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26 December, 2016


History: While putting together a recent EstoNews newsletter I stumbled across an interesting webpage in the National Security Archives quite by accident. It presented a now-declassified list of nuclear targets within the USSR. Logically I knew that sites within Eesti might have been targeted, but it was a bit shocking to actually read each town and city name. The list, which was at one point top secret, was released to the public on 22. December 2015. 
Each page is labelled ‘Declassified - Authority NNO-75573’. 



- U.S. Cold War Nuclear Target List
National Security Archives
George Washington University

22. December 2015

"The SAC [Strategic Air Command] Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959, produced in June 1956 ... provides the most comprehensive and detailed list of nuclear targets and target systems that has ever been declassified. As far as can be told, no comparable document has ever been declassified for any period of Cold War history.” 
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"SAC laid out the numbers and types of nuclear weapons required to destroy each DGZ [Designated Ground Zeros]. The nuclear weapons information is completely excised from the report making it impossible to know how many weapons SAC believed were necessary to destroy the various targets. In any event, SAC could anticipate a very large stockpile of nuclear weapons by 1959 to target priority objectives. This was a period when the nuclear weapons stockpile was reaching large numbers, from over 2400 in calendar 1955 to over 12,000 in calendar 1959 and reaching 22,229 in 1961.” 
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"Heavily-targeted Eastern European cities revealed in the list include Berlin; Bucharest; Budapest; Dresden; Leipzig; Riga; Sofia; Tallinn; Tbilisi; Vilnius; Warsaw; and WrocΕ‚aw (Breslau).” 


https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear-Target-List-Declassified-First-Ever/



The following are screenshots of six pages from the Strategic Air Command Atomic Weapons Requirements Study of 1959. Targets in Estonia are circled in red.









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