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Russia’s Nuclear Weapons May Be Useless
Nuclear physics may have rendered Russia’s atomic threat hollow.
Putin seems to be on a nostalgia trip and is desperately trying to relive his Cold War days. Not only has he sparked a deadly war to try and reclaim the old Soviet state of Ukraine, but he is also throwing nuclear threats at the West left, right, and centre. In fact, these nuclear threats are why NATO hasn’t been able to support Ukraine’s independence as much as they want to, given that they can’t risk starting a global nuclear war that could wipe out humanity as we know it. Fortunately, thanks to a quirk of nuclear physics, there is a chance that Putin’s nuclear weapons have been rendered useless. But how? And what does this mean for Ukraine and NATO?
To fully understand why Russia’s nuclear weapons might be a dud, we first need to understand what type of nuclear weapons Russia has.
Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, with 4,447 active strategic nuclear weapons and 1,912 tactical nuclear weapons in reserve (all of which are ready to be rolled out quickly). The difference between these two types of weapons is surprisingly small, but they have a massive impact on how they are used and the logistics surrounding them. Strategic nuclear weapons are what you might consider a “typical” nuclear weapon, i.e., an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) designed to wipe out a city on the other side of the world. Russia’s ICBMs have many designs and have a yield (the size of the explosion measured in an equivalent explosion in tonnes of TNT) of 300–800 kilotonnes. For reference, 300 kilotonnes is enough to destroy the whole of Washington. Tactical nuclear weapons are far smaller and can be fired from artillery guns as shells or from small truck-mounted missile launchers, meaning they have a range of up to 1,500 km. This is due to the fact that they are designed to be used in active combat against the military, so rather than destroying a distant city, they are intended to eliminate specific positions, bases, or military infrastructure. As such, they also have a much smaller yield of 1–50 kilotonnes.
But these two types of nuclear weapons actually use very different types of nuclear reactions. You see, to fit a nuclear bomb into a shell or small missile, it has to be…
