[Rockingham]

US plans varied with the era. As best as I recall, the Soviet assessment of US and NATO intentions made public is correct for the time period, that the US and NATO would strike deep in Poland with nuclear weapons aimed at Soviet assembly areas and lines of communications.

Expecting equivalent Soviet restraint, US planners preferred to keep a nuclear war in Europe limited to Europe and would have avoided nuclear strikes on Soviet home territory for fear of a retaliatory strike on the US homeland. Similarly, US planners did not want to nuke Soviet armies on the territory of West Germany, an ally, or even in East Germany, as a concession to the West Germans. By geographic elimination, that meant that the Poles would get nuked.

Notably, the US plans for such a use of nuclear weapons were as a defensive response to a Soviet first use of nuclear weapons on West Germany and invasion by Soviet armies. For the Poles and Germans, the provocative part is that the Soviet plans projected first use of nuclear weapons on West Germany in an offensive war, with a nuclear stricken Poland an acceptable price.

In the Soviet view, civilian casualties from nukes used by the US and NATO on Poland (a Soviet ally) and by the Soviets on West Germany (an enemy) were affordable so long as Soviet home territory was safe. With Soviet armies on the Rhine and in effective control of the continent, the Soviets would have seen themselves as the winners, notwithstanding millions of dead German and Polish civilians.

There is another wrinkle that seems not to have been mentioned so far. In order to limit collateral civilian casualties, the US developed smaller yield nuclear weapons and wanted to develop a neutron mini-nuke with small blast damage and virtually no fallout. Naturally, the Soviet Union denounced the project and the Left in the US and Europe opposed it fiercely, so the neutron bomb was not developed in the West. In the context of Soviet war plans, the civilians spared by the neutron bomb would mostly have been Poles.

[Paul Ross]

Bump.

That is largely the way I remember the strategic models of the time. And the history.

And the same Leftist stooges...in both parties nowadays...are still up to no good. They have kept us from developing and deploying the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator...or the so-called nuclear bunker busters. Now we all may pay the penalty as Iran and North Korea proliferate willy-nilly....

[Cheburashka]

In the context of Soviet war plans, the civilians spared by the neutron bomb would mostly have been Poles.
---
Jimmy Carter killed the U.S. Neutron Bomb program. Fortunately we have never needed the weapon in an actual war, so no harm has been done.
Just another one of the bright ideas from the peanut farmer.

[Luke21]

Our fifth column and the press screamed bloody murder about the neutron bomb. It's amazing that the Gipper accomplished as much as he did in the wake of world wide hysteria, having only one house of congress, and with the press braying like jackals.