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.