DAILY TRIFECTA + 1: Just A Friendly Reminder That We Could Nuke The Whole Damn Planet If We Really Wanted To
We don't want to strategically limit ourselves, do we?
TITLE: Does the US Need New Plutonium Pits?
https://inkstickmedia.com/does-the-us-need-new-plutonium-pits/
EXCERPT: Sprinkled across five western states, in silos buried deep underground and protected by reinforced concrete, sit 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each of those missiles is equipped with a single nuclear warhead. And each of those warheads is itself equipped with one hollow, grapefruit-sized plutonium pit, designed to trigger a string of deadly reactions.
All of those missiles are on “hair-trigger alert,” poised for hundreds of targets in Russia — any one of which could raze all of downtown Moscow and cause hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Except — what if it doesn’t? What if, in a nuclear exchange, the pit fizzles because it’s just too old? In that case, would the weapon be a total dud or simply yield but a fraction of its latent power?
Outwardly, at least, that’s the question driving a whole new era of plutonium pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in South Carolina.
Plutonium is widely known as one the most exotic elements in the periodic table. Trace amounts of it have been identified in the earth’s crust, though all of what’s now used for America’s nuclear weapons is manmade. For decades, these pits were cast with plutonium and other materials at a breakneck pace, installed in warheads and strapped into missiles that were regularly upgraded and modernized in an escalating arms race with the Soviet Union. Plutonium pits were never intended to grow old and senescent.
“We never worried about aging,” said Siegfried Hecker, former director of LANL and one of the world’s leading plutonium experts. “Because bombs were supposed to be out there for a dozen years or so.”
It’s been almost 40 years since America’s Cold War pit factory at Rocky Flats near Denver was raided by FBI agents and closed due to environmental crimes — among them, releases of radioactive effluent into nearby waterways. In that time, pit production went largely dormant, the USSR collapsed, arms reductions treaties were signed, stockpiles reduced and underground testing ceased.
Now, as the nuclear industrial complex awakens from its long slumber, the resumption of plutonium pit production has emerged as a deeply polarizing and political act. Anti-nuclear activists have accused the federal government of exploiting the uncertainty around aging to jumpstart a nearly $60 billion dollar manufacturing program. They assert that the real reason America has resumed the production of pits is for the purpose of introducing a new generation of warheads for a new generation of missiles — the first of which is the Sentinel, one of the most complex and expensive programs in the history of the US Air Force.
The Sentinel ICBM has the capability to carry three separate warheads, each with its own target. Earlier versions of America’s missiles could and did have such capabilities and the option has remained available, but with post-Cold War weapons reductions, the number of warheads per missile was also reduced — one warhead, one intercontinental ballistic missile. As the US, Russia and China barrel toward a new Cold War, the US will likely eschew such a convention in a matter of years.
“The issue of plutonium pit aging is a Trojan horse for the nuclear weaponeers enriching themselves through a dangerous new arms race,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an anti-nuclear group based in Santa Fe. “Future pit production is not about maintaining the existing, extensively tested stockpile. Instead, it’s for deploying multiple new warheads on new intercontinental ballistic missiles.”
TITLE: Return To ICBMs Armed With Multiple Warheads Suggested By STRATCOM Boss
https://www.twz.com/nuclear/return-to-icbms-armed-with-multiple-warheads-suggested-by-stratcom-boss
EXCERPT: The head of the U.S. Strategic Command has called for "serious consideration" of a return to deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, with multiple nuclear warheads. The U.S. Air Force's LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBMs have this capability, but operational examples are presently only loaded with one warhead due to arms control agreements with Russia. The plan has been that the service's future LGM-35A Sentinel ICBMs will also only have a single warhead for the same reasons.
U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) boss Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton highlighted the importance of looking into returning to deploying ICBMs with more than one warhead, also known as a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) configuration, while testifying before members of the Senate earlier today. STRATCOM oversees the U.S. military's triad of nuclear deterrent forces, which include silo-based ICBMs, nuclear-capable bombers, and nuclear ballistic missile submarines.
"I do believe that we need to take serious consideration in seeing what uploading and re-MIRVing the ICBM looks like, and what does it take to potentially do that," Cotton told the assembled members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Cotton was responding to a question about which of the 81 recommendations in a report from the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States that was published last year he felt deserved prioritization. The STRATCOM head also pointed to that report's discussion about the need for more planning for integrated strategic-level nuclear-conventional operations as being of particular note, especially in the Pacific and Europe.
The Strategic Posture Commission's specific recommendation regarding MIRVing is to "plan to deploy the Sentinel ICBM in a MIRVed configuration."
The Air Force has previously disclosed that the Sentinel ICBM design allows for a MIRV configuration, should a decision be made to deploy the missiles in this way.
However, the present plan is that each LGM-35A ICBM will be loaded with a single W87-1 nuclear warhead inside a Mk 21A re-entry vehicle when they enter service, which is expected to start in the 2030s. It is unclear what the W87-1's exact yield is, but the original W87 warhead has a reported baseline yield of 300 kilotons. W87's second stage is understood to be modifiable to increase the weapon's yield to 475 kilotons.
This is in line with the current configuration of the 400 LGM-30G Minuteman IIIs that the U.S. Air Force has deployed now and that the Sentinels are set to replace on a one-for-one basis. Each LGM-30G either has one W87 warhead in a Mk 21 re-entry vehicle or a single W78 in a Mk 12A re-entry vehicle. The older W78 has a reported yield of around 335 kilotons.
When the Minuteman III first entered service in 1970 it had a MIRV configuration with three W62 warheads. Those were subsequently replaced by the W78s. The Air Force's LGM-118A Peacekeeper ICBM, which was first operationally deployed in 1986, was also a MIRV type capable of carrying up to 11 W87s.
TITLE: The 6,000 nuclear warheads that Russia uses to deter Western support for Ukraine
https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-03-04/the-6000-nuclear-warheads-that-russia-uses-to-deter-western-support-for-ukraine.html
EXCERPT: The U.S. and Russia have over 90% of the planet’s nuclear bombs. Just a year ago, Putin suspended the New START agreement with Washington, aimed at the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Frozen in practice since the pandemic — Moscow has not allowed the U.S. to inspect its arsenals since 2020 — this pact limited the destructive power of both powers to 700 strategic delivery systems (intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and heavy bombers); 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads and 800 nondeployed launchers. In practice, both sides are suspected of having about 200 more nuclear warheads each.
These are weapons that could destroy the world in a few minutes. In addition, there are the thousands of Cold War nuclear warheads that remain locked in warehouses, which would take time to deploy. The actual figures are classified, although the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that Russia and the United States had 5,889 and 5,244 nuclear warheads, respectively, in 2023.
This is where the so-called “tactical bombs” come into play. They are designed to destroy specific targets, such as a fleet or a base — not entire cities — but they are still a major threat. According to the Pentagon, Russia has about 2,000 nuclear warheads of this type.
Under official Russian military doctrine, using the most powerful weapons in the world is acceptable in response to an aggression “which puts the very existence of the Russian Federation under threat,” according to the latest revision that Putin signed in 2020. However, the Kremlin began to consider using these weapons in conflicts two decades ago, when it observed the technological superiority of NATO in conflicts such as the two wars in Iraq.
Western experts do not agree on whether Moscow is capable of resorting to the “escalate to de-escalate” tactic. In other words, [capable] of employing a tactical bomb first to force the opponent to negotiate. Mark Schneider, former senior official of the U.S. Department of Defense, recalls that Russian doctrine considers this option “in response to large-scale aggression utilizing conventional weapons.” Kristin Ven Bruusgaard, an analyst at Chatham House, says that “describing Russian nuclear strategy as ‘escalate to de-escalate’ is an unproductive simplification.” She believes Moscow would be more concerned about NATO’s possible response after such an action.
NATO’s problem is that it does not know what to expect from Putin. “The contradiction between declared and actual policy casts doubt on all previous and future Russian nuclear doctrines,” warns Nikolai Sokov, a researcher at Center for Nonproliferation Studies, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was created by scientists from the Manhattan Project.
“In its war against Ukraine, Russia has ‘utilized’ its nuclear weapons in the offensive deterrence mode — that is, as a cover for its unprovoked aggression rather than for the purposes of defensive deterrence against what is proscribed in all official documents — from the national security concepts to the military doctrines,” continues Sokov, who was one of the Russian negotiators of the first disarmament treaties with the United States. He believes it is possible that Moscow will “escalate to de-escalate.”
TITLE: Nuclear War: The Rising Risk, and How We Stop It
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/04/opinion/nuclear-war-prevention.html
EXCERPT: 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.
NOTE: If you are a NY Times subscriber or still have “freebies” avail (10 per month, I believe), I do recommend clicking through to the story and scrolling down to the illustration/visualization of a nuclear blast, if only to see how online journalism is evolving. - jp