According to the study's authors, the targets would expose civilians and "friendly forces and people" to high levels of deadly nuclear fallout. The devastation would come via bombs between 1.7 and 9 megatons and a proposed 60 megaton bomb. (A megaton equals about 70 times the destruction of a single Hiroshima.) Specific targets were chosen with particular regard to crippling the Soviet Union's air capabilities, which at the time (before subs and ICBMs became dominant) would have been the most effective means of limiting the effectiveness of a counterstrike."SAC laid out the numbers and types of nuclear weapons required to destroy each DGZ," writes William Burr, an analyst with the National Security Archive, in an accompanying essay. "The nuclear weapons information is completely excised from the report making it impossible to know how many weapons SAC believed were necessary to destroy the various targets. In any event, SAC could anticipate a very large stockpile of nuclear weapons by 1959 to target priority objectives. This was a period when the nuclear weapons stockpile was reaching large numbers, from over 2400 in calendar 1955 to over 12,000 in calendar 1959 and reaching 22,229 in 1961."Burr elaborates on the civilian aspect of the list:In other words, people as such, not specific industrial activities, were to be destroyed.
The study, which can be viewed in PDF form here, doesn't represent a military plan so much as it does guidance to those crafting those actual final target lists. But it does offer a new glimpse into just how far we were willing to go even in the Cold War's earliest days.What is particularly striking in the SAC study is the role of population targeting. Moscow and its suburbs, like the Leningrad area, included distinct "population" targets (category 275), not further specified. So did all the other cities recorded in the two sets of target lists. In other words, people as such, not specific industrial activities, were to be destroyed. What the specific locations of these population targets were cannot now be determined. The SAC study includes the Bombing Encyclopedia numbers for those targets, but the BE itself remains classified (although under appeal).
The SAC study does not include any explanation for population targeting, but it was likely a legacy of earlier Air Force and Army Air Force thinking about the impact of bombing raids on civilian morale.