprisals in Western Europe from a retaliating Soviet Union.
The first city the United States planned to hit was Moscow. There were 149 targets chosen in Moscow alone. No one really knows why or what targets were chosen specifically, but many believe that Kremlin was likely on the list.
Although these documents were once top secret, almost all of the information was released to the public, except for the exact number of bombs that were planned on being dropped in each city. Obviously, there has to be more than a few since American had so many targets.
The United States had also prepared to bomb about 145 targets in Saint Petersburg, which was then known as Leningrad. It had planned on dropping 23 in Beijing and 15 in Warsaw, Poland.
One of the more shocking pieces of information is that America was ready to take out East Berlin with 91 bombs. Parts of the Allied West Berlin would have fallen with the impact and fallout zones in the area. However, the report does reveal that the weapons that would have been used on Berlin would have been less powerful for “political reasons.”
Each of the targets was named by the Strategic Air Command and was known as a Designated Ground Zero (DGZ).
It’s assumed that the first list of 3,400 DGZs were industrial and military sites, since America had hoped that the Soviet Union would surrender before they would have to turn to the civilian targets. About 1,100 of the sites were air bases, which indicates that America wanted to destroy the chances of the Soviet bombers’ retaliation.
In the documents, there was a second target list that had mentioned 1,209 DGZs that would be hit by nuclear weapons, but a majority of the document is redacted. There were about 1,200 cities from East Germany to the eastern parts of Russia that were identified for systematic destruction.
The number of weapons and bombs is still unknown, but many believe that there had to have been around 12,000 to 22,000 warheads in the arsenal at the time of the reports. The bombs would have been dropped by B-47 bomber planes flying from the United Kingdom, Spain, and Morocco. The B-52s would have been sent from the United States.
Here is a list of the targets:
Moscow – 149 targets. Population: 5 million
St. Petersburg – 145 targets. Population: 3 million
Budapest – 120 targets. Population: 1.8 million
East Berlin – 91 targets. Population: 1.2 million
Prague – 72 targets. Population: 1 million
Tallinn – 28 targets. Population: 238,000
Beijing – 23 targets. Population: 19 million
Sevastopol – 23 targets. Population: 1.8 million
Warsaw – 15 targets. Population: 1 million