But I'm curious how much if any official doctrine has become public.
If you live in a suburban bedroom community, there
is a very high chance of you surviving an initial
attack unscathed.
One might imagine a regime that was sufficiently evil and/or endangered enough to launch wide-scale nuclear attacks might also spare a few warheads for such bedroom communities as well, especially if resistance continued after an initial exchange. Would be a terrifyingly effective way to cow a populace - to make them feel nowhere was safe.I don't have sources, but the list is very similar to the list I would write. I have no work experience in the field, but since the end of the cold war, my probability of nuclear war has always been much higher than most English-language commentators, so I've been keeping an ear out for information.
I would add that runways over 7000 feet would be such a high priority that even straight stretches of highway longer than that (which can be used as improvised runways) will probably be targeted (and some sections of the US interstate highway system built in the 1950s were made straight precisely so that they could be used as runways during a war).
Also, it is at least possible that they would attack the US, but not with everything they got (at least at first) and if they do that, then oil refineries would be much higher on my list than on the list in the grandparent comment because if they do decide to attack, it is probably because they (the leaders of Russia's security apparatus) are about to lose power in which case it is likely that they blame the sanctions the West has just imposed on them as the primary cause of their immanent loss of power -- and their attacking our oil refineries will have an effect on the US much like very severe sanctions would.
"Unscathed" is a questionable term here. Sure you likely don't get vaporized in the initial blast, but given grounds strikes, which to my understanding are more likely in a modern nuclear exchange you likely get enough radiation from the fallout you wish you had been vaporized. Depending on prevailing winds this can be true for a shocking distance from the impact site.
After ICBM silos, primary targets are (roughly in order):
1) Runways longer than 7000 feet, long enough for a B-52 to take off and land.
2) Naval bases, primarily those involved in the basing and maintenance of ballistic missile subs.
3) Command and control facilities of the U.S. military and government. This includes much of Washington D.C, the Pentagon, major government institutions like the CIA and NSA, and secondary military bases where leadership might relocate to.
4) Port facilities, which may become naval bases in a war.
5) Refineries and oil fields.
6) Concentration of heavy industry where military equipment might be made. Think of metro Detroit auto factories, or Caterpillar's factory, or Hendy Ironworks in Sunnyvale.
7) Office parks where significant brain trusts are located. You can bet that Livermore, Apple's headquarters, and the Googleplex are on a target list. (The Googleplex is actually in the blast radius for Moffett Field, so it may not need to be a separate target.) Also major universities.
8) Major city centers.
If you live in a suburban bedroom community, there is a very high chance of you surviving an initial attack unscathed. Nuke blast radiuses are often surprisingly small, relative to metro areas, and there is no reason for Russia to target a lightly-populated bedroom community 10 miles outside of the city.