So I research Cold War science, notably nuclear weapons, for a living. So it’s hard to find documents that make me a little sick to my stomach.

The absolute worst though are the ones in which US generals ran through nuclear war plans and their consequences. Here are a bunch of serious, patriotic, hard-working people, all of whom believe in the ideals of the country and all that, and they’re having conversations about killing of hundreds of millions of people, nearly all of them civilians, because they believed that this was the only way to keep the same thing from happening to American civilians.

Every once in awhile there is someone who says, in essence, “what the fuck are we doing.” It’s rare, but it happened. And that is both kind of refreshing and kind of terrible in its own light — like, if they _never_ asked that, it’d be creepy, but you’d be able to say, “well, they really just never saw it as a problem.” But the fact that every once in awhile someone says something like, “this sounds like the Wannsee conference” (the meeting at which the Nazis hashed out the “Final Solution” of the Jews) makes it clear that these people, somewhere deep inside, know this isn’t really the way that decent people ought to be acting.

Here’s an account from a war planner at a meeting in 1960:

> The meeting took place near mid-December 196057 at Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, attended by Secretary Gates, Deputy Secretary Jim Douglas, myself, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a multitude of general officers representing every unified and specified Command from all over the world. […]

> After presenting a few charts he came to one defining the first wave of attacks to reach the Soviet Union. As I recall, these came from carrier-based fighter-bombers stationed near Okinawa. Having made this disclosure, he stepped aside.

> Thereupon two airmen appeared, one from each side of the long wall lined with maps, each carrying a tall stepladder. Each airman stopped at the edge of the large map which, we now observed, showed China and the Soviet Union and probably some other nearby features on a heroic scale. Each man climbed his tall ladder at the same brisk rate, reaching the top at the same instant as his counterpart. Each reached up toward a red ribbon which, we now noticed, encircled a large roll of clear plastic. With a single motion, each untied the bowknot securing the ribbon at his end of the roll, whereupon the plastic sheet unrolled with a whoosh!, flapped a bit and then dangled limply in front of the map. …

> Each time the briefer described an attack wave the ballet of the ladder masters would be re-enacted. They would untie another pair of red ribbons, a plastic roll would come whooshing down and Moscow would be even further obliterated beneath the little marks on those layers of plastic sheets. There were little marks in other places, too, but somebody noted that a third of Soviet industrial-military strength was concentrated in the greater Moscow area, hence the concentration of bombs dropped on that region. I recall that the plan called for a total of forty megatons—_megatons_—on Moscow, about four thousand times more than the bomb over Hiroshima and perhaps twenty to thirty times more than all the non-nuclear bombs dropped by the Allies in both theaters during more than four years of WWII …

> At the point in the briefing where some bombers were described flying northeast from the Mediterranean on their way to Moscow, General Power waved at the speaker, saying: “Just a minute. Just a minute.” He then turned in his front row chair to stare into the obscurity of uniforms and dusk stretching behind me and said, “I just hope none of you have any relatives in Albania, because they have a radar station there that is right on our flight path, and we take it out.” With that, to which the response was utter silence, Power turned to the speaker and with another wave of the hand, told him to “Go ahead.”

> A subsequent chart shown by the briefer displayed deaths on the vertical axis and time in hours, extending out to weeks, along the horizontal axis. He announced that there were about 175 million people in the USSR. This chart depicted the deaths from fallout alone—not from the direct effects of blast or radiation from a bomb going off, just from fallout subsequent to the attacks when radioactive dust propelled to high altitudes by the initial blast begins to fall back to earth. The curve of deaths, rising as time went by, leveled off at about 100 million, showing that more than half the population of the Soviet Union would be killed from radioactive fallout alone.…

> The briefing was soon concluded, to be followed by an identical one covering the attack on China given by a different speaker. Eventually, he too arrived at a chart showing deaths from fallout alone. “There are about 600 million Chinese in China,” he said. His chart went up to half that number, 300 million, on the vertical axis. It showed that deaths from fallout as time passed after the attack leveled out at that number, 300 million, half the population of China.

> A voice out of the gloom from somewhere behind me interrupted, saying, “May I ask a question?” General Power turned again in his front-row seat, stared into the darkness and said, “Yeah, what is it?” in a tone not likely to encourage the timid. “What if this isn’t China’s war?” the voice asked. “What if this is just a war with the Soviets? Can you change the plan?”

> “Well, yeah,” said General Power resignedly, “we can, but I hope nobody thinks of it, because it would really screw up the plan.” …

> That exchange did it. Already oppressed by the briefings up to that point, I shrank within, horrified. I thought of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, when an assemblage of German bureaucrats swiftly agreed on a program to exterminate every last Jew they could find anywhere in Europe, using methods of mass extermination more technologically efficient than the vans filled with exhaust gases, the mass shootings, or incineration in barns and synagogues used until then. I felt as if I were witnessing a comparable descent into the deep heart of darkness, a twilight underworld governed by disciplined, meticulous and “energetically mindless groupthink aimed at wiping out half the people living on nearly one third of the earth’s surface. Those feelings have not entirely abated, even though more than forty years have passed since that dark moment.

Excerpts from John H. Rubel, _Doomsday Delayed: USAF Strategic Weapons Doctrine and SIOP-62, 1959–1962_ (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2008), 23–39, as quoted in Daniel Ellsberg, _The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner_.

Other than that… this was never classified, but reading the official US guidance for how to dispose of millions of corpses in the event of a nuclear attack is pretty chilling:

> To plan and organize for the disposal of the bodies of millions of civilians killed in an enemy nuclear attack is a grim business, even for those trained and accustomed to the work of mortuaries. The individual care we traditionally bestow on our deceased will not be physically possible when the dead must be counted in the thousands. However, FCDA, with the assistance of its Religious Advisory Committee, is planning for suitable memorial services for the dead in areas devastated by enemy attack. …

> Final legal identification by personal recognition will not be possible because of the large number of dead, wide dispersal of the population after a disaster, and lack of necessary space, time, and labor. Ten thousand unidentified bodies would require over 5.5 acres of space (250,000 square feet) for adequate display. A person would walk 5 miles between the rows of bodies before all were seen and for each 25,000 identifiable bodies probably 10,000 would be unrecognizable because of disfigurement by injury or fire. …

> Mortuary and burial areas selected should have space to accommodate about 25 percent more than the maximum expected number of bodies. … A method of rapid, mechanical grave digging and filling will be needed for the large number of graves required. … If conditions permit, mechanically dug continuous trenches offer the best solution to the burial problem. If the machines available are capable only of digging narrow trenches, bodies can be placed head to foot instead of side by side.

The above and [this amazing flow-chart](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/1956-Mortuary-services-flow-chart.jpg) can be found in the 1956 Federal Civil Defense Administration publication, [“Mortuary Services in Civil Defense.”](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/1956-Mortuary-Services-in-Civil-Defense.pdf)