In the late 70s and 80s, I worked for a defense contractor on various nuclear weapons programs, once of which was the Strategic Mission Data Preparation System (SMDPS), which was essentially a computer program that used huge (for the time) databases to create missions that were stored on special magnetic tape drives that could be plugged into the aircraft to direct it where to fly and where to launch its weapons.

So, yes, it was for specific targets as a nuclear weapons target map. Each of several hundred aircraft had mission tapes prepared to respond to a number of different scenerios. Plug it in and each of a large number of aircraft would fly synchronized routes with synchronized weapon launches.

I can't answer whether the overall objective was. I was never involved in the actual mission planning. My guess is as good as yours.

I can't answer what the end result would be. Again, my guess is as good as yours. Or rather, your guess is as good as mine.

this is a bit more complex than just "detailed plan", because nuclear arms doctrine changed over time due to political and technological progress.

when nukes came into fashion in the 40s/50s they were potent, but comparatively crude weapons. they had to be air-dropped by bombers. slow bombers at the time, that is, easily intercepted by contemporary jet fighters. at some point in the 50s, both superpowers developed jet-powered bombers for delivery (the myasischev M4 and the b-52, respectively), however due to some fuck-ups a few higher-ups in the US government believed that the soviet union had built a massive fleet of said bombers, requiring the US to put defense spending through the roof to keep up.

this is known today as the "bomber gap", but also known as only a perceived imbalance. i don't have the exact numbers in my head, but i believe the soviets where said to have in excess of 100 strategic bombers when in reality they had only four. the air force received 2.500 strategic airplanes nonetheless (ironically, a few years later, the same thing would be repeated with the sputnik-induced missile gap. again money was thrown at the problem).

later, people found out that strapping nukes to missiles eliminates the human factor almost completely. development towards the intercontinental ballistic missile got into the focus and advances in tech made those systems feasible and powerful. the reason for this was to maintain a so-called secon-strike capability. so even if the soviets were to attack with everything they had, the US could still strike back with everything they had. and they would. every slight bit of soviet aggression would be met with an all-out attack. this doctrine was called "massive retaliation" under eisenhower. although the soviets at the time had neither the means nor the impulse to attack, it created an impressive deterrence. even a conventional attack led to an all-out response.

it's funny when you take into account that battlefield commanders saw nukes as just another piece of bad-ass OP artillery. rumour has it, that general douglas mcarthur almost casually nuked the chinese when they entered the korean war and had to be denied by president truman himself.

anyway.

massive retaliation changed. during the cuban misslie crisis, the world was at the brink of war. kennedy realized this and, thanks to more accurate missiles (and common sense), introduced the doctrince of "flexible response".

you see, early missiles had terrible accuracy. to compensate, yields were increased dramatically. in just 6 years, from 1945 to 1951, yields increased by a factor of almost 1.000. in 1951, a 10 megaton bomb (explosive power equivalent to 10 MILLION tons of TNT) could vaporize anything in a 2 mile radius form the point of impact. you had to get through hardened silos somehow.

but, tech got better. and as missile guidance improved, you could dial back the yields to reach the same effect. you know, avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths and all? this was also part of flexible response. each attack would be met with an equal amount of force. no all-out nukefest. this also meant strapping more than one warhead to a missile to fight multiple targets.

speaking of targets. no civilian cities, at least primarily. again, it has been some time since i read this, but there were 4 or 5 categories of targets, ranked from second-strike importance down. first category: carrier battlegroups. second category: airfields and ICBM silos. third category: army/air force/etc bases and so on.

this is also the reason the soviets invested heavily in submarines instead of carriers...because they knew that those would be the first to be glassed in case of war, with either cruise missiles or nuclear torpedos.

and there you have it - flexible response till the end of the cold war, fought by the so called nuclear triad: bombers, subs, missiles - ensuring second strike capability, no matter what. the missiles got pretty bad-ass later on, with multiple (10+) indepentend warheads (MIRVs) per missile, that would each move at mach 5+, doing evasive maneuvers and dropping decoys left and right during final phases.

pretty much no defense.

would mankind have survived an all-out exchange? nobody knows. there are simulations, but before the first nuke detonation some scientists were afraid it would incinerate the entire atmosphere. so there.

after i get home i will look up the books :)