What does one call a country that plans to kill millions of people in a cold blooded first strike attack, and measures its level of success in the number of civilians killed and the percentage of the civilian infrastructure destroyed, reducing the attacked nation to a non-viable condition?

A rogue state?

A terrorist state?

Actually, it’s called USA.

In the recently-declassified documents, the US military details such plans of an all-out nuclear first strike against the USSR and China. I have written before about the American plans to drops 204 A-bombs onto the 66 of the largest Soviet cities, including Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev… The plans below are shown to go to an even greater detail in actually measuring the level of “success” such an attack would have, in the magnitude of the CIVILIAN casualties.

This strongly reminds of the scene of Alderaan’s destruction in the iconic George Lucas’ film “Star Wars – A New Hope”, where in a feat of «art mimicking reality», Tarkin destroys the peaceful planet as an act of force projection.

This is so in character of the American Militaristic Imperialism, we should not even be surprised. Especially since there were several examples of American war criminal attacks during WWII (as well as before and after):

The firebombing of Dresden, which was a German city without any military targets, possibly with the exception of the railway hub. As such, the city became the place where the German CIVILIANS were fleeing to from the war. The city did not even have any anti-aircraft defences. The Americans fire-bombed the city in such a way so as to create a fire storm, which in its destructive power was as powerful as the A-bombs. According to the more realistic estimates, about 135000 civilians perished in Dresden. The only place that survived the fire-bombing was… the railway hub. All the residential areas were gone.

And later the Americans dropped the two atomic bombs on the Japanese Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as well as fire-bombing Tokyo before that). Neither of the two cities had any military infrastructure to speak of, and Japan was anyway on the verge of being beaten down by the advancing Soviet troops. The only reason hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians had to dies was so that the USA could send a message to the USSR – you are next.

As an aside to this topic, those interested in the detailed account of the American “heroic deeds”, starting with the extermination of the 100 million strong Indian Nation (of the equivalent of 25 British populations of that time), and to the present day providing of the air superiority support to ISIS can read this article on Kont (in Russian).

The readers will also fin more on this matter and the historical backdrop in Lad Ray’s article Truth & Karma! How USA Created 20th Century Cold War & Arms Race: Russian Berlin & Manchuria Operations vs. USA’s Hiroshima/Nagasaki Atomic Bombing

Back to the topic at hand, here are the opening paragraphs of the National Security Archive publication on the newly-declassified matter:

U.S. Nuclear War Plan Option Sought Destruction of China and Soviet Union as “Viable” Societies

U.S. nuclear war plans during the Johnson administration included the option of a retaliatory strike against nuclear, conventional military, and urban-industrial targets with the purpose of removing the Soviet Union “from the category of a major industrial power” and destroying it as a “viable” society. This is one disclosure from a Joint Staff review of the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) obtained via a Mandatory Declassification Review request by the George Washington University-based National Security Archive and posted on our site today.

The document, the Joint Staff’s review of SIOP guidance in June 1964, showed continued acceptance by policymakers of the cataclysmic nuclear strike options that had been integral to the plan since its inception. Accordingly, the SIOP set high damage requirements—95 percent for the top priority nuclear targets—ensuring that it remained an “overkill” plan, referring to its massively destructive effects. Prepared and continually updated by the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, the SIOP has been characterized by some as a “doomsday machine.
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Population as an Objective

The emphasis on a capability to destroy urban-industrial targets provided context for a related issue in the SIOP review: the Joint Staff raised the possibility of using “population loss as the primary yardstick for effectiveness in destroying the enemy society with only collateral attention to industrial damage.” The implication of this alarming statement was that as long as urban workers, clerks, and managers were killed the level of damage to industrial targets might not be as important. Given the JSCP-65 requirement for “an assured capability to destroy the enemy’s war supporting and urban/industrial resources,” fatalities were likely to increase “in that a larger portion of the urban population may be placed at risk.” Placing “at risk” amounted to using population loss as a “primary yardstick” but whether that criterion became embedded in SIOP planning remains to be learned.

RT has summed the newly-declassified documents really well in their article

Declassified docs reveal how Pentagon aimed to nuke USSR and China into oblivion

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The review, conducted two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, devises the destruction of the Soviet Union “as a viable society” by annihilating 70 percent of its industrial floor space during pre-emptive and retaliatory nuclear strikes.

A similar goal is tweaked for China, given its more agrarian-based economy at the time. According to the plan, the US would wipe out 30 major Chinese cities, killing off 30 percent of the nation’s urban population and halving its industrial capabilities. The successful execution of the large-scale nuclear assault would ensure that China “would no longer be a viable nation,” the review reads.

The Joint Staff had proposed to use the “population loss as the primary yardstick for effectiveness in destroying the enemy society with only collateral attention to industrial damage.” This “alarming” idea meant that, as long as urban workers and managers were killed, the actual damage to industrial targets “might not be as important,” the George Washington University researchers said.

The 1964 plan doesn’t specify the anticipated enemy casualty levels, but – as the researchers note – an earlier estimate from 1961 projected that a US attack would kill 71 percent of the residents in major Soviet urban centers and 53 percent of residents in Chinese ones. Likewise, the 1962 estimate predicted the death of 70 million Soviet citizens during a “no-warning US strike” on military and urban-industrial targets.

The Pentagon continues to rely heavily on nuclear deterrence, and – just like in the 1960s – the US nuclear strategy still regards Russian and Chinese military capabilities as main “challenges” faced by Washington. The latest Nuclear Posture Review, adopted in February, outlined “an unprecedented range and mix of threats” emanating from Beijing and Moscow. The document, which mentions Russia 127 times, cites the modernization of the Russian nuclear arsenal as “troubling” for the US.

The existing nuclear strategy also allows the US to conduct nuclear strikes not only in response to enemies’ nuclear attacks, but also in response to “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks” on the US, its allies and partners.
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