Technical information on tactics for Cold War nuclear weapons

[CaptainKoloth]

Hello everyone, odd history question, but I just absolutely cannot find the answer anywhere. I want to build a scenario along these lines but don't know how to do so realistically.

Is there any information out there about how the actual, technical, tactical employment of nuclear weapons would have worked in a NATO-Warsaw Pact Cold War gone hot scenario post Cuban Missile Crisis? There is endless information on:

1) Lists of all the weapons themselves and delivery systems
2) High level political considerations about strategic war
3) Speculation about conventional war in that scenario
4) Very-very early Cold War scenarios along these lines like Operation Dropshot and concepts like Pentomic divisions
5) Many, many things where the authors basically throw up their hands and say "nuclear war bad, not worth thinking about at all"

But when it comes to the specific, purely operational questions of how tactical nuclear weapons would have been used on the battlefield in a post ~1965 context, there seems to nothing at all. I'm talking very technical/tactical information, at the level of "one useful tactic would be to have F-111s saturate front-line airfields with gravity bombs, where the air burst would have destroyed aircraft in the open but not hardened shelters", etc., stuff to that effect.

I can only assume that either a) all that information essentially remains classified or b) wasn't even ever seriously considered as a battlefield tool beyond holding in reserve endless lists of targets, or some combination of these two.

Does anybody know of any other sources on this topic that I'm missing?

[Gunner98]

This stuff should be declassified by now but I have no idea how to find it.

I am stretching my memory banks here but: For tactical planning your looking for effects like:
-Rubbleing (surface burst)
-cratering (delay burst)
-Tree blowdown (air burst)
-Blast

Radiation and fallout are way down on the list and you're generally trying to minimize these. Most of the effects your looking for are for blocking movement and immediate neutralization. The plan has to account for your planned movement and how to prevent the other guy from moving.

Weather and ground is a big factor. Heavy rain keeps the radiation localized, high winds are opposite. Bodies of water were avoided in the plan as were the standard list of no-strike targets.

Been a long time but it was really a task of matching the effect needed with yield and weapon that would give it, while disrupting your operations the least.

Hope that helps

[CV60]

You may want to check out RAND corporation to see if they have something along the lines of what you are looking for. I'm pretty sure most of the material remains classified. However, you may be able to mine some nuggets. See for instance this document: https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3011.html

[Coiler12]

There's the unclassified Cold War wargaming guidelines:

Nuclear Play Calculator

OPFOR Nuclear Play Calculator

[nkocevar]

I don't know how accurate all of the information is, but I've found a lot of detailed Cold War/WW3 information and things like old school MS-DOS nuclear weapon effects calculator programs built for D.O.D. on the following website:

http://www.alternatewars.com/

[SunlitZelkova]

I can only assume that either a) all that information essentially remains classified or b) wasn't even ever seriously considered as a battlefield tool beyond holding in reserve endless lists of targets, or some combination of these two.

A is true, B definitely not. These sorts of things were done just as they were in the 50’s and 60’s. They remain classified because the way nuclear weapons would be used today remains very similar to then. Here is a nice YouTube video going over the myth of how nuclear targeting was supposedly random and maniacal- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RZp3LJ-WtrU

Beyond a very vague and general “the US switched from primarily countervalue to counterforce targeting from the mid-60’s onwards” and “the Soviet Union did not have an effective counterforce capability until the late 70’s because they lacked high resolution reconnaissance imagery to locate American siloes and MAFs, and therefore likely primarily did countervalue targeting”, there isn’t anything like what you are looking for available.

It is sometimes possible to determine intended use based on the weapon’s design characteristics, however. For example, the AGM-86B would likely have been used against air defence sites initially while gravity bombs would be used against the then-undefended targets, because it replaced the AGM-28 Hound Dog which had that same role.

[CaptainKoloth]

I can only assume that either a) all that information essentially remains classified or b) wasn't even ever seriously considered as a battlefield tool beyond holding in reserve endless lists of targets, or some combination of these two.

A is true, B definitely not. These sorts of things were done just as they were in the 50’s and 60’s. They remain classified because the way nuclear weapons would be used today remains very similar to then. Here is a nice YouTube video going over the myth of how nuclear targeting was supposedly random and maniacal- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RZp3LJ-WtrU

Beyond a very vague and general “the US switched from primarily countervalue to counterforce targeting from the mid-60’s onwards” and “the Soviet Union did not have an effective counterforce capability until the late 70’s because they lacked high resolution reconnaissance imagery to locate American siloes and MAFs, and therefore likely primarily did countervalue targeting”, there isn’t anything like what you are looking for available.

It is sometimes possible to determine intended use based on the weapon’s design characteristics, however. For example, the AGM-86B would likely have been used against air defence sites initially while gravity bombs would be used against the then-undefended targets, because it replaced the AGM-28 Hound Dog which had that same role.

This is the first really good and logical answer I've heard on this, thanks!

[Coiler12]

There's also this, albeit in a modern Indo-Pakistani context. But the yields are similar.