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This is a complete reblog of two articles, written by Alex Wellerstein, published April 27 and May 9, 2012. The original article is now only available at the WebArchive. This article, together with the reblogs of “From 1945-49 the US and UK planned to bomb Russia into the Stone Age” and “204 A-Bombs Against 66 Cities: US Drew up First Plan to Nuke Russia Before WWII Was Even Over” give a solid foundation for repelling future projections coming from the USA that the USSR wanted to start a nuclear war, a topic that we will be coming back to at a later point.

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Targeting the USSR in August 1945

– by Alex Wellerstein, published April 27th, 2012

If the World War II alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom was the special relationship, what was the alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union? The especially problematic relationship? The relationship that could really have used to go to counseling? A relationship forged out of extreme crisis that later seemed like a sketchy thing? (Easily abbreviated as the sketchy relationship, of course.) My wife suggests perhaps calling it the shotgun marriage.

Maybe special fits the bill there too, in the sense of it being odd. Case in point: by August 30, 1945 — before World War II was officially over — some part of the U.S. military force (I’m not sure what branch; the Army Air Corps are a likely suspect) had already taken the time to draw up a list of good targets for atomic bombs in the USSR… and even overlaid a map of the Soviet Union with the ranges of nuclear-capable bombers, along with “first” and “second” priority targets marked on it.¹

How many other war alliances end with one side explicitly plotting to nuke the heck out of the other ally? Probably not too many.

This amazing map comes from General Groves’ files, and was sent to him in September 1945 as part of a list of estimates for how many atomic bombs Curtis LeMay thought the US ought to have. I’ll talk about that another time, but here’s a hint: it was so many that even General Groves thought it was too many. Whoa.

A few things: the majority of these “dark” plots are B-29s (the same bombers that carried Fat Man and Little Boy), and they are going out of all kinds of “allied” bases (some currently in their possession, others labeled as “possible springboards”) around the USSR (Stavanger, Bremen, Foggia, Crete, Dhahran, Lahore, Okinawa, Shimushiru, Adak, and Nome). Which is an interesting way to quickly conceptualize the Cold War world from a military standpoint.

The very large, empty plots are for B-36s, which didn’t exist yet. They wouldn’t get fielded until 1949, but were already in the planning stages during the war. The actual B-36s as delivered had somewhat longer ranges (6,000 miles or so, total, if Wikipedia is to believed) than the ones estimated on here.

The target cities are a bit hard to make out (the next time I’m at NARA, I’ll try to get them to bring me the original map), but the “first priority” cities include Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Stalinsk, Chelyabinsk, Magnitogorsk, Kazan, Molotov, and Gorki. Leningrad appears to be listed as a “second priority” target, which surprises me, but it might just be the microfilm being hard to read. All in all, it’s not the most interesting list of cities: they have literally just taken a list of the top cities in the USSR (based on population, industry, war relevance) and made those their atomic targets.

NOTES

Citation 1: “A Strategic Chart of Certain Russian and Manchurian Urban Areas [Project No. 2532],” (30 August 1945), Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 1, Target 4, Folder 3, “Stockpile, Storage, and Military Characteristics.” The microfilm image I had of this came in two frames, a top and a bottom, and I pasted them together in Photoshop. This took a little bit of warping of the bottom image in odd ways (using Photoshop’s crazy “Puppet Warp” tool) because it didn’t quite line up with the top one due to folds in the paper and things like that. So there is a tiny bit of manipulation here, though none of it affects the content.

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The First Atomic Stockpile Requirements (September 1945)

– by Alex Wellerstein, published May 9th, 2012

The question of how large the American nuclear stockpile should be has long been a controversial one. Usually it is argued out as a question of how many nukes do we need to be safe?, where “safe” here means, “to make sure nobody wants to nuke us first,” i.e., deterrence.

It’s a fair enough question, although, as my readers all surely know, there are many sides to how one should pose it.

But for the Weekly Document, let’s go back to an earlier time. Today, I want to look closely at the very first attempt at coming up with a systematic estimate for how many nuclear weapons the United States should ideally have. This was completed in early September 1945 — well before nuclear deterrence was on the table, for at this point the United States still had a literal monopoly on nuclear arms.

The architect of this estimate appears to have been Major General Lauris Norstad of the US Army Air Forces (USAAF). Norstad would later go on to be one of the top Air Force planners, and later the Supreme Allied Commander Europe for NATO, but at this junction he was high-ranking staff at the USAAF headquarters in Washington, DC.

On September 15, 1945 — just under two weeks after the formal surrender of Japan and the end of World War II — Norstad sent a copy of the estimate to General Leslie Groves, still the head of the Manhattan Project, and the guy who, for the short term anyway, would be in charge of producing whatever bombs the USAAF might want. As you might guess, the classification on this document was high: “TOP SECRET LIMITED,” which was about as high as it went during World War II. (That the report came with an attached map showing projected US atomic capabilities in the USSR probably didn’t help with that.)¹

Let’s cut to the chase. How many bombs did the USAAF request of the atomic general, when there were maybe one, maybe two bombs worth of fissile material on hand? At a minimum they wanted 123. Ideally, they’d like 466. This is just a little over a month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Of course, in true bureaucratic fashion, they provided a handy-dandy chart:

Let’s cut to the chase. How many bombs did the USAAF request of the atomic general, when there were maybe one, maybe two bombs worth of fissile material on hand? At a minimum they wanted 123. Ideally, they’d like 466. This is just a little over a month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In other words, M-Day is a first-strike attack by the United States — a nuclear knock-out punch designed to beat another nation immediately into the stone age. “There has been no attempt to estimate the quantity of atomic bombs which would be required to conduct a prolonged war of attrition,” the paper continues. Oy, that’s an idea.

And, of course, it isn’t just “any other nation.” The analysis quickly fesses up to the fact that the only nation they’re concerned about is Russia, because they’re the only one who is projected to be even remotely on par with the United States from a military point of view for the next decade. “For the purpose of this study the destruction of the Russian capability to wage war has therefore been used as a basis upon which to predicate the United States, atomic bomb requirements.”

For the “minimum” strike, there are “15 first priority targets,” and for the “optimum” strike, there are “66 cities of strategic importance.” Amazingly, these planners have decided that you need around three nukes per city to really destroy them.

And “really destroy them” is not too far from the language in the plan: “The primary objective for the application of the atomic bomb is manifestly the simultaneous destruction of these fifteen first priority targets.” They don’t weasel around with euphemisms, do they? Later in the report, it describes the possibility of a back-and-forth nuclear exchange as “a mammoth slug-fest.”

Here is the list of the 15 priority targets, in order of priority: Moscow, Baku, Novosibirsk, Gorki, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Kuybyshev, Kazan, Saratov, Molotov, Magnitogorsk, Grozny, Stalinsk, and Nizhny Tagil. You might wonder why Baku is on there and, say, Leningrad is not. The priority targets are based largely on important industrial output; Baku was responsible for 61% of all Soviet crude oil output, 49% of oil refining, and 15% of steel output. Leningrad, at that point, was responsible for far fewer things.

The full map of the 66 Soviet targets — and 21 Manchurian targets (which they decided weren’t of a high enough priority to worry about right now, but they did map them — is here:

What the map really underscores is the methodology. It’s about industrial, war-making capacity, not just population or cultural importance. That is, when they say “strategic,” here, they still mean it in the World War II sense, not the Cold War, “strategic as deterrence” sense. They aren’t planning on deterrence, here. They’re planning for destruction.

Back to the plan: The only differences between the “minimum” and “optimum” plan are the total number of cities targeted. At three-ish bombs apiece, that 39 for the “minimum,” 204 for the “optimum.”

Both estimates also include 10 bombs for the “neutralization of possible enemy bases in the Western hemisphere” — the report explains that this is in case the USSR grabs a few other bases in the meantime that might be within shooting distance of US bases. It doesn’t elaborate. Let’s imagine that at least one of them is in West Germany, since the Soviets rolling westward is the common military scenario from this period. (Note: After writing this, a friendly reader wrote in to point out that the official definition of the “Western hemisphere” does not include West Germany at all. It’s actually considerably to the West of most of Europe. Was the idea that the USSR would roll across France and Spain as well? That they would somehow land in North or South America? I don’t know.)

Lastly, both estimates include a desire for 10 more bombs for “strategic isolation of the battlefield” — that is, keeping the Soviets from being able to move their ships or tanks or whatnot into useful places. In practice, they explain, this means blowing up the Dardanelles, the Kiel Canal, and the Suez Canal. That’s as close as the report gets to recommending any kind of “tactical” use of the bombs. For anything smaller than that, the analysts conclude, conventional weaponry will do the trick.

So that adds up to 59 for the “minimum” and 224 for the “optimum.” But they don’t stop there. They assume, based on World War II figures, that a certain number of the bombers will get shot down, have technical problems, miss the target, or simply drop duds. So they calculate that all of those bombs will only be 48% effective anyway, and thus they’ll need just over double the total number. So instead of about three bombs per city, they’ve allocated six.

So we divide our original totals by 0.48, and we end up with the final figures of 128 as the “minimum” and 466 as the “optimum.”

Well, that’s lovely, isn’t it? So did General Groves think about this?

Quoth the General: “The number of bombs indicated as required is excessive.”²

Why? It’s not because Groves thinks the entire idea is wrong, or that maybe as the world’s sole nuclear power, the country could perhaps do with fewer than a hundred of these things. (What if Groves thought the USSR was going to get a bomb soon? you ask. Groves believed that it would take the USSR 20 years to get a bomb, so that’s not the issue on his mind at this point.)

No. Groves’ reasons for disagreeing are very Grovesian. He disagrees because they’re low-balling the destructive power of the bombs. “It is not essential to get total destruction of a city in order to destroy its effectiveness. Hiroshima no longer exists as a city even though the area of total destruction is considerably less than total.” 

So what, we might speculate, would Groves propose as a revised version? He doesn’t offer up any figures. But it’s worth noting that Groves is only taking issue with the question of how many bombs might be needed per city — Groves is more or less saying that one should do the trick in most cases. So if we re-ran the numbers, exactly as before, but assumed only one successful bomb per city (even leaving in the 48% fudge factor), that drops the “minimum” to around 73 and the “optimum” to 179. That’s a reducing of 40% for the minimum, and 60% for the optimum.

That’s still an ambitious figure for September 1945, if not a somewhat bloodthirsty one. The US wouldn’t hit 100+ bombs until 1948, and broke the 400 bomb mark in 1951. Of course, by that point, the Air Force had decided that many more bombs would be necessary. When we know that the peak US nuclear stockpile was over 32,000 warheads (in 1966), a paltry 466 looks like kid’s stuff.

But from the perspective of the immediate postwar, it still seems like quite a lot. And its very ambitiousness was a sign of things to come.

Notes

Citation 1: Lauris Norstad to Leslie Groves, “Atomic Bomb Production,” (15 September 1945), Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 1, Target 4, Folder 3, “Stockpile, Storage, and Military Characteristics.”

Citation 2: Leslie Groves to Lauris Norstad (26 September 1945), attached to the previous document.