Talk:Plan Totality

Disinformation

If this was a disinformation plan, that presumes it was secret but "leaked" to the Soviets. Was it? Or was it an unduly optimistic plan, designed to be implemented if war broke out - provided that the USA had enough bombs. It there evidence that it was a serious plan or misinformation, or are either speculation?122.59.167.152 (talk) 09:50, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

The section on disinformation is inaccurate to begin with. According to the Nuclear Weapons Frequently Asked Questions or NWFAQ found at http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq8.html, there was ample material for over 100 bombs, it was the initiators which were the holdup. And for combat use, as demonstrated at Los Alamos, those could be fabricated in a matter of weeks. (Downix (talk) 23:33, 15 December 2015 (UTC))

I'm not sure if whether or not that estimate incudes semi-processed and raw material (ore). Also, by 1946 Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford were all shadows of their former selves due to the end of the Manhattan project & post-war cutbacks, so I doubt that the U.S. would have been easily able to match their wartime efforts in anything resembling a short timescale, even leaving aside the initiator issue. Ceannlann gorm (talk) 12:29, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Was Totality a nuclear plan or it is just "JIC 329/1" to be nuclear.

Hello. The source "Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, "To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon's Secret War Plans", Boston, South End Press, 1987, pp. 30-31." explicitly says that "Totality" was non-nuclear plan ("conventional war"). And 20-30 A-bomb targets were not in the Totality, it was in other AirForce study (not plan):

Soon after returning from Potsdam, Truman ordered General Dwight Eisenhower to draft a top secret battle plan for a possible all-out war with the Soviet Union. The war plan was called TOTALITY, which analyzed the results of a massive conventional war with the Soviet Union. 9 As British millitary historian John Bradley has noted, "TOTALITY was the first emergency war plan by one erstwhile ally against the other." TOTALITY, which only considered the effects of a conventional war with the Soviet Union, was taken one step further by the Air Force. Just two months after Nagasaki, the Joint Chiefs of Staff commissioned their Joint Intelligence Committee to began drafting a secret study of an atomic attack on the Soviet Union called JIC 329/1, or "Strategic Vulnerability of the U.S.S.R. to a Limited Air Attack." Figuring the devastating power of the atomic bomb into the formulation of war plans, the study analyzed the impact of a 20 to 30 A-bomb first strike on the Soviet Union. 10

Can anybody check text of other early sources? `a5b (talk) 16:25, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: HIST 432, International Relations in the 20th Century 2022

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 9 January 2023 and 9 April 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Armtank2001 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Armtank2001 (talk) 20:18, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

the article lacks an answer to the obvious question: WHY?

I don't get it- why would we want to bluff about having more nukes than we actually did? That would obviously get them moving toward making their own nukes ASAP, right? Or maybe we thought they were about to attack us?

I have a declassified report of Truman's.. its a discussion of NSC-68, released by Kissinger. Not sure if its discussing plan Totality. Its very long, but from what I got skimming it, nuking Russia back to the stone age was his plan. Because they don't value democracy.. among other things. (Note: in 1950, we didn't either. Most people of color couldn't vote, It took us 189 years to get to universal suffrage. It took the Bolsheviks 1 year. Maybe we hated them for their freedom? ;) Yes, I'm aware it didn't last long. There is something to be said for the slow-and-steady that 1st gen Marxists just didn't understand. They are like parents! :P

The only problem is I don't remember where I got this stupid PDF file, so I can't actually source it. Maybe somebody can drop a 1-liner on why the big bluff was considered necessary, is really all I came here to say. Know Einstein (talk) 09:47, 10 March 2023 (UTC)