Plan Totality
Plan Totality was a disinformation ploy established by US General Dwight D. Eisenhower in August 1945 by order of US President Harry S. Truman after the Potsdam Conference.
The plan was for a nuclear attack on the USSR with 20 to 30 atomic bombs. It named 20 Soviet cities for obliteration by a nuclear first strike: Moscow, Gorky, Kuybyshev, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Saratov, Kazan, Leningrad, Baku, Tashkent, Chelyabinsk, Nizhny Tagil, Magnitogorsk, Molotov, Tbilisi, Stalinsk, Grozny, Irkutsk, and Yaroslavl.[1] However, this plan was actually a disinformation ploy. After the two atomic bombings of Japan during August of 1945, the United States government did not have any nuclear weapons ready for use. It had depleted all its fissile uranium in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a large amount of its plutonium. There was enough plutonium to build one more atomic bomb in August of 1945. They were expecting it to take until some time in October to get six more bombs built.[2] By 1946, the United States still had only nine atomic bombs in its inventory, along with twenty-seven B-29 bombers capable of delivering them.[3] Plan Totality was part of Truman's "giant atomic bluff" intended primarily to misinform the government of the USSR.[3][4][5]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, "To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans", Boston, South End Press, 1987, pp. 30–31.
- ^ "The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, A Collection of Primary Sources" http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/72.pdf (PDF). National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 162. George Washington University. 13 August 1945.
- ^ a b Rosenberg, David A (June 1979). "American Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen Bomb Decision". The Journal of American History. 66 (1): 62–87. doi:10.2307/1894674. JSTOR 1894674.
- ^ Clensy, David (1999). "America's Atomic Monopoly". American Resources on the Net (online presence of the American Studies Resource Centre (ASRC), John Moores University). John Moores University. Archived from the original on 20 March 2017. Retrieved 27 March 2017.
- ^ Rhodes, Richard (1 August 1995). Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-68-480400-2. LCCN 95011070. OCLC 456652278. OL 7720934M. Wikidata Q105755363 – via Internet Archive.
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