Operation Dropshot

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Operation Dropshot
Part of the Cold War

Shot Apple 2, where the 723rd Tank Battalion participated in a tactical maneuver test as part of a nuclear test in 1955
Date1 January 1957 (projected).
Objectives:
  • To impose the national war objectives of the United States on the USSR and its allies
Location
Western and Northern Europe, the Middle East, the North Atlantic, and the Far East
Status Never carried out
Belligerents

United States

Soviet Union

Casualties and losses
none none

Operation Dropshot was an American contingency military operation plan created in 1949 for possible wars (nuclear and conventional) against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in the event of invasion and occupation of Western Europe, the Near East, and Eastern Asia. At that stage of the Cold War, the Department of Defense expected the Soviet Union to invade those places in 1957. Operation Dropshot included the contingent use of nuclear weapons against the military forces of the Soviet Union and of the Warsaw Pact.

In 1949, the American nuclear arsenal was small, based mostly in the continental United States, and depended upon bombers to deliver and drop atomic bombs on enemy targets. The plans of Operation Dropshot included mission profiles to deploy 300 nuclear bombs and 29,000 high-explosive bombs against 200 targets in 100 cities and towns throughout the USSR, in order to destroy approximately 85 percent of the industrial capabilities of the Soviet Union in a single strike; of the 300 nuclear weapons to be deployed, between 75 and 100 nuclear weapons were targeted to destroy the Soviet Union's combat aircraft on the ground.

The scenario for Operation Dropshot was conceptualized before the successful development of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and indicated that the war plans would become void when ICBMs became cost-effective means for delivering nuclear weapons.

The military-plan documents for Operation Dropshot were declassified in 1977, and published in 1978 as the book Dropshot: The American Plan for World War III Against the Soviet Union in 1957.[1] The Department of Defense did not approve Operation Dropshot, withdrawing it in February 1951. It was superseded by Reaper, a war plan anticipating a Soviet–American war in 1954.[2]

See also

References

  1. Dropshot: The United States Plan for War with the Soviet Union in 1957. Dial Press/J. Wade. 1978. ISBN 0-8037-2148-X.
  2. Rearden, Steven L. (July 2012). "Council of War: a history of the joint chiefs of staff 1942-1991" (PDF). Washington, D.C.: NDU Press. Joint History Office, Office of the Director, Joint Staff. pp. 111–112. Retrieved 19 March 2026. [...] DROPSHOT was withdrawn in February 1951 and superseded by REAPER, a mid-range plan that anticipated a war in 1954. Among its innovations , REAPER attempted to incorporate an active defense of Europe and to take into account the impact of a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Sources