Marshal Kazakov and the 500 Kiloton Plan for US Marine Landings

By Eleanor Voss · September 15, 2026

US Marines and carrier strike groups were the designated targets of a Soviet nuclear strike plan that stayed hidden in a classified CIA file until 2017.

A Marine on a landing craft does not see the flash until the water beneath him turns to steam. In the geometry of Soviet war-planning, the American soldier is not a combatant to be defeated in a fair fight, but a target to be erased in a concentrated burst of 500 kilotons while trapped in the bottleneck of a harbor or the chaos of a beachhead.

This is the cold arithmetic of Marshal of Artillery K. Kazakov, the man who once commanded the Rocket Troops and Artillery for the Soviet Ground Forces—the land warfare branch of the Soviet military. Kazakov did not write for the public; he wrote for the inner circle of the Soviet officer corps. His analysis, published in the secret journal Military Thought and issued by the USSR Ministry of Defense, the body that supervised the Soviet Armed Forces, outlines a doctrine of maritime slaughter.

The Third Day

Kazakov’s objective was simple: the total neutralization of the United States Navy’s ability to project power. He identified the primary targets as carrier strike groups and amphibious landing forces. The record shows a specific, predatory patience in his timing. Kazakov notes that the American command requires roughly five days to load a single division across several ports. He concludes that it is "obviously be advisable to strike these ports on the third or fourth day after the troop loading begins."

He was not looking for a strategic victory; he was looking for a maximum body count. By waiting until the third or fourth day, the Soviets would ensure the highest possible density of troops, equipment, and materiel gathered in a single kill zone. The record quotes Kazakov’s preference for "surface of the water" bursts, which maximize the destructive pressure against ships and landing craft.

To achieve this, the Soviet Ground Forces relied on a suite of tactical rockets. The record provides a table of these weapons: the R-65, R-170, R-300, and KR-500. The range of these assets stretched from 65 to 500 kilometers, with nuclear yields topping out at 500 kilotons. For context, the blast that leveled Hiroshima was approximately 15 kilotons. Kazakov was planning to drop more than thirty times that power on a concentrated group of US Marines.

The Coordination of the Kill

Kazakov recognized that nuking a moving ship is harder than nuking a city. He admits in the record that "even the most insignificant errors in determining the projected position, or a delay in mounting the strikes, can lead to failure." To solve this, he proposed a seamless integration of the Soviet Navy and the Ground Forces. He suggested that an operations group from the naval headquarters be attached directly to the coordinating front to ensure that the "fastest possible transmission" of reconnaissance data could trigger a launch.

His priority list was a directory of American naval assets. He identifies aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers armed with guided missiles as the "first priority strike objectives." He specifically argues that carriers should be hit while their assault aircraft are still on board, denying the US the ability to launch a retaliatory air strike.

When it comes to the Marines, Kazakov’s plan is a sequence of eliminations. He identifies helicopter carriers—each potentially carrying a reinforced battalion—as primary targets. He then moves to the landing ships and transports, specifically while they are "standing in place for the transfer of assault subunits onto landing craft." Once the Marines hit the beach, he suggests they be hammered by nuclear strikes as they reach the landing area, focusing on the "forward landing detachments" and ships carrying tanks and artillery.

The Blee Memorandum

While the tactical details of the 500-kiloton plan are harrowing, the history of the document itself is more revealing. The article by Kazakov appeared in Issue No. 2 of Military Thought in 1968. However, the memorandum delivering this intelligence to the Director of Central Intelligence is dated May 7, 1974.

Six years. In the world of targeting and war-plans, six years is an eternity. By 1974, the R-300 rockets were old news, and Kazakov had already been moved from his command to become an Inspector-General of the USSR Ministry of Defense, as established by the public record.

This memorandum was not signed by an analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence. It was signed by David H. Blee, the Acting Deputy Director for Operations. Blee was not a desk officer; he was a career clandestine officer who had served as Chief of Station across Asia and Africa and led the CIA's Near East Division. The DDO's office does not handle the translation of open-source journals. They handle spies.

Blee’s memo is brief and clinical. He notes that the report is "part of a series now in preparation" and warns that "because the source of this report is extremely sensitive, this document should be handled on a strict need-to-know basis." The distribution list is a who's who of the American defense establishment: the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the NSA, the DIA, and the heads of Army and Navy intelligence. Yet, the actual source—the person or method that allowed the CIA to walk into the secret archives of the USSR Ministry of Defense and walk out with the Military Thought journals—remains a redaction, a black hole in the record.

The Desk's Reading

If the technical data was six years stale, the memorandum was not about rockets. The desk's reading is that this document served as a "proof of access" memo. Blee was not warning the DCI about the R-300; he was demonstrating that the CIA had a high-level human asset—a mole—deep within the administrative or publishing apparatus of the Soviet Ministry of Defense.

The pattern suggests that the "extremely sensitive" source was likely someone with systemic access to the Ministry's secret archives, capable of providing not just one article, but a "series" of them. The fact that Blee, the spy chief, signed the memo rather than an intelligence analyst confirms that the value of the file was the provenance, not the content. The CIA was showcasing a breach in the Kremlin's inner sanctum to justify the protection and funding of a high-risk channel.

Furthermore, the inclusion of Kazakov’s career trajectory—his move to Inspector-General and his subsequent articles in publications like Gudok—suggests the CIA was using these documents to map the cognitive framework of the Soviet officer corps. They weren't just tracking yields; they were tracking the evolution of the Soviet mind.

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the still-withheld pages contain the identities of the men who betrayed the Soviet Ministry of Defense. The redactions are not protecting the secrets of 1968; they are protecting the methods of 1974. The cost of this intelligence was the continued existence of a mole in Moscow, a man who saw the plan to incinerate the US Marine Corps and decided that the Americans were the better bet. The record shows us the target; the gap in the record shows us the spy.

Sources

1. MILITARY THOUGHT (USSR): THE EMPLOYMENT OF TACTICAL ROCKETS AGAINST NAVAL TARGETS — CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room
2. CIA Analysis of the Soviet Navy collection — CIA FOIA Reading Room
3. Document PDF (MILITARY THOUGHT (USSR): THE EMPLOYMENT OF TACTICAL ROCKETS AGAINST NAVAL TARGETS)
4. Background: Military history of the Soviet Union — Wikipedia