If a nuclear war breaks out, will both sides target civilians, military targets, or both?
It is difficult to predict things, particularly the future. We don’t know what would actually happen, nor what the current secret orders are for any nuclear forces. This is also one of the reasons why no one wants to see it happen. However, if you really want to know about nuclear targeting, we actually know this quite well.
There is a very popular and vague idea, that in case of nuclear war, everyone targets all the biggest cities launch and then we all die and the world collapse. The reality is that the world would not end, even if we detonated all nuclear weapons over cities. Cities in Europe, USA and Russia, are in fact not the world, and fallout would not cover the world either, no matter how pessimistic you are.
Additionally, far more thought has been put into strategic nuclear targeting than merely kill everyone, and while we do not know the details now, it is safe to say it is an evolution of previous doctrines, and we have a pretty good idea about those actually.
Soviet Doctrine:
80% of ICBMs deployed by the USSR in the 1980s had the purpose of targeting NATO nuclear weapons, particularly those in the USA such as the US ICBM silos. The nuclear SS-19 and SS-18 rockets were designed specifically with this target in mind. Other targets would include US air force bases with nuclear weapons. That doesn’t mean that the Soviets would not target cities. However, the priority was without a doubt military targets, particularly western ability to use their own nukes. As such, you could say the priority mission of a Soviet nuclear first strike would be to prevent an actual city annihilation exchange.
It should also be noted that according to Soviet/Russian doctrine, a front commander is an semi-independent strategic war leader, authorized to carry out nuclear strikes in strategic depth once nuclear weapons are released.
The goal of such strikes is stated directly by the Soviet general staff in the 1980s as such:
The most important task is to correctly determine economic objectives and targets and vulnerable points, and to deliver strikes to those targets where it will lead to disorganization of the enemy economy. The objective is not to turn the large economic and industrial regions into a heap of ruins, but to deliver strikes Targeting Policies and Plans which will destroy strategic combat means, paralyze enemy military production, making it incapable of satisfying the priority needs of the front and rear areas and sharply reduce the enemy capability to conduct strikes.
American Doctrine
American nuclear doctrine likewise has more thought to it than merely just blowing up every city. First of all an important concept in US nuclear doctrine is deterrence, which is centered around the MAD principle, Mutually Assured Destruction. In short, the idea that any nuclear strike, will automatically trigger a holocaust event on enemy cities. In a sense the idea was to have a permanent terror threat to deter any first strike.
American theorists in the 1980s, came to the conclusion that the Soviets were too confident in their ability to win a nuclear war in political and economic terms, and therefore more deterrent was needed. The US was convinced and probably still is, that Russia functions as an elite group of Russians oppressing every other minority, and that eliminating Russians ethnically, would cause the country itself to fracture as minorities all sought to establish themselves.
While the idea of breaking up Russia by ethnic cleansing is not likely to be the current plan, it is quite likely that priority of US nuclear strikes would be to completely black out internal communication and try to isolate potential fractured states, by total annihilation of hub cities such as Moscow.
In Practice
Both countries would target their nuclear weapons primarily for air bursting at a height optimizing the radius of 5–20 PSI blast zones, which will destroy any military equipment in the open, as well as most buildings. Fallout and lasting radiation will be minimal in this configuration, and so the environmental impact will not be as much as people usually think it is. Flattening a city or air base, does not yield the same result as throwing it into the air as debris. Ground bursting detonations will create considerable fallout, but are only carried out when the target is a super heavy one, such as a bunker or silo, in which the missile needs to almost directly hit to ensure destruction. As such the most radiated area would probably be Colorado, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, Montana, Wyoming. Russia operates with few fixed silos and ground detonations would be unlikely to occur there.
In short
Both military and civilian targets would be selected. The US focuses on cities as targets, the Russians focuses nuclear capabilities and military production (which is often located in cities).
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Prepper1cense 