[iSnow]

>The primary targets are the enemy's own nuclear weapons, military assets and infrastructure come second and population centres last of all.

Humbug:

"“The authors developed a plan for the ‘systematic destruction’ of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted ‘population’ in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin and Warsaw,” Burr pointed out. “Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day, which prohibited attacks on people per se (as opposed to military installations with civilians nearby).”

But other contemporary sources make it abundantly clear the Pentagon saw any person tied to a war effort as a viable military target. A now declassified 1952 U.S. Navy film on chemical and biological warfare specifically states a goal “to incapacitate the enemy’s armed forces and that portion of his human population that directly supports them.” With similar thoughts in mind, the U.S. Army had looked into radiological warfare and built deadly dirty bombs."

(http://warisboring.com/articles/this-cold-war-study-is-a-cat...)

Civilians have always been targets and always will be.

[simonh]

Of course they are, and “Purposefully targeting civilian populations as such directly conflicted with the international norms of the day" is complete and utter guff. This was immediately after the systematic, thorough going population centre bombing campaigns of WW II. Which planet are these people from?

nevertheless the fact remains that most nuclear weapons are tactical or mid-range and therefore not primarily suitable for population attack. The primary reason Russian tank divisions didn't swoop through Germany in the 1950s wasn't because atom bombs would rain down on Moscow (although they would) it was because atom bombs would rain down on the tank divisions.