Plan Totality was a
disinformation ploy established by US General
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; ; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, ...
in August 1945 by order of US President
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A leader of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 34th vice president from January to April 1945 under Franklin ...
after the
Potsdam Conference
The Potsdam Conference (german: Potsdamer Konferenz) was held at Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan the postwar peace, while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris P ...
.
The plan was for a nuclear attack on the
USSR
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
with 20 to 30 atomic bombs. It named 20 Soviet cities for obliteration by a nuclear first strike:
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...
,
Gorky,
Kuybyshev,
Sverdlovsk,
Novosibirsk,
Omsk,
Saratov,
Kazan
Kazan ( ; rus, Казань, p=kɐˈzanʲ; tt-Cyrl, Казан, ''Qazan'', IPA: ɑzan is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia. The city lies at the confluence of the Volga and the Kazanka rivers, covering an ...
,
Leningrad
Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...
,
Baku,
Tashkent
Tashkent (, uz, Toshkent, Тошкент/, ) (from russian: Ташкент), or Toshkent (; ), also historically known as Chach is the capital and largest city of Uzbekistan. It is the most populous city in Central Asia, with a population of 2 ...
,
Chelyabinsk
Chelyabinsk ( rus, Челя́бинск, p=tɕɪˈlʲæbʲɪnsk, a=Ru-Chelyabinsk.ogg; ba, Силәбе, ''Siläbe'') is the administrative center and largest city of Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. It is the seventh-largest city in Russia, with a ...
,
Nizhny Tagil
Nizhny Tagil ( rus, Нижний Тагил, p=ˈnʲiʐnʲɪj tɐˈgʲil) is a city in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia, located east of the boundary between Asia and Europe. Population:
History
The prehistory of Nizhny Tagil dates back to the mid- ...
,
Magnitogorsk
Magnitogorsk ( rus, Магнитого́рск, p=məɡnʲɪtɐˈɡorsk, ) is an industrial city in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, located on the eastern side of the extreme southern extent of the Ural Mountains by the Ural River. Its population ...
,
Molotov,
Tbilisi
Tbilisi ( ; ka, თბილისი ), in some languages still known by its pre-1936 name Tiflis ( ), is the capital and the largest city of Georgia, lying on the banks of the Kura River with a population of approximately 1.5 million p ...
,
Stalinsk,
Grozny
Grozny ( rus, Грозный, p=ˈgroznɨj; ce, Соьлжа-ГӀала, translit=Sölƶa-Ġala), also spelled Groznyy, is the capital city of Chechnya, Russia.
The city lies on the Sunzha River. According to the 2010 census, it had a po ...
,
Irkutsk, and
Yaroslavl
Yaroslavl ( rus, Ярослáвль, p=jɪrɐˈsɫavlʲ) is a city and the administrative center of Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia, located northeast of Moscow. The historic part of the city is a World Heritage Site, and is located at the confluenc ...
.
[Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, "To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans", Boston, South End Press, 1987, pp. 30–31.] 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.
["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.]
By 1946, the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
still had only nine atomic bombs in its inventory, along with twenty-seven
B-29s airplanes capable of delivering them.
Plan Totality was part of Truman's "giant atomic bluff" intended primarily to misinform the government of the USSR.
See also
*Operation Dropshot
Operation Dropshot was the United States Department of Defense code name for a contingency plan for a possible nuclear and conventional war with the USSR and its allies in order to counter the anticipated Soviet takeover of Western Europe, the ...
*Operation Unthinkable
Operation Unthinkable was the name given to two related possible future war plans by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee against the Soviet Union in 1945. The plans were never implemented. The creation of the plans was ordered by British Prime ...
*Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine is an American foreign policy that pledged American "support for democracies against authoritarian threats." The doctrine originated with the primary goal of containing Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It wa ...
*Seven Days to the River Rhine
Seven Days to the River Rhine (russian: «Семь дней до реки Рейн», ''Sem' dney do reki Reyn'') was a top-secret military simulation exercise developed in 1979 by the Warsaw Pact. It depicted the Soviet Bloc's vision of a seven- ...
*Feint
Feint is a French term that entered English via the discipline of swordsmanship and fencing. Feints are maneuvers designed to distract or mislead, done by giving the impression that a certain maneuver will take place, while in fact another, or e ...
*509th Composite Group
The 509th Composite Group (509 CG) was a unit of the United States Army Air Forces created during World War II and tasked with the operational deployment of nuclear weapons. It conducted the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in ...
* Fat Man (Post-war development)
* Little Boy (Post-war development)
*Mark 4 nuclear bomb
The Mark 4 nuclear bomb was an American implosion-type nuclear bomb based on the earlier Mark 3 Fat Man design, used in the Trinity test and the bombing of Nagasaki. With the Mark 3 needing each individual component to be hand-assembled by only h ...
* SAC (Establishment and Transfer to USAF)
*RDS-1
The RDS-1 (russian: РДС-1), also known as Izdeliye 501 (device 501) and First Lightning (), was the nuclear bomb used in the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon test. The United States assigned it the code-name Joe-1, in reference to Joseph ...
References
Cold War history of the United States
Nuclear strategy
Military plans
Military deception
Deception operations
Soviet Union–United States relations
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