The Cold War: A MILITARY History (65 page)

– Using 1 MT weapons, five million people would have been within the area of significant fallout, of whom some three million would have received a radiation dose of 200 roentgens or more, thus becoming casualties, while two million would have received between 50 and 200 roentgens and thus become ineffective.

— Using 8 MT weapons, the numbers within the area of significant fallout rose to sixteen million, of which ten million would have received more than 200 roentgens, and six million between 50 and 200 roentgens.

It is impossible to escape the conclusion that, had the Soviet Union decided on a heavy attack on the UK, the country would have been devastated by the use of a comparatively small proportion of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

A STRATEGIC ATTACK ON THE USSR

The papers on JIGSAW’s assessment of a strategic attack on the USSR as a whole remain closed, but one study is in the public domain; this uses a slightly different approach to examine ‘
the effects of a strategic nuclear attack on Soviet ground forces located in the Western USSR
’. The attack was confined to the Baltic and Belorussian military districts, principally because these contained the bulk of the forces threatening the NATO Central Front.
^fn5
The area concerned covered 400,000 km
²
, which is 2 per cent of the Soviet land
mass
, and included 6 per cent of the population. The paper assumed that the remainder of the USSR was being attacked with equal severity, and that heavy (but possibly less severe) attacks would also be delivered on the satellite countries.

The paper is based on the NATO doctrine of the time, according to which the targets of a nuclear strike on the USSR would be the political and military command structures and civil targets such as communications hubs (e.g. railways). In essence, this meant targeting cities, and JIGSAW considered three scales of attack:

– Attack A. A single 1 MT attack on each city with a population exceeding 50,000, of which there were twenty in the area under consideration (364 in the USSR as a whole).

– Attack B. An attack designed to kill about eighty per cent of the Soviet population, which would require 250 deliveries, averaging 3 MT on the area under study (4,000 deliveries on the whole USSR).

– Attack C. An attack designed to kill about sixty-five per cent of the Soviet population in the selected area, which would require 120 deliveries, averaging 3 MT (2,000 deliveries on the whole USSR).

It was assumed that a period of escalating political tension had led to a period of warning, in which the military forces had deployed to their ‘survival locations’, where they had dug in and covered their vehicles.

Attack A

This attack would involve one 1 MT weapon being dropped on each of the twenty cities with a population of over 50,000. The cities would have been devastated, with heavy casualties. The area of high contamination (a cumulative dose of 1,000 roentgens measured one hour after the explosion) from each burst would have covered some 310 km
²
and extended to a distance of some 48 km downwind from ground zero. For the lower-contamination criterion (450 roentgens after forty-eight hours) the area covered would have been some 26,000 km
²
.

The outcome of such an attack would have been the devastation of every city, with very heavy casualties, leaving the survivors totally involved in the struggle for their own survival and in dealing with those casualties for whom treatment might offer a glimmer of hope. Communications within the cities would have been disrupted – and almost certainly destroyed in the area round ground zero. The normal system of supplies would have completely broken down, and the competition for the remaining stocks of food, fuel and medical treatment would have been both intense and frantic.

Because Soviet cities were widely spaced, however, the situation outside the cities would not have been so serious. Much of the rural population would have survived, and some travel would have been possible. The troops
who
had dispersed from the cities had a very strong possibility of survival, their chances being improved by distance from the city, by taking cover and maintaining movement discipline, and by adopting positions upwind (i.e. to the west) of the potential targets.

Attack B

The second attack to be considered was one designed to kill about 80 per cent of the Soviet population, which would have required about 4,000 deliveries on the whole USSR, averaging 3 MT each, of which 250 would have been on the area under study. JIGSAW estimated that this would result in contamination of 1,000 roentgens after one hour over 350,000 km
²
, which was 85 per cent of the area under study, while a lower level of 450 roentgens after forty-eight hours would have covered the entire area. Even for those who, through taking precautions or through chance, survived the blast effects, the prospects of survival were very bleak, since they would have had to move very rapidly to an area of insignificant fallout to continue to survive – a journey which would have been difficult, if not impossible. The transport system would have been virtually destroyed, and the areas of insignificant radiation would have been difficult to identify and, even if they were identified, might well have been on the other side of a region of high contamination. The lack of supplies and the probable breakdown of public order would have added yet further to the dismal prospects.

Attack C

This attack, intended to kill about 65 per cent of the Soviet population, would have required about half the weight of strikes involved in Attack B: i.e. 2,000 3 MT deliveries on the whole of the USSR, with 120 in the area under study. In this case, a contamination level of 1,000 roentgens after one hour would have covered about 186,000 km
²
, or 46 per cent of the area, while a level of 450 roentgens after forty-eight hours would have covered the entire area. Once again, damage would have been very extensive, and the over-lapping of the fallout plumes would have made it impossible to escape from at least the less serious (450 roentgens after forty-eight hours) contour.

ATTACKS ON CITIES

A further JIGSAW report concerned a nuclear attack on the British city of Birmingham, a highly industrialized urban area, with a population of approximately 1,800,000 people. A 1 MT airburst
^fn6
weapon exploded over
the
centre of the city would have damaged virtually every building in the city, half of which would have been demolished or burnt out, the intensity of the damage decreasing with distance from ground zero. The normal functions of the city – such as transport, gas, electricity, food supplies and sewage disposal – would have been severely disrupted. There would also have been a serious local fallout hazard, extending over part of the city and for about 400–500 km
²
in the neighbourhood. Birmingham would to all intents and purposes have ceased to exist.

JIGSAW assessed that only cities with populations greater than several million would have required more than one 1 MT weapon to inflict a similar level of damage. London, for example, might have required six weapons, New York five, and Moscow four.

In 1980 the US Office of Technology Assessment published a study, which compared the effects of a single 1 MT weapon targeted on the US city of Detroit and on the Soviet city of Leningrad, both of which had a population of 4,300,000. The estimated casualties were 470,000 killed and 630,000 seriously wounded in Detroit, while Leningrad would have suffered 890,000 killed and 1,260,000 seriously wounded. The reason for the difference was the population density: in the US city the population was widely dispersed, whereas in the Soviet city the population was much more heavily concentrated, with the majority being housed in high-rise blocks.

All the examples given above were well within the capacity of both the superpowers
.

CASUALTIES

One of the most chilling elements of these studies is the discussion of casualties of almost incomprehensible magnitude. Massive numbers of people had been killed in previous wars, and most estimates agree that the Soviet Union lost some 20 million people in the years 1941–5. These, however, were lost over a period of four years in a large number of individual actions.

Air power inflicted the four most devastating attacks in the Second World War – two with conventional bombs and two with atomic bombs. The attack on Dresden, Germany, took place on 13–14 February 1945 and involved several hundred bombers of the British and United States air forces; at least 100,000 people died. Probably the most costly attack of the war, however, was the USAAF raid on Tokyo on 9–10 March 1945, in which 334 B-29 bombers dropped 1,600 tonnes of incendiaries and the resulting firestorm killed 83,000, with a further 100,000 injured. Then came the two atomic bombs: on Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945, with 78,150 killed and over 70,000 injured, and on Nagasaki, on 9 August, with 40,000 killed and 25,000 injured.

In terms of casualties incurred during the attack, the conventional attacks on Dresden and Tokyo were actually more destructive than the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The former attacks, however, required many hundreds of bombers dropping thousands of bombs, while the latter each needed only one bomber and one bomb. The atomic attacks also introduced a new and invisible killer: radiation. This ability of nuclear warheads to carry destructive power equivalent to hundreds (and later to hundreds of thousands) of conventional bombs, allied to the residual, invisible killer, was the spectre that was to haunt the planners of both sides throughout the Cold War.

One of the major problems in discussing casualties is that, not surprisingly, estimates varied wildly, not least because they were assessing something for which not even the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided a precedent. In addition, there were a large number of variables and uncertainties:

In the mid-1970s one assessment of US deaths varied from 200,000 in a first-strike Soviet missile attack aimed specifically at US ICBM fields, to 20 million for an attack on all strategic forces and the related command-and-control facilities. Ten years later, another two studies showed that matters had moved on considerably. The first study analysed the civilian casualties likely to be incurred in the USA from a Soviet counter-force attack involving approximately 3,000 individual weapons. It was found that:

12–27 million Americans would die and that altogether 23–45 million would suffer lethal or serious non-lethal injuries from the short-term, direct effects of the nuclear explosions. In the longer term, an additional 2–20 million might develop radiation-caused cancers. The variation was due to different assumptions concerning winds and casualty models.
⁸

The same authors then conducted a study of a similar attack on the USSR, and concluded that:

– A major US attack on strategic nuclear facilities in the Soviet Union might kill 12–27 million people, kill or injure a total of 25–54 million people in the short term and cause 2–14 million people to suffer radiation-induced cancers in the longer term.

– A worst-case attack on Soviet urban areas with one hundred one-MT airbursts would kill 45–77 million people and cause a total of 73–93 million to suffer lethal and non-lethal injuries.
⁹

In other words, a counter-value attack would have involved up to 93 million casualties, but even an attack on counter-force targets would have involved at least 12 million and possibly as many as 27 million deaths.

A BATTLE IN EUROPE

The Setting

The setting devised by JIGSAW for its European study started with a ground battle in which the Warsaw Pact forces advanced into West Germany, with NATO forces’ role being to delay and hold the main thrusts until the strategic nuclear strike on the Soviet Union had taken its full effect. In the area of interest to the British (i.e. that part of northern Germany where 1 (BR) Corps would be fighting), the Warsaw Pact thrust was considered to have two main axes: one in the north, on a frontage of some 160 km across the North German Plain, against Belgian, British and West German forces; the second, in the south, through the Fulda Gap and towards Frankfurt am Main, against West German and US forces. There would, of course, have been other thrusts in the Central Region from Czechoslovakia into southern Germany and along the Baltic coast to Hamburg and Denmark, as well as in Norway and southern Europe.

The JIGSAW team prefaced its assessments by drawing attention to one of the unusual characteristics of the German rural areas, which is the very large number of relatively small villages, which are laid out as if on a grid, some 3–5 km from each other. This meant that, even if the tactical weapons were very low-yield and aimed at military targets, they would inevitably include several of these villages within their lethal area.

The nuclear battle had three elements.
^fn7
The first was the exchange actually on the battlefield in support of operations at the operational and tactical
level
. The study assumed exchanges of 500 weapons in the north and 250 in the south, with an average yield of 30 kT each.

The second was a series of interdiction strikes, aimed at bridges, ferries and other crossing points, which were designed to prevent reinforcements and supplies reaching the enemy’s forward troops. The NATO interdiction strikes would have consisted of some 250 nuclear weapons, each of 300 kT yield, on a north–south line generally following the line of the river Elbe and extending from the Baltic to Prague – a distance of some 560 km. The Soviet interdiction strike would have been along a line running from Strasbourg in the south northward along the Rhine to Nijmegen and then north to the Ijselmeer, and would have been intended to prevent reinforcements and supplies reaching NATO forces in the forward area, and also to prevent those forward troops from withdrawing across the Rhine. This strike would have been of the same size as the NATO strike: i.e. 250 weapons, each with a 300 kT yield.