HowtoSurvive.net

The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility. A single modern nuclear weapon hitting a major American city would be many times worse than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki.It would be a historic destruction of unbelievable proportions. 69% of Americans surveyed said they are worried the invasion of Ukraine could lead to nuclear war. And they fear that we could be at the beginning stages of World War Three.

But the Biden administration is assuring Americans the threat isn’t critical. We are assessing President Putin’s directive, and at this time, we see no reason to change our own alert levels. Even before the invasion of Ukraine. Over the past few years, the norms and the agreements that kind of put guardrails on nuclear weapons have really eroded. It’s a weapon that’s not designed to kill soldiers. It’s designed to destroy cities or take out critical infrastructure.

If you are a activist that cares about climate change or reproductive health care or government spending, you should care about nuclear weapons. As long as these weapons are around, the possibility will always be there that they will actually be used. So while a nuclear attack is very unlikely, here’s how it would hypothetically look and how the US could respond. Researchers estimate that there are approximately 12,700 nuclear weapons around the world, spread across nine different countries: the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea.

The U.S. and Russia hold the majority. As of 2022, the U.S. has more than 5,400 nuclear weapons, while Russia has close to 6,000. The total explosive power of all the nuclear weapons today is so large that if you took a Hiroshima bomb and dropped it every 2 hours, 12 times a day, every day, starting in 1945, on August 6th, up till today, you still couldn’t use up our current arsenal in terms of its explosive power.
It can be used as one single nuclear weapon, which already has devastating humanitarian consequences. Researchers, academics and advocacy groups have written reports detailing what a hypothetical attack could look like.

There would be blast, there would be radioactivity, and there would be fires, and those would be horrific and horrible direct effects on the people where the bombs would be dropped. In 2014, the Dutch peace organization PAX put together a report examining what would happen if a nuclear bomb exploded in a cargo ship in the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where PAX is based. Susi Snyder was one of the authors of that report. And we took it as the least impactful way it could explode, which is at the ground level. It’s not dropped from the air. So it minimizes fallout, it minimizes blast.

Eight thousand people dying immediately who would find themselves within one kilometers of distance. Others suffering from severe burns and other injuries. And then there’s, of course, radiation, which over the course of a few days would result in the deaths of another estimated 60,000 people, and double that amount would maybe not survive but would have massive health consequences. Location can significantly change how destructive an explosion is. So you have an explosion on Wall Street. You’re going to have blast damage probably into the Lower East Side and to the East Village that far away.

And you’re going to have fire damage, maybe Upper East Side, maybe even up to Harlem. And that’s in New York, where the design and the buildings of New York actually contain things in a great way. If it’s a smaller city, a lower city, a city that’s more spread out. Where we did our study around Rotterdam, Rotterdam does not have a lot of skyscrapers. So the blast damage and the impact of the firestorm is much greater if something happens. No adequate medical response would be possible.

There’s a high number of deaths, the destruction of infrastructure. And then, of course, because of the radiation, medical personnel would not be able to come close and tend to those in need. The plans I’ve seen in the US, the plans are you isolate the center, the very center of the explosion. You don’t allow emergency services in there and that’s just it. You hope people can help each other, pull each other out of rubble and you triage around that where you can have more services and the broader concentric circles the further out.

But because that fireball also sets everything on fire and goes out from there, a firestorm might erupt. If Putin feels that his efforts are stalled. There’s a possibility of a desperation move. He could use a nuclear weapon in a demonstration strike outside, in a rural area or even at sea, just to say, look, I’ve got these weapons that I could use them. I personally think that’s not that likely because that to me would signal irresolution. What’s more likely is that he could use a nuclear weapon on a Ukrainian target, use it on a city, and then demand that Ukraine government has unconditional surrender.

That’s what we did in 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I believe that that would be a war crime. Beyond the immediate catastrophe, a nuclear attack would have a serious long term impact on the planet. A 2014 report from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons concluded that a nuclear blast anywhere could lead to the collapse of public services infrastructures, which would disrupt the entire economy, including communication networks and food supplies.

If there was a nuclear war, bombs would be dropped on cities and industrial areas which would burn and the fires would produce smoke which would be pumped up into the atmosphere. And a lot of it would get up into the stratosphere where there’s no rain to wash it out.

And so the amount of climate change we would get would depend on how much smoke there would be once our food supplies ran out. If we couldn’t grow any more food, there would be famine, and so many more people could die in the rest of the world. For example, if there was a war between the U.S. and Russia, more people in China could die from starvation. And then the U.S. and Russia combined. Survival is going to become the number one most important thing that we will have left if we ever do see a full blown nuclear war.

If the U.S. or an ally nation were attacked with a nuclear weapon, there’s a chance the U.S. would respond with a nuclear attack of its own. The Defense Department runs exercises to try to simulate various military scenarios in order to practice how it would respond. These exercises are called wargames. Wargames are used by academics by people in government to basically lay out a scenario that could happen and go through it step by step to see how things might play out.

Sometimes these war games simulate a nuclear attack on either the U.S. or one of its allies. In February 2020, the Pentagon disclosed it had conducted a military exercise which simulated what it called a limited nuclear exchange with Russia. According to a senior Defense Department official, this exercise featured a hypothetical scenario where Russia attacked NATO territory. In Europe, the military personnel undergoing the exercise decided to respond with a nuclear weapon.

But these war games don’t always end in a nuclear response from the US. Journalist Fred Kaplan reports on a 2016 war game held inside the Obama White House in which the Russians intervened in one of the Baltic countries, a NATO country, and they used a single nuclear weapon against a NATO airbase trying to end the war. The United States had to decide what would we do under that circumstance? And they made a decision in the first round that we’re going to respond conventionally in a large scale retaliation, presumably against the base from which the Russians had launched this initial nuclear attack.

That, to my mind, was the appropriate thing to do, to be tough, firm, but to de-escalate rather than escalate the war. But in the second round of that war game, military personnel undergoing the exercise reportedly decided to respond with a nuclear exchange. When told If we, the US uses a nuclear weapon on Russian territory, they will consider that to be an attack by the United States and will respond attacking the United States directly. And so in this war game, the principals reportedly chose to use nuclear weapons and targeted them at Belarus rather than Russia, trying to stop escalation.

Even though Belarus wasn’t involved in the initial war game operation. In the United States, the president has the sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons using what is frequently referred to as the nuclear football. The president is the only person who makes the decision to launch those weapons, and sometimes they have as little as 7 minutes to make that choice, which doesn’t really allow for a lot of critical thinking. Presidential administrations typically publish a nuclear posture review within the first year in office. This document outlines the White House’s policy on the use of nuclear weapons and arms control.

President Biden, as a candidate, said that he supported a policy of “sole purpose”, which is that the only purpose of nuclear weapons should be to deter the use of nuclear weapons. As of April 5, 2022.
The Biden administration had not released its Nuclear Posture Review. To get an idea of what to expect from the Biden administration, experts look to the Obama White House for precedent. While the Obama administration pledged in its Posture Review to accelerate efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism, it did not go as far as adopting a “sole purpose” policy.

I think already we were not expecting the Biden administration to adopt this policy of sole purpose because of the current climate, which even before the actual war was very bad with Russia, as well as concerns about China’s growing arsenal in it, and a concern that our allies who rely on us for their defense would be unnerved.

There’s a paradox when it comes to nuclear deterrence. Nuclear deterrence works only if an adversary believes that you might actually execute a nuclear attack if you are attacked first. So the US government and other governments practice nuclear war all the time so that we are confident that we could retaliate if necessary.

That creates an inherent tension because adversaries don’t know whether we would only use nuclear weapons in retaliation or whether we might use them first. The theory of mutually assured destruction has been around for almost as long as nuclear weapons have, and we have been at risk of nuclear war for as long as nuclear weapons have been around. There have been many efforts to create international agreements in order to reduce risk. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was an international initiative, first launched in 1968 by the United Nations.

Its goal is to work toward a world without nuclear weapons. A total of 191 states have joined the treaty, including five nuclear weapons states. States agreed to negotiate nuclear disarmament and would also work toward reducing their nuclear arsenals. But that’s not happening. On the contrary, actually, states are all nuclear armed states are continuing to modernize their nuclear arsenals also and spending a lot of money on it as well. The US and Russia also signed a separate agreement in 2010 called the New START Treaty.

It’s a treaty that’s still enforced today and in fact that is the only treaty right now that regulates the limits US and Russian nuclear forces. 18 times a year, United States inspectors go to Russian territory and literally look at their strategic nuclear weapons and vice versa. Now, these inspections have been paused because of COVID, but not because of the political situation. And in fact, I think the inspections will be resuming soon. And there are other means of verification provided for in the treaty, including we send each other notifications every time a delivery vehicle, a plane, a sub, an ICBM that’s mobile.

If it leaves the place where it normally is, we send an instant notification to Russia. So we have complete pictures at all times of where each side’s nuclear weapons are. I personally would like to see the United States move towards a no first use policy. I just think this is not the time to be doing that right now given this particular crisis. I do think that we should say that we will respond appropriately. We will never target civilian targets and that we will use our nuclear forces against military targets only in response to grave threats to national security.

I am not saying that nuclear war would end the world. It would just end the world as we know it. But humans are resilient creatures, and we know how to work together when we have to.