Premeditated Mass Murder and Nuclear Weapons Policy

On December 22, 2015, the National Archives and Records Administration of George Washington University, DC, published a document entitled “Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959” which they had succeeded in getting declassified. The document had been produced in June 1956 by the Strategic Air Command (SAC) which was headed up by General Curtis LeMay. The latter is well known for his hawkish policies and his advocacy for the use of nuclear weapons in Cuba, Korea, and many other countries where the US was having a conflictual relationship. The report is 800 pages long and contains truly frightening containing details of what might be called the razing to the ground of much of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China.

The study distinguishes between three different types of targets and designates the type and strength of the nuclear weapons to be used in each category. The first order priority for destruction was the air power facilities of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China. 1,100 airfields were designated to be destroyed in the with ground blasting H-bombs of 1 to 7 megaton capacity. But air power facilities was much more expansive than airfields and included air force storage areas, air force military control centers, guided missile centers, atomic energy centers, airframe entities, aircraft engine entities, liquid fluid plants and liquid fluid refineries. In a word, a vast swath of the industrial infrastructure of the former Soviet bloc was designated for nuclear destruction. The policy was a bomb as you go systematic destruction of the entire air power of the Soviet bloc.

The Strategic Air Command SAC) document identified a second list for systematic destruction which was urban-industrial areas in the bloc. The document listed 1,200 cities with priorities established among them. The highest priority was Moscow with 179 Designated Ground Zero (DGZ) locations. Leningrad had 145 such locations. What is particularly chilling in this second listing is targeting of “populations” in the various cities identified for destruction. It constitutes a special category designated as No. 275. The details of the populations targeted for bombing is not contained in the declassified document but is rather contained in an accompanying still classified document entitled “Bombing Encyclopedia.. The National Archives and Records Administration is still seeking the declassification of this latter document.

The most shocking revelation of this document is its flouting of all accepted norms of civilized behavior and conduct in war. It has been recognized as a basic principle of warfare that civilians and non-combatants cannot be used as targets. But this document in a premeditated way designates for bombing and therefore mass-death whole swaths of the then Soviet population. Their expansive definition of the sectors of society that are contributing to a potential war effort is so great that hardly anyone is excluded from it. Even those employed in agricultural production could be designated as people contributing to feeding the enemy forces and hence appropriate targets for nuclear annihilation.

This document was produced in 1956 and has been classified until 2015, a period of almost 60 years. Most of the population of the US and the world is still unaware of what was planned and done in our name. The fact that Curtis LeMay and his likes did not get their way in executing this plan could be designated as a miracle as a result of which humanity has survived at least through the Cold War crisis. In a more recent period of nuclear lunacy with the admission of India and Pakistan into the nuclear arms club, Arundhati Roy says in regard to the leaders of India “What do you do with these levels of lunacy? What do you do if you’re trapped in an asylum and the doctors are all dangerously deranged”. Yes, that is the basic question that we confronted with in a world where nuclear weapon possession and possible use is normalized.

The declassification of this document on nuclear targeting and policy should put the importance and urgency of nuclear abolition.on the front burner of everyone’s consciousness We have somehow survived the first 70 years of the nuclear age but that is no guarantee of anything for the future. Somehow nuclear weapons and the lunacy that they engender is like unto an ugly secret that no one dare speak of it. Never shall it enter the polite or not so polite discourse and conversation of Presidential candidates. Of all the existential dangers that face humanity including global climate change, terrorism and gun violence, nuclear weapons is clearly the most pressing and imminent danger. Yet, it is the greatest taboo in media, politics and social discourse. Clearly there is something bizarre about this situation.

Michael Drohan is a member of the NewPeople editorial collective.

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