AMERICA’S CHANGING NUCLEAR STRATEGY : Southland Loaded With Key Targets for Soviet Attack

World War III, if it ever comes to Los Angeles, will mean megatons of hell.

To Soviet war planners, Southern California is loaded with attractive targets: nuclear weapons facilities, military bases, defense plants, military command centers and even a civil defense command center. Except for Washington, Los Angeles would be the ripest urban area in the United States for an attack by the Soviet Union.

Theodore A. Postol, a targeting expert at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Arms Control, has identified 31 likely targets in the Los Angeles area, from Ventura to Newport Beach. Soviet nuclear weapons would wreak near-total devastation on the entire area.

Everything in a 1.8-mile radius of each nuclear blast (as shown on the accompanying map) would be leveled. For another two miles out from the blast, heat and fire would kill every living thing. Mass fires, driven by hurricane-force winds, would burn to a distance of at least eight miles from the blast.

“The attack laid out could set a couple of thousand square miles on fire simultaneously,” Postol said. “Since the heated air over this region would be well above the boiling point of water, and wind speeds would be very high, it is unlikely anyone in this fire zone would survive such an attack.”

Besides the blast effects, the heat would boil water over the entire 2,000 square miles. Toxic clouds of carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases would be generated. Radiation from fallout would be high enough to deliver a lethal dose to any unsheltered person exposed for 10 to 20 minutes anywhere in the area.

Half of the estimated 8 million people who live within the borders of the map almost certainly would die.

Planning a nuclear strike is simple in concept but complex and even subtle in detail, assuming that the Soviets use much the same approach and criteria as U.S. planners.

The first step is to select specific targets. Next is to decide how much damage to inflict, and then the size of the weapon and “delivery system” to carry it--submarine-launched missile, land-based missile or bomber. Flight times from launch to target range from minutes to hours.

Planners must decide whether to set the fuses on their weapons so that they detonate upon striking the ground or while about 1,000 feet above their targets. Destruction is most widespread with airborne detonation, but surface blasts are most effective in cratering targets such as airport runways to preclude their rapid repair.

Planners must also ensure that weapons do not “conflict” with each other. A warhead passing through a cloud of debris rising from an earlier explosion could be disabled, for example. To avoid this danger, missiles arriving from over the Arctic would be timed to detonate in a “south-to-north march,” striking southernmost targets first.

Soviet targeting doctrine--at least through the end of the 1964-82 period during which Leonid I. Brezhnev led the Soviet Union--called for striking first at enemy nuclear weapons and “for the simultaneous mass destruction of . . . the enemy’s military, political and economic potential,” according to William T. Lee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, writing on Soviet plans in the book “Strategic Nuclear Targeting.”

The Soviet Union, like the United States, plans to launch a preemptive strike if it gets unequivocal evidence that a surprise attack is on the way. The first sign of this intention came in the mid-1950s when a spy provided U.S. intelligence with a copy of “Military Thought,” a secret publication of Red Army doctrine, which outlined the strategy of launching a “forestalling blow” when a U.S. attack appeared imminent.

When challenged, the Soviets officially denied that they had a preemptive strategy. And in any case, they were then incapable of carrying it out.

But in the late 1960s, when both sides had intercontinental ballistic missiles that could strike targets half an hour after launch, U.S. satellite photographs indicated that the Soviets had designed their weapons for a first strike.

In particular, their SS-9 ICBM, then their newest, unloaded its three warheads in an impact “footprint” that, when overlaid on Minuteman ICBM fields in the Midwest, matched the distribution of the key launch-control silos, each of which controlled 10 missiles. That capability is meaningful only for a surprise attack, not retaliation, because the targeted U.S. facilities would have fired their missiles before a retaliatory strike could be launched.

In subsequent years, the huge and increasingly accurate Soviet ICBM force reinforced the conclusion that Moscow was building a first-strike force.

The overall Soviet war plan for the United States (known in Pentagon parlance as the RISOP, for Red Integrated Strategic Operations Plan) is believed to cover perhaps 2,500 targets. Chief among them, in approximate priority order:

-- 1,000 Minuteman and MX ICBM silos, 100 ICBM launch control centers for those silos and another 50 command and control facilities and nuclear weapons storage depots. That makes a total of at least 1,150 “hardened”--that is, fortified--weapons facilities targets. These would be hit by at least two and probably three Soviet warheads each.

-- Another 54 nuclear bomber and bomber dispersal bases and at least three naval bases that service missile-firing submarines. Although these are relatively “soft” targets, they would also be targeted for multiple hits to ensure that runways and missiles would be disabled.

-- About 475 other naval bases, airfields, ports, terminals, military camps, depots and other military installations associated with nuclear as well as conventional forces.

-- About 150 industrial facilities that have Defense Department contracts for $1 million a year or more in military hardware.

-- About 325 electric power plants that generate 70% of the nation’s electricity.

-- About 150 oil refineries that turn out 70% of the nation’s petroleum products.

-- About 200 “soft” economic, communications, transport, chemical and civilian leadership targets.

In these last four categories, many targets are located sufficiently close together so that only one nuclear weapon would be needed to destroy them.

In Southern California, first-priority targets are nuclear weapons delivery facilities such as Edwards, March and Norton Air Force bases, where bombers or their refueling tankers could be based. The missile test centers at Vandenberg and Pt. Mugu would also be targeted because weapons might be launched from them.

Nuclear support facilities, including weapons depots and larger airports, would have similarly high priority. Los Angeles International Airport would be a prime target, for example, as would the Marine Air Station at El Toro and the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Center.

Other military targets, with next priority, range from San Pedro Harbor and the Marine Corp base at Camp Pendleton to various communication facilities such as the Air Force Space Division at El Segundo.

Industrial complexes that produce military weapons and components would be targeted. In all, 25 facilities in the Los Angeles region do more than $1 billion a year in government business, including the clusters of Northrop, Lockheed and Rockwell plants at Palmdale and those of Hughes and TRW in the area south of Los Angeles International Airport.

A final target set is civil authority, such as the government buildings that compose the Los Angeles Civic Center.

No communications complexes are identified on the map. U.S. authorities have expressed concern that such sites, if located, might become targets of terrorists.

To simplify the description of nuclear war’s impact on Southern California, it is assumed in the projections represented on the map that the yield of all Soviet weapons is 500 kilotons (equal to 500,000 tons of TNT) because most Soviet warheads are that size. The U.S. bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II was in the 15-20 kiloton range.

Most weapons are set to explode in the air, although some would be timed to explode on the ground--like those intended to crater airport runways--to cause maximum local damage.

Only one nuclear weapon is assigned to each target, although in practice, the military installations probably would be targeted with two to compensate for poor aim and other errors. Hardened facilities such as missile silos and command bunkers, as well as high-priority targets such as airports, could get three or more warheads.

The weapons would not arrive simultaneously. Submarine-launched missiles with the shortest flight time (10 to 20 minutes) would arrive at airfields first, followed by intercontinental missiles (30-minute flight time), whose greater accuracy is required to destroy hardened silos. Last would come cruise missiles and bombers, with flight times of several hours.

On the map, the inner circle of 1.8-miles radius around each “ground zero” represents the area at which the blast wave from the explosion would create an “overpressure” of 15 pounds per square inch (psi) more than normal atmospheric pressure, which is 14.7 psi at sea level. All but the most reinforced buildings in this area would be blown away.

Within half a mile of ground zero, 40 psi overpressure would reduce to rubble even the most monumental and reinforced buildings. Everywhere in the inner circle, the metal of cars would melt. The blast wave at the periphery, arriving six seconds after the detonation, would be accompanied by 350-m.p.h. winds.

About a mile farther out, overpressure of 10 pounds per square inch would destroy “soft” structures such as aircraft hangars and naval shipyard facilities. Still another mile from ground zero--about 3.8 miles--overpressure of 5 pounds per square inch would obliterate residences and other unreinforced frame buildings.

Out to a distance of four miles from ground zero--the outer circle on the map--heat from the fireball, 500 times brighter than the desert sun at noon, would deposit 20 calories per square centimeter of heat on the ground. There would be a “near certainty,” Postol said, that standing structures would be consumed by fire. Winds of about 120 m.p.h. would fan the flames.

Massive fires would occur, Postol calculates, over areas twice the radius of the largest circles, with intensities rivaling the firestorms of Hamburg and Tokyo in World War II. A region of the Los Angeles basin roughly 40 miles by 50 miles could be incinerated.

Within 10 minutes of the near-surface detonations, pieces of intensely radioactive rock and debris would start falling out over large sections of the entire region, according to Postol. Radiation levels might be high enough to kill unsheltered people within 20 minutes. Depending on prevailing winds, radioactive dust would drift as far as 100 miles or more.

Some strategists argue that an all-out attack on Los Angeles of this kind is unrealistic. In their view, Soviet planners would select limited targets, designed to achieve specific military objectives rather than total devastation.

However, as Postol has written in “Managing Nuclear Operations,” the unpredictable nature of many nuclear effects make it almost impossible to implement limited nuclear strikes cleanly and unambiguously.

In addition, more weapons and perhaps more powerful weapons might be used against selected targets such as airfields to insure their destruction. For example, Postol said, Los Angeles International Airport might be hit with as many as four or five 500-kiloton weapons to take out at the same time nearby military facilities such as the Air Force Space Division.

“Nuclear weapons are blunt cudgels,” Postol said. “You can’t go after a nation’s leadership with an attack that is distinct from attacking population, or after large-scale military targets like marshaling yards, nuclear storage depots, airfields and major bases. And certainly if you go after industry, they are indistinguishable from population attacks. And that would be the nature of nuclear war.”

Centers of Political And Military Control: 1-Los Angeles Civic Center Military Bases And Other Military Targets: 2-Los Angeles Air Force Station 3-Air Force Space Division (El Segundo) 4-San Pedro harbor 5-Long Beach harbor 6-Long Beach Naval Base 7-Seal Beach Naval Weapons Center 8-Seal Beach 9-Marine Air Station El Toro 10-Morris Dam (Azusa) Industrial And Economic Facilities: (includes industrial sites that do over $1 billion in government business a year) 11-Northrop Ventura (south Ventura County) 12-Rocketdyne (Canoga Park) 13-Lockheed (Burbank) 14-Aerojet (Azusa) 15-General Dynamics (Pomona) 16-General Dynamics (Rancho Cucamonga) 17-Rockwell (El Segundo) 18-Aerospace Corp. (El Segundo) 19-Northrop (Hawthorne) 20-Hughes (El Segundo) 21-TRW (Redondo Beach) 22-Northrop (Pico Rivera) 23-Rockwell Space Transportation (Downey) 24-McDonnell Douglas (Long Beach) 25-Rockwell Satellites (Seal Beach) 26-McDonnell Douglas (Huntington Beach) 27-Hughes (Fullerton) 28-Northrop (Fullerton) 29-Northrop (Anaheim)30-Rockwell International (Anaheim) 31-Rockwell International Collins Radio (Santa Ana) 32-Ford Aerospace (Newport Beach) Effects Of A 500 Kiloton Air Burst Area within which blast wave exceeds 15 psi overpressure; only highly reinforced buildings survive.Area within which heat exceeds 20 cal/cm2, causing mass fires.