I went down a rabbit hole of archival recordings (on archive.org) of insane material from the Cold War era, including this gem called "The Complacent Americans" which aimed to instruct Americans on how to survive a nuclear blast. It's really quite mental to listen to: https://archive.org/details/lp_the-complacent-americans_larr...
It inspired me to make an EP about the same topic, utilizing samples from that material plus some others, called Leader of all Nations. You might like it if you're into slower-paced dubstep / Boards of Canada stuff, it's on Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/taaapes/sets/leader-of-all-nations) plus all the usual places.
It's strange to me that some of the basic principles of what to do in the event of a nuclear explosion are no longer taught, despite the fact that the risk of nuclear war is arguably just as high as it once was. For instance, I bet if a bomb went off in the middle distance, most people would look at it: bad move! If you see a big flash, you should actually (it's a cliche, but true), "duck and cover". Duck to avoid flying debris. Cover to avoid burns. I didn't know this until I dug into the archival material making this EP but it's genuinely odd to me that this is not widely known. (I'd heard the phrase before, but had no idea what it really meant.)
TrainedMonkey · 2h ago
The risk of a nuclear war is fairly low compared to historical flash points. From memory there were at least 2 instances where if people followed orders to the T we would have had a nuclear exchange.
First one was cuban missile crisis that had a lot of escalation, but most poignant was probably dropping depth charges against submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis). On that front - thank god Khrushchev chickened out.
I think the closest call we've had since the end of the Cold War was the Russian cruise missile that crashed in Poland near the beginning of the war in Ukraine. There was a world where that hit something more important (or at least the Russians thought it did), which would potentially lead to an Article 5 call, which if the Russians anticipated, the rational move could well be a preemptive strike. But as you said, that's miles from the "One act of open defiance by a subordinate from armaggedon" type scenarios.
vayup · 1h ago
Good time to remind everyone that Article 5 does not really commit the member states automatically into a war. It will be insane for any country to sign such a treaty. The language in Article 5 permits each NATO member to decide for themselves what action they want to take when Article 5 is invoked.
This is what it says:
"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one .. shall be considered an attack against them all and ..that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, ...will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."
el_zilcho · 21m ago
Except it wasn’t a cruise missile nor was it Russian.
An article 5 call wouldn't trigger an invasion of Russia.
Besides the best response is to simply gift more toys to the Ukrainians.
bryanlarsen · 2h ago
And situations like that could happen again. Experts put the odds of a nuclear war at around 1-3% per annum, and that feels about right. The odds of it happening in any particular year is fairly low, but the odds of it happening during a person's lifespan becomes quite high. 70 years of those kind of odds make it more likely than not. We've landed on "not", but the kind of close calls you called out indicates that "more likely than not" feels about right, and that we landed on "not" has a huge component of luck.
nancyminusone · 3h ago
It does bother me that people think duck and cover is completely useless. It is if the bomb explodes directly above you, but if you're a few miles away, it's pretty much the same situation as a tornado, and we still have drills for those.
JKCalhoun · 2h ago
Not sure. My understanding is that it made sense before the hydrogen bombs. After Teller did his magic, the bomb shelter (etc.) became laughable.
LorenPechtel · 2h ago
It depends on how far from the bomb you are. For any reasonable bomb there's a distance where duck and cover helps. It takes less overpressure to kill you with flying debris than to kill you directly.
When the bomb is big enough this no longer applies, but in this realm adding more power to the boom doesn't do much to increase the damage area. There's no point in such a bomb unless you detonate it at high altitude--that means rockets, and you need a lot of rocket to lift such a bomb.
lupusreal · 1h ago
It's not simple; with large bombs the lethal blast radius grows faster than the lethal prompt radiation radius, but the thermal damage grows fast too. You can duck and cover to survive flying glass and falling roofs, but if you're in line of the thermal pulse you're cooked.
In any case, massive bombs being used in "counter-value attacks" (euphemism for targetting civilians) aren't the most likely way for a nuclear war to start. Both the Soviet Union/Russia and America invested heavily in tactical nuclear weapons, designed for battlefield use (e.g. "counter force".) Additionally, other nuclear powers like France have counter-force first strike as part of their nuclear doctrine. Any semi-rational way to start a nuclear war would be to target the oppositions ability to respond in kind, not to attack cities right off the bat. Strikes against cities are a reaction, a threat meant to deter, but starting the war out that way is just an elaborate form of suicide. Point is, it's a good idea to assume that civilians will have at least some period of disturbing escalation as warning to get the fuck out of urban areas. When you hear about the US military setting off nukes in the Fulga Gap to stop Soviet tanks, that's when you GTFO.
jbm · 1h ago
As someone who normally would not take such anti-life positions, I legitimately cannot understand why anyone would want to survive a nuclear attack.
You'd survive just to starve. From that perspective, duck and cover is trading a quick death for a long one.
xboxnolifes · 44m ago
Only if you assume a single nuclear attack leads to escalation into nuclear holocaust. It's certainly the prevailing wisdom, but it's not an actual guarantee.
unyttigfjelltol · 3h ago
A tornado leaves only local destruction. Duck-and-cover implies that with proper preparation, total thermonuclear war is survivable by a society, which is not the correct mindset.
Stratoscope · 3h ago
Duck and cover doesn't imply any such thing. It is simply a way to protect yourself in a case like nancyminusone described.
A good example is the Chelyabinsk meteor event of 2013. Many people went to look out the window to see what was going on, not realizing that the shock wave would come moments later.
> A fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, was hailed as a hero after saving 44 children from imploding window glass cuts. Despite not knowing the origin of the intense flash of light, Karbysheva thought it prudent to take precautionary measures by ordering her students to stay away from the room's windows and to perform a duck and cover manoeuvre and then to leave the building. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated when the blast arrived and window glass severed a tendon in one of her arms and left thigh; none of her students, whom she ordered to hide under their desks, suffered cuts. The teacher was taken to a hospital which received 112 people that day. The majority of the patients were suffering from cuts.
Okay, so you survive your initial local blast. Now what?
Nuclear war won't be a local thing. Your country will be hit by hundreds if not thousands of nukes. Not only is your local city devastated, so is literally every other city. Nobody is coming to help: your government and military no longer exist, there is no emergency response possible, the Red Cross isn't a thing anymore. The electric grid has collapsed. The internet is dead. You're rapidly running out of fuel, heating sources, running water, and food.
So what exactly did the whole "duck and cover" do for you? Is surviving the initial blast worth the week or two of complete horror which will inevitably follow?
Duck-and-cover maybe makes sense if a nuclear war is going to be a single hit and the rest of society survives to help you recover. But that's not what nuclear war will be like.
LorenPechtel · 2h ago
Exactly. Half a megaton, but high enough up that duck and cover would probably have saved everyone.
slt2021 · 3h ago
it is survivable according to the Soviet doctrine, which denied the concept of MAD. Soviets focused on the survival of small military command in hardened bunkers, rather than survival of entirety of civilian population.
This doctrine allows unlimited pre-emptive nuclear strikes to achieve decisive victory over the enemy, and avoid attrition-style prolonged nuclear war
unyttigfjelltol · 28m ago
You have agreed with my comment that the event would not be survivable by society. Duck-and-cover drills are for those who you call civilians, who will not survive. At best they invite the misinterpretation that such an event is survivable and capable of generating a “decisive victory over the enemy.”
Would military command really have achieved a decisive victory by glazing the surface of their own country and burying what’s left underground for the foreseeable future? Clearly a failure of strategic thinking by our erstwhile competitors.
slt2021 · 16m ago
the nuclear deterrence is basically a game of Russian roulette, and nobody can play it better than the Russians.
The Soviet bet was that the collective West is more wealthy and hedonistic than Soviets, and has more to lose in the global hot war, and therefore would be less willing to climb up the escalation ladder, thus giving the escalation dominance to the Soviets, as long as technical means of delivering the decisive strike are available (ICBM, IRBM, SLBM, ALBM, MIRV, Perimeter, etc).
examples are numerous:
1. Cuban missile crisis. It was JFK who blinked first in the Caribbean crisis and called Khrushev to deescalate and agreed to remove missiles from Turkey
2. Ukraine war. It was Jake Sullivan that turned off the tap on military shipments to Ukraine, when Russia communicated that they will be using tactical nukes in Kherson
compass_copium · 3h ago
Hmm, I remember reading that the Soviets had significantly better preparations for civilian protection in nuclear war than the US (including more bunkers in cities), but I'm struggling to remember where. Possibly Raven Rock (subtitle: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die) by Garrett Graff.
bigyabai · 3h ago
Moscow in particular has a few low-hanging-fruits that can be mentioned; the Metro bunkers[0] and A-135 system[1]. Both were designed to make the city deeply survivable in the event of a targeted conflict, but it's questionable how well they would have worked.
Moscow subway (many other subways and bunkers throughout the country) are the underground bunkers that could shelter the Soviet elites in the event of nuclear war
ajcp · 3h ago
Got a source for that doctrine?
lupusreal · 1h ago
American doctrine too. Both countries built thousands of tactical nuclear weapons.
vkou · 2h ago
> Soviets focused on the survival of small military command in hardened bunkers, rather than survival of entirety of civilian population.
How exactly is the focus of the Americans any different? The VIPs[1] will be whisked away into bunkers, you and me will be vaporized.
---
[1] Who have utterly and irredeemably failed in their most important job - of preventing a nuclear war. In a just world, not a single one of them should be allowed to survive such a failure.
We don't live in a just world, though, the captain will run for the VIP life raft at the first glint of sea ice.
slt2021 · 1h ago
the difference is ideology and class difference.
American VIPs want to survive because they are rich and want to enjoy their wealth, they don't want to die.
Soviet VIPs were not wealthy and their goal of survival was purely decisive military win and achievement of political goals.
vkou · 1h ago
I assure you, people and VIPs and their desires are more or less the same the world over.
Othering and ascribing alien ambitions to the enemy only fools yourself.
Why do you think their goals differed from those of someone like, say, Kissinger? Or any of the other people who have spent the past century and a half grooming and growing the empire?
slt2021 · 8m ago
who blinked first during Cuban missile crisis? It was JFK who called Khrushev for deescalation.
who blinked first during Ukraine-Russia war? It was Jake Sullivan who redirected military gear from Urkaine to Israel and drip-fed the ammunition shipments, when Russia showed they are ready to use tactical nukes if necessary and formally updated their nuclear doctrine
Thanks for the kind words I appreciate it. That was a great listen. Unexpected ending, especially at the volume I was listening at! What artist is that?
mannykannot · 4h ago
I see the ambiguous Vela incident of 22 September 1979 has been excluded.
“But if they have thermonuclear power, where then do they conduct their tests and detonations?”
“On their own planet, sir.”
Naron rose to his full twenty feet of height and thundered, “On their own planet?”
“Yes, sir.”
Slowly Naron drew out his stylus and passed a line through the latest addition in the smaller book. It was an unprecedented act, but, then, Naron was very wise and could see the inevitable as well as anyone in the galaxy. “Silly asses,” he muttered.
Bomb pulse: a global increase in atmospheric carbon-14 resulting from the large-scale nuclear bomb testing conducted primarily between the 1950s and mid-1960s. Used by scientists as a chronological marker to date a wide variety of materials and study environmental processes.
Does this prove/disprove the idea of nuclear winter? I know these bombs were blown up at different times, but it seems an event like nuclear winter would probably not happen.
cjensen · 2h ago
No.
Most tests were underground after the first decade or so once the effects of fallout were better understood. Plus underground testing reduces the affected radius and conserves area for additional testing.
Also note that most tests were "small" yield weapons rather than the really big hydrogen bombs. It's easy to forget how large the range of power there is among different nuclear weapons. E.g. Tsar Bomba was 4000 times more energetic than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
LorenPechtel · 2h ago
Nuclear winter requires two things.
1) Big bomb. The mushroom cloud must go up to above the maximum altitude for rain.
2) Soot. You need a city or the like underneath the bomb to produce a bunch of soot to get lifted into the sky.
Either one by itself (we've seen really big bombs, but they're not dropped on places that will make a bunch of soot, Saddam's oil fires created enough soot but nothing lifted it above the rain, the bombs on Japan weren't big enough to lift the crud above the rain) has little effect.
bobmcnamara · 2h ago
No, either way.
Presumably the operational devices are more consistent and higher yield than the early pre-fusion cores. There are outliers on both sides in the test data.
Much of the soot generated from a nuclear blast comes from the surrounding environment, cities presumably, which seems to be less flammable than in the past(armchairing here).
Time of year will always be a factor.
I'm sure there are things I'm not thinking of off the cuff.
Rover222 · 3h ago
Yeah I think the nuclear winter idea came from if the US and Soviets both launched their full arsenals in a MAD exchange, and society now associates nuclear winter with just a few nuclear explosions.
dylan604 · 2h ago
Is that what society thinks, or just some random people on the interwebs? Does society think the earth is flat, or just some random people on the interwebs? It's easy to find oneself in a bubble and think everyone else thinks the same way, when stepping out of the bubble for a moment brings reality crashing back
Rover222 · 2h ago
weird take
hopelite · 2h ago
Most of these nuclear tests were underground and undersea. In a nuclear exchange, most devices would detonate above the target surface level to maximize destruction through the shockwave.
There is also the secondary impacts that would start immense uncontrolled wildfires all over the planet that would produce much of the nuclear winter effect that is assumed, due to the amount of soot and ash it would produce. But most people would not live long enough to experience the nuclear winter anyways after the explosions, the fireball, the uncontrollable wildfire, the marauding, and the starvation and disease.
If you lived long enough to make it to nuclear winter, you would probably just wish you had died long ago. If you had anyone at all with you, you might have to even make hard decisions about who you can take with you and who to leave behind, and if you managed to somehow get to somewhere where you might be able to feed yourself and survive near the equator, you would only really be living a primitive subsistence life. If you happened to have a female with you, you may try to rebuild the human population, whether she wants to or not. Yes, it’s very grim; but maybe even optimistic. But even if that is pessimistic, at best you will find yourself in a world where there is nothing left that you could rely on for contemporary existence. No communications, no electronics, nothing but manual transportation once any surviving fuel is used up on any surviving carbureted engines, no running water, and you would have to fight off savage roaming marauders, who want all your things and will have thrust everyone into a hellish version of Madmax, etc.
See any of the actual first hand accounts of what happened in the New Orleans and the Superdome after hurricane Katrina for a tiny little taste of what you would be facing.
The nuclear winter would be the least of your problems.
OkayPhysicist · 1h ago
Nuclear armageddon would not spell human extinction. Not even close. Most of the southern hemisphere would be basically untouched: No one's wasting their nukes hitting most of South America or Africa, and frankly even Australia's a stretch.
Even in the United States, in a worse case scenario, large swathes would be untouched by the direct blast effects of all-out nuclear war. There's basically nothing in Idaho worth nuking, for example. It would spell civilizational collapse, sure, since the major economic, industrial, and administrative hubs would now be smoking holes in the ground. But for people living in the agricultural interior of the US, most problems would be economic rather than desperate survival.
The effects of EMP are grossly overblown. Most electronic devices would still work fine, once you have a generator or access to the parts of the grid that would not be targets (again, even when you're firing a couple thousand nukes, the windfarms of Iowa are going to be faaaaaar down the list of targets).
The refuge crisis of people migrating from places not completely annihilated but still no longer safe for habitation (think Merced or Gileroy, California) would be straining. Such desperation would breed banditry, sure, but not to the level of a Mad Max hellscape. Most people do not have the stomach for such violence, which is why even in the most apocalyptic conditions (look at say, Syria during its civil war, or Gaza today) you only see a moderate increase in criminality.
Nuclear war can be very bad without making up silly scenarios.
jebarker · 2h ago
Given the huge number of tests, I wonder how many people alive have seen a nuclear detonation
mandevil · 1h ago
Most of those tests (almost all since the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963) were underground, where no one could witness them except in photographs. Since the LTBT over 60 years ago, China has done 22 above-ground tests, and France did 50. France stopped atmospheric testing in 1974 (over 50 years ago), China in 1980 (45 years ago).
So the last test at which it is feasible that someone watched with their own eyes would be the Chinese nuclear test at Lop Nor on 16 October 1980, at 04:30:29.67 UTC.
That was a test of the JL-1 missile, which was fired off and then flew all the way through reentry to nuclear detonation. At the time, a lot of people in the West doubted that Chinese missiles were capable of delivering a working warhead (1) so they proved their capability by firing an actually armed SLBM and it detonated in the atmosphere, exactly like it would do against a city.
1: Much like a lot of people discount North Korea's missile delivery today. No one doubts that Israel, France, Russia or the UK have missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads successfully (the US, like China, has actually done a full SLBM launch-to-warhead detonation test, the only two countries to do so- though the US Operation Frigate Bird was before the LTBT). I wonder what it is that connects China and North Korea, and makes Westerners doubt their abilities in ways that they don't doubt the French or the UK?
OkayPhysicist · 1h ago
France and the UK are not desperately poor like North Korea, or China in the 70's.
compass_copium · 3h ago
Those dirty commies... American testing had absolutely no consequences for its own citizens or others.
The authors overt nationalistic tone is really at odds with reality. There are no "good guys" when it came to nuclear weapons testing. The UK nuclear weapons tests in Australia were also a disaster for locals and poisoned large areas.
Finnucane · 3h ago
Many of the workers at the Nevada Test Site got radiation sickness, cancers, and other health issues from exposure to the bombs and fallout. As did their families (contaminated clothing was worn home). Soldiers taking part in tests, downwinders in Utah and elsewhere, experienced high rates of cancer. Farmers lost livestock and crops. The AEC and DoD did everything they could to cover it up.
I read once the tsar bomba is actually not very efficient. The problem is the explosion is concentrated on one spot and most of the energy gets dissipated upwards. If you really want to cause huge widespread destruction you are better off using multiple smaller megaton bombs. Still, it would probably ruin your day.
Apparently they could have even doubled its power to 100 megatons? You have to wonder what that would have been like.
In case you were wondering this is what would have happened if they had detonated it under the marinas trench https://what-if.xkcd.com/15/
fusionadvocate · 3h ago
One interesting thing about the Teller-Ulam design is that you can scale the bomb as big as you want. Imagine a skyscrapper sized bomb.
arethuza · 3h ago
Edward Teller (who else) got there first with his Sundial design for a 10Gt bomb...
> If you really want to cause huge widespread destruction you are better off using multiple smaller megaton bombs. Still, it would probably ruin your day.
Isn't this the basic idea of ICBMs / MIRVs with multiple warheads? Basically nuclear cluster bombs.
dylan604 · 2h ago
I think that's just a side benefit to the MIRVs' main purpose of being more difficult to stop
boringg · 3h ago
I think they very much had to watch the weather for radiation dispersal with the large upwards column. Also why they scaled down the size I believe. Would need to validate this though.
buckle8017 · 4h ago
They scaled it down so the plane dropping the bomb could escape.
LorenPechtel · 2h ago
And to reduce the fallout.
50mt vs 100mt came down to whether the jacket was U-238 or something inert. (U-238 can't do a chain reaction, but when subject to the neutron flux of an h-bomb it's willing to fission and increase the yield.)
mandevil · 3h ago
Alright, let's talk physics! Presume that every thing I mention is actually caveated with "so far as unclassified understanding goes." Also, another caveat that I was an intern at a WMD non-proliferation group two decades ago, so my understanding was never perfect to begin with and time may be playing tricks on me.
So the Tsar Bomba was designed to be twice as large as it actually detonated. What the hell?
See, a thermonuclear bomb like this is (in the Teller-Ulam design) a three stage weapon: first, the primary (a regular atomic bomb, generally a sphere of plutonium that is imploded really fast) goes. The primary is a fission bomb, where a bunch of fissile material (Pu-239 or U-235- or technically U-233 but that's never been done at scale- Pu239 is easiest to isolate so its most common) is rapidly pushed together and generates a whole bunch of energy. This is what destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is an "atomic bomb." This energy release comes from the chain reaction of atoms splitting: one U or Pu atom splits into a chain of daughter atoms and gives off a lot of energy- and extra neutrons which hit other atoms and cause them to split, setting off a chain reaction of energy release when enough U/Pu atoms are dense enough.
And then the energy from that release is directed into a bunch of fusionable material (probably lithium-deuteride) which causes those atoms to get so hot they start to fuse. And that fusion (like in the sun itself) gives off much more energy- as a rough estimate let's say something like 10x the amount of energy from the primary.
And then there is a third stage, the uranium tamper. You take some depleted uranium (U238- which is what is left behind when you pulled out all of the U235 from the natural uranium) and you direct the energy of the fusion into that. And that causes the U238 to do fission (which it won't do normally, unless you dump a whole lot of neutrons into it). This is, basically, doubling the amount of energy released. It's this uranium tamper- which is basically free, once you have an enrichment program up and running- which was replaced by lead in the Tsar Bomba test, so it only produced half the energy it could have.
As a note, fission turns out to be where most of the fallout is generated, and fusion doesn't generate a much fallout. The infamous "neutron bombs" of the 1970's and 1980's were a common name for basically, a thermonuclear bomb without that Uranium tamper (e.g. something like a Tsar Bomba but smaller) which produced very little fallout relative to its size. This worried some people, who thought that a conventional NATO-Warsaw Pact war might go nuclear if the West German government could be convinced to allow the use of such a bomb on their territory because it had less fallout. This also explains why the uranium tamper wasn't included on the Tsar Bomba test, because that would have produced absurd amounts of nuclear fallout.
Also as a general rule large bombs aren't very efficient, because you are destroying everything in a sphere volume: to double the radius of destruction you need to increase the energy by a factor of 8. Once Minuteman came along, and there were a thousand very accurate ICBM's available (and then Minuteman III which added MIRV's so quickly tripling that- and the Soviets responded with SS-11) it was more efficient use of the expensive fissile material to put more smaller warheads around, because the delivery systems were no longer the bottleneck.
Cthulhu_ · 3h ago
My knowledge of neutron bombs was mainly popular science saying it would "just" kill everyone in a radius without damaging anything else, but the way you describe it it's "just" a thermonuclear bomb without the third stage.
LorenPechtel · 1h ago
Neutron bombs are small fusion bombs designed for putting as much energy into the neutrons as possible. Set the bomb off high enough and the blast would not be worse than a big storm but deliver an instant-kill neutron dose.
Turns out to be a horrible idea, though--yes, that's what it does to it's target, but consider farther out. The quick kill dose is several times the kill dose--you likely have a bunch of enemy forces that are dead men walking. And when you put soldiers in hopeless positions they have a tendency to try to take the enemy with them. You just made a bunch of kamikazes.
mandevil · 2h ago
So, in the Cold War, when NATO would do conventional war games, they almost always lost. (1) At some point or another NATO ran out of troops and a Soviet tank army Operational Maneuver Group broke through and there were no NATO forces left to stop them.
At that point it becomes a political question: will the NATO political leaders (most importantly West Germany) allow the use of nuclear weapons on their own territory, killing their own civilians? (2) Some people thought that 'neutron bombs' were destabilizing because they made it more likely that, under those circumstances, the West German government would say "yes, let's go nuclear" and then that would lead to an escalation chain and pretty quickly it's Dr. Strangelove. (That all depends on the idea that a conventional NATO-Warsaw Pact war was even possible, which I'm not sure is true.)
But that's why some people made it such a big deal, they thought that a bomb that had almost no fall-out might lead to nuclear weapons use, it's the political not engineering consequences of deployment that worried them. The engineering is not the constraint, in fact it's actually barely easier to build one.
1: Looking at the capabilities that the Soviet Army was supposed to have, not necessarily the capabilities that they actually had, the Soviet Army should have crushed NATO conventionally from anytime ~1950 on. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine reminds us, armies are not always actually at the level they claim to be.
2: The French- who were sort of in and sort of out of the NATO command structure- answer to this question was the Pluton missile which was not capable of reaching East Germany, could only hit targets in West Germany (from bases in France- it was a mobile missile that could theoretically drive into West Germany, but... come on now). So they had the ability to engage targets in West Germany, and there was no question of their political leaders: they were 100% totally willing to nuke Germany rather than let Soviet troops conquer their country.
buildbot · 1h ago
According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb; yes it’s basically a fusion bomb with a different casing but also can be tuned to put a good deal of that energy into very high energy radiation vs. thermal radiation.
What I don’t understand is how neutron activation can be avoided. In particle accelerators this happens to whatever is around the collision point, you end up with lots of radioactive sensors.
mempko · 4h ago
Didn't Russia just create some kind of underwater nuclear torpedo to cause tsunamis? I guess they are fans of Dynson
Cthulhu_ · 3h ago
With limited knowledge (the What If link posted earlier), would a tsunami created by a nuke be more damaging than a direct nuke itself? You'd lose the explosive and heat damage for the most part, and at least in my head the water would contain and dampen a lot of the explosion (although on the other hand water isn't nearly as compressible as air)
mandevil · 1h ago
The scale of energy released is the problem. Tohoku earthquake (which caused the Fukushima tsunami) released ~600 million Little Boy's worth of energy. Yeah, modern bombs are bigger- you'd only need a few hundred thousand Tsar Bombas to get that much energy- but still we're talking an absolutely gargantuan amount of energy.
This is why no one looked at the idea until Putin needed something to threaten America with after GWB did a really stupid thing and pulled out of the ABM Treaty. And I don't believe that the official Russian sources claim it can make a tsunami, I think that's mostly propaganda.
ben_w · 3h ago
Russia has claimed to have done many things that, on close investigation, it has in fact not done.
Well, they can't exactly test that particular system without causing massive ecosystem damage. As for your first comment - you are commenting from a politically motivated position, not a technical one. Said another way, you are making the warfare 101, chapter 1, paragraph 1 mistake.
ben_w · 1h ago
> warfare 101, chapter 1, paragraph 1 mistake.
"All warfare is based on deception" - Sun Tzu
What every nation, Russia included, talks about and shows off has very little in common with what they can actually do.
In Russia's case we mere civilians can just directly observe the difference a lot of the time, enough for me to be comfortable projecting the same assumption where only real military analysis could actually tell for sure. The claim that this weapon could cause a tsunami is within the set of things even civilians can disprove.
This option is not available to us civilians for more competent cases such as China or Iran.
mandevil · 3h ago
The 2011 Tohoku earthquake that created the devastating tsunami was an energy release of something like 600 million Hiroshima bombs. Nuclear weapons are just the wrong order of magnitude to make a tsunami, this isn't about politics, it's about scale.
sschnei8 · 3h ago
So sad. Humans are so smart and yet soooo dumb.
dylan604 · 2h ago
Hence, mostly harmless
themafia · 4h ago
Yes, the Soviets didn't let a lot of things get in the way of their military goals; however, the US was actually observed dropping those types of weapons on actual cities as an act of war. Cities that were much closer to the Soviet Union than they were to the USA.
Rover222 · 3h ago
What's your point?
compass_copium · 3h ago
It's not very nuanced analysis to say the Russkies don't give a fuck and focus only on them when their enemies (who wanted them annihilated) tested more bombs and directly killed civilians in war with them.
Rover222 · 3h ago
oh my bad, I somehow only watched the video without reading the dumb article below it
It inspired me to make an EP about the same topic, utilizing samples from that material plus some others, called Leader of all Nations. You might like it if you're into slower-paced dubstep / Boards of Canada stuff, it's on Soundcloud (https://soundcloud.com/taaapes/sets/leader-of-all-nations) plus all the usual places.
It's strange to me that some of the basic principles of what to do in the event of a nuclear explosion are no longer taught, despite the fact that the risk of nuclear war is arguably just as high as it once was. For instance, I bet if a bomb went off in the middle distance, most people would look at it: bad move! If you see a big flash, you should actually (it's a cliche, but true), "duck and cover". Duck to avoid flying debris. Cover to avoid burns. I didn't know this until I dug into the archival material making this EP but it's genuinely odd to me that this is not widely known. (I'd heard the phrase before, but had no idea what it really meant.)
First one was cuban missile crisis that had a lot of escalation, but most poignant was probably dropping depth charges against submarines armed with nuclear torpedoes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis). On that front - thank god Khrushchev chickened out.
Second one was a false detection by Soviet early warning system which should have triggered an immediate retaliation, but was stopped by one person with critical thinking skills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...).
This is what it says:
"The Parties agree that an armed attack against one .. shall be considered an attack against them all and ..that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, ...will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_missile_explosion_in_Po...
Besides the best response is to simply gift more toys to the Ukrainians.
When the bomb is big enough this no longer applies, but in this realm adding more power to the boom doesn't do much to increase the damage area. There's no point in such a bomb unless you detonate it at high altitude--that means rockets, and you need a lot of rocket to lift such a bomb.
In any case, massive bombs being used in "counter-value attacks" (euphemism for targetting civilians) aren't the most likely way for a nuclear war to start. Both the Soviet Union/Russia and America invested heavily in tactical nuclear weapons, designed for battlefield use (e.g. "counter force".) Additionally, other nuclear powers like France have counter-force first strike as part of their nuclear doctrine. Any semi-rational way to start a nuclear war would be to target the oppositions ability to respond in kind, not to attack cities right off the bat. Strikes against cities are a reaction, a threat meant to deter, but starting the war out that way is just an elaborate form of suicide. Point is, it's a good idea to assume that civilians will have at least some period of disturbing escalation as warning to get the fuck out of urban areas. When you hear about the US military setting off nukes in the Fulga Gap to stop Soviet tanks, that's when you GTFO.
You'd survive just to starve. From that perspective, duck and cover is trading a quick death for a long one.
A good example is the Chelyabinsk meteor event of 2013. Many people went to look out the window to see what was going on, not realizing that the shock wave would come moments later.
> A fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, was hailed as a hero after saving 44 children from imploding window glass cuts. Despite not knowing the origin of the intense flash of light, Karbysheva thought it prudent to take precautionary measures by ordering her students to stay away from the room's windows and to perform a duck and cover manoeuvre and then to leave the building. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated when the blast arrived and window glass severed a tendon in one of her arms and left thigh; none of her students, whom she ordered to hide under their desks, suffered cuts. The teacher was taken to a hospital which received 112 people that day. The majority of the patients were suffering from cuts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
Nuclear war won't be a local thing. Your country will be hit by hundreds if not thousands of nukes. Not only is your local city devastated, so is literally every other city. Nobody is coming to help: your government and military no longer exist, there is no emergency response possible, the Red Cross isn't a thing anymore. The electric grid has collapsed. The internet is dead. You're rapidly running out of fuel, heating sources, running water, and food.
So what exactly did the whole "duck and cover" do for you? Is surviving the initial blast worth the week or two of complete horror which will inevitably follow?
Duck-and-cover maybe makes sense if a nuclear war is going to be a single hit and the rest of society survives to help you recover. But that's not what nuclear war will be like.
This doctrine allows unlimited pre-emptive nuclear strikes to achieve decisive victory over the enemy, and avoid attrition-style prolonged nuclear war
Would military command really have achieved a decisive victory by glazing the surface of their own country and burying what’s left underground for the foreseeable future? Clearly a failure of strategic thinking by our erstwhile competitors.
The Soviet bet was that the collective West is more wealthy and hedonistic than Soviets, and has more to lose in the global hot war, and therefore would be less willing to climb up the escalation ladder, thus giving the escalation dominance to the Soviets, as long as technical means of delivering the decisive strike are available (ICBM, IRBM, SLBM, ALBM, MIRV, Perimeter, etc).
examples are numerous:
1. Cuban missile crisis. It was JFK who blinked first in the Caribbean crisis and called Khrushev to deescalate and agreed to remove missiles from Turkey
2. Ukraine war. It was Jake Sullivan that turned off the tap on military shipments to Ukraine, when Russia communicated that they will be using tactical nukes in Kherson
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro-2
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_s...
How exactly is the focus of the Americans any different? The VIPs[1] will be whisked away into bunkers, you and me will be vaporized.
---
[1] Who have utterly and irredeemably failed in their most important job - of preventing a nuclear war. In a just world, not a single one of them should be allowed to survive such a failure.
We don't live in a just world, though, the captain will run for the VIP life raft at the first glint of sea ice.
American VIPs want to survive because they are rich and want to enjoy their wealth, they don't want to die.
Soviet VIPs were not wealthy and their goal of survival was purely decisive military win and achievement of political goals.
Othering and ascribing alien ambitions to the enemy only fools yourself.
Why do you think their goals differed from those of someone like, say, Kissinger? Or any of the other people who have spent the past century and a half grooming and growing the empire?
who blinked first during Ukraine-Russia war? It was Jake Sullivan who redirected military gear from Urkaine to Israel and drip-fed the ammunition shipments, when Russia showed they are ready to use tactical nukes if necessary and formally updated their nuclear doctrine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident
The possible responsible parties is interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident#Possible_respons...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_pulse
All I can find now is this: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Time/index.html?appid=b8540a8a25...
Most tests were underground after the first decade or so once the effects of fallout were better understood. Plus underground testing reduces the affected radius and conserves area for additional testing.
Also note that most tests were "small" yield weapons rather than the really big hydrogen bombs. It's easy to forget how large the range of power there is among different nuclear weapons. E.g. Tsar Bomba was 4000 times more energetic than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
1) Big bomb. The mushroom cloud must go up to above the maximum altitude for rain.
2) Soot. You need a city or the like underneath the bomb to produce a bunch of soot to get lifted into the sky.
Either one by itself (we've seen really big bombs, but they're not dropped on places that will make a bunch of soot, Saddam's oil fires created enough soot but nothing lifted it above the rain, the bombs on Japan weren't big enough to lift the crud above the rain) has little effect.
Presumably the operational devices are more consistent and higher yield than the early pre-fusion cores. There are outliers on both sides in the test data.
Much of the soot generated from a nuclear blast comes from the surrounding environment, cities presumably, which seems to be less flammable than in the past(armchairing here).
Time of year will always be a factor.
I'm sure there are things I'm not thinking of off the cuff.
There is also the secondary impacts that would start immense uncontrolled wildfires all over the planet that would produce much of the nuclear winter effect that is assumed, due to the amount of soot and ash it would produce. But most people would not live long enough to experience the nuclear winter anyways after the explosions, the fireball, the uncontrollable wildfire, the marauding, and the starvation and disease.
If you lived long enough to make it to nuclear winter, you would probably just wish you had died long ago. If you had anyone at all with you, you might have to even make hard decisions about who you can take with you and who to leave behind, and if you managed to somehow get to somewhere where you might be able to feed yourself and survive near the equator, you would only really be living a primitive subsistence life. If you happened to have a female with you, you may try to rebuild the human population, whether she wants to or not. Yes, it’s very grim; but maybe even optimistic. But even if that is pessimistic, at best you will find yourself in a world where there is nothing left that you could rely on for contemporary existence. No communications, no electronics, nothing but manual transportation once any surviving fuel is used up on any surviving carbureted engines, no running water, and you would have to fight off savage roaming marauders, who want all your things and will have thrust everyone into a hellish version of Madmax, etc.
See any of the actual first hand accounts of what happened in the New Orleans and the Superdome after hurricane Katrina for a tiny little taste of what you would be facing.
The nuclear winter would be the least of your problems.
Even in the United States, in a worse case scenario, large swathes would be untouched by the direct blast effects of all-out nuclear war. There's basically nothing in Idaho worth nuking, for example. It would spell civilizational collapse, sure, since the major economic, industrial, and administrative hubs would now be smoking holes in the ground. But for people living in the agricultural interior of the US, most problems would be economic rather than desperate survival.
The effects of EMP are grossly overblown. Most electronic devices would still work fine, once you have a generator or access to the parts of the grid that would not be targets (again, even when you're firing a couple thousand nukes, the windfarms of Iowa are going to be faaaaaar down the list of targets).
The refuge crisis of people migrating from places not completely annihilated but still no longer safe for habitation (think Merced or Gileroy, California) would be straining. Such desperation would breed banditry, sure, but not to the level of a Mad Max hellscape. Most people do not have the stomach for such violence, which is why even in the most apocalyptic conditions (look at say, Syria during its civil war, or Gaza today) you only see a moderate increase in criminality.
Nuclear war can be very bad without making up silly scenarios.
So the last test at which it is feasible that someone watched with their own eyes would be the Chinese nuclear test at Lop Nor on 16 October 1980, at 04:30:29.67 UTC.
That was a test of the JL-1 missile, which was fired off and then flew all the way through reentry to nuclear detonation. At the time, a lot of people in the West doubted that Chinese missiles were capable of delivering a working warhead (1) so they proved their capability by firing an actually armed SLBM and it detonated in the atmosphere, exactly like it would do against a city.
1: Much like a lot of people discount North Korea's missile delivery today. No one doubts that Israel, France, Russia or the UK have missiles that can deliver nuclear warheads successfully (the US, like China, has actually done a full SLBM launch-to-warhead detonation test, the only two countries to do so- though the US Operation Frigate Bird was before the LTBT). I wonder what it is that connects China and North Korea, and makes Westerners doubt their abilities in ways that they don't doubt the French or the UK?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Tooth_Survey
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_(1956_film)#Nucl...
Apparently they could have even doubled its power to 100 megatons? You have to wonder what that would have been like.
In case you were wondering this is what would have happened if they had detonated it under the marinas trench https://what-if.xkcd.com/15/
Isn't this the basic idea of ICBMs / MIRVs with multiple warheads? Basically nuclear cluster bombs.
50mt vs 100mt came down to whether the jacket was U-238 or something inert. (U-238 can't do a chain reaction, but when subject to the neutron flux of an h-bomb it's willing to fission and increase the yield.)
So the Tsar Bomba was designed to be twice as large as it actually detonated. What the hell?
See, a thermonuclear bomb like this is (in the Teller-Ulam design) a three stage weapon: first, the primary (a regular atomic bomb, generally a sphere of plutonium that is imploded really fast) goes. The primary is a fission bomb, where a bunch of fissile material (Pu-239 or U-235- or technically U-233 but that's never been done at scale- Pu239 is easiest to isolate so its most common) is rapidly pushed together and generates a whole bunch of energy. This is what destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is an "atomic bomb." This energy release comes from the chain reaction of atoms splitting: one U or Pu atom splits into a chain of daughter atoms and gives off a lot of energy- and extra neutrons which hit other atoms and cause them to split, setting off a chain reaction of energy release when enough U/Pu atoms are dense enough.
And then the energy from that release is directed into a bunch of fusionable material (probably lithium-deuteride) which causes those atoms to get so hot they start to fuse. And that fusion (like in the sun itself) gives off much more energy- as a rough estimate let's say something like 10x the amount of energy from the primary.
And then there is a third stage, the uranium tamper. You take some depleted uranium (U238- which is what is left behind when you pulled out all of the U235 from the natural uranium) and you direct the energy of the fusion into that. And that causes the U238 to do fission (which it won't do normally, unless you dump a whole lot of neutrons into it). This is, basically, doubling the amount of energy released. It's this uranium tamper- which is basically free, once you have an enrichment program up and running- which was replaced by lead in the Tsar Bomba test, so it only produced half the energy it could have.
As a note, fission turns out to be where most of the fallout is generated, and fusion doesn't generate a much fallout. The infamous "neutron bombs" of the 1970's and 1980's were a common name for basically, a thermonuclear bomb without that Uranium tamper (e.g. something like a Tsar Bomba but smaller) which produced very little fallout relative to its size. This worried some people, who thought that a conventional NATO-Warsaw Pact war might go nuclear if the West German government could be convinced to allow the use of such a bomb on their territory because it had less fallout. This also explains why the uranium tamper wasn't included on the Tsar Bomba test, because that would have produced absurd amounts of nuclear fallout.
Also as a general rule large bombs aren't very efficient, because you are destroying everything in a sphere volume: to double the radius of destruction you need to increase the energy by a factor of 8. Once Minuteman came along, and there were a thousand very accurate ICBM's available (and then Minuteman III which added MIRV's so quickly tripling that- and the Soviets responded with SS-11) it was more efficient use of the expensive fissile material to put more smaller warheads around, because the delivery systems were no longer the bottleneck.
Turns out to be a horrible idea, though--yes, that's what it does to it's target, but consider farther out. The quick kill dose is several times the kill dose--you likely have a bunch of enemy forces that are dead men walking. And when you put soldiers in hopeless positions they have a tendency to try to take the enemy with them. You just made a bunch of kamikazes.
At that point it becomes a political question: will the NATO political leaders (most importantly West Germany) allow the use of nuclear weapons on their own territory, killing their own civilians? (2) Some people thought that 'neutron bombs' were destabilizing because they made it more likely that, under those circumstances, the West German government would say "yes, let's go nuclear" and then that would lead to an escalation chain and pretty quickly it's Dr. Strangelove. (That all depends on the idea that a conventional NATO-Warsaw Pact war was even possible, which I'm not sure is true.)
But that's why some people made it such a big deal, they thought that a bomb that had almost no fall-out might lead to nuclear weapons use, it's the political not engineering consequences of deployment that worried them. The engineering is not the constraint, in fact it's actually barely easier to build one.
1: Looking at the capabilities that the Soviet Army was supposed to have, not necessarily the capabilities that they actually had, the Soviet Army should have crushed NATO conventionally from anytime ~1950 on. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine reminds us, armies are not always actually at the level they claim to be.
2: The French- who were sort of in and sort of out of the NATO command structure- answer to this question was the Pluton missile which was not capable of reaching East Germany, could only hit targets in West Germany (from bases in France- it was a mobile missile that could theoretically drive into West Germany, but... come on now). So they had the ability to engage targets in West Germany, and there was no question of their political leaders: they were 100% totally willing to nuke Germany rather than let Soviet troops conquer their country.
What I don’t understand is how neutron activation can be avoided. In particle accelerators this happens to whatever is around the collision point, you end up with lots of radioactive sensors.
This is why no one looked at the idea until Putin needed something to threaten America with after GWB did a really stupid thing and pulled out of the ABM Treaty. And I don't believe that the official Russian sources claim it can make a tsunami, I think that's mostly propaganda.
If you mean this, it's mostly (and certainly the tsunami part is merely) propaganda nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_...
"All warfare is based on deception" - Sun Tzu
What every nation, Russia included, talks about and shows off has very little in common with what they can actually do.
In Russia's case we mere civilians can just directly observe the difference a lot of the time, enough for me to be comfortable projecting the same assumption where only real military analysis could actually tell for sure. The claim that this weapon could cause a tsunami is within the set of things even civilians can disprove.
This option is not available to us civilians for more competent cases such as China or Iran.