Economic Targeting in Modern Warfare,

Nuclear weapons and strategies for their use play a variety of roles in the defense and foreign policies of the United States and Soviet Union. Accordingly, both nations buy forces and prepare war plans for many purposes. Although it is perhaps the least likely contingency for which either country prepares, the scenario in which both sides launch more or less all-out attacks against their opponents economic or urban-industrial target system often dominates public consideration of strategic policy issues. These kinds of strikes, generically termed countervalue attacks, are usually assumed to throw many thousands of nuclear weapons against cities and isolated facilities in order to destroy the adversary nation as an organized, functioning, and economically viable entity.