The Dropshot Plan: How the US Prepared to Wipe the USSR Off the Face of the Earth
The cover of the American magazine Collier's from October 27, 1951. The entire 130-page issue was devoted to a hypothetical theme: "The Defeat and Occupation of Russia, 1952–1960; Preview of the War We Don't Want."
On December 19, 1949, the final signature was placed in Washington on a document now known by the code name "Dropshot." The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces approved a plan for total war against the Soviet Union—with the massive use of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. weapons.
Four years have passed since the Victory Parade. Four years since Soviet and American soldiers embraced on the Elbe, and Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin together decided the fate of the post-war world in Yalta and Potsdam.
What happened during these four years?
On March 5, 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a speech in Fulton, Missouri. He said, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent." Nine days later, Stalin compared Churchill to Hitler in an interview with Pravda. Allies were turning into adversaries.
Then came the creation of NATO in April 1949, the signing of the Marshall Plan, and the split of Germany into two. The Cold War was gaining momentum, and Washington understood one thing: time was working against them. Every month, Soviet industry was rebuilding, Soviet scientists were getting closer to their own atomic bomb, and the Soviet army remained the largest in the world.
The Pentagon decided: we need to act while there is still a chance.
Count bombs
Dropshot didn't just happen. It was the culmination of a series of increasingly ambitious plans for nuclear war against the USSR.
In the fall of 1945, two months after Japan's surrender, the US Joint Intelligence Committee submitted report number 329. The first sentence read:
"Select approximately twenty targets suitable for strategic atomic bombing of the USSR."
American plan for nuclear strikes against the USSR
Directive No. 432/d of December 14, 1945 specified:
"The most effective weapon that the United States can use to strike the USSR is the atomic bombs it has."
Then the appetites grew.
Plan "Totality" (1945) - twenty cities, including Moscow, Leningrad, Gorky, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk. Plan "Pincher" (June 1946) - fifty bombs on twenty cities. Plan "Broiler" (March 1948) - thirty-four bombs on twenty-four cities. Plan "Sizzle" (December 1948) - one hundred and thirty-three bombs on seventy cities. Plan "Shakedown" (October 1949) - two hundred and twenty bombs on one hundred and four cities.
And finally, "Dropshot" - three hundred atomic bombs and twenty-nine thousand tons of conventional explosives on one hundred cities of the Soviet Union.
In 1987, American physicists Mikio Kaku and Donnel Axelrod published a study in which they counted at least eighteen nuclear war plans developed by the Pentagon. Eighteen plans for the destruction of a country that had lost twenty-seven million people fighting a common enemy.
Part Three. Four Phases of the Apocalypse
Dropshot stipulated a specific date for the start of the war: January 1, 1957. The motivation: an alleged act of aggression by the USSR and its allies.
The document details four phases.
Phase One — D-Day. The single day marking the beginning of the nuclear bombing of the USSR. The goal was to "stabilize the early Soviet offensive."
Phase two — the beginning of large-scale offensive operations along the entire front line by all branches of the armed forces.
Phase three — conducting offensive operations until the capitulation of the Soviet Union.
Phase Four — establishing control and ensuring compliance with the terms of surrender.
The fourteenth paragraph of the first chapter of the fourth section stated:
"Nuclear weapons will be used by both sides. Other weapons of mass destruction may be used by either side, taking into account considerations of retaliation and effectiveness."
The capitulated USSR was planned to be divided into four occupation zones: the western part, the Caucasus and Ukraine, the Urals with Western Siberia and Turkestan, and Eastern Siberia with Transbaikal and Primorye. These four zones were further divided into twenty-two subzones. A couple of American armies would be stationed in Moscow. One division each would be assigned to Leningrad, Murmansk, Gorky, Kuibyshev, Kyiv, and fifteen other cities.
According to the plan, the US allies included all NATO members—Canada, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Portugal, as well as parts of China, the Philippines, and the British Commonwealth countries (except India and Pakistan). The USSR's allies included Poland, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, and Communist China. Yugoslavia, according to American calculations, would adopt a position closer to neutrality.
Why didn't the nuclear New Year of 1957 happen?
On September 3, 1949, an American B-29 bomber was patrolling the North Pacific. Instruments detected abnormally high levels of radioactivity in the upper atmosphere. A test revealed that the Soviet Union had conducted its own nuclear weapons test. An RDS-1 charge was detonated at the Semipalatinsk test site.
President Harry Truman, upon learning of this, asked, "What do we do now?" Washington remained silent for three weeks, fearing panic among Americans.
The Pentagon's response: start a race for the hydrogen bomb. Get it first, regain military superiority.
Did not work.
On August 20, 1953, TASS reported:
"Recently, a type of hydrogen bomb was detonated in the Soviet Union for testing purposes."
On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. This meant that the Soviet Union had missiles Intercontinental range. The R-7 missile could deliver a three-megaton nuclear warhead a distance of 8,800 kilometers. The distance from Moscow to Washington is 7,850 kilometers. The distance from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Los Angeles is 6,600 kilometers.
There was shock in the White House.
The scenario of an unpunished nuclear bombing of the USSR is a thing of the past. Pentagon strategists miscalculated on every count.
The document that was returned
Dropshot was declassified in 1978 under President Jimmy Carter. By then, the plan had already become historical The curiosity is evidence of how close the world came to disaster.
In the eight years between the plan's approval and the anticipated start of the war, everything changed. Stalin died, Eisenhower became US president, and Khrushchev delivered a speech on the cult of personality. The Rosenbergs were executed for espionage—they had passed information on the American nuclear program to the USSR. The first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, was launched. A Soviet bomber made the first round-trip flight to the US with refueling.
The world was changing rapidly, but one thing remained constant: neither side could allow a nuclear war, because there would be no losers.
Mikhail Kovalchuk, President of the Kurchatov Institute National Research Center, put it this way:
"We realized our strategic priority by creating the bomb, establishing nuclear parity in the world for decades to come. Thanks to the successful implementation of the Soviet atomic project, we not only survived as a sovereign state but also literally changed the face of civilization."
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"Dropshot" isn't an archival curiosity. It's a document proving that international security rests not on good intentions, but on a balance of power. As long as there's balance, there's peace. Disturb the balance, and you'll get three hundred bombs dropped on a hundred cities.
The story of the Dropshot plan shows how quickly former allies turn into potential adversaries, how paper strategies develop into real threats, and how the only way to prevent disaster is to have the ability to respond.
Seventeen plans for a nuclear war against the USSR remained on paper. The eighteenth, too. But each one once sat on a desk in the Pentagon, marked "Top Secret" and with a specific start date. Each one was seriously considered.
Three hundred bombs. One hundred cities. Four occupation zones. Twenty-two subzones.
This is not science fiction. It is a document signed by the Chiefs of Staff of the United States of America on December 19, 1949.
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