The NEW Targeting Doctrine of TODAY’s Nuclear Powers

What are the odds of a nuclear war kicking off soon? If it does, what areas will be directly targeted by Russia or China? How can we know where to go to have the best chances of being safe? 

Those are some of the questions we are going to take a look at today, while I provide you with all the tools available to figure these things out for yourself and do your own personalized nuclear threat assessment for your area. 

Our focus will be a new report that was issued just a couple months ago by the Federation of American Scientists, and it represents the most recent and thorough examination of nuclear targeting doctrines since the days of the Cold War. This is a massively important update that details modern strategies for all 9 nuclear armed states, and a must have for any collapse prepper. in addition to this article, there is a companion video for the discussion that is available on my YouTube channel as well.

So, let’s talk about it. I will tell you where to get it, and how to use it. 

Changing Nuclear Doctrines

The various additions and enhancements to global nuclear arsenals in the past decade are certainly more inline with the old Cold War thinking than not, and given that we are a bit overdue for the next big international conflict, none of it should be very surprising. Looking at the major moves, particularly China’s nuclear buildup, Russia’s nuclear doctrinal changes and modernization of delivery systems, and of course NATO’s response to these, many people are wondering about how nuclear-armed states intend to use their nuclear weapons, and against which targets, in what some are hoping is only a new Cold War. 

Details about how countries will be targeting locations with their nuclear weapons are usually some of the most closely held national secrets. Targeting information rarely reaches the public, and discussions almost exclusively take place behind closed doors. Most often in the depths of national military headquarters or in the conference rooms of defense contractors. The general public is, to a significant extent, excluded from those discussions, and even general ideas about such things are rarely pushed in the media. There are a couple of different reasons for this, not the least of which is the governmental desire to keep the populace somewhat ignorant of nuclear weapons strategies and capabilities. Especially targeting. Now, while this can seem borderline undemocratic, there is a good reason for it. Not good for the populace, of course, but good for the government.

Really, I could go into a lot of depth about that, but it all comes down to a simple key point, and that is that if you know a decent amount about general military affairs, strategy, technology, and geopolitics, it really isn’t all that hard to make some pretty good guesses about where nations will target their nuclear arsenals. In addition to that, some basic knowledge about those aforementioned subjects also gives you a pretty good handle on being able to see when escalations may be reaching the point where nuclear weapons may end up being used.

And those are things that the governments of the world, all of them, don’t want their citizens to be able to do. From their perspective, they need to maintain order and avoid any national panic, especially right as a nuclear escalation is imminent. They will not have resources to spare for such things, and chaos will just make the overall damage worse, in the end. That is a gross oversimplification, obviously, but it holds well enough for our purposes here. The main thing to take away is that governments don’t want people knowing too much about the technology of nuclear weapons, the strategies for their use, and especially the doctrines regarding actual use and targeting. They don’t want people worrying about the Russian “Perimeter” system and how it may have been changed under Putin… They don’t want them thinking about things such as the existence of nuclear artillery shells made to be fired out of standard artillery pieces already deployed on the battlefield… And they most certainly don’t want people discussing the realities of things like Mutually Assured Destruction, which in reality may not be either mutual, or assured. 

Those are some reasons. Other reasons regarding specific targeting information are simply national security precautions. Revealing targeting information could open up a country’s nuclear policies and intentions to intense scrutiny by its adversaries, its allies, and – as we just mentioned – its citizens. And that just won’t do at all.

staying ahead of the data

This presents a significant challenge for both nuclear powers and the international community. Despite the profound implications for national and international security, the intense secrecy means that most individuals who would bear the consequences of nuclear use, and also the lawmakers that vote on nuclear policies remain ignorant. They do not have much understanding of how countries make fateful decisions about what to target during wartime, how they do it, or why. When the legislators of nuclear power nations approve military spending bills that enhance nuclear forces, they often do so with little knowledge of how those forces would be used. And individuals across the globe do not know whether they live in places that are likely to be nuclear targets, or what the consequences of a nuclear war would be.

Basically, everyone other than those pushing the buttons and giving the orders has little to no real awareness of what may be about to happen. Thus, they not only can’t foresee it early, they can’t adequately prepare for it either. And that is a huge problem for a collapse prepper. That is why learning about such things in detail is a very important part of collapse awareness and preparedness.

My previous professional positions, as well as many decades of studying such things and paying attention to nuclear doctrine, have given me even more than the general understanding that I would need to prepare for such things and see them coming, but not a day goes bty when I am not absolutely astounded by the lack of knowledge some people have regarding both nuclear warfare and national doctrines and capabilities. If it isn’t the “MAD prevents everything” argument, it ends up being either the “No one would obey such an order” one, or the “Russian nukes probably don’t even work LOL” ridiculousness.

I mean, I hate to always be the one shitting in your soup, but MAD isn’t a doctrine, it is a theory that resides solely in academic circles. And yes, the people involved would most definitely follow those orders, and there are contingencies in place to ensure it. And yes, sorry, but of all the things the Russians have failed to maintain well, their Strategic Rocket Forces aren’t one of them. They built more than they needed to destroy the world several times over, so I promise that enough of them will work to make a huge mess of things. 

Prepping for nuclear war

Anyway, while it’s obviously reasonable for governments to keep the most sensitive aspects of nuclear policies secret, the rights of their citizens to have access to general knowledge about these issues is equally valid. People need to have real knowledge and understanding about such things so they know about the consequences to themselves should such a war kick off, and so that they can make informed decisions about their votes when it comes to nuclear policies. Not that such really matters anymore. The real advantage to being informed is that you can take steps to prepare for likely scenarios, and you can see them coming with enough time to do something about it. 

So, when it comes to collapse preppers, we should all generally be able to know whether our cities or nearby military bases are nuclear targets and whether our government’s policies and doctrines make it more or less likely that nuclear weapons will be used. Beyond that, we should also be familiar enough with geopolitical affairs, military matters, and nuclear technologies to make assessments of current and developing threats in real time. 

In short, we need to know where the nukes are going and when they will be more likely to do so. While nuclear war doesn’t just happen overnight, the signs of its imminence may be missed by those who don’t understand what they need to pay attention to. By the time it gets to the point of actually happening, you won’t be reading about it in the newspaper, you will be watching it unfold in real time.

For myself, it is my last remaining mission in this dying civilization to empower and inform as many people as I can. I want all of us to be collapse aware, and prepared with factual information about critical topics that most affect us now, during SHTF, and in the post-collapse world that follows. There are a great many factors that are all leading us towards the collapse of civilization, from climate change and resource scarcity to geopolitics and economics. All of them are accelerating at different rates, and all are acting as force-multipliers on each other, okay? But, when you get right down to the nitty gritty of it all, there are a few true driving forces behind them all, and there is only one real way that the end will begin. 

All roads lead to nuclear war. That is a subject for another article, and it is something that I have addressed before in my book and on my YouTube channel, but for now, all we need to keep in mind is that we all need to know as much as we can about nuclear war and what it means for each of us in our own areas of operation. To that end, I try to help fill some of these significant knowledge gaps whenever I can.

The new report

Now, here on my website I have created a kind of tool and resource collection for people to get educated about nuclear war, and also to make an accurate threat assessment for themselves and their area. I made a video about that before, which I will link right here, I highly suggest you take a look. 

But today we are talking about a new development in the form of the most recent report to come out regarding nuclear targeting. This report here, “Planning For The Unthinkable: The Targeting Strategies Of Nuclear-Armed States.” It was published just a couple months ago by the Federation Of American Scientists, and it gives a complete and updated rundown of everything we know and don’t know about each country’s nuclear targeting policies and nuclear doctrines. It also goes into how those plans are formulated, how they have changed in recent decades, and what recent events have influenced them. It isn’t a comprehensive guide to nuclear targeting, such a thing doesn’t exist, but it does serve as a primer to get people informed and able to make your own logical conclusions about such things. Once you come to understand exactly how and why nuclear war will be waged, you can easily deduce a few things regarding what will, and will not, be targeted.

With all of the secrecy surrounding nuclear targeting information, it’s important to recognize the limitations of using exclusively open sources to evaluate these things, but at the end of the day you have to make the best threat assessment that you can and then work with that. Some things can be harder to figure out, such as whether one city could be targeted by the Russians over some other city, and some things are easily understood once you grasp the standard doctrinal concepts like counterforce, counter value targeting, and especially for those of us in the US, nuclear sponge doctrine. Figuring out which places will be higher risk than others becomes a bit more simplified once you have a grasp of the basic principles involved. It all comes down to making your best educated guesses, but first you need to be educated, right? 

And that is what it will ultimately be: your best guess. There is very little publicly available information about the nuclear strike plans themselves or the specific military doctrines that lead to them. For less transparent countries like Russia and China that are currently forming up in an alliance of opposition to the west in general, and the US in particular, we have to try first to understand what their general plans are regarding geopolitical aspects of their national direction. A country will have a much different nuclear strike plan if they are thinking primarily in defensive terms than the plan they would institute when gearing up for offensive actions. Since these are nations where targeting strategy and plans are rarely discussed in public, you need to use media sources, intelligence estimates, and nuclear force structure analysis to make educated assumptions about targeting strategies. 

Conclusion

At any rate, while I have already laid out a significant amount of the groundwork for you on the aforementioned resource page, this new report is the first comprehensive update to come out in quite some time, so it had to be taken into consideration. For those of you who are too young to have to retrain your mind out of the old cold-war structural analysis, this report can serve as your new basis for starting out. I highly recommend incorporating it into your planning process. I have added it to the resource list now, so I hope you will give it a look.

Look, as uncomfortable a truth as it is, this really is where everything eventually leads. The same international and geopolitical pressures that always led to conflict in the past are not gone at all. Far from it. They have really only been suppressed by the power of the US and the international order instituted by the winning side after WW2. And we all know that, when you repress urges and feelings, they eventually explode with much greater force than they originally had. We are starting to see this play out, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine being the main breach of the peace, followed closely by the Middle East mess as Israel and Iran get sandland all fired back up. But even little sparks show the cracks in our structure, like the brief flare ups between India and Pakistan, or Thailand and Cambodia. Soon, we will have the China/US showdown over Taiwan to worry about as well…

It is all the same thing. It is the building pressures of all aspects of collapse, whether it is the economic and political ones you want to focus on, or the force being applied by climate change and resource scarcity. It all leads to conflict, and eventually nuclear conflict which brings us to collapse. Our job right now is to look at those facts clearly and emotionlessly, and make what plans we can to prepare for them.

That is why I am here writing this article, and why you are reading it. So, take advantage of the tools we have available, and make your plans. The world isn’t getting any more stable, and time is running out.