Do we know exactly what would've been hit had the cold war gone hot?

by mr_yogurt
restricteddata

Not exactly. First of all, the targets, strategies, and capabilities varied by time period. So the answer for 1962 is not going to be the same for 1983, for example. Second, the exact targets have tended to be classified. Occasionally there are ways to glance at that information, e.g., a list of possible targets in the USSR used for weapon requisition purposes was released by the US recently that gives some impression of what kinds of things they considered a target. But it did not indicate priorities, how many weapons would be assigned to each target, the type or size of the weapons, the method of delivery, etc.

We do have a pretty good guess as to what the US thought the USSR would target if the USSR was using US targeting strategies, though. Note this is several leaps from knowing what the Soviets would do. But the US assumed the USSR would target all nuclear facilities (counterforce), any airfields that could be converted to military use (almost all of them), large power plants, sites of heavy industry, and so on. So that's a pretty big list in and of itself.

We do have some indications about some of the historical war plans for the US. Generally not to the detail of specific targets but bulk information about how many targets, how many megatons assigned, whether you could choose not to target China or not (in the early plans, you could not), and so on.

It's necessarily a speculative game in any case — war is chaotic and contextual. We can see the rough outlines of what it might look like.