I was recently asked (in person) why I think the Americans are considering starting a nuclear war if nuclear weapons are obviously world ending. I answered that the Americans don’t see it that way, and this article shows I was right:
“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability” said new DoD doctrine before it was taken offline (Steven Aftergood)
What was the reasoning behind my argument? I said that the danger posed by the nuclear weapons was incredibly overstated by the anti-war activists during the 1980s, for instance the entire “nuclear winter” argument is incredibly overstated and there is no reason whatsoever to assume a full nuclear exchange between three superpowers would produce global cooling effects that would be worse than the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, and mankind has seen much worse, for instance “the year without a summer” caused by Mt. Tambora eruption. The people who actually do the thinking for Pentagon have much better information than normal people do, and even better than I do, and I consider myself quite well informed in that regard.
The Pentagon analysts know the data obtained by long-term studies of the participants of Operation Crossroads:
The increase in all-cause mortality was 4.6 percent (relative risk [RR] = 1.046, 95% confidence interval, 1.020–1.074) and was statistically significant (p < 0.001). For malignancies, the elevation of mortality was lower—RR = 1.014 (0.96–1.068)—and was not statistically significant (p = 0.26). Similarly, leukemia mortality RR was elevated to 1.020 (0.75–1.39), but not significantly (p = 0.90) and by less than all-cause mortality. The increase in all-cause mortality did not appear to concentrate in any of the disease groups we considered.
TL;DR version for people with American-levels of attention span is that the Americans did a series of nuclear weapon tests in Bikini 1946, to see how nukes would influence surface ships. Everybody was exposed to radiation and all kinds of fallout including un-fissioned Plutonium, and when you read articles about it you expect everybody to have died from cancer within five years from the experiment. However, it turns out that, to quote Wikipedia, “one study showed that the life expectancy of participants was reduced by an average of three months”. In the time-span of half a century.
The data from other nuclear mishaps including Chernobyl shows similar, quite surprising outcomes. Stress from relocation is the main cause of death. People who didn’t evacuate from the exclusion zone had better health outcomes than those who were evacuated. The data from the Soviet K-19 submarine, nicknamed “Hiroshima”, where the officers decided to re-route radioactive coolant of the reactor through an external pump, spraying everybody on the ship with super-radioactive coolant, stuff got into the ventilation system and everybody was exposed to high levels of radiation. Of the crew of 125, “twenty-two crew members died during the following two years” (Wikipedia). Having in mind that they were sprayed with and/or inhaled radioactive substance while sealed in a metal container, one would expect everybody to have died of cancer; however, I’ve seen survivors living to very old age.
Essentially, you can even survive the levels of radiation exposure causing acute radiation sickness and live to die of old age in your 80s. Radiation is quite deadly in extreme doses, but those extreme doses are actually extreme, the kind Pripyat firemen received during their unfortunate attempt of putting down a reactor fire in Chernobyl. However, there are strong indications that both wildlife and humans can be exposed to quite high levels of radiation in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and live quite normally.
Also, the amount of radioactive fallout released during the Castle Bravo fuckup was so large, it’s what one would expect from a limited nuclear war with dozens of atmospheric MIRV warhead explosions, and guess what, we’re still here. So, having in mind what I know, there are very good reasons to believe that the Pentagon people know more. Knowing more, they fear nuclear war less. However, the potential for miscalculations is great. They may plan for a limited nuclear exchange within a tolerable range of outcomes, and things may escalate wildly and end up as something altogether different.
So the things discussed within this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVmI0tWrVGY we shouldn’t worry about? At least when it comes to full nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan?!
Let me be perfectly clear: a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would increase the levels of atmospheric radiation worldwide to the level from the sixties, when atmospheric testing was all the rage. Other than that, it would be a very bad time to visit India or Pakistan. But no, there won’t be a global disaster, that’s bullshit. A few hundred nukes going off is like that Eyjafjallajokull volcano that went off in Iceland. You have to have in mind that military nukes are not the Castle Bravo or Tzar Bomba size, they are 150-800kt size. You would need a good spread of those to level Zagreb. It’s not like one of those goes off and it’s the end of the world. It’s the end of your world if it goes off close to where you live, though. You have to have this in mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
As of 1993, worldwide, 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions (including 8
underwater) have been conducted with a total yield of 545 Mt while the estimated number of underground nuclear tests conducted in the period from 1957 to 1992 is 1,352 explosions with a total yield of 90 Mt. (Wikipedia).
Basically, that’s more than the total combined nuclear arsenal of India and Pakistan blowing up in the atmosphere. 520 atomic bombs. And that’s just atmospheric tests. An expected nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan is what exactly? A dozen bombs? Maybe multiplied by two. But certainly not *all* the bombs they have, since most of the arsenal is always redundancy, and multiple delivery methods. As I said, it would be bad locally, but globally, I wouldn’t really buy wine from that vintage, or any fruit and veggies imported from India in the next 20 years. 🙂
OK, I’m taking your word for it. Makes sense. As for India and Pakistan they both have something in between 100 and 150 when it comes to total number of warheads, and none of them ready for action?! According to this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons
So, in your opinion, based on presumption that US and Russia both have 1600 of nuclear warheads deployed … it still wouldn’t be enough to FUBAR The World in the case of full nuclear exchange?
I don’t have any idea how much of hits for them is actually acceptable to have it sustained?
The number of warheads they *have* is wildly misleading. Also, the number of warheads they have *deployed*. It only tells you what they could do if they decided to go all-out, and they received no interference from the enemy. Those assumptions are completely unrealistic. Also, everybody assumes the nuclear strikes are going to aim at the cities. From what I know, only the last tier of deterrence is aimed at the cities, the stuff that gets launched once the war is lost, and serves to deter the enemy from pursuing that goal. Essentially, while the enemy targets your military facilities, you will target his. If he has you backed into a wall, you will go all-out. Also, the great numbers of nukes serve the purpose of overwhelming the enemy’s defenses. It is assumed that a significant percentage of them will not make it through, that they will be taken out by the missile defenses. This is the most dangerous part, because nobody will dare underestimate the effectiveness of the enemy’s defenses, and you can’t add more if the previous wave didn’t get through, because you can’t assume you’ll be there to make those assessments, and such an approach will also make the job much easier for the enemy. You need to overwhelm their defenses significantly, which means you throw the kitchen sink at them in the first wave, and if their defenses don’t work as well as you think, you end up over-nuking them by a factor of 10 or 100, and that’s a nasty thing to do to someone. That’s why they all aim to disable the defenses first, to pull out a sneak attack that will be 100% effective, limited but deadly, and will force a diplomatic solution, basically you wipe out someone’s submarines and missile silos and try to get them to surrender before it gets really ugly.
Also, let’s say you have nuclear submarines, each with 16 launch tubes, each rocket carrying a 6-10 MIRV cluster. Let’s say you have ten submarines, and only 2 manage to launch, because the rest of them are taken out by the hunter-seekers. The starting number is 160 warheads per submarine, 1600 total, which is a lot. However, realistically you have reduced MIRV clusters due to START-II so it’s not 10 heads but 6, so we’re down to 192 heads, and let’s say a certain percentage of those 32 rockets fail, because rockets occasionally do. Also, let’s assume some of them will be taken out during the ascent phase, taking out the entire MIRV cluster at once. And it’s also safe to assume that some will be taken out at high altitude using a nuclear blast, taking out a significant portion of the MIRV cluster. Also, some warheads will be intercepted in the terminal phase. So, of 1600 warheads we got down to 192 and then down to, well, who knows, but it’s safe to assume that not all 192 will arrive at their targets and do their thing. So, essentially, a full nuclear exchange between America and Russia will realistically look like 200 actual nukes going off, most of which will be aimed at the military installations: shipyards, aircraft carrier battle groups, air bases, that kind of stuff. Unfortunately, I would expect America to be aiming at Moscow, St.Petersburg and Vladivostok as primary targets, because of Russia’s dense population grouping, high industrialization of those centers, proximity of important military installations and desire to take Russia out permanently and tell deceptive stories later. Russia, however, would want to avoid targeting cities at first, but after their own cities are destroyed, they will take the gloves off, and then something will happen that Americans didn’t predict, and the Russians will completely wipe out America, to the point where the entire place is a glass parking lot.
I think that we should only care about things from the closure of your reply i.e. when Americans get crazy and desperate enough to go all-in with their plans to obliterate fully Russians from the face of the Earth due to their evil bully kind of nature. It would be really nice if they cared about chivalry, playing fair and performing only strikes at targets of military nature but that’s far-fetched in my opinion as we know that had plans for contingency of Soviets right after the WW2. Luckily enough they were too lazy and also pompous about how they “single-handedly” won the war so they didn’t bother at the point when they actually had the upper hand considering the fact Soviets still didn’t have nuclear weapons to be able to retaliate on that. Thank God, they were also too smug about “winning” Cold War so Russians managed too get ahead of them when it comes to nuclear warfare technology, once Putin started sorting out the chaos that Yeltsin left, so I’d place my bets on Russians they would be survivors in the end, maybe not unscathed but not irreversibly FUBARed at least. Recently I read that Muricans plan to build and deploy new generation of nuclear submarines armed with nuclear warheads so they might be aware that Russians wouldn’t be easy to handle these days but I’m not that convinced they’ll be able to wait till 2031 when first of submarines are to be deployed?! https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-navys-new-stealth-nuclear-missile-submarines-21318
It is my opinion that the most likely disaster scenario might result from Americans planning for a limited nuclear war, and things going very wrong from there.
The Russians are a country that’s impossible to invade and control by conventional military means due to the vastness of the territory and nastiness of its climate, however they are a country that is also the least likely to survive a nuclear attack, because their population is grouped into very few major cities. A very small number of nukes can harm them disproportionately, which is an ironic twist from their near-invulnerability to a conventional attack.
Another irony is that they share those traits with America. Both are impossible to kill with conventional military means, and incredibly vulnerable to even a relatively small nuclear attack.
The thing that is most indicative of Russian assessment of the situation is that they developed a large array of modern weapons and technologies, but all the real money went into the production of nuclear weapons and defenses. Not into Armata tanks or SU-57, which are produced in prototype quantities; why, because if there’s a war, it won’t be fought with tanks and planes, and existing conventional weapons are quite sufficient for stopping any NATO force at the borders.
Also, regarding Sagan’s favorite invention, the nuclear winter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires
This happened, was very bad locally, but zero global effect. It’s much, much worse than the aftermath of nuclear explosions on multiple cities. Also, cities were burned down routinely during WW2, also no global effect.
People would die from starvation due to interruptions in food supply, artificial fertilizers supply, and water/gas/electricity supply, in case of a global nuclear war. Agriculture would suffer for other reasons, not the nuclear winter, which is bullshit.