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> it's my understanding that during the Cold War a team of US ethicists determined that the most ethical direction to point nuclear weapons was at major population centers (not military targets)

This was never US policy and not how our weapons were targeted.

> America was actually postured for a first strike,

Once the cold war was in earnest, both sides were capable of a first strike, and were also capable of successfully launching a crippling retaliatory strike. Hence the phrase "mutually assured destruction" describing the tension used to prevent either side from attacking.

> Russian airfields,etc being the highest priority targets,

To put the ancient information you're linking to in perspective, it's apparently 63 years old, prior to when the United States successfully tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile.

Later, the highest priority targets for nuclear weapons were... other nuclear weapons. Specifically, things like hardened missile silos were targeted once we had ICBMs capable of targeting them accurately enough to destroy them.

> urban-industrial targets being lower down the list. After that, population centers were considered targets.

No. I don't have time to pick through the fifties-era document you linked to, but cities were never really a target. It's easy enough to understand why.

The serious damage done to population centers in a nuclear war would have been largely incidental. That would have been terrible enough. You don't have to target population centers per se when you launch enough thermonuclear weapons to cause a nuclear winter, and when a lot of population centers happen to be located adjacent to (or simply downwind from) your military targets. Those people are fucked anyway

If you have a really good anti-ballistic missile defense system, the game changes and you can target whatever you want. We haven't seen what that is like yet.

I would love a source for this, or any further reading recommendations on similar topics.

This is not the particular source I recall, but is related:

Kavka, G. S. (1978). Some Paradoxes of Deterrence. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(6), 285. doi:10.2307/2025707

(https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/2025707)