Civilian Airports and Power Plants in an early 1980s exchange

At the peak of the US and USSR arsenals, would airpots and power plants outside of main target areas be targeted? I live in Nebraska, and I know Lincoln's small airport (like 8 gates) has a runway that is long enough to land a Boeing E-4 on, even though there's no commercial purpose for such a long runway in Lincoln, NE. This made me wonder, although Lincoln would be a counter-value target, how would airports in random 30,000ish cities do in a full counter-value exchange?
 
The problem would be the lack of delivery vehicles that can throw warheads at CONUS; only ~1390 ICBMs, the SLBMs at sea and in firing positions and whatever long range bombers with long range missiles dedicated to CONUS targets. Given the limitations on MIRV coverage; a MIRV can only hit targets I an oblong 200miles long and 100 miles wide along the flight trajectory, only a few thousand target groups can be attacked which doesn't leave a lot left over to plaster secondary airports.

Europe and Northeast Asia are different matters sine there are a lot more systems to hit these closer targets and such targets will be valuable in the context of warfighting.
 
At the peak of the US and USSR arsenals, would airpots and power plants outside of main target areas be targeted? I live in Nebraska, and I know Lincoln's small airport (like 8 gates) has a runway that is long enough to land a Boeing E-4 on, even though there's no commercial purpose for such a long runway in Lincoln, NE. This made me wonder, although Lincoln would be a counter-value target, how would airports in random 30,000ish cities do in a full counter-value exchange?
I suspect there would have been an effort made by the Soviets to target air fields / air ports within the CONUS that would have been of use to the U.S. during and perhaps after a nuclear exchange.

I doubt most of these targets would have warranted the use of ICBM's and modern SSBN's but they might have been assigned to bombers and older SSBN's. I suspect many of these targets might also have effectively been "counter value" targets as well (with what ever that implies re Soviet Targeting.)
 
I suspect there would have been an effort made by the Soviets to target air fields / air ports within the CONUS that would have been of use to the U.S. during and perhaps after a nuclear exchange.

I doubt most of these targets would have warranted the use of ICBM's and modern SSBN's but they might have been assigned to bombers and older SSBN's. I suspect many of these targets might also have effectively been "counter value" targets as well (with what ever that implies re Soviet Targeting.)

So, like the Eveleth, MNs of CONUS? Not to digress too far, but when we mention MIRV limitations, is it fair to say this may be overstated?
 
In the late 70s I had the "joy" of seeing a best guess targeting map of California. It showed everything, not just what they thought would get thru. Southern California was solid overlapping blast radius circles from the mountains to the sea. Mind you this included second and third strike level targets, so it's reasonable to assume in a long (all day) war an extra long runway in Nebraska might attract notice.
 
Civilian airports that have runways long enough to operate nuclear-armed bombers would probably be nuked, since they could be used as alternate bases for the bomber fleets. Likewise, any civilian airport with combat aviation units, like USAF Reserve or Air National Guard squadrons, would probably be targeted as well.

@creighton, Lincoln Airport used to be Lincoln Air Force Base until 1966. That's why it has a runway that's almost 13,000 feet long. It used to be a base for B-47 bombers and KC-97 Stratofreighter tankers. It was also the command post for a wing of SM-65 Atlas ICBMs during the 1960s. Ever after the Air Force decommissioned the base and turned it over to civilian control, the Nebraska Air National Guard maintained a presence at the airport: the 155th Tactical Reconnaissance Group flying RF-84s and later RF-4s; in 1995 the unit converted to flying KC-135 tankers and was renamed the 155th Air Refueling Wing. During a nuclear war in the 1980s, Lincoln Airport would probably serve as a dispersal base for Strategic Air Command bombers. So it would definitely be a potential target of Soviet nukes.

As for power plants, I've seen maps of hypothetical nuclear war targets in the United States where some of the target dots matched the locations of large power generating stations - it looked like every power plant with a nameplate capacity above 1,000 megawatts was targeted. At the very least, nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams would be nuked: they both generate large quantities of electricity, and nuclear reactors also produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.

On a more general note, here's an example of potential nuclear targets in the state of Missouri. The original map came from FEMA materials in the 1980s. The guy who runs the Nuclear Secrecy blog managed to determine what the targets in Missouri were:

CXJ-31MUQAAuUjS.png


As you can see, in addition to military bases like Whiteman AFB and Fort Leonard Wood, other targets included major civilian airports, major power plants, and even some automobile factories (perhaps the Soviets thought those plants would be retooled to produce military vehicles?). If auto factories were planned to be nuked, then major aircraft factories would probably be hit as well. St. Louis Lambert International Airport is home to a Boeing factory (formerly McDonnell Douglas) where the F-15 and F/A-18 are built and where the Boeing Phantom Works (formerly McDonnell Douglas Phantom Works) was located. In a countervalue strike, I think it's reasonable to expect that any large facility that can support the military-industrial complex - be it auto factories, aircraft factories, oil refineries, etc. - would be a viable target.
 
Civilian airports that have runways long enough to operate nuclear-armed bombers would probably be nuked, since they could be used as alternate bases for the bomber fleets. Likewise, any civilian airport with combat aviation units, like USAF Reserve or Air National Guard squadrons, would probably be targeted as well.

@creighton, Lincoln Airport used to be Lincoln Air Force Base until 1966. That's why it has a runway that's almost 13,000 feet long. It used to be a base for B-47 bombers and KC-97 Stratofreighter tankers. It was also the command post for a wing of SM-65 Atlas ICBMs during the 1960s. Ever after the Air Force decommissioned the base and turned it over to civilian control, the Nebraska Air National Guard maintained a presence at the airport: the 155th Tactical Reconnaissance Group flying RF-84s and later RF-4s; in 1995 the unit converted to flying KC-135 tankers and was renamed the 155th Air Refueling Wing. During a nuclear war in the 1980s, Lincoln Airport would probably serve as a dispersal base for Strategic Air Command bombers. So it would definitely be a potential target of Soviet nukes.

As for power plants, I've seen maps of hypothetical nuclear war targets in the United States where some of the target dots matched the locations of large power generating stations - it looked like every power plant with a nameplate capacity above 1,000 megawatts was targeted. At the very least, nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams would be nuked: they both generate large quantities of electricity, and nuclear reactors also produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.

On a more general note, here's an example of potential nuclear targets in the state of Missouri. The original map came from FEMA materials in the 1980s. The guy who runs the Nuclear Secrecy blog managed to determine what the targets in Missouri were:

CXJ-31MUQAAuUjS.png


As you can see, in addition to military bases like Whiteman AFB and Fort Leonard Wood, other targets included major civilian airports, major power plants, and even some automobile factories (perhaps the Soviets thought those plants would be retooled to produce military vehicles?). If auto factories were planned to be nuked, then major aircraft factories would probably be hit as well. St. Louis Lambert International Airport is home to a Boeing factory (formerly McDonnell Douglas) where the F-15 and F/A-18 are built and where the Boeing Phantom Works (formerly McDonnell Douglas Phantom Works) was located. In a countervalue strike, I think it's reasonable to expect that any large facility that can support the military-industrial complex - be it auto factories, aircraft factories, oil refineries, etc. - would be a viable target.

This is really interesting, thanks!
 
Maps like the one of Missouri are available for other states; you can do an image search or search "FEMA fallout map <state>". The original 1987 document, the NAPB-90 study, is at https://fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/napb-90/ . What makes the Missouri map above special is that the targets are identified; the other state maps just show blast symbols with no identification of why the location was targeted. The maps are hosted on various survivalist sites but that shouldn't be too shocking for anyone interested in nuclear issues.

IMO, it will never be possible to know what industrial targets the Soviets slated for destruction. The FEMA map assumes that industries in urban areas will be targeted (but not necessarily airports), but perhaps the USSR simply targeted the urban area itself. I would imagine that nuclear plants and probably hydroelectric plants were somewhere on the Soviet equivalent of the SIOP. They are more or less self contained and so a hard kill is required; coal, oil and gas plants require supplies of fuel that would be disrupted post-exchange.

For airports, note that Jefferson City with a 6,000 foot runway and Rosecrans Airport with a 8,000 foot runway and an ANG detachment (at present, anyway) were likely targets in MO. Six thousand feet is apparently shorter than a B-52 or KC-135 would like to have, though I saw reports that it could land at shorter runways. As mentioned, Lincoln Airport in NB has a 12,000 foot runway and an ANG refueling detachment (at present). So, if Jefferson City and Rosecrans were considered likely targets by FEMA, then Lincoln would be as well. Indeed, the NB map does show a "designated ground zero" north of the city that might be that airport. (Note only one blast on Omaha -- Offutt AFB certainly had more than one high-megaton warhead assigned to it.)

The NAPB-90 study had 6,139 targets and it states the USSR had 7,800 strategic (ICBM/SLBM) warheads available in 1985. That's 78% of the arsenal allocated to the US. Some of the warheads would have been allocated to European targets (although of course shorter-ranged missiles could target European assets, at least until the INF treaty) and, perhaps more significantly, some targets would be allocated multiple warheads. Also, as often brought up on here, post-Cold War assessments of Soviet weaponry predicted a ~30% failure rate

Airports are not a category in NAPB-90. Power plants were, and the methodology was as follows: the power plants were ranked by capacity and were targeted so as to knock out 75% of total generating capacity. 1,632 power plants were included, the second largest category after chemical plants. (Yes, the study includes only ~1,228 ICBM silos and LCCs, but 2,094 chemical plants.) 199 "other Air Force" targets probably includes ANG facilities and *may* include possible dispersal/landing sites.

Someone mentioned old SSB/SSBNs earlier -- at maximum the USSR had 24 Golf-class SSBs and 8 Hotel-class SSBNs, each with only three missiles, and not all of those would have been on alert. Discounting the delay required for the subs to surface, and discounting the Navy's ability to destroy them, SSB(N)s in bastions off the US coast would offer some of the fastest 'delivery times', and so it's hard to say whether they were really allocated to less-important targets. They might have been allocated to the most important coastal targets, with other SLBM/ICBMs slated to follow up later on.

Maybe someday we'll have something of an idea of what targets the US or USSR had in mind in the 80s. I don't believe there is anything other than "Seven Days to the River Rhine" from the Soviet side, and that is a limited war scenario where the UK and France are explicitly not targeted for nuclear weapons. The bottom line, though, is that Lincoln, NB's airport was almost certainly targeted. And so were the hydroelectric plants near me, at Niagara Falls.

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The NAPB-90 study had 6,139 targets and it states the USSR had 7,800 strategic (ICBM/SLBM) warheads available in 1985. That's 78% of the arsenal allocated to the US. Some of the warheads would have been allocated to European targets (although of course shorter-ranged missiles could target European assets, at least until the INF treaty) and, perhaps more significantly, some targets would be allocated multiple warheads. Also, as often brought up on here, post-Cold War assessments of Soviet weaponry predicted a ~30% failure rate

I'd like to add that many of those 7,800 Soviet ICBMs carried multiple warheads, allowing a single missile to wipe out multiple targets. Half of the land-based ICBMs were SS-18s (10 warheads) and SS-19s (6 warheads), and together they carried about 80% of the warheads in the land-based arsenal. Many SLBMs were MIRV-capable as well: the SS-NX-20, deployed on the Typhoon-class SSBNs, carried 10 warheads; the R-29 series, deployed on the Delta-class SSBNs, could carry up to 7 warheads depending on the missile variant and size of the nukes. Between the land-based and sea-based arsenals, the Soviets had more than enough warheads to hit those 6,139 targets in the United States, with plenty of nukes leftover for strikes on Western Europe, China, and other locales, plus accounting for failure rates.
 
allowing a single missile to wipe out multiple targets

Only if those targets are within an oblong 200 long and 100 miles wide in the direction of the missile flight, a single MIRV missile cannot hit targets in NY and LA and other places in between. ICBM oblongs are going to be north-south, as will SLBMs fired from 'boomer bastions' in Soviet waters; east-west oblongs will be harder to organise in the face of the USN's expertise in ASW.

For example Roche's map above Sioux City, Omaha and Lincoln will all be hit with a single MIRV ICBM or SLBM, but that single dot out on its own (a hydro power station?) will require its own warhead or one from that cluster that appears to be drilling an ICBM field.
 
NABP-90 is probably the best available data looking at what targets (i.e. - designated ground zeros) exist in the US in a late Cold War exchange scenario. It's predecessor TR-82 is a nice resource for anyone looking at this type of scenario in the late 1970s. Unfortunately, I have never been able to find the really interesting part of the study with the is NABP-90 National Aimpoint Database. That has all of the DGZs in the study and is what all those state maps are based on.

To answer the OP, I think that power plants and other key industrial targets to include POL and heavy industrial base were certainly targeted in any Soviet countervalue strike. I agree that hydroelectric and nuclear plants would be the most likely to be targeted due to their relatively resiliency in the post-attack environment. I'd also expect that near every runway greater than 10000 ft would be targeted either directly due to it being an active military field or as a known site for B-52/B-1 dispersal or indirectly when targeting large urban areas.

This obviously depends on what kind of exchange you are looking at and where the US/USSR are on the nuclear escalation ladder. If this is a bolt out of the blue counterforce attack then these secondary/tertiary targets would probably be spared, at least in the first wave. If it's a counterforce to countervalue escalation again many might be spared based on how many deliverable warheads were expended or lost in the first strikes. If it's an everything flies scenario then all these and more will get plastered. Most likely you are looking at some percentage of these types of targets being hit in any full late 1980s exchange - with the interest in "protracted" nuclear war then these secondary industrial targets become more important.

I think the Golf/Hotel/Yankee boats were probably targeted on the SAC bases - they are close enough that warning time can be less than 10 minutes and they are so inaccurate they are perfect for large, soft targets like airbases.
 
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