Among the industrial infrastructure and military sites that analysts concluded would achieve “high levels of damage” for the Soviet Union is one particularly troubling type of target: “population.”
“It’s disturbing, for sure, to see the population centers targeted,” William Burr, a nuclear historian and senior analyst at the National Security Archive, told the New York Times.
The SAC [Strategic Air Command] Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959 is broken into two lists: “Air Power,” referring to airfields and other military sites, and “Systematic Destruction,” which referred to targets in urban-industrial areas including “population” targets. The study lists 1,200 cities total, from East Germany to China, with established priorities.