APOCALYPSIS

GUIDE · APO-06B

Nuclear targets & high-risk zones

This guide is not a list of doomed cities. It is the logic behind the target — why atomic war planners pick certain points on the map, what declassified documents reveal, and how to assess geographic risk without slipping into panic or complacency.

Two doctrines: counterforce and countervalue

Counterforce aims at the adversary's arsenal — ICBM silos, bomber bases, submarine ports, command nodes. Countervalue aims at what the society values — cities, industry, infrastructure. No real plan is pure; the American SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) and its Soviet equivalent always combined the two into packages.

What the declassified documents show

  • SAC Atomic Weapons Requirements Study (1956, declassified 2015 by the National Security Archive) — lists over 1,200 cities in the Soviet bloc and China, prioritized by class (Priority 1 to 3) with an explicit "population" target category.
  • SIOP-62 (Kennedy) — 3,500 targets, ~80% classified as military but with massive urban collateral by proximity.
  • FEMA TR-82 (1990) — public map of US "fallout risk zones", the source of the "FEMA nuclear target map" folklore. It was never a Soviet target list; it was the inverse — domestic contamination modeling over plausible targets.
  • Nukemap (Alex Wellerstein, Stevens Institute historian) — educational tool applying damage curves to arbitrary coordinates; the methodological backbone of most modern "target map" analyses.

The five high-priority target classes

  • ICBM silos — Malmstrom (MT), Minot (ND), F.E. Warren (WY/NE/CO) in the US; Kozelsk, Tatishchevo, Uzhur fields in Russia. Rural low-density areas, but each would absorb multiple warheads in any counterforce exchange.
  • Strategic bomber bases and SSBN ports — Barksdale, Whiteman, Minot; Kings Bay (GA), Bangor (WA). Hardened targets with high kill-before-launch value.
  • Command, Control, and Communications (C3) nodes — NORAD Cheyenne Mountain, STRATCOM Offutt, the Pentagon; Russian equivalents at Kuntsevo and Chekhov. Destroying these is what makes "decapitation" a doctrinal objective.
  • Defense-industrial complexes and refineries — Houston, Baton Rouge, Norco (LA), container ports, pipeline hubs. Not about immediate casualties; about disabling the wartime economy.
  • Population centers in countervalue packages — political capitals, metro clusters, financial hubs. Historically the last layer; today, with reduced arsenals, they may return to the top in escalation scenarios.

Fallout: why the risk map is not the target map

A surface burst on a hardened silo produces ten to a hundred times more radioactive fallout than an airburst over a city — the fireball touches the ground and vaporizes rock, which becomes contaminated aerosol. A rural resident 300 km downwind of a silo field can receive a higher dose than an urban resident of a city hit by airburst. It is counterintuitive, and the reason risk maps look "wrong" compared to target lists.

How modern planners assess zones

  • Population density within 5 km of a declared military target.
  • Prevailing wind direction over silo fields (the US Great Plains belt carries fallout east-northeast).
  • Concentration of critical infrastructure — refineries, high-voltage substations, fiber communication hubs.
  • Local response capacity: hospital bed counts, strategic national stockpile, siren reach.
  • Habitable shelter density — Swiss-level saturation is rare; most Western countries have near-zero effective coverage.

Scenarios and scales

  • Limited exchange (dozens of warheads) — mostly counterforce; regional devastation; moderate climate effect (see the Nuclear Winter guide).
  • Reduced strategic exchange (100–500) — mix of counterforce and countervalue; multiple capitals hit; continental fallout.
  • Full exchange (1,500+) — New START envelope; cities above 500k population have a high probability of appearing in some execution package.
  • Accidental escalation — "launch on warning" scenarios documented by Petrov (1983) and Arkhipov (1962) show the real map depends on who reads the ambiguous signal, not on published doctrine.

What you can do with this information

  • Check the distance from your municipality to the nearest declared military target (bases, silos, ports, capitals).
  • Check the prevailing wind direction — if you are downwind of a target, fallout risk dominates over proximity.
  • Locate the nearest usable shelter: dense underground (parking garage, subway), preferable to an interior room in a light building.
  • Keep the fundamentals discussed in the solar storm guide — water, power, communication — since they apply to any infrastructure collapse.
  • Do not build target spreadsheets by city name. It does not change personal decisions and it feeds anxiety without return.

Technical sources

  • National Security Archive — SAC Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959 (declassified, 2015).
  • Kaplan, Fred — "The Wizards of Armageddon" (1983); "The Bomb" (2020) — history of SIOP and doctrine.
  • Wellerstein, Alex — NUKEMAP and Restricted Data (blog); methodological reference.
  • Kristensen, Hans M. — FAS Nuclear Notebook; updated US/Russia/China inventories.
  • Reed, Thomas — "At the Abyss" (2004) — insider view of the American strategic complex.
  • FEMA TR-82 (1990) — US domestic fallout risk map.
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