What were people responsible for firing nuclear weapons supposed to do afterwards in the Cold War?

Experience of a downed B52 crew appears in Drakonfin's A Land of Sad Songs which is well worth a read. A Finnish Protect and Survive.

To be fair, it is an exceptionally, unrealistically positive fate, all things considered. They get captured by the Finns, interrogated and then held as POWs/ interned by an intact Finnish military organization. They are even eventually allowed to leave Finland for Sweden only months later, with the chance of getting back to the US (such as it is) later on.

By P&S standards, it's a bona fide feelgood story (by design).

Thank you for the kind words for the TL, BTW.
 
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Without going into current politics, I wonder what the plans are today? About 1500-2000* deployed warheads on either side and with other arsenals in the low hundreds, lots of second-line places will survive, unlike the heyday of SIOP, when the US assigned multiple warheads to individual cement factories.
The guys manning the ICBM silos are probably toast, but in some ANG airfield?

*Plenty enough to send you back to the stoneage regardless.
 
The missile boats would likely head for some port that is intact-even if it's something like Crescent City in CA or Casco Bay in Maine, If there are returning bombers and tankers, they would find ANG bases or civilian airports to return to-but the old joke about heading to Tahiti would still apply.... Most of the carriers at sea would likely survive, even though nowadays, they no longer are certified to carry "Special Weapons" nor are the aircrews qualified to deliver them.
 
Even in a worst-case scenario, there would be enough surviving civilian fields and highways suitable for use.

This is where the expected "brokeback warfare" phase comes from. No system works perfectly, and despite their best efforts to the contrary, neither side could guarantee 100% of the other in the first wave. Some bases, launch silos, bomber squadrons and so on would survive at least the first waves, and would potentially be used in follow-on strikes. If all national C&C broke down, surviving forces might well continue fighting from reflex, hitting each other's remnants because they were never given orders to stop.

For this reason, there were arguments raised periodically that in the event of a nuclear exchange, pains must be taken to not destroy every last vestige of the enemy's command structure. You have to leave someone alive in Moscow or Washington to surrender, after all. This idea was posed fairly early on in the Cold War, actually.
 
There was (and still is) something called Presidential Directive 58: it's still classified, pretty much, but its general terms are known: it lays out the line of succession (Constitutional successors first) in the event of nuclear war. It also suggests that if all lines of communication to civilian leaders fail, the highest-ranking military officer in the chain of command takes over (if the JCS Chair is aboard a command plane, he's in charge, or it could be the one-star aboard Looking Glass...). This is all part of Continuity of Government, and is justifiably still very classified, though some of it has been talked about in books about planning for WW III, documentaries, etc.

You actually see the issue of taking out the enemy leadership in the movie By Dawn's Early Light. As Capt. Cindy Moreau points out: "You do not kill the Enemy's leaders. You know that, they know that. Someone's got to be there to turn it off!"
 
If I worked in a silo and escaped being blown up, think I would avoid talking to people about my job "before the bombs fell" because I don't know how popular I'd be for helping cause Armageddon...
 
Not sure if I would order the air raid sirens to be turned on. Wouldn't it be better to avoid the mass panic? I figure, let them carry out their lives until the nukes go off.
 
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