The Effects of Nuclear War
Chapter IV
CASE 4: A LARGE U.S. ATTACK ON SOVIET MILITARY AND ECONOMIC TARGETS
A U.S. retaliatory attack against the Soviet Union would destroy 70 to 80 percent of its economic worth. The attacking force would consist primarily of U.S. strategic bombers and Poseidon/Polaris SLBMs, since most U.S. land-based ICBMs are assumed lost to a Soviet first strike. Bombers carry gravity bombs and short-range attack missiles having yields of about 1 Mt and 200 kt respectively. Poseidon SLBMs nominally carry up to 10 RVs of 40 kt each.
The attack would strike the full set of Soviet targets —strategic offensive forces, other military targets, economic targets, and cities. Population would in fact be struck, although killing people would not be an attack objective in itself. The objectives would be to cause as much industrial damage as possible and to make economic recovery as difficult as possible. The attacks might not be limited in time. Concentrations of evacuees would probably not be struck, but industries that recovered very quickly after the attack could be.
The immediate effects of the attack would be death and injury to millions of Soviet citizens, plus the destruction of a large percentage of Soviet economic and industrial capacity. As with the all-out Soviet attack, the executive branch studies provided a wide range of casualty estimates. Since the thrust of those analyses was to look at the potential effectiveness of Soviet civil defense, casualties were estimated under various assumptions reIated to the posture of the population.
If the Soviet population remained in-place, fatality estimates range from a high of 64 million to 100 million (26 to 40 percent of the Soviet population) to a low of 50 million to 80 million (20 to 32 percent). The high-value range is due to the different data bases used by DOD and ACDA and the higher protection levels assumed by ACDA. The low-value range results from the use of day-to-day alert status by the interagency intelligence study as compared to ACDA’s use of generated forces, and the types of weapons used against the economic target base in the two studies. With evacuation, the ACDA study estimated that fatalities would be reduced to 23 million to 34 million. It is difficult to judge whether these figures represent a high or low estimate. They could be considered as representing the low side because of the coarseness of Soviet data as used by ACDA. On the other hand, some would say that the evacuation scheme assumed by ACDA was unrealistic, and the results should be considered a high estimate. Nevertheless, Soviet fatalities are lower than the United States for both in-place and evacuated population postures. The lower Soviet fatalities are again primarily due to major differences in the yields of the weapons detonating in each country, and to the greater proportion of Soviet population that lives in rural areas.
As to the cause of fatalities (blast, thermal radiation, and direct nuclear radiation versus fallout radiation), DCPA data suggests that, in large attacks, that is, attacks that include economic or economic and population targets, fatalities are primarily due to prompt effects as opposed to fallout. Prompt effects account for at least 80 percent of the fatalities for all population postures when economic targets or population are included in the attack. ACDA notes a similar result in its study for attacks that include counterforce and other military targets. The reason for this is that in attacks on targets near urban areas, that is, attacks involving economic targets or population, those protected enough to survive the blast effects also have enough protection to survive the fallout. Conversely, those who do not have enough protection against fallout in urban areas near targets will not have enough protection against prompt effects and will already be dead before fallout has an effect.
Estimates of Soviet injuries were generally not included in the analyses. However, one study suggested that injuries might be roughly equal to fatalities under certain attack and exposure assumptions.
- Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), p. 241.