Putin Keeps Threatening With His Nukes
This man(Putin) seems to think only he has the cojones to use his storage of tactical and intercontinental nuclear arsenal. This little man thinks only he has the right to use them. But he is smarter than that, we'll hope. Knowing that using any type of nuclear weapons will leave the West, particularly the United States without a choice, they will retaliate. They would have to retaliate and the retaliation as mentioned by a few Pentagon officials as well as secretaries of defenses in different administrations even before there was a Ukraine War will depend on the initial attack or attempt to attack. Once Nukes are used if the other side does not respond then it will be fair to assume they will never respond which will place them in the category of a canon without a canon ball or the Canon Operator.
Mr. Putin’s purported bomb move represents more bluster than a serious war plan. “Putin’s not stupid,” (?)
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| Edward Teller, Ronald Reagan, and James A. Abrahamson stand behind a table on a stage in front of a sign that has a logo of an object orbiting a globe that says “SDI.” |
The whole idea behind nuclear weapons, said David Wright, a nuclear expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is that “you’re self-deterred in part because the arms would cause significant collateral damage to yourself and other countries.” Such deterrence could apply to a space bomb as well, he added, unless an attacker were desperate and saw the risks as acceptable.
President Ronald Reagan was flanked by the physicist Edward Teller, left, and Lt. Gen. James A. Abrahamson, the director of Strategic Defense Initiative, as he arrived to address a conference marking the first five years of his “Star Wars” missile defense program in 1988.Credit...Charles Tasnadi/Associated Press
“It would be dangerous for the Russians themselves,” said Richard L. Garwin, a physicist and longtime adviser to the federal government who helped design the world’s first hydrogen bomb.
Ever since Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine, he has made atomic threats that analysts see as central to his strategy of deterring Western intervention. If he stationed an atom bomb in orbit, it would violate two bedrock treaties of the nuclear age — signed in 1963 and 1967 — and signal a major escalation.
On Feb. 20, Mr. Putin denied that he intended to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit. “Our position is clear,” he said. “We have always been categorically against and are now against the deployment of nuclear weapons in space.”
But days later, on Feb. 29, in his annual state-of-the-nation address, he reverted to his usual saber-rattling, warning that the West faced the risk of nuclear war. Mr. Putin singled out states that have helped Kyiv strike Russian territory. The West must understand, he declared, that such assistance risks “the destruction of civilization.”
Nuclear arms in general, and space bombs in particular, are the antithesis of precision. They are indiscriminate — unlike conventional arms, typically characterized by pinpoint accuracy. In 1981, when I first wrote about orbital nuclear arms as a reporter for Science magazine, I referred to the mayhem from outer space as the “Chaos Factor.”
The unexpected phenomenon flashed to life in July 1962 when the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. Dark skies lit up. In Hawaii, streetlights went out. In orbit, satellites failed.
President John F. Kennedy, unsettled by the technical surprises, worried that lingering radiation from nuclear blasts would endanger astronauts. In September 1962, he canceled a test code named Urraca. The hydrogen bomb was to have been detonated at an altitude of more than 800 miles — the highest of any test explosion, American or Soviet. The next year, Mr. Kennedy signed a treaty that banned experimental blasts in space.
The scientific world was then making an important distinction about the space detonations that are absent in most current discussions. It is that the atomic blasts have immediate, as well as residual, effects.
The initial repercussions are best known. A bomb’s rays speed across vast distances to produce lightning-like bolts of electricity in satellites and ground networks, frying electrical circuits. Experts call them electromagnetic pulses, or EMP. The pulses turned out the lights in Hawaii.
But what caught Mr. Kennedy’s attention was a longer-term effect — how radioactive debris and charged particles from a nuclear blast pump up the natural, donut-like belts of radiation that encircle the Earth. These belts are intense, but nothing like what they become when amplified by a bomb’s radiation.
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| An old black and white picture of palms on a beach with dramatic clouds in the sky. |
What appears to be a sunset at Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii, after the bomb exploded. Credit...Associated Press
The five nuclear experts who authored the 2010 study linked such belt overloading not only to astronaut risks but also, after the July 1962 test, to major damage to at least eight satellites. The most famous casualty was Telstar, the world’s first communications satellite.
Over the years, I grew concerned that the complicated topic was being oversimplified. Fringe groups and hawkish politicians sounded alarms over Russian EMP attacks on the nation’s electrical grid, though they seldom noted the risk to Moscow’s own spacecraft and astronauts.
Peter Vincent Pry, a former C.I.A. officer, warned in a 2017 report that Moscow was prepared for surprise EMP attacks that would paralyze the United States and wipe out its satellites.
In 2019, President Trump ordered the strengthening of the nation’s EMP defenses. Rick Perry, the energy secretary, said the order “sends a clear message to adversaries that the United States takes this threat seriously.”
National security experts know how weapons of mass destruction become caught up in cycles of fear that come and go with the political winds. After decades of reflecting on the basics of nuclear blasts in space, I have come to see the risks as extremely low to nonexistent because of a detonation — as Drs. McDowell, Younger, Wright, Garwin, and others have argued that — would harm not only the attacked but also the attacker.
“Maybe the Russians will decide their astronauts have to take one for the homeland,” Dr. McDowell said. “But I think that Putin, crazy as he is, is not going to do that.”
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