The When we want to doctrine
There are some very strange ideas about rights and entitlements out there.
Russia has approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads – the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In an interview on Saturday, Medvedev said Russia’s nuclear doctrine did not require an enemy state to use such weapons first.
It’s a nuclear doctrine, you see. Bullies have a fist doctrine, murderers have a gun doctrine, Russia has a nuclear doctrine.
He said: “We have a special document on nuclear deterrence. This document clearly indicates the grounds on which the Russian Federation is entitled to use nuclear weapons. There are a few of them, let me remind them to you: number one is the situation, when Russia is struck by a nuclear missile. The second case is any use of other nuclear weapons against Russia or its allies.
“The third is an attack on a critical infrastructure that will have paralysed our nuclear deterrent forces. And the fourth case is when an act of aggression is committed against Russia and its allies, which jeopardised the existence of the country itself, even without the use of nuclear weapons, that is, with the use of conventional weapons.”
Medvedev added that there was a “determination to defend the independence, sovereignty of our country, not to give anyone a reason to doubt even the slightest that we are ready to give a worthy response to any infringement on our country, on its independence”.
There you go. It’s all very official and written down. No one can complain that it’s not clear. Russia has a right to use the nukes if someone in charge claims to think its independence needs defending. You can’t say fairer than that.
It should be noted that the United States has never adopted a “no first use” policy on nuclear weapons. Obviously there was no such policy in WWII — see Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But through most of the Cold War, the Soviets had superiority in conventional weapons in Europe. The only thing that stopped the Soviets from rolling tanks through West Germany, etc. was the threat of nuclear retaliation by NATO.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. Russia has its hands full with Ukraine, if NATO were to commit conventional forces it would likely be a wipeout for Russia, so it’s Russia that wants to raise the spectre of first use of nukes.
Given what we’ve seen I strongly suspect the United States has the largest *functional* arsenal of atomics… Imagine the hilarity of an unexploded warhead leaking radiation in a city square. /s
I was reading an article yesterday about America’s B61 nuclear dumb bombs stored in Europe. Since the Cold War ended the US has at times contemplated removing them, because they serve a political purpose, not a military one. Now the US has committed to not only keeping them in Europe, but upgrading them over the next year so that they will have tuneable yield and steerable tail kits to enhance accuracy. The current bombs come in a range of preset yield and once dropped by an aircraft deploy a parachute.
More concerning, one of the people interviewed, a former political appointee with Pentagon access said he had noted over the last few years that more and more American Generals were discussing the circumstances in which tactical nukes could be used with military effectiveness, rather than as a deterrent (political) tool. He is concerned that the concept of using battlefield nukes is becoming normalised by both the US and Russia, without any regard to the fact that once you start using nukes in the battlefield, escalation is almost certain.
Case in point Ukraine. Russia is now deeply concerned that they could be militarily humiliated in this war. Even more so than they have already. If western countries were to provide really substantial aid, or even ground troops, Russia could conceivably be pushed back to the borders. That’s unlikely for a variety of reasons, but possible. I could see Russia using one or more tactical nukes in Ukraine to either break such a push and launch a counterattack, or even just as a pyrrhic fuck you.
It’s certainly become clear that Russia’s much vaunted professionalised and re-equipped military, despite having some very good equipment, is dysfunctional verging on incompetent and in a head to head with NATO forces would likely lose a conventional war. Russia’s leaders are probably paranoid enough to believe the West would invade them if they look weak.
BKiSA #2
If you are *trying* to make a nuclear explosion & get things a bit off, your device blows itself apart when only a minute fraction of the weapons grade U or Pu has fissioned, so you get an explosion only modestly larger than what you would get from a similar mass of chemical explosive. This is a ‘pre-detonation’ leading to a ‘fizzle’.
So that would scatter the U or Pu around & do a modest amount of explosion damage too. Use that for your scenario of a failed nuclear bomb in a city.