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Comment by king_magic | Hacker News Reader

"I quickly read the article and was stunned." ... "Could such a momentous historical discovery have been so totally ignored by our mainstream journalists and historians that I’d never heard of it during the previous twenty years?"

Ugh, come on, enough, Internet, enough with the over-sensationalization of everything. Is the author really that naive? Of course we planned a nuclear first strike against Russia. And China. And likely the entire Eastern Bloc. It would have been irresponsible for our war planners to do otherwise, as it's one of many contingencies that may ultimately arise.

The United States is not a "no first use" country. So it absolutely, 100% stands to reason we would have planned out first strikes against many countries.

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> Of course we planned a nuclear first strike against Russia. And China. And likely the entire Eastern Bloc. It would have been irresponsible for our war planners to do otherwise, as it's one of many contingencies that may ultimately arise.

There are only five comments here, but I'm relieved to see that they all more or less come to the same conclusion you do. The press (especially the national security press) would have known the same thing, so they're highly unlikely to have considered the existence of these plans to be particularly revelatory. I think that explains away UNZ's fears about the press's possible complicity with whitewashing history (in this case, anyway).

Having these documents add to the story in a meaningful way through. It very much gives context to the Cuban crisis as the USSRs only decent tools appear to have been shorter range than what the US had. The US could be just as threatening to the USSR without leaving home when it took the USSR setting up in Cuba to counter the threat. This certainly gives context to me and make the USSR look less the aggressor and actually weak, forced into a corner.

For a fascinating, fictional, but well researched look into what the Cuban crisis could have turned into if it had gone hot, check out the Cuban Missile War:

http://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-cuban-miss...

It does a great job of illustrating just how uneven the two sides were at the time, and how unpleasant the potential consequences were.

Well, the USSR's problem was two-fold: until Cuba they didn't have a place to put their short- and medium-ranged ballistic missiles. They did have ICBMs that could hit the US, but 1) there would be enough warning for an immediate counter strike and 2) they just couldn't deliver enough to cripple the US. The Soviet Union's concern was also that the US did have missiles in places like Turkey and Germany, which provided them decent first strike ability that-- until Cuba-- the Soviets didn't have.

To my mind, though, the big differentiater was Strategic Air Command. The US had an enormous amount of bombers regularly patrolling outside of Soviet airspace. Had SAC been ordered in there would have been plenty of warning, but it provided massive second strike capability. The Soviet Union had no answer for that and never would, which is why they did opt to go heavy on the ICBMs whereas the US spread out its weaponry across the nuclear triad.

The problem is one of language; to laypersons "to plan" implies "has the intent to", you know, like "I plan to BBQ at the weekend". But to the people actually doing it, it literally means to write down the steps involved then put it away in a filing cabinet.

Exactly. The US military has plans for everything, up to and including dealing with a literal zombie apocalypse [1].

[1]: http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/05/13/exclusive-the-pentagon-h...

> Ugh, come on, enough, Internet, enough with the over-sensationalization of everything. Is the author really that naive? Of course we planned a nuclear first strike against Russia. And China. And likely the entire Eastern Bloc

and Allies, since before the cold war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red

Basically, it appears the American's have had a plan to attack everybody from the moment they thought they were big enough to do so.

Every competent military maintains plans for every imaginable contingency, including war with all countries within reach (which, for a superpower, means all countries on the planet) regardless of current political status. Note the part of your Wikipedia page where it describes how the Canadians had a counterpart plan for invading the US.

Or even not on this planet, as per CASE NIGHTMARE RED.

As entertaining as cstross's books are.. (and I believe he's a user here)

A more relevant (non-fiction) example might be the CDC zombie outbreak exercise.

http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombies.htm

That isn't actually the government believing and planning for a zombie outbreak.

You have got to be kidding me. There's a difference between "having a plan" and "planning to do something". National militaries are obligated to have a plan for everything. That doesn't mean the military wants to do those things. The civilian government decides on actions, the military just makes plans for potential actions they might be asked to do, no matter how unlikely. I'm sure there's also a plan for invading Rhode Island were it to be occupied by aliens. That doesn't mean they expect Rhode Island to be occupied by aliens, or that they think it's likely to happen, or that they want it to happen, or that they think the civilian government expects it to happen or wants it to happen.

Do you really think that America is any different from any other large nation in the world in this respect? Do you really think that the Russian military doesn't spend just as much time (if not more) planning for every eventuality? If they don't, they're failing at their jobs, and while I have issues with Russia's political direction, I don't think of them as suffering from an underfunded or incompetent military.

Whether we have a 'no first use' policy or not, I would hope that we go through the exercise if only to gain insight into what our adversaries might do.

A first strike against Russia and China is probably a part of Obama's nuclear playbook even today.

I'm curious what a US first strike would look like. Would we assume any strike would devolve into nuclear terror bombing? If so, maybe we'd hit their cities in a first strike. But there is a possibility that a first strike purely against Russian nuclear weapons wouldn't cause the Russians to bomb US cities. In that scenarios Russia might retaliate against US military targets but not civilian targets. I wonder where we came down on that.

A few years ago there was an online story about the US plans for Moscow - which apparently even Dick Cheney was shocked by, because the idea was to destroy it with hundreds of warheads.

I seem to remember 600 or so.

Obviously no one has any idea what that would do because it's never been tested. But I'd guess it would remove absolutely all trace of the city and leave only a glassy layer of bedrock, which might take a few centuries to cool.

US and Russian cities have significant missile defence systems, so I guess the rationale is to make sure that at least some warheads get through.

If that's the plan for the biggest capital cities on both sides, details become academic.

"During his first week on the job, Butler asked the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff to give him a copy of the SIOP. General Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had made clear that the United States needed to change its targeting policy, now that the Cold War was over. As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow—dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city."

From Command & Control by Eric Schlosser

Moscow's defenses include about 100 anti-ICBM missiles. Depending on how stuff comes in, each one might, if it's lucky, take out multiple incoming warheads. Add in potential losses in the attacking force due to counterstrikes and malfunctions, and attacking Moscow with hundreds of warheads starts to make some sense.

Other Russian cities don't have such things, nor do any American cities. At least as far as is known.

Ok - let's say that the retaliation is purely aimed at military installations and comes after a completely successful US first strike. God help us all, but let's think this through.

Only one of the Borei submarines would be on patrol, it's reasonable for there to be some failures, but even with a 50% fail of missiles and warheads 30+ nukes would be hitting the USA.

I imagine that the targeting for Russian SLBM's is calculated to cause maximum loss to the USA - maximum loss of life and economic damage. I imagine this because if I were Russian that would be the message I would want a US president to have when calculating this, but it is just possible that there is a military targets only war plan, and this is the scenario you are exploring here.

In this scenario the minimal retaliation would be 30 ~200 kt warheads striking military bases - like San Deigo, Puget Sound and so on. Each strike would probably result in ~5k dead and 100k other casualties. So, minimum, 30 craters, 3 million casualties and 150k dead.

That's three Vietnams in an afternoon. Now, discount the stain of murdering many more Russians (because the successful first strike would involve many strikes that would result in large scale civilian deaths), I find it really hard to think that any rational human could contemplate causing the death of ~150k fellow citizens for "the greater good".

A first strike with conventional weapons is an interesting possibility. If you could wipe out the command and control layer swiftly enough maybe immediate retaliation could be avoided. Use ballistic weapons to deliver GPS guided conventional bombs once the radar systems are down. Of course all that would depend on having the ability to locate and sink the missile subs.

And now you know why Game Theory is so important to the Pentagon and State Department.

I'm a little surprised as well; Unz is usually at least somewhat more level-headed than this. On the other hand, he strikes me as a person whose ideals are very deeply held and whose perception of the United States is strongly informed by them, so maybe it's not too unlikely he would react this way.

Hell, it's likely that the US had first strike plans on her allies too.

The world can be an unpredictable place, it's better to plan for the worst but hope for the best.

> not a "no first use"

Well, at least for a few more months: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-08-16/say-no-to-...

I'm struggling to understand how someone can honestly consider the failure to have a contingency plan to commit mass murder is somehow irresponsible.

I do not think he is "naive" I think he is being paid to drum on the "OMG US want to invade Russia" drum

Just yesterday we had this UNCONFIRMED article appear in all Russian news outlets

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/4ybaud/us_moves_nuc...

Its almost as if there is an organised disinformation campaign /s

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