Quora asks:
Will Putin resort to nuclear weapons now that it is becoming increasingly clear, from the many, many posts that I have read on Quora, that he has little or no chance of being victorious in Ukraine by means of conventional war?
and John Mark McDonald dispels the bunkum.
As someone who has studied nuclear war for close to forty years now, I am going to give you an answer that will blow your mind. Even if the entire Russian nuclear arsenal were used against Ukraine, it wouldn’t substantially change the course of the war. How could I possibly say that? Because, the power of nuclear weapons has been used as a boogeyman for so long that the actual power of a nuclear detonation has almost no relation to their actual destructive power. No nuclear power can afford to actually use one in combat because it would expose the mythical nature of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are hyped to the point that no one contradicts it when a media outlet publishes a statement indicating that even a single nuclear device will destroy the world. This is a blatantly, stupidly, obviously untrue, but never corrected. After all, two were used in WWII. BUT that is just the tip of the iceburg. I thought there had been a couple of hundred nuclear test that prove this point. I was off by over an order of magnitude. There have been nearly THREE THOUSAND NUCLEAR DETONATIONS ALREADY, that are either known or suspected and this has not effected the survivability of life on Earth even slightly.
Well then, how dangerous are nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons, if they weren’t their own catagory, would be classified as incendiary weapons. They set stuff on fire. They set a lot of stuff on fire. In fact they can set things on fire as far as two miles away from the actual detonation. Besides this, nuclear detonation are very bright, capable of blinding people 20–30 miles away. This is only constrained by the curvature of the earth. They also create hurricane force winds as the air around the detonation expands and contracts. If you are outside and unshielded and within a mile of a nuclear detonation, you are going to die.
The problem here is that Ukraine is really big. I mean the size of Texas big. Cities there tend to be spread out in modern times and their larger ones cover over a hundred square miles. The average nuclear detonation are only burn 2–3 square miles of territory. A city the size of Kiev would take on the order of 200 warheads to cover the whole thing.
Which brings us to our next point. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable to incendiaries. Modern city centers and industrial areas are made of concrete and steel. Most of the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done because almost all the buildings were made of wood and paper. The initial blast set the city centers on fire which spread and ended up burning down most of the city. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable. In Ukraine, despite millions of rounds of being poured into their cities, not one of them caught fire and burned to the ground like the Great Chicago or Great London Fires in the 19th century or the fire storms of WWII. In the Japanese nuclear detonations, the brick buildings were still standing, despite being much less sturdy than modern buildings. This leads to the most surprising revelation about nuclear detonations: If you are not outside, you stand a good chance of surviving even within the blast zone. Nuclear blasts are mainly line of sight killers. The vast majority of “radiation” created by an nuclear detonation is infrared radiation, or heat the same as a gas stove or fireplace makes. Unless the building you are in is collapsed by the wind or you fail to leave if it catches on fire or you happen to be in front of a window with a direct line of sight to the detonation, you are probably going to be fine.
Thus we get to the real reason why Putin will not use nuclear weapons: they’re just not all that effective compared to the boogeyman that is in our collective imaginations. Were a nuclear missile to detonate over central Kiev, no one would believe that it was an actual nuclear blast because the city is still there and all the major buildings are still standing.
Secondly, he doesn’t have very many of them. The numbers given for the Russian nuclear arsenal are an outright farce. You get that number by taking of bombs that the USSR claimed to have built, and subtract the number used in their testing program. This leaves you with about 9,000 warheads. First of all, Russia doesn’t have nearly enough delivery systems to put those warheads on. The second problem here is that nuclear warheads have a very short shelf life. Nuclear warheads require a detonator made of conventional expolsives. These detonators are some of the most precision pieces of engineering in the history of mankind. A series of explosives has to go off in such a way that the core is hit by the same amount of pressure from all directions simultaneously. If any of those explosives are even slightly off, the nuclear warhead will not go off. You now have an extremely precise machine sitting around a core of material emiting hard radiation. Hard radiation is not friendly to machines. Nuclear warheads need to be rebuilt a least every five years and maintained a lot more often than that. Even with that, a twenty year old warhead is a piece of junk. It’s been more than twenty years since the Putin kleptocracy came to power. I’m sure that Russia has a number of Potemkin warheads that are kept in top shape for inspectors, but given the current Russian system, the Russian nuclear arsenal most likely resembles the Russian tank reserves: the bare minimum kept in service while the rest is a scrap pile.
Currently, the spectre of the vast Russian nuclear arsenal is the last card he has in his hand. If he were to actually use it, it would expose that he never had anything but a junk hand and bluffing to back it up.
I can recall reading a scientific calculation that contended that if you took all the nuclear weapons in existence, put them into a great big pile and fired them off, you would not get a hole as large and deep as the Grand Canyon.
Dan Kurt
This article actually makes the case that nuclear weapons mostly, that is, almost all won’t work if used, and if they work no big deal. The author also pushes the case that the Russians will lose yet when I look objectively at the “war” what I see is that Russia has already conquered 20% of Ukraine and is poised to acquire the rest of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. Is this writing Sophistry or Realpolitik?
Dan Kurt
ambisinistral
I happened to visit Hiroshima one day after the 63rd anniversary of the city’s bombing. After visiting the Peace Park, I had a very nice dinner at an outdoor riverside cafe.
Half-way through the dinner it occurred to me, “Hey? Where are all the dry ice clouds of fog that accompany nuclear wastelands in the movies? Where are the mutants with lobster claws in place of hands? Come to think of it, where are the swarms of punk rockers riding deathmobiles looking for gas?”
For all the ‘uninhabitable for a zillion years due to radiation’ talk, Hiroshima was a thriving and pleasant city. Clearly, something was off in our imagination of a nuclear aftermath.
OneGuy
Too many errors to even try to counter them all. Let’s start with what is likely:
A nuclear exchange between the two major nuclear powers, the U.S. and Russia, will likely see each side firing off between 2000 and 4000 nukes each. Most will be fired off within 24 hours after war starts but the nukes on subs will be used (assuming there is still a way to communicate) to mop up those targets that were insufficiently destroyed. In the first 24 hours it is likely that half a billion will die and then another billion and a half in the next 7 weeks or so. Most all of those deaths will be the direct result of the nuclear explosion and effects AND from fallout. Most previous tests of nuclear devices were intentionally and carefully designed to reduce or eliminate fallout. It is likely that Russia for sure and possibly the U.S. will intentionally set off nukes in a way to maximize fallout.
Nuclear war IS survival able but the vast majority of people in the Northern hemisphere will not survive. If you believe that this fact is trivial than you are a fool. The nuke set off over Hiroshima (notice I said “over” as in to minimize fallout) was a tiny, tiny nuke. Russia has and will likely use nukes that are 5000 times more powerful. If one of these is used on NY City the entire city, 100% of it will be gone and nothing in a 75-100 mile radius will live.
If you survive the first 24 hours and any subsequent nukes (which could be possible for months) it is likely that you will have received a dose of radiation that will kill you within a week or two. Possibly you could be lucky and suffer for a few months before you die. But if by chance you evade all of those risks then what do you eat? Where do you go? where do you get health care? The world as you knew it no longer exists. What then?
JDZ
A lot of Russia’s military weapons don’t work. Probably many of those made on Monday or Friday. And you must not be following the news: the orcs are losing.
JDZ
A full-scale nuclear exchange is highly unlikely. Russia would be utterly destroyed. More likely is Putin trying to terrorize with a couple of tactical nukes.
OneGuy
“More likely is Putin trying to terrorize with a couple of tactical nukes.”
I would hope you are right. The problem is that in any nuclear exchange the goal is for both sides to destroy each other. The tacticians and advisors prefer to not fire nukes but their only second position is to fire first or to retaliate with everything they have at their disposal. So if Russia were to use a few nukes in Ukraine it will cause some harm (unknown how much) to NATO countries. How can it not? And by the very act of using nukes they have let the Genie out of the bottle. Now the tacticians have to decide (and very quickly) what Russia’s intentions are AND Russian tacticians are deciding the same thing about us (which is also put into the calculation). What to do? You don’t really want to be second best in a war of Armageddon but on the other hand you don’t want to start it either. But make no mistake decisions will be made on both sides and no one toady in their right mind would say absolutely that the other side wouldn’t follow up with a full scale nuclear attack. So what do you do?
My guess is we would most probably wait while responding with a harshly worded letter. But Russia… I’m not sure what they would do (and THAT to will be calculated into our response).
My best guess is if Russia uses nukes that you should take five minutes or less to put as much as you can in your car and then drive directly to the safest place you know of to ride it out. Because I think that once nukes are used you might have 2-24 hours or maybe 2-7 days before one side or the other makes a decision that they cannot afford to wait any longer.
Where is “safe”? Probably no where in the long run but I would pick a fairly deep valley in the Alleghanies or the equivalent out West as far as possible from any target. No guarantees!
Putin’s nuclear option may not be as decisive in Ukraine as many fear « Quotulatiousness
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bob sykes
Russia has not threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. That fairy tale is a fabrication of Jake Sullivan.
What the Russians have said is that the territorial integrity of Russia is threatened, they will attack the “decision making centers.” That means Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin. The threat to use nuclear weapons agains the centers was implicit.
Fifty large bombs on the 50 largest cities in the US would destroy all the nodes in our road, railroad, airline, communication, and electrical networks. That would shut down the whole economy indefinitely.
Some 50 million people (maybe less) would be killed immediately, but during the year following another 250 million would starve to death.
The optimistic version of the aftermath is described by William R. Forstchen’s “One Second After.” Of course, that scenario was an EMP attack.
In any event, the US would cease to exist as a political entity, and so would Russia.
Univ of Saigon 68
“Nuclear weapons are hyped to the point that no one contradicts it when a media outlet publishes a statement indicating that even a single nuclear device will destroy the world.”
I have never heard one single person, much less any media outlet, say anything remotely like this.
OneGuy
you cannot over hype nuclear weapons. Imagine a single 5 megaton nuke dropped in midtown Manhattan or on DC at noon today. That’s all! One measly relatively small nuke dropped on a critical city at noon on a weekday. But it is critical to understand that if Russia were to decide to nuke the U.S. it would not be onesy or twosy it would be 4000 nukes all delivered within 15-30 minutes of us identifying the attack. There wouldn’t even be enough time to make a public announcement. The first that any civilian would know about it is when the sky lit up and the mushroom cloud rises up. This is a very real risk and any loose talk by Russian or American officials increases the risk dramatically. If you want a real life example of how that is true sit your spouse down and tell them that you are through with the marriage and are planning to get a divorce and watch how quickly things escalate and get out of your control.
JDZ
Rural America would survive and certainly wouldn’t starve.
JDZ
It seems to me highly unlikely that Putin’s generals would actually let him start a nuclear war on that scale. They would undoubtedly prefer their own survival to his.
JDZ
Lucky me. I’m currently residing at my long time vacation farm, 250 acres in a hollow in the Alleghenies.
OneGuy
“Rural America would survive and certainly wouldn’t starve.”
There is some truth to this. But how long? Months?
Assuming the worst it is likely that most Chinese would survive and at some point where the radioactive level of the fallout has decreased top survivable levels that China would simply send troop and colonizers to North America and take it over. Survivors would be shot or enslaved.
It is likely though that the bombs and radioactive fallout would kill 99% of the population of North America so it may not matter much.
What do you have in your pantry today? After an attack could you defend it from looters? What do you do when it’s gone? If you are planning on growing your food can you defend that from looters?
The problem(s) are bigger than you think. It is likely that someone living in the Amazon jungle could survive for years after losing ever amenity created in the 20th and 21st century but it is equally unlikely that anyone in North America could. Yes! Yes! I have heard the “Country Boy Can Survive” song and it sounds reassuring but take time to go back and look at the video of the thugs looting the Wa WA store. If you are “weighted” down by a wife and kids and a crop and a house you are a “target” NOT a survivor. The “survivors” will be 19 YO’s who give a shit less about anything. And as soon as the easy looting is over their lack of any real “survival” knowledge will doom them as well.
Steve (Retired/recovering lawyer)
“Russia has and will likely use nukes that are 5000 times more powerful. If one of these is used on NY City the entire city, 100% of it will be gone and nothing in a 75-100 mile radius will live.”
So, a good thing, right?
Now, do Hollywood. Or Washington, DC. Or both.
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