The United States National Archives and Records Administration has released a detailed list of nuclear targets during the Cold War in the 1950s. The list included areas in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China as potential atomic bomb targets.

The target areas are referred to as designated ground zeros or GZBs, and government and industrial buildings are labelled as "Population." The list was first obtained by Dr. William Burr in 2006 when a request was first made. The list is said to be the most detailed Air Force target list that has ever been made public.

"It's disturbing, for sure, to see the population centers targeted," said Burr, who is a senior analyst for a research group at George Washington University called the National Security Archive.

"Their target priorities and nuclear bombing tactics would expose nearby civilians and 'friendly forces and people' to high levels of deadly radioactive fallout. Moreover, the authors developed a plan for the 'systematic destruction' of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted 'population' in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw," he added.

The target list is entitled "Atomic Weapons Requirements Study for 1959" that is basically a spreadsheet made by the Strategic Air Command or SAC in 1956. The SAC projected the cities and locations to hit just in case another World War and a nuclear war break out three years later, per the New York Times.

The study also identified a plan to develop a 60 megaton bomb that is 70 times more explosive than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Alex Wellerstein said that, in 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered to reduce the number of atomic bombs produced in the U.S. and was cut in half in just two years.

"He just thought this would lead to the annihilation of the human species," said Wellerstein, a historian of nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He added that the plan was to surround USSR with bases and, if war breaks out, bombs will be dropped in every city and infrastructure in the target list.

The Cold War between the United States, its NATO Allies and the rest of the Western Bloc against the Eastern Bloc consisting of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies started shortly after the end of World War II. It ended in Christmas Day 1991 when the USSR was officially dissolved and the Commonwealth of Independent States was formed with Russia and some ex-Soviet states.