There is No Nuclear Option in War

Vladimir Putin since being stymied by Ukraine’s resistance to his invasion has suggested that Russia, because of the U.S. precedent referring to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no longer needs to feel constrained about using its nuclear arsenal. If this only came up once in his interviews, that would be frightening enough. But lately, he has talked about waiving Russia’s commitment never to use nuclear weapons first in a war.

The war in Ukraine is one conflict zone of many where nuclear weapons are very much in the mix. Russia sees NATO countries on its European frontier as threats that could justify using tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a military conflict. The paranoid state of North Korea sees enemies all around it and without China serving to constrain it, probably would have used its missiles and its nuclear war capability by now. China and the United States in the South China Sea, and over the issue of Taiwan, may become a flashpoint for nuclear escalation. India and Pakistan, both armed with nuclear weapons, enjoy an uneasy armistice in their dispute over Kashmir. And India and China have already fought one border war along their Himalayan frontier, and recently have seen troops from both sides fighting each other. Then there is Israel and its nuclear deterrent capability in addressing a potential threat from Iran. The latter continues to enrich uranium well beyond the needs of nuclear power plant requirements as it pursues joining the nuclear arms club.

Yesterday, William Burr published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Burr directs the Nuclear Documentation Project for George Washington University’s National Security Archive. Entitled, “Cold War estimates of deaths in nuclear conflict,” Burr describes the apprehension raised by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the speculation that President Putin is talking about using limited nuclear strikes. The danger that this would draw NATO directly into the conflict leading to a nuclear exchange has led to speculation on what would be considered acceptable casualty levels should this be the outcome.

The very thought, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that any nation would consider using nuclear weapons is abhorrent. And to think that back at the height of the Cold War, nuclear powers were bandying about casualty numbers is equally horrific.

Just after the first two atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, the American military began planning for a future nuclear war with the Soviet Union. At the time, the U.S. was the sole owner of atomic weapons. The Soviets within a few years matched them. The military planners in the U.S. estimated acceptable casualty levels in a nuclear war they could win. Those numbers were kept top secret. At the time, nobody in governments or the military thought about the conditions after a nuclear strike and post-apocalyptic casualties.

In the late 1940s, the estimates of deaths from a nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. talked about millions. In the 1950s with the hydrogen bomb, the number rose to tens of millions. Then with intercontinental ballistic missiles, the number escalated to hundreds of millions.

A 1958 report estimated 50 million American deaths and 9 million injured in a war between the U.S., the People’s Republic of China and the Soviets. The casualty numbers for the other side were estimated to be 71 million immediately with 196 million more dying within the next thirty days.

In 1983 the television drama, The Day After which can be viewed on YouTube, was watched by more than 100 million Americans at the time. It showed the post-apocalyptic devastation of a thermonuclear war. For those who watched it, I was one of them, we were introduced to nuclear winter, a climate-forcing change to weather resulting from a thermonuclear exchange.

In 2013, the second edition of Nuclear Famine, produced by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility, concluded that two billion on the planet would be at risk from the nuclear winter that would follow even a limited thermonuclear exchange between countries like India and Pakistan.

Nature published an article in August of last year about the post-apocalyptic impacts of nuclear war on food security. It describes what soot injections into the stratosphere from a thermonuclear exchange between adversaries would do to global agricultural production and marine food sources. The article concurs with the Nuclear Famine study previously mentioned in terms of the number of casualties in a limited confrontation between India and Pakistan. But it goes on to look at casualties from a U.S.-Russia thermonuclear war which it estimates would kill upwards of 5 billion.

Who plans for wars that could cause holocausts that kill billions? Apparently, all of the militaries and governments of these aforementioned countries. Reams of classified studies are revealed in William Burr’s article. These come from U.S. military archives. And one can assume the same can be found in the Soviet Union and Russian Federation, China, India, Pakistan, and other nuclear-armed countries.

Is There Such a Thing as a Small Nuclear Confrontation?

What is the thinking behind Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats? There are big nuclear weapons and then there are small ones. Those with the latter call them battlefield tactical nuclear weapons. They are theoretically designed to target conventional military forces in the field. In most cases, they produce energy yields smaller than the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But evidence published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, last July, that describes the tactical nuclear arsenals of both the U.S. and Russia contradicts the smallness of these weapons.

The Union article notes that the U.S. has approximately 200 tactical nuclear gravity bombs yielding between 0.3 and 170 kilotons. (Hiroshima’s explosive yield was 15 kilotons, so that means the biggest of these small weapons is 11 times more destructive.) The deployment of 100 of these tactical nuclear weapons is in NATO countries in Europe.

Russia, the article estimates, has approximately 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons. The Russian arsenal of small nuclear produces energy yields per each of up to 100 kilotons. These can be delivered by air, ship, and ground-based conventional weapon systems such as those currently being used in Russia’s Ukraine “special military operation.”

Burr describes the Ukraine conflict as “a newer danger” because of Putin’s nuclear sabre rattling. He asks that the countries with nuclear weapons not take any rash steps that could make the casualty estimates of past war planners “more than historical curiosities.”