nuclear-news

At the Brink, THE RISK OFNUCLEAR CONFLICTIS RISING.

New York Times , 4 Mar 24 [Awesome graphics] By W.J. HenniganW. J. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion.

Today, the mechanisms of peace aren’t moving as swiftly as the machinery of war.

THE RISK OF
NUCLEAR CONFLICT
IS RISING.

NUCLEAR NATIONS ARE
BUILDING UP THEIR ARSENALS,
SPEEDING TOWARD
THE NEXT ARMS RACE.

IS ANYONE
PAYING ATTENTION?

Today’s generation of weapons — many of which are fractions of the size of the bombs America dropped in 1945 but magnitudes more deadly than conventional ones — poses an unpredictable threat.

It hangs over battlefields in Ukraine as well as places where the next war might occur: the Persian Gulf, the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula.

This is one story of what’s at stake — if even one small nuclear weapon were used — based on modeling, research and hundreds of hours of interviews with people who have lived through an atomic detonation, dedicated their lives to studying nuclear war or are planning for its aftermath.

Nuclear war is often described as unimaginable. In fact, it’s not imagined enough.

By W.J. HenniganW.J. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion.

IF IT SEEMS ALARMIST to anticipate the horrifying aftermath of a nuclear attack, consider this: The United States and Ukraine governments have been planning for this scenario for at least two years.

In the fall of 2022, a U.S. intelligence assessment put the odds at 50-50 that Russia would launch a nuclear strike to halt Ukrainian forces if they breached its defense of Crimea. Preparing for the worst, American officials rushed supplies to Europe. Ukraine has set up hundreds of radiation detectors around cities and power plants, along with more than 1,000 smaller hand-held monitors sent by the United States.

Nearly 200 hospitals in Ukraine have been identified as go-to facilities in the event of a nuclear attack. Thousands of doctors, nurses and other workers have been trained on how to respond and treat radiation exposure. And millions of potassium iodide tablets, which protect the thyroid from picking up radioactive material linked with cancer, are stockpiled around the country.

But well before that — just four days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, in fact — the Biden administration had directed a small group of experts and strategists, a “Tiger Team,” to devise a new nuclear “playbook” of contingency plans and responses. Pulling in experts from the intelligence, military and policy fields, they pored over years-old emergency preparedness plans, weapon-effects modeling and escalation scenarios, dusting off materials that in the age of counterterrorism and cyberwarfare were long believed to have faded into irrelevance.

The playbook, which was coordinated by the National Security Council, now sits in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing of the White House. It has a newly updated, detailed menu of diplomatic and military options for President Biden — and any future president — to act upon if a nuclear attack occurs in Ukraine.

At the heart of all of this work is a chilling conclusion: The possibility of a nuclear strike, once inconceivable in modern conflict, is more likely now than at any other time since the Cold War. “We’ve had 30 pretty successful years keeping the genie in the bottle,” a senior administration official on the Tiger Team said. While both America and Russia have hugely reduced their nuclear arsenals since the height of the Cold War, the official said, “Right now is when nuclear risk is most at the forefront.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin reminded the world of this existential danger last week when he publicly warned of nuclear war if NATO deepened its involvement in Ukraine.

The risk of nuclear escalation in Ukraine, while now low, has been a primary concern for the Biden administration throughout the conflict, details of which are being reported here for the first time. In a series of interviews over the past year, U.S. and Ukrainian officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, diplomacy and ongoing security preparations.

And while it may cause sleepless nights in Washington and Kyiv, most of the world has barely registered the threat. Perhaps it’s because an entire generation came of age in a post-Cold War world, when the possibility of nuclear war was thought to be firmly behind us. It is time to remind ourselves of the consequences in order to avoid them.

Imagine a nuclear weapon is launched.

The missile is launched. Once its solid-fuel rocket motor burns out, the warhead plunges back toward Earth.

A third of a mile above the ground, it explodes.

Its plutonium core and surrounding contents — so delicately pieced together inside — convert into ionized gas and electromagnetic waves within a millisecond.

Temperatures inside the explosion reach millions of degrees, hotter than the surface of the sun.

A roar equal to 10,000 tons of TNT quakes the ground below. A massive fireball blooms so quickly that it seems instantaneous.

Nearly everything flammable below ignites: wood, plastics, oil. Small animals burst into flame, then turn to ash.

Ruptured gas and downed electricity lines fuel an inferno that can rage for miles.

The firestorm consumes so much oxygen that it can suffocate people sheltering inside their cars or homes.

Then there is the shock wave, a rumbling force that expands in every direction, racing at supersonic speeds.

Buildings, trees and other living things are torn apart and thrown at one another.

Near the explosion’s epicenter, buildings heave, sag and crumble. Scalding hot glass and debris shoot like shrapnel into everything in their path. Dry leaves crackle like popcorn and disappear in the blazing heat.

The wreckage — what once was asphalt, steel, soil, glass, flesh and bone — is suctioned into the roiling stem of a mushroom cloud rising for miles.

The cloud appears like a living thing. Its colors change from white to yellow to red to black, billowing into the sky until it eclipses the sun.

Screams for help — and for death — can be heard everywhere, but help is not on the way. Finding a doctor or a nurse is nearly impossible. Most medical workers in the immediate area are dead or injured. Those who survive are quickly overwhelmed.

Then, darkness. There’s a discordant ringing. The air is thick with smoke and debris. Breathing in is difficult — spit out a mouthful of dust and glass fragments, only to take in another.

EVEN AFTER LAST week’s nuclear threat, few believe that Mr. Putin will wake up one day and decide to lob megaton warheads at Washington or European capitals in retaliation for supporting Ukraine. What Western allies see as more likely is that Russia will use a so-called tactical nuclear weapon, which is less destructive and designed to strike targets over short distances to devastate military units on the battlefield.

The strategic thinking behind those weapons is that they are far less damaging than city-destroying hydrogen bombs and therefore more “usable” in warfare. The United States estimates Russia has a stockpile of up to 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads, some small enough they fit in an artillery shell.

But the detonation of any tactical nuclear weapon would be an unprecedented test of the dogma of deterrence, a theory that has underwritten America’s military policy for the past 70 years. The idea stipulates that adversaries are deterred from launching a nuclear attack against the United States — or more than 30 of its treaty-covered allies — because by doing so they risk an overwhelming counterattack.

Possessing nuclear weapons isn’t about winning a nuclear war, the theory goes; it’s about preventing one. It hinges upon a carefully calibrated balance of terror among nuclear states.

After the nuclear age began in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an arms race. Each side amassed tens of thousands of nuclear arms.

Over time, nuclear weapons became symbols of national power and prestige. Other nations in Europe and Asia developed their own arsenals.

The dangerous, costly arms buildup pushed Washington and Moscow to the brink of confrontation, before a gradual warming in relations led to mutual reductions.

In the decades since, overall nuclear stockpiles have shrunk, but the number of nuclear powers has increased to nine

…………………………………………… Moscow has made implicit and explicit nuclear threats throughout the war to scare off Western intervention. Around this time, however, a series of frightening episodes took place.

On Oct. 23, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of Russia made a flurry of phone calls to the defense chiefs of four NATO nations, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, to say Russia had indications that Ukrainian fighters could detonate a dirty bomb — a conventional explosive wrapped in radioactive material — on their own territory to frame Moscow.

……………………………………………………… If the Russian leader was indeed inching toward the brink, he stepped back.

…………………………………….. IMAGINE THE DAMAGE THE WEAPON WOULD WREAK ON PEOPLE AND
THE ENVIRONMENT………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

India, which has continuing tensions over its borders with China and Pakistan, is fielding longer-range weapons.

Pakistan is developing new ballistic missiles and expanding nuclear production facilities.

North Korea, which has an arsenal of several hundred missiles and dozens of nuclear warheads, regularly threatens to attack South Korea, where the U.S. keeps about 28,500 troops.

China, which has publicly expressed its desire to control the U.S.-allied island of Taiwan by force if necessary, is increasing its nuclear arsenal at a “scale and pace unseen since the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race that ended in the late 1980s,” the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States concluded in October.

So while Washington has been helping Ukraine prepare for a nuclear attack, Taiwan or South Korea could be next. The National Security Council has already coordinated contingency playbooks for possible conflicts that could turn nuclear in Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East. Iran, which has continued its nuclear program amid Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, has amassed enough enriched uranium to build several weapons if and when it chooses.

During this time of widening conflict, the rising nuclear threat is especially destabilizing: A nuclear explosion in Ukraine or Gaza, where tens of thousands of civilians have already been killed or injured, would sizeably escalate either conflict and its humanitarian toll………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

THIS ISN’T AN easy time for adversaries to be making big leaps of faith, but history shows it’s not impossible to forge deals amid international crises.

The Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and underwater, was signed by the United States, Britain and the former Soviet Union in 1963, less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis. Negotiations over the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which froze the number of American and Soviet long-range, nuclear-capable missiles, were concluded less than two months after the United States bombed Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam in 1972, damaging some Soviet ships. Several close calls in Europe during the Cold War contributed to a sweeping collection of agreements between Washington and Moscow that capped the number of each nation’s strategic weapons, opened communication channels and amplified monitoring and verification measures.

…………………………………………………………………………………… The United States is now preparing to build new nuclear warheads for the first time since 1991, part of a decades-long program to overhaul its nuclear forces that’s estimated to cost up to $2 trillion. The outline of that plan was drawn up in 2010 — in a much different security environment than what the country faces today. This administration, or the next one, could make the political case that even more weapons need to be built in response to the expansion and modernization of other nations’ arsenals, particularly Russia’s and China’s.

BEHIND A NONDESCRIPT door on the fifth floor of the State Department building in Washington, down the hall from the former offices of the director of the Manhattan Project, a windowless control room provides a direct channel between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.

The National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Center was established in 1988 as a 24-hour watch station to facilitate the information exchange required by various arms control treaties and security-building agreements, mostly between the United States and Russia…………………………………

Today, the mechanisms of peace aren’t moving as swiftly as the machinery of war.

………………….. The National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Center is adding translating services for Persian, Mandarin, Korean and other languages in case more nuclear nations express an interest in sharing information to reduce the risk of an inadvertent conflict.

But for now, those ambitions are unrealized, and the communication lines remain quiet.  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/04/opinion/nuclear-war-prevention.html

March 6, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war