Did the US Plan a Nuclear First Strike Against Russia in the Early 1960s?
I sure hope we did. &quot;Plan&quot; in the context of national militaries has a very different meaning from making a &quot;plan&quot; with your buddies. Any national military planners wouldn&#x27;t be doing their job if they didn&#x27;t have a plan for attacking any country they could conceivably reach. It&#x27;s their job to have plans available and ready for the political leaders, and it&#x27;s those leaders&#x27; jobs to decide which plans to actually execute and when.<p>Consider: If you&#x27;re, say, the Secretary of Defense, at any meeting, the President might tell you &quot;Country X just went nuts! We have to deal with this now! What can we do?&quot;. You don&#x27;t wanna tell the President &quot;Umm, I dunno, let us look into it&quot;. You wanna be able to say something more like &quot;We could go with a nuclear strike, using units A, B, and C. Expected casualties in country X are Y military and Z civilian, and we estimate a possible retaliatory nuclear strike against at least 10 US cities, with casualty estimates as described. Or we could launch a conventional strike with Carrier Group D, attacking these government and infrastructure targets, optionally following up with a land invasion with these units or special forces attacks, with enemy and friendly casualty estimates.&quot;<p>Clearly, we want to have plans for every possible way of attacking every country we would be capable of attacking, all continuously updated to reflect our forces and their readiness, as well as estimated enemy forces and their readiness. We also want to be able to talk intelligently about possible force level changes. If the President wants to, say, dissolve one or more Army divisions, raise another one, buy or sell aircraft, retire nukes or build more, etc, we want to be able to describe how that would affect our ability to attack and defend against attacks from various countries.