Letter sent to New York Times:
Your
extraordinary report “1950s U.S. Nuclear Target List Offers Chilling Insight,” NY
Times, Dec. 23, (
www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/us/politics/1950s-us-nuclear-target-list-offers-chilling-insight.html) coming as it does at the start
of the season of peace and goodwill to all men and women, concentrates the mind
on how insane was the policy of mutually assured destruction (M.A.D.) throughout
the so-called Cold War between the super atomic-armed powers
The key document reported was the MAD target list is titled
“Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, developed in in 1956, the year of
my birth in Wales in Great Britain.
Eleven years
ago, the British equivalent of the National Archives and Records Administration,
hosted a blood
curdling exhibition opened at its London base, titled ‘Secret State.’.
My own home city of Swansea was listed
as one of the 20 major cities in a Top Secret report ‘Probable Nuclear targets in the United Kingdom: Assumptions for
Planning’- prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee. (Annex A, File
TNA: DEFE 4/224, dated November 2nd,1967).
One document – the ‘Strath Report’-
prepared in 1955, so secret it was not publicly released until last 2003, was the best estimate of the atomic war experts
of what would have happened if Britain was attacked by the Soviet Union with
just 10 Hydrogen (H-) bombs
It concluded 12 million people would be incinerated in the
first few seconds with another 4 million seriously injured, even before the
radiation clouds had made their poisonous way across the country.
However, there were some instances of
black humor.
Scientists working on an atomic land
mine - meant for deployment underground in Germany’s northern plains - realized
that it could fail in winter if vital components become too cold, so they
explored ways of keeping the inner workings warm.
One proposal put forward consisted of
filling the casing of the mine with live chickens, which would give off
sufficient heat - prior to suffocating or starving to death - to keep the
delicate explosive mechanism from freezing.
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