By contrast, the trend in Soviet fatalities was constant during the decade because U.S. ![]() According to the estimate, in 1964, the Soviets could kill 48 million Americans in a preemptive attack by 1968, with greater numbers of ICBMs in place, they would be able to kill 91 million. Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee, declared that the radioactive fallout from an all-out U.S.-Soviet nuclear war would cause “enormous” numbers of casualties, but they “would represent only a small portion of the total casualties from all causes (blast, thermal radiation, fire, and local fallout).” Įxemplifying the catastrophic scale of the casualties was a 1967 interagency report that reported on the comparative vulnerabilities of the United States and the Soviet Union. Beckler, executive director of President Dwight D. H-bombs were “area weapons” that could destroy large cities or military bases. Once thermonuclear weapons became available during the 1950s, however, the prospects for levels of casualties in the hundreds of thousands and millions became certain. That nuclear conflict could be a mass casualty event, in terms of immediate and prospective deaths and injuries, had been demonstrated in 1945 by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where scores of thousands were killed. government agencies routinely produced estimates of nuclear war devastation, including numbers of fatalities and injuries. However unlikely that prospect, a major nuclear war could involve large numbers of fatalities and injuries on both sides depending on the types of targets and numbers of weapons involved.īeginning in the early years of the Cold War, U.S. Yet, since the days of the Cold War, defense officials have often assumed that a local nuclear conflict could deteriorate quickly into a major nuclear exchange involving NATO countries with strategic forces, notably France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Estimates of Nuclear War Casualties During the Cold War Regularly Underestimated Deaths and DestructionĪpprehensions about the escalation risks involved with the current Ukraine war has produced speculation about the possibility of limited Russian nuclear strikes against targets in that country. national strategies and capabilities) candidly admitted that a nuclear war could never have a “winner.” Carter administration reports on the famous PRM-10 (assessing U.S. ![]() A 1964 report to JFK approximated 134 million American and 140 million Soviet deaths from a theoretical superpower nuclear exchange. strategists produced from the late 1940s into the late 1970s.Įxamples include the landmark Harman Report from 1949 which was the first to spell out (massive) casualty projections while also predicting that resorting to nuclear weapons would not force the Kremlin to capitulate. To put the problem of nuclear casualty estimates in broad perspective, today’s posting of almost two dozen high-level White House, State, Defense, CIA, and other records features a broad range of the fatality estimates and related information U.S. government analyses provided civilian and military leaders with staggering estimates of likely casualties in a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union, but the sheer scale of those projected fatalities kept the reports classified until after the end of the Cold War.Īpprehensions over escalation risks involved with the current Ukraine war have brought the issue of potential casualties, even from possible limited Russian nuclear strikes, back to the forefront of public attention even though averting a superpower conflict is a high White House priority. Washington, D.C., J– For decades starting in the late 1940s, influential internal U.S. FOIA Advisory Committee Oversight Reports.
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