Yves here. This may be more sobering that our usual Monday fare, but sadly it seems important to do what we can in our small way to make the horrors and destruction of even a “limited” nuclear war more vivid. There have been far too many people, starting with Lindsay Graham, but taken up by those who ought to know better, of resorting to nuclear weapons for the US to get its way (a recent proposed discipline object is Iran) or acting as if the use of tactical nuclear weapons is somehow OK as an escalatory measure. Readers can correct me, but my understanding is that Russia does not treat “tactical nuclear weapons” as a separate category in its doctrine. I would assume that means “nukes are nukes” and a nuclear attack, even if arguably limited, would be met with a nuclear retaliation.
Scott Ritter has separately warned that every war game the US has conducted where the US and Russia get in a hot war end in a nuclear war.
On a cautiously more cheery note, a new article at The Conversation, India and Pakistan have agreed a precarious peace – but will it last? describes how India and Pakistan have been able to turn ceasefires into somewhat stable longer-term “very limited hostilities” state. That has been due to internal as well as international pressures. But it also describes how Pakistan, which does not have a first-strike prohibition in its nuclear doctrine, convened its National Command Authority, which controls Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Not exactly subtle.
An understanding of the horrific effects of nuclear war has so far managed to stop their use. One concrete example was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Jonathan Glover, in his book Humanity (which included considerable archival research), said two factors contributed to the caution the Kennedy Administration exercised in stopping the planned Soviet missile installation.1 One was that the Barbara Tuchman book The Guns of August, was then a widely-discussed best-seller. A big message was how no one (or at least many key actors) wanted World War I to start, but communications delays plus perceived-to-be-binding treaty obligations led the war wagon to careen downhill. The second was that on the first day Kennedy was in office, he and his top team received a half-day briefing on what the impact of nuclear war would be.
By Jeff Masters. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections
Military clashes between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan over the past few weeks have once again raised the sobering question: What would a “limited” nuclear war do to the global climate? The answer is not reassuring. Research over the past decade has found that such a conflict would be capable of causing a catastrophic global nuclear winter, and recent work predicts that over 2 billion people could be killed — with famines and diseases in the aftermath eventually killing hundreds of millions more.
The Extraordinary Dangers of Global Nuclear War
In the 1980s and early 1990s, a series of scientific papers published by Soviet and Western scientists (including prominent scientists Carl Sagan, host of the PBS “Cosmos” TV series, and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen) laid out the dire consequences to the global climate of a major nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The nuclear explosions would send massive clouds of dust high into the stratosphere, blocking so much sunlight that a nuclear winter would result, they said. Global temperatures would plunge 20-40 degrees Celsius for months and remain 2-6 degrees Celsius lower for one to three years. Up to 70% of the Earth’s protective stratospheric ozone layer would be destroyed, allowing huge doses of ultraviolet, or UV, light to reach the surface. This UV light would kill much of the marine life that forms the basis of the food chain, resulting in the collapse of fisheries and the starvation of the people and animals that depend on it. The UV light would also blind huge numbers of animals, who would then wander sightless and starve. The cold and dust would create widespread crop failures and global famine, killing billions of people who did not die in the nuclear explosions.
The nuclear winter papers were widely credited with helping lead to the nuclear arms reduction treaties of the 1990s, as it was clear that we risked catastrophic global climate change in the event of a full-scale nuclear war.
Even a ‘Limited’ Nuclear War Would Kill Billions
But even a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan is a catastrophic threat to Earth’s climate. A landmark 2008 paper by Brian Toon of the University of Colorado, Alan Robock of Rutgers University, and Rich Turco of UCLA, “Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War,” concluded that a war between India and Pakistan using 50 Hiroshima-sized weapons with a 15-kiloton yield on each country, exploded on cities, would immediately kill or injure about 45 million people.
And a 2014 paper led by Michael Mills of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “Multidecadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict,” found that the final toll would be global — and astronomically higher.
Mills and his co-authors used an Earth system climate model including atmospheric chemistry, ocean dynamics, and interactive sea ice and land components to investigate a limited nuclear war where each side detonates 50 15-kiloton weapons — just 30% of the existing 340 or more warheads India and Pakistan are estimated to have. These urban explosions were assumed to start 100 firestorms. Firestorms are self-feeding fires that suck air into themselves and generate immense columns of rising smoke that lofts into the stratosphere, where it spreads globally. The model predicted the smoke would block enough of the sun’s energy to reduce the global average temperature by 1.25 degrees Celsius for three to four years and by more than 0.5 degree Celsius for a decade.
The effects would be similar to what happened after the greatest volcanic eruption in history, the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia. The cooling from this eruption triggered the infamous Year Without a Summer in 1816 in the Northern Hemisphere, when killing frosts disrupted agriculture every month of the summer in New England, creating terrible hardship. Exceptionally cold and wet weather in Europe triggered widespread harvest failures, resulting in famine and economic collapse.
However, the cooling effect of that eruption only lasted about three years. Cooling from a limited nuclear exchange would cause five to 10 consecutive Years Without a Summer and more than a decade of significantly reduced crop yields. Killing frosts would reduce growing seasons by 10-40 days per year for five years at midlatitudes. Global precipitation would fall 6% during the first five years and be reduced by 4.5% 10 years later, resulting in a crippling increase in regional droughts. Over the Asian monsoon region, including the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia, annual rainfall would fall by 20-80%, so that even the “winner” of the nuclear war between India and Pakistan would experience devastating famine from the failure of the life-giving monsoon rains.
Destruction of ozone would lead to another global calamity. As smoke in the stratosphere absorbed sunlight, the stratosphere would heat by 30 degrees Celsius (54°F). In the hot stratosphere, chemical reactions would destroy ozone, causing global ozone losses of 20-50% over populated areas. Ultraviolet light would increase by 30-80% over the midlatitudes, likely causing widespread damage to human health, agriculture, and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.
The Latest Research
The most recent research has strengthened these conclusions. Catastrophic forest fires in Canada in 2017 and Australia in 2019 and 2020 lofted massive quantities of smoke into the stratosphere. These events have allowed researchers to test their models of what a nuclear war might do.
A 2022 paper led by Lili Xia of Rutgers University, “Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection,” used state-of-the-art climate, crop, and fishery models to determine the impact of a nuclear war on human survival.
“In a nuclear war, bombs targeted on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere, which would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet,” the authors wrote. “Such soot loadings would cause decadal disruptions in Earth’s climate, which would impact food production systems on land and in the oceans.”
They estimated over 2 billion people would die from a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan. The 100 nuclear weapons used in such a war are only about 0.8% of the world’s total nuclear arsenal of over 12,000 warheads, and the authors estimated that over 5 billion might die from a wide-scale global nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia.
In a 2023 article for the journal Public Health Policy, Andreas Vilhelmsson and Seth Baum implored experts and institutions in public health to study the potentially cataclysmal health impacts of nuclear winter more thoroughly: “Given the global scope of nuclear winter, there should be participation from public health experts and institutions from around the world.”
The bottom line: Preventing nuclear war is crucial to protecting the future of humanity.
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1 Experts might argue that the USSR took this cheeky move to get the US to abandon its plans to put missiles in Turkiye, which the US did.
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And here I thought that browsing NC would be a good distraction from my back pain, which is killing my sleep. Well, it is still a distraction.
More seriously, I grew up during the First Cold War knowing what this article says as they knew about radiation poisoning and smoke, and since a still large number of our leaders also have, I wonder if they truly believe that they could survive a nuclear conflict. The Boomers and Generation X were well aware of the dangers when they were children (which nobody could quite escape from knowing) even if earlier studies had underestimated the them. Since the facts are easy to understand, widely known or available, and not in dispute aside from nitpicking about the scale, and have been for over sixty years, I have to ask myself why is our political leadership so foolish? I don’t ask in a rhetorical sense, but in the serious need to understand what is happening.
>I have to ask myself why is our political leadership so foolish? I don’t ask in a rhetorical sense, but in the serious need to understand what is happening.
Probably because they have their bunkers to retreat to and ride it out. Emerging then to crown themselves King Nothings and rule over a wasteland.
I do think that they truly believe a nuclear exchange anywhere on Earth is survivable. But of course, in what form does what remains of society become?
I think they think their bunkers will save them. This might be true in some cases. Key military and political decision makers in particular have essentially built whole unoccupied towns under mountains with room for a small military force in addition to the fearless leaders and their families. Fresh air is always going to be a bit tricky, as are the politics of a mostly male community of young, mostly male, professional killers ruled by elderly arrogant sociopaths. But assuming they can avoid being smoked out by desperate surface dwellers, and avoid turning their cave town into a charnel house, these places are supposedly hardened against any nuclear attack and provisioned with enough food, water, and fuel to support their occupants for many years.
As for the rich people with private bunkers hidden in the mountains of Montana and such, who have convinced themselves it would be they, instead of their contractors and security people who would be taking up residence in their little sanctuaries… As long as they convince themselves they will be safe and comfortable and maybe even see some of their eugenicist fantasies realized, they won’t bother to leverage their power in the name of peace – something which history has shown us isn’t the general disposition of the wealthy and powerful in any case.
Basically, as long as key decision makers and those who could theoretically oppose them think they will be safe, erroneously or no; and as long as they don’t care about, or even see some positive gain in a rapid population reduction; and as long they have an ideological commitment to conflict and “winning” at all costs, it is perfectly logical for them to engage in nuclear conflict.
It’s also worth mentioning that the logic of nuclear war is that if you are going to “win,” the gameplan is to act decisively at the point in time when you have a decisive advantage. If, for example, there is another nuclear power who seems to be gaining rapidly in the fields of military engineering, and if you view conflict as inevitable anyway, the only way to win that war game is to bring on a nuclear holocaust ASAP while you retain the greatest advantage.
Of course the assumptions underlying this logic are pure insanity, but if you accept them, and it seems many in power do, the inescapable logical conclusion is that imminent nuclear war is both necessary and desirable.
Unmentioned here is the problem of the radiation spread by these nukes. I understand that within a week of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, that farms in the United States were dumping milk a coupla days later. There were crops that were contaminated in Europe that nonetheless were still being sent to market. There was a cargo of irradiated figs from Turkiye that hit the docks here in Oz and authorities were balking at taking delivery of them. The Commonwealth government said Nah, it’ll be fine. Just tumble mix them with other figs so that the radiation is spread evenly and the average radiation is lowered. No mention of hot spots. Fortunately the health department of NSW put their foot down and killed that whole idea. But in case of even a small nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, can you really trust the food that you will be buying? After the Fukushima disaster and people were worried about radiation being spread to North America the Obama regime acted immediately to solve this problem – by shutting down radiation monitoring stations in the US.
Japanese ministers eat Fukushima fish to show it’s safe after nuclear plant wastewater is discharged
https://apnews.com/article/japan-fukushima-nuclear-wastewater-fish-fcb7498f38676192cce7e404277fc976
I wonder if there was a demonstrative eating of figs by Ozzie polticians. :)
That’s like the time that Britain’s Minister of Agriculture tried to get his very young daughter to eat a burger during the Mad Cow outbreak back in 1990 to prove that nothing was wrong with the meat-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH-c8Pru3jE (2:58 mins)
At least Obama only pretended to drink water from Flint, Michigan in front of all those people. And it was said anyway that the water actually came from Air Force One’s onboard stock.
Please forgive my dark mood, but living in a country, where Baerbock, Pistorius or Wadephul are revered as serious and honorable politicians and not prosecuted as the criminal fools that they are, I’ll play the devil’s advocate here: Isn’t a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, limited to the subcontinent, just the healthy measure as envisioned by our Malthusian overlords?
I recall from the times of my youth discussions in the media about “one or two limited world wars a year” as a proper means against ‘overpopulation’, the latter being nothing else than putting the darker scinned peoples in their place…
Let’s give the Malthusians their due. Without an occasional extinction event we’d all still be dinasours or something.
Don’t look now, but the USA is running out of conventional missiles to attack our foes, thank goodness we have quite the arsenal of atomic weapons, many of which are older than Bruce Springsteen, so many dried out prunes.
I can imagine the press conference after our Teetotalitarian leader crows about using them…
‘We have the best nuclear weapons, some say the greatest!’
You mean “we have the biggest beautiful nuclear weapons”.
Synchronicity strikes again! This article follows me watching the series “Chernobyl” last night on Max. If you would like some idea of what radiation exposure can do watch this series. And the radioactive fallout lasts almost forever. There is still a 30 km exclusion zone around Chernobyl, though the radiation has decreased somewhat. The Soviets built a containment building to cover the failed reactor to the tune of $2B dollars. Lobbing tactical nukes back and forth would wreck far more destruction than Chernobyl. And no building could be built to cover the destruction. I don’t want to even think about strategic nukes. Thank you for this article.
There were many hundreds of atmospheric tests in the 1940’s to 1960’s of nuclear weapons, how come none of them really effected us all that much in the scheme of things?
How do you know?
One of the theories I have heard for organ harvesting of cattle (single cows from herds found dead, with certain organs removed, clearly by someone with a lot of experience using surgical implements, timing and distances means it can’t have been a lone nutter) is that the officialdom wanted to measure radioactive traces in what were downstream blast residue areas. No way to buy single cows in the right pastures and haul them away w/o raising eyebrows.
I’m sure there has been effects, such as all metal post the Trinity test containing nuclear fallout, and certain things that have come up such as what you mentioned, but it wasn’t as if people watching a mushroom cloud in the distance from their Las Vegas pool in 1953 all died a horrible death shortly thereafter, as what happened in the direct bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That said, i’d rather not find out that we were ‘ok’ in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange in the subcontinent, that would only embolden us to use more of them.
Surprisingly few big epidemiological studies have been done on atmospheric testing (well, maybe not so surprising when you consider that none of the big five nuclear States wants to ask that question), but its also a very difficult question to answer scientifically. Surprisingly little is known for sure about the impacts of long term exposure to low levels of radiation (studies tend to focus on high level exposure and be relatively short term). The only thing we do know is that every living thing on the planet was exposed to extra radiation from those tests, including people born long after the last of them. Radioactive contamination is so universal it has some unusual uses – for example, you can use tritium levels to give a date for when groundwater originated as rainwater (if it post dates 1950). One reason WWII battleships are so popular for salvage as its the only way to get non-contaminated steel for some very specific purposes.
I’ve seen credible studies that indicate that excess mortality due to atmospheric testing, in particular of infants, can be measured in many millions of people worldwide. But there are so many confounding variables both in localised studies (i.e. around test sites) or in global terms, that I doubt any consensus figure will be arrived at.
Threads movie, especially uncut ending. Over 40 years ago.
When I was in graduate school I became quite good friends with a fellow classmate from India. Over time I became friends with many of her other Indian graduate school friends. In the summer of 1998 I found myself at a party they were throwing, and I was probably about the only non-Indian at the party and most definitely the only American there; out of about 30 people.
At some point late into the evening I began to notice that there is this conversation in the other room that is getting heated. It’s worth pointing out that in May of 1998 Pakistan successfully tested a nuclear bomb. This heated conversation was about whether or not India should invade Pakistan. Mind you, everyone was against Pakistan the argument was over whether it was worth it or not to invade. They were confident that India could quickly defeat Pakistan and they didn’t seem to worry about whether or not nuclear weapons would be used.
My mind had been blown to witness a conversation among people my own age (mid to late 20’s) who didn’t seem to have any reservations about 2 nuclear armed countries going to war with each other.
From a warmongers point of view, Tactical Nukes are not weapons of mass destruction. If detonated at ground level or sub-ground as bunker busters, the fallout would localised and much less damaging to the climate. It could be argued that they are equivalent to the new Russian Hypersonic (although details of the actual destruction that was caused has been kept secret by Western powers).
This agrees with the reading that I’ve done. Weapons detonated at or below ground level do not disperse a lot of radiation, however they produce a lot of materials and smoke that goes into high elevations. Meanwhile weapons detonated in the atmosphere cause a lot of radiation to spread and also the electromagnetic pulse wave, but don’t cause the firestorms and elevation of smoke and materials into the higher atmosphere levels.
A few notes on Kashmir, Pakistan, India and the Indus.
Kashmir is commonly referred to as the most militarized zone in the world. Reported numbers vary between 500K to a million Indian troops stationed in the IIOJK, which has a population of around eight million civilians.
The Indus River is the major source of water for the more than 180 million people of Pakistan., Pakistan and Water: New Pressures on Global Security and Human Health, NIH. From 2011, probably significantly higher at this point.
Indus Waters Treaty cannot be unilaterally suspended: World Bank president, Express Tribune. The lede, The Indus Waters Treaty cannot be unilaterally suspended or altered, World Bank President Ajay Banga said last week, emphasising that any changes to the agreement require mutual consent from both India and Pakistan.
Here is the interview, cnbc-tv18.
Here, from the World Bank, is a declassified overview of the Treaty. Interestingly, the World Bank’s link to the text of the Treaty goes 404.
Lammy, heh heh. Asked about India’s suspension of the Indus Water Treaty, potentially squeezing Pakistan’s water supply, Lammy said: “We would urge all sides to meet their treaty obligations.”, Reuters.
One additional thought, China addition.
The Indus and the Sutleg rivers both come out of Tibet. Historically, China and Pakistan are strong allies. China has form. Just saying.
We read every day that the US is preparing for a war with China. How can that war not go nuclear? Once a couple of its carriers are sunk, either the US must admit defeat, or its political “credibility” will oblige it to resort to nuclear weapons.
What targets will the US choose? My guess would be a military installation or two, with a civilian city thrown in as a demonstration of resolve. What will the Chinese do when the US targets its cities with nuclear weapons? They will respond in kind.
China possesses ICBMs which can reach the West Coast of the US. Targets for its nukes would include the military port of San Diego, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and the submarine pens in Washington State.
What happens then? Will the US pull back from general nuclear war? Or go for the Jackpot?
What Ritter doesn’t understand is that exercises of the kind he saw are not intended to make predictions, but to practice procedures and decision-making processes. If you’ve ever been involved in playing them or writing them you try to include everything you can think of, such that wherever real life goes, you know the kind of decisions you would be called on to take.
On the detail, it’s fair to say that, ever since I began reading about nuclear winters in the 1980s, it’s been a controversial theory, heavily dependent, as all such theories are, on the assumptions you make. There’s a good article in Wikipedia that goes into the controversy in some detail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
Thankfully, we haven’t actually had a nuclear war of this type, so everything depends on modelling, usually taking the Hiroshima bomb as a sort of point of departure. There it’s fair to say that the explosion took place on a sunny day when large numbers of people were in the streets (many were actually looking at the aircraft) and the target was a city where the vast majority of the buildings were made of wood.
The author doesn’t give any indication, apart from numbers chosen apparently randomly, of why and how nuclear weapons would be used. I assume he’s trying to apply to the Indian sub-continent scenarios from modelling of US-Soviet nuclear wars in the Cold Wars, but this scenario is very different. Pakistani weapons are in the first instance intended to compensate for their conventional inferiority, and would probably be used first against troop concentrations. Indeed, it’s hard to see where 50 Indian nuclear weapons would be targeted: there are only two large cities in Pakistan, Karachi and Lahore, although I suppose Islamabad would be included as well.
Moreover, the article is not clear what it’s trying to say. We read that there is a thing called a “limited nuclear war,” which, though not further defined, “would immediately kill or injure about 45 million people.” But in fact this is a very specific scenario, assuming 50 nuclear warheads on cities down to populations of about 200,000 and of no conceivable strategic value. We can assume that this is what the Strangelove tendency call “prompt casualties,” ie from blast, fire and radiation. But all such scenarios are highly dependent on things like ground vs airburst, atmospheric conditions, wind strength and direction, and especially what the targets are. And the study assumes a nuclear war lasting a week, which is highly improbable given that nuclear systems, airfields and command and control would be the first targets. But we then jump abruptly to a figure of 2 billion deaths (the referenced paper makes it clear that this is after a number of years) based on a whole series of climate modelling assumptions.
I’d be the last to downplay the dangers of a nuclear war between these two countries, nor the potential for environmental catastrophe, but I’m not sure that this way of proceeding–heroic assumptions and spurious precision mixed with very large numbers–is the best way to do it.
I think the logic goes along the lines that the Tambora eruption in 1815 did cause a perceivable drop in global temperature records causing failed crops and so forth. It’s also possible to estimate how much dust it did spew in the stratosphere and then compare that to the know (or well estimated quantities) of Hiroshima bomb/firestorm.
At this point it’s not really that controversial: a lot of particles in the lower stratosphere will cause cooling. No ifs and not buts.
But as you point out, it’s quite unlikely that all nuclear explosion will cause a firestorm, and not all firestorms do reach the stratosphere. So, a lot depends on the assumptions one makes at the start of the modeling. Assume 100 or more huge firestorms in big cities, and you will certainly get global cooling as a result. Technically, incendiary bombs would be more likely to achieve a nuclear winter, I think.
That said, personally I really, really dislike nuclear powers rattling their sabers no matter the underlying assumptions.
Did you miss the ozone layer destruction element? It’s quite possible 2 billion is a massive undercount – if the ozone layer is completely destroyed we are all dead.
This is what I don’t understand about the paper, how are only 2 billion people killed? The things described in the paper of everybody being blind and there being no food don’t explain how 5 billion people survive. Unless there’s something they’re not talking about, which might be hemispheric effects. I’ve looked into this quite a bit, and it’s hard to find information, but there’s not a great deal of mixing of air masses between the northern and southern hemisphere, at least in the lower levels. I couldn’t find anything about what happens in the upper levels. But the modeling that they’ve done of the atmospheric effects shows that the global average is not equally experienced in the two hemispheres.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219159/#:~:text=Furthermore%2C%20the%20chronic%2Dphase%20climatic,for%20elimination%20of%20grain%20yields.
And….
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust#:~:text=A%20major%20caveat%20is%20that,on%20the%20other%20is%20diminished.
Unfortunately, reference number 31 doesn’t seem to be correct….
I remember there was a study recently published that had a map that showed in red and green the temperature affects on the entire world, and they were quite different in the southern hemisphere for a bomb that was set off in the northern hemisphere. I wish that I could find that study. It might have been published here…. Like I said, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information released on hemispheric effects in the case of a nuclear war.
If even a localized nuclear war threatens the planet itself then surely the planet itself needs to be clear that it will react accordingly against the initiator of such a war. That goes double for the special pleaders in the ME who are even now testing the limits of barbarism. In an age of hypersonics decapitation strikes are increasingly possible against those who wish to style themselves as all powerful.
Perhaps there’s some comfort in the report that Trump dislikes the non bargaining nature of nukes and wants to revive disarmament. Some of us can suggest where he should start and it wouldn’t be Russia.
“…my understanding is that Russia does not treat “tactical nuclear weapons” as a separate category in its doctrine. I would assume that means “nukes are nukes” and a nuclear attack, even if arguably limited, would be met with a nuclear retaliation.”
As did the Soviets. And the retaliation would be strategic, not “tactical”. I.e., if Macron drops a “message” nuke in Ukraine, all Western targets, including in the US, would need to crank up the sirens. Further, one should realize that Soviet strike planning considered targets not just to disable the current aggression, but also to impede post-conflict Western economic recovery to deter subsequent attacks.
Western military constructs for limited nuclear war such as Countervailing Strategy (leadership bunkers and military targets but not cities – notwithstanding that many military installations are proximate to large urban areas) or other proposals for limited nuclear exchanges, such as: we’ll take out one of their medium cities, and then let them take out one of ours, then everyone will come to their senses and stop to engage in sincere talks; or escalatory, i.e. we’ll launch one, and then if they don’t come to their senses a few more, etc, until they do) arrogantly presupposed that the Soviets (now Russians) would be willing to be party to such an arrangement. They never have been, and have been clear about this since at least the 1960s.
Any nuclear attack, of whatever level, on Russia (or their armed forces) will be dealt with as full-on strategic war. They’ll launch everything.
Lindsay Graham is a buffoon and indeed a cartoon. I propose NC have a rule that debars mention of his name or his utterances.
– CT
“Fun” fact: the way Russian “nuclear suitcase” or The Button works, is that the Supreme Commander-in-Chief (Putin), the Minister of Defense (Belousov) and the Chief of the General Staff (Gerasimov) each have one. They are actually very capable and secure communication devices that activate when a complicated sensor system (or The Air and Missile Defense Forces HQ) thinks Russia is under a nuclear attack.
The purpose of the devices is to get the surviving leaders immediately into contact with the aforementioned HQ and receive all the possible information on the situation. The device has only one button: Deactivate. They are not for launching a nuclear strike, they are for canceling one. Technically two of the three have to push the button to prevent the HQ from delivering the launch codes to all missile troops.
It’s a system designed to deter enemies from a decapitation strike, and I guess it doesn’t really do finesse.
In her terrific book – Nuclear War – A Scenario the journalist Annie Jacobsen points out that the launch of even a single nuclear missile will likely lead to an all-out nuclear exchange. The reasoning for this is simple – once a missile launch is detected it takes many precious minutes to determine the target. So it behooves adversaries to assume they are the target and respond accordingly before it is too late. MIRVd missiles greatly increase this urgency. This aspect of nuclear war doesn’t get the attention it deserves. The odds of a “limited” nuclear war remaining limited are small.
Here’s a transcript of the first 60 seconds of Brian Toon’s powerful lecture (I reprinted it here a couple of years ago: https://sierravoices.com/2022/09/02/the-grim-poetry-of-science/): “66 million years ago a mountain-sized asteroid traveling ten times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle, slammed into the shallow seas covering what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. The immense energy of that impact hurled rocks as far north as Canada, and it vaporized the asteroid, part of Mexico and part of the shallow sea. This fireball of vaporized rock and water rose far above the Earth’s atmosphere and spread over the planet. As it cooled, molten drops of rock about the size of a grain of sand solidified into an immense storm of shooting stars. The shooting stars re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and heated the upper atmosphere to a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Standing at the ground, the dinosaurs saw the blue sky become a sheet of red-hot lava. The dinosaurs “broiled to death under the glowing skies.” Then energy in the sky was like that in the glow bar in an electric oven. The glowing skies started everything on fire. Great clouds of smoke rose into the upper atmosphere and blocked the sun, so that no sunlight reached the ground. It became cold and dark. Photosynthesis stopped, and plants and animals in the ocean or on the land, either starved or froze to death. Unfortunately, in our lifetimes, we may experience the same fate as the dinosaurs. But I’m not talking about another asteroid collision, I’m talking about nuclear war.”