There’s something I’ve been thinking about regarding nuclear weapons. You see, we’ve been exposed to the incredible amount of propaganda stating that the use of nuclear weapons is an “all or nothing” proposition, meaning that if nuclear weapons are used at all, it will eventually lead to a total, unlimited nuclear exchange destroying at least our civilization, if not all life.
This is not necessarily bad, because it probably contributed to the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used in war since Nagasaki. However, as we approach the point where nuclear weapons might very likely be used in war, it might become a double-edged sword of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ask people what would happen if 500 nuclear weapons were to be detonated, and they would tell you it would be the end of the world, mostly due to radiation and “nuclear winter”. I’m not saying that people in the fireball and shockwave radius of those 500 nuclear weapons would not have a very bad day, but let’s look at this rationally. There were over 500 atmospheric nuclear tests, before they were banned. There were over 500 megatons of total yield of those weapons. Some, like Castle Bravo, were extremely “dirty”, producing record amounts of fallout. Not only did mankind did not go extinct, but the number of people in fact doubled since then. The total result of 500 nukes going off in the atmosphere was, basically, negligible, unless you happen to be one of those few unfortunate people near the Nevada, Semipalatinsk and Bikini test sites. For those few, it was a life altering (or ending) disaster, but considering how many nukes we detonated in a very brief time span, the total effects were incredibly close to zero. Also, I don’t seem to recall there having been a nuclear winter of any kind, the greatest by far event of this kind during my lifetime being the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. No, there would be no nuclear winter, and you could blast 500 nukes, wait a few weeks for the dust to settle, and in most of the world the radiation would be low enough not to matter. How do I know? We’ve been there, we did that. Unlike the “scientists” who like to talk about those matters, I’m not guessing, I’m working with historical data. We detonated 500 nukes and, outside of the testing polygons, the total cumulative result was negligible. This means that the casualties from nuclear war would amount to those in the impact zones, and those who died due to infrastructure failure – electricity, heat, fuel, transportation, refrigeration, agriculture, basically they would die from poor hygiene, neglected medical issues, water-borne disease, starvation, exposure to elements, looting and similar things you can expect if big cities are struck by an earthquake of great proportions and there’s no outside help for months and years. It would be a great disaster; imagine a combination of the Asian tsunami and this Turkey-Syria earthquake, and multiply it by a hundred. That’s what total nuclear war would look like. However, the problem with the “suicide pact” of NATO is that it basically guarantees escalation to exactly that point if, for instance, several nuclear weapons mounted on cruise missiles get to be used in Europe, against the American bases that coordinate the war against Russia. What would actually happen in such a case remains to be seen, but I guess some rational people would try to limit the conflict to a dozen or so warheads deployed against military targets, because I don’t think a rational person would assume that use of nuclear weapons against strictly military targets in a big war between superpowers is something extreme, irrational and something that needs to be escalated to the point of complete destruction of civilization.
The second thing people get wrong is the concept of a “nuclear button”, where the presidents of superpowers give authorisation and hundreds of ICBMs launch simultaneously. Yes, a final phase of a nuclear war would look like this, but I would expect a dozen or so military installations to be hit by nuclear-tipped cruise missiles or ordinary bombs at that point. The nuclear response is so hardwired to full retaliation at the sight of ICBMs flying, I actually don’t expect ICBMs to be used in war; they are “for later”, if everybody goes bat-shit crazy. In an actual war, expect ordinary cruise missiles of the kind Russia routinely uses in Ukraine, the kind that can hit a single building from 1500 km distance, or nuclear-tipped hypersonics, that are immune to detection and interception. The difference between using conventional warheads and using nukes is that one nuke with 10kt yield is more effective than many, many conventional warheads. How much more? One Kalibr carries 500kg of explosive; this is 0.5 tons. 10kt means ten kilotons, or ten thousand tons. This means that one thermonuclear Kalibr with low yield has the same destructive power as 20000 conventional ones. There’s been talk about Kinzhals, Zircons and other hypersonic being a replacement for nukes because of sheer kinetic energy equalling around 7 tons of explosive. Well, a single low-yield nuke is equivalent to around 1400 hypersonics. A typical modern thermonuclear warhead with 100kt yield equals around 14000 hypersonic strikes. A big, obsolete thermonuclear warhead would be around 20 Mt. This is 2000 ordinary 10 kt nukes, and that’s the kind of stuff people scare children with, but that’s also the kind of stuff that’s unlikely to ever be used. What’s actually very likely to be used is the kind of stuff you put on a Zircon hypersonic and turn Ramstein base into a glass parking lot to let Americans know you’re done fucking around. That kind would produce very little effect outside the area of immediate impact, but the main effect would be complete panic and lunacy everywhere, because everybody is conditioned to believe that the world is about to end as soon as the first nuke is detonated anywhere. In reality, it could be 2-3 nukes in one strike, then panic, then a response within a few weeks, then panic, and then they either start talking to each other and stop posturing like they’re Churchill staring down Hitler, or they escalate and really bad stuff starts happening. Because, you see, if the impacts are reserved to the military installations alone, the total overall effect of that would be 99.9% psychological, on everybody but the soldiers killed, but they already participate in war and as far as I’m concerned, being killed by a nuke or being killed by an artillery shell is pretty much the same, except that in this case the American cowards piloting drones and plotting attacks from a safe distance would learn that there’s no such thing as a safe distance. In fact, there would be much less civilian casualties in a limited nuclear war, than in a conventional war of the kind we’re having right now, because I am absolutely sure that the first nukes would be targetted at very symbolic military targets, of the kind absolutely everybody would agree are legitimate, and everybody there got what they had coming. For instance, Ramstein base, or a similar one in Poland, or Deveselu installation in Romania, or Aviano base in Italy, or something similar in Britain, or American aircraft carriers, they are all guilty as sin – those are the bastards who bully other countries into submission just because they can. It’s not like Hiroshima or Nagasaki, where civilians were deliberately hit to showcase the weapon to Stalin. The idea people have, that somehow Putin would use Sarmat missiles, that’s just because they are absolutely clueless. Sarmat and Yars is what you use to turn America into a glass parking lot, and that’s no longer war, it’s retaliatory extermination of the enemy. The actual weapon of war used to compel the enemy to stop fucking with you permanently is a nuclear-tipped cruise missile, and they would all be targetted at the American bases, not at the poor bastards in Ukraine who are stupid and villainous enough to fight for them.
This is kind of an unusual “I’m the ray of sunshine article” coming from you. š
I’m curious is there a limit on how many nukes can go off at the same time in the northern hemisphere and the people out of the zone of impact wouldn’t notice any impact on quality of their life?
Also, are there any explanations on how do nuclear forces choose to detonate nukes when they get to their targets i.e. are detonations airborne which would bless us with NEMPS and consequential frying of our electric infrastructure and stuff or nukes just get slammed to a ground and produce a lot of nuclear fallout which is not desirable either?
At the end, what would trigger Putin to make a glass parking lot of Rammstein, Aviano and other NATO bases?
Nothing short of decapitation strike on Russian leadership, I would guess. And how safe is the presumption that Americans would wait weeks for a response and then call for the talks instead of immediately going for total nuclear exchange ? My current notion is that they are so trigger happy that they would go instantly bat-shit crazy if things are not going their way.
That’s hard to tell, because it includes many variables, such as whether an explosion is an airburst or if it hits the ground (the latter produces much more fallout), what the wind conditions are, did the fallout go down with the rain or did it travel a long distance through the atmosphere, is an explosion “clean” or the nuke fizzled-out producing lots of fallout, etc.
Let’s assume some mixture of conditions to keep things realistic and say that a dozen of nukes would produce results that are basically imperceptible outside the immediate strike and fallout zones. Most would be reasonably clean, one or two would be major fuckups that produce more fallout than all others. There would be no “nuclear winter” because the theory is nonsense (basically completely made up as a scare tactic to avert nuclear war), all strikes would be limited to military targets, minimal civilian casualties. There would be some global radioactive contamination, but nothing outside of what we already had, historically, so basically insignificant. However, the problem with this first phase would be that, after a huge initial panic, people would decide that nuclear war is no big deal, and this mentality might lead to escalation.
So, basically, I’m reasonably sure that a limited nuclear war of a dozen or so 10-100kt warheads would have negligible effects outside of the immediately struck area, but the damage to the global economy and political system might be huge. What is the maximum number of nukes that could go off within a timeframe of, let’s say a year, without it being too disruptive? Hundreds, I’d say, if they kept striking military installations – navy fleets, shipyards, weapons stockpiles, airports, command centers etc. If someone comes up with a stellar idea of detonating a few in orbit to mop up the satellites, this might cause a big enough n-emp to fry the electric grid, and *this* would be bad, because if the big transformers are fried, they basically can’t be replaced easily, and if a large enough disruption of the global economy takes place, they can’t be replaced at all. Good news: Croatia is one of the few manufacturers of such big transformers in the world, I think there’s a factory in Karlovac that makes them. It’s a big deal, though.
The main issue is the energy grid, fuel supplies, transformers, power plants, transport grid and so on. Also, it should be noted that air traffic would likey be grounded in case of a nuclear war and this would cause serious disruptions.
My calculations are based on the hierarchy of needs – if you don’t have breathable air, you die. If you don’t have drinkable water, you die. If you don’t have food, you die. If you don’t have medical care and you have a condition, you likely die. If you belong to a vulnerable group (elderly, disabled, with chronical conditions, small children etc.) you are more likely to die in aggravated conditions, so basically if air/water/food/medical are disrupted, you have a massive dying-off. Conversely, if these things go on mostly without disruptions, you might have big economic and societal issues but nothing necessarily lethal. Also, military targets are usually isolated and self-contained and contain expendable people, because the soldiers basically don’t contribute anything to society and you can theoretically kill all of them and things will go on without much disruptions.
However, anything that takes out the power grid results in terrible casualty numbers. Anything that permanently disrupts big cities and their supply systems results in terrible casualty numbers. Anything that messes up with production of food… you get the picture. Basically, enumerate the factors that kill you when they are absent, and you have a list of things that can’t be disrupted if you don’t want to have a terrible catastrophe. However, you can kill every soldier in every army in the world using nuclear weapons, and as long as the nuking takes place away from densely populated areas, agricultural areas, and big electric and petrochemical facilities, things go on.
Yes, KonÄar makes the big transformers:
http://www.koncar-mjt.hr/proizvodi/visokonaponski_mjerni_transformatori/Naponski_transformatori_velike_snage
Yes, thatās what I wanted to reply back to you as Iām from Karlovac and we never had any big electric tranformers company there as far as I know. I remembered this news from 2013 when Ukranian Antonov landed to Pleso to pick up this big MoFo transformer from KonÄar and deliver it to the customer on Philippines.
https://www.jutarnji.hr/vijesti/zagreb/foto-gigantski-pothvat-transformator-od-136-tona-teglili-na-pleso-u-18-sati-slijece-antonov-918377 Wouldnāt be suprised at all if someone told that General Electric is incapable of producing these things today similar as NASA wouldnāt be able to land man back on the Moon. š³š³š³
BTW, one more thing came to my mind ā¦ every now and then when discussion on nuclear war stirs up everybody is putting focus on striking capabilities of each side and how Russians now lead the game with their new generation of nuclear missiles. But, what about nuclear strike detection systems? We know that in 1983 there was a glitch on sensor array on Soviet satellite that raised false alarm about American nuclear strike happening and only sheer logic of Stanislaw Petrov prevented Sovietās response on that by concluding he would notice not few missiles flying on his monitor but some
few hundreds at least. And I think that one MIT professor who participated in Gonzalo Liraās Round table had some critique of Russianās nuclear strike detection system but he didnāt go into details, if I remember well, so Iām wondering whatās the state of the art here in case that information is disclosed at all?
I’m not *sure*, but either Jugoturbina or something else there made some huge transformers that had to be moved with that Antonov Mriya transport plane to some island in the middle of nowhere years ago. I didn’t pay much attention to the article so I don’t remember the details.
I have no information on those, unfortunately. I can guess, but that’s not worth much; there are Voronezh radars, and they are probably the best there is. There are likely satellites that monitor the Earth in the infrared spectrum, and there are certainly all kinds of gamma-ray detectors, combined with seismic detectors and probably processed by some AI; I would be surprised if they don’t have that, because that’s what I would do if I had the other stuff they have. The Russians are extremely technologically capable, especially in fields that require hard science, and this kind of stuff is right in their field of expertise.
I split the answer into several replies because the first one was already big enough.
A decapitation strike on Russian leadership would trigger an automatic strategic retaliatory response against the USA mainland, strking both their cities, critical facilities and military, permanently ending their existence and viability as a state. This is the only thing the Americans never, ever want to do. If there’s a nuclear explosion on the territory of the Russian federation, and the President and his staff don’t answer an automated phone call, Perimetr system orders a strategic retaliatory launch. So, that’s not something that would make Putin do a limited tactical warning-strike. No, this is the end of civilization.
The conditions that would make Putin want to use a tactical nuclear counterforce attack against American bases and assets in Europe is really not clearly defined, because it’s somewhere in the interval between America using those assets to aid Ukraine in its war against Russia, and America using those assets to plan deep strikes using Ukrainian terrorists in Russia proper.
As we can see, some of those conditions have been met already, and there has been no significant response from the Russian side, which makes me think that the Russians are possibly encouraging further encroachments, and it is also obvious that if I know that, the Russians must know it as well, and such a decision was certainly made against serious objections from the senior military staff. It’s likely that Putin overrode his generals and tried to give things a chance to blow themselves out by not feeding the fire, but if the history of the SMO in Ukraine teaches anything, it’s that such overrides aren’t forever. Putin can likely convince the generals to try doing things his way first, because the overhead in losses would be negligible if a wider war were to happen anyway, but if this fails, he will give them a nod to do things their way.
I would expect there to be a warning to Americans that they are to stand down, I would expect the Americans to act defiantly and arrogantly, and then the Russians would do a limited nuclear strike against their military assets in Europe as the last warning before they launch against America.
This all assumes that Putin is still in power, because his Christian beliefs have been a huge moderating factor. If he dies, all hell breaks loose within a timeframe of days and weeks.