On Saturday, a publication call Vozpopuli published an article on a 1949 Strategic Air Command war plan called OFFTACKLE which called for a huge strike against the Soviet Union while a joint military evaluation warned that logistics and expected bomber losses made an offensive of that scale impossible to sustain. “Strategic Air Command might have delivered many weapons during the opening attacks, but it risked burning through bombers, trained crews, fuel, tankers, forward bases, and assembly teams before the wider campaign was finished,” writes author Kevin Montien. “Getting one wave through was not the problem. Repeating it was.”
Montien cites a 1949 report by an Air Force panel called the Harmon Board, which assumed that atomic attacks could neutralize roughly 30 to 40% of Soviet industrial production. It also estimated 2.7 million deaths and 4 million injuries, “figures that reveal the staggering human consequences planners were prepared to contemplate at the dawn of the Cold War.”
“Yet the board did not believe bombing alone would force Soviet capitulation,” Montien reports. “It warned that the attacks might instead unify the population and strengthen its will to fight, while Soviet armies could seize much of Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia before industrial disruption slowed them. In other words, unprecedented destruction still did not answer the oldest military question of what happens next.”
The documents that Montien links to have been online for years and the technology and operational concepts of nuclear war have changed considerably since 1949, but the question of “what happens next” is as relevant as ever.