Operation Dropshot

In US military history, the codename Operation Dropshot referred to a 1949 contingency military operation plan 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 Russo–American Cold War of 1947 to 1991 the US Defense Department expected the Soviet Union to invade those places in 1957. The plan for Operation Dropshot was prepared in 1949, in the early post-war years of the Cold War. Despite the defensive-war scenario for each possible theatre of war, Operation Dropshot included the contingent use of nuclear weapons against the military forces of the Soviet Union and of the Warsaw Pact.

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

Quick facts Date, Location ...

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
Date 1 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 Western Bloc	Soviet Union Soviet Bloc
Casualties and losses
none	none

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In 1949, the US nuclear arsenal was small, based mostly in the continental United States, and depended upon bomber aeroplanes to deliver and drop atomic bombs upon 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 per cent 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 ICBM rocketry became a cost-effective means for dropping nuclear bombs on people, places, and objects.

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] In the event, the US Department of Defense did not approve Operation Dropshot and withdrew that war plan in February 1951; it was superseded by Reaper, a war plan anticipating a Soviet–American war in 1954.^[2]