The Daily - What Are Tactical Nuclear Weapons, and What if Russia Uses Them?

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

If President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia follows through on his threats to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, he is likely to turn to a specific type.Tactical nuclear weapons have a fraction of the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and of the super bombs and city busters that people worried about during the Cold War.What exactly are these weapons, how did they develop and what would it mean if Mr. Putin resorted to them in the war in Ukraine?Guest: William J. Broad, a science reporter and senior writer for The New York Times. Background reading: American officials suspect that Mr. Putin is discovering that small nuclear weapons are hard to use, harder to control and a far better weapon of terror and intimidation than a weapon of war.Amid recent nuclear threats from Russia, President Biden calls “the prospect of Armageddon” the highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. If Vladimir Putin ever follows through with his threat to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, he's likely to use a very particular kind of nuclear weapon. Today, I talked to my colleague Bill Broad on what that weapon is, how it works, and what it would mean to deploy it. It's Friday, October 7th. So Bill, two weeks ago, we did an episode with our colleague Anton, and he told us that Putin had effectively declared a chunk of Ukraine Russian territory. And he said that if it was attacked, he would fight back. And he kind of hinted that, you know, he would use his nuclear arsenal. So this whole

week, the Ukrainians are making a lot of military advances in that very area that Putin was talking about. And so everyone, you know, I'm in D.C. here, is talking about this and kind of on edge. You know, are we in a new, more dangerous moment in the world? So we wanted to ask you, Bill, what would an attack like this look like? I mean, when I think of nuclear weapons, I think of a mushroom cloud. Is that what we're talking about? Hiroshima. We've seen pictures of tests around the globe where these frightening huge things would scare and intimidate everybody into all these unthinkable scenarios. What we're talking about now is extremely different. It's a whole different dark universe that grew up in parallel to this ginormous scary world of mushroom clouds.

Okay, different universe. They grew up in parallel. So tell me about that, Bill. I mean, how are the nuclear weapons of today different from the ones that we have in our mind? They're fundamentally much, much, much, much smaller. They call them tactical nukes. They are tiny fractions of the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and tiny, tiny little fractions of the super bombs and the city busters that everybody worried about during the Cold War. In comparison to all that and to everything we've known and thought about publicly for a long time, they are minuscule.

So how did these smaller ones in this new world you're talking about come to be? Well, they all grew out of the very first atomic weapons. The one we all remember was Hiroshima. Right? 1945, ended World War II. Right, 1945, ended World War II. The city of Hiroshima lies prostrate after the withering blast which wiped out 53,000 of its population. The big mushroom cloud over this Japanese city and one over Nagasaki, too. Four square miles of buildings leveled by the first of two small bombs that decided the fate of Japan. That's what's indelibly imprinted on our minds.

Right. Another evidence of the enemy's final inability to wage war. Well, after that, we went into the next chapter of the Cold War, where there was this global race for bigger and better and more terrible weapons. History turns its most ominous page far out in mid-Pacific, where in the enemy talk at all, the world's most awesome weapon is readied for detonation. And they got enormously large compared to Hiroshima. They were called H-bombs. Here on Iluchalab Island, the cab or housing for the first hydrogen bomb take shape after months of preparation. And we popped our first one in 1952. The pictures you are about to see have been released by the Department of Defense under presidential order.

They put a device on an island in the South Pacific, and they tested it. Five, four, three, two, one, zero. The ball of fire is three miles across as it shatters both land and sea. And it was 700 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, with a mushroom cloud that just went into the stratosphere. In seconds, the fireball erupts into a geyser that towers 25 miles into the stratosphere, spreading into a 100-mile-wide mushroom cloud. I mean, it was so big, it just blew people's minds.

Rising with the cloud are millions of cubic feet of radioactive ash, a virulent byproduct of the fusion bomb that will shower down over the area in approximately one hour. But the Soviets, not wanting to be outdone in this great race, the explosion was accompanied by a light flash of unusual power. It detonated one that was 3,000 times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb. Hiroshima bomb. I mean, imagine that. One weapon, something you could fit in your closet there or, you know, it would sit comfortably in your living room, having the destructive power of 3,000 Hiroshimas. And this was the United States and the Soviet Union making these bigger and badder bombs. Both of us in a big race.

And this is the part of the history that we all kind of intuitively know. There was a race to make these super bombs and these city busters. And we got into this kind of straitjacket of mutually insured destruction where nobody could do anything because if we did X, they'd do Y, and we'd annihilate each other. And because of how unthinkable the whole situation was, it was a standoff. Okay, so those were the big bombs of the Cold War era, right, of the arms race. But what you said we're talking about today is something different, right, something smaller. So tell me about that. So while we were popping all these enormous big bombs that got everybody's attention,

there was a whole parallel effort under the radar that the public really wasn't aware of, and I wasn't aware of as a reporter until late in my career, in which they developed bombs that were incredibly small. I mean, we're talking about things like, you know, a big toaster. One of them was called the Davy Crockett, right? After the great frontiersman and American folk hero, right? It was like a watermelon with fins on the back. But that means also, presumably, that they weren't as strong, right?

No, that's it. They weren't as strong. Their blasts were a tiny fraction of the Hiroshima bomb. The Davy Crockett, you know, this little watermelon with fins, it was one thousandth of the power of the Hiroshima bomb. But these bombs were not meant to blow up cities. They were meant for the battlefield. These bombs were not meant to blow up cities. They were meant for the battlefield. They were small, portable, but still powerful enough to blow up a bridge or take out a dam or destroy a train yard or a storage tank or a command bunker, vaporizing it, gone, off the battlefield, right? And it was all, you know, from nuclear technology, which put into a tiny little package the power

of a ginormous conventional weapon. It just put a huge amount of power in your hands. But Bill, why though? I mean, why did they feel like they needed these small things? They needed them for Europe. It was a techie fix for a terrible situation. They wanted little bombs that could stop the Soviet hordes cold. The Soviets could, with a snap of their fingers, create armies with millions of men. And they did. You know, their standing army was something like four or five million people. We couldn't do that in the West. The democracies couldn't get that many people up on the front lines. So rather than turning ourselves into dictatorships and forcing everybody to march to the front lines. So rather than turning ourselves into dictatorships

and forcing everybody to march to the front lines, we went, hey guys, let's make teeny weeny little bombs that'll intimidate the Soviets and stop these hordes, right? They'll know about it. We'll advertise it. We'll send signals. We'll let them know that our planes are practicing with this, that we have nuclear artillery shells eight inches wide that exactly look like conventional shells. But guess what? They're nuclear. It'll be a real bad day on the invasion front. So the West is essentially thinking, OK, we don't have the manpower to counter the Soviets who can just, you know, get everybody in their country to fight. And instead, they were going to use this newfangled and potentially quite devastating new weapon to stop them. Right. And instead, they were going to use this newfangled and potentially quite devastating new

weapon to stop them. Right. And they went wild with it. NATO, our Western European partners, put, get this, 7,400, 7,400 of these weapons all across Western Europe at the peak of the Cold War, right? It was like you could have one in every kitchen, right? They were everywhere. And they were ready to go at a moment's notice to try to counteract the hordes. And what about the Soviets, Bill? I mean, did they also develop these smaller tactical nuclear weapons? They did, but it took a while.

Typically, in the history of the arms races, we have always been the leaders. We developed the first H-bombs. We developed the first A-bombs. The Soviets always would lag a few to many years behind. But they eventually started doing this too. And we kind of got into yet another arms race, a tit-for-tat race with smaller bombs that the public didn't really follow. It was another kind of invisible part of the East-West standoff. So eventually, the Soviet Union collapses, Cold War ends. What happens to all these things? Well, we come to agreements to cut back our very big arsenals with these city busters that would

get flung halfway around the world. You know, we went from tens of thousands of these things down to what today in East and West are big long-range arsenals of 1,500 weapons. But the little stuff has a more checkered history. Right at the end of the Cold War, we both agreed to get these off the battlefield because they were so small, we didn't want terrorists and crazy people running off with them. It was the time of Osama bin Laden and of rising Islamic terrorism. Absolutely. So there was a big push, a bilateral push to get these things in safe places. And the result of that is that in the West, a lot of these small weapons got disassembled and taken to bunkers where they sit today. They're in parts and pieces.

And maybe some of the material turned back into just handy-dandy material for the day we might want it. We now have on the order of 100 tactical weapons in Western Europe. Just 100? Just 100, right. Why did NATO keep so few? I mean, what was the thinking there? The thinking was that these things were dangerous because they were so small. They were easy to lose and easy to be misplaced. And they didn't have the serious, serious command and control functions that we had for these big super weapons and city busters that would go on top of intercontinental ballistic missiles. So, you know, the decision was made to just downsize radically, which they did. And what about the Russians? Did they reciprocate? They did in the sense that they pulled a lot of these tacticals off the battlefield and put them into storage areas.

off the battlefield and put them into storage areas. But unlike the U.S., they didn't disassemble them. So these weapons are still around, 2,000 of them ready to go. Wow, that's a lot more. Yes, it could make for a terrible bad day if they started going off. It's kind of surprising that the U.S. would just voluntarily get rid of these things while Russia kept theirs. Wasn't this process governed by the same type of treaties and arrangements that they used for the big bombs? No. And that's one of the surprising parts of this whole story. These things were never regulated by treaties. We just decided to ditch them. The Cold War was over. The Soviet Union collapsed.

Their military apparatus was a shambles. Their economy was crippled. War was not going to break out. The much feared invasion of West Germany and Western Europe was not about to happen. They could barely feed their soldiers, much less marshal, you know, a group of them to invade Europe. We didn't need these weapons anymore. And nukes are unimaginably dangerous. Nobody wanted to use these things. Okay, so we decided we didn't need them. We got rid of most of them, even though we had no guarantee that Russia would reciprocate. Right. So nobody thought about this a lot in public, in the secret councils of Washington, in the National Security Council, in the Pentagon. They were just old news.

Until Russia, in recent years, emerged as a major aggressor on the world stage, plowing into Ukraine and starting to make all these threats again about its great nuclear arsenal. We'll be right back. So Bill, the Russians have a lot of these smaller tactical nuclear weapons. If Putin decides he wants to use one, what does that actually look like? What are his options? Well, it all depends, right? The one that analysts talk about over and over is the shock and awe technique, where Putin says, let me take one of these things. They're not so big. The world won't end. But I'll take it, and I'll pop it off over the Baltic or the Black Sea, right? No mushroom cloud,

just this instantaneous bright flash, like all of a sudden, a second sun. The satellites will notice, the West will notice, NATO and the US will notice, and it will send a terrifying message that I'm willing to break the nuclear taboo that's been in place for 77 years. Or if he wanted to take out, say, a Ukrainian military base, one of his main options would be this missile that our NATO partners know very well called the Iskander. It has a range of about 300 miles. It has two big tactical rockets that can get carried on a truck. two big tactical rockets that can get carried on a truck. Usually, the Iskanders have conventional warheads, but they also take nuclear warheads. So, Putin could order the nuclear Iskander warheads to be taken out of storage, run up in Russia to somewhere relatively close to the front lines,

to somewhere relatively close to the front lines and aim it toward that base. Now, that's not the end of the story because all these detonations of nuclear weapons have lots of options, mainly the height of the burst. So there are all these different dimensions to how this thing could actually be used, including where it physically explodes. Yes. Let's say you just wanted to scare the bejesus out of them. Maybe you'd detonate it a thousand feet above the base. Maybe you'd just start some fires in the surrounding woods and kill maybe a hundred people rather than a thousand or something. But if you really want to create a nightmare for somebody, make sure it's a ground burst. Because then all the stuff that gets

vaporized on the ground becomes radioactive. So you multiply the radiation many, many, many times over if you do a ground burst, which is why sites can be uninhabitable for a long time. Right. The Hiroshima bomb was detonated at a height of 1,500 feet. There was prompt radiation. It happened very quickly, and that killed a lot of people. But there wasn't this radiation that lasted for years and decades, right? They went around with Geiger counters through Hiroshima afterwards, and there was very little residual radiation. So how these things are detonated is as important as what they are. I'm remembering now Chernobyl. And I actually have a friend who was living in Belarus at the time

and said that the wind carried the radiation toward him as a child, and that everybody remembers that. And I guess I'm thinking, you know, if Putin explodes a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, you know, wouldn't that be a risk for him as well? The wind carrying the radiation and effectively making parts of Russia toxic? Right. That's a great question. And the answer is it depends on what Mother Nature is thinking that day. Usually at the latitude of Kiev, you're right smack dab in what they call the westerlies. These are trade winds. They blow constantly from west to east, and that's what you would normally have had over Chernobyl, which is very close to Kiev. On that day, however,

instead of the westerlies blowing, which would have taken the radiation to Kazakhstan, the winds were coming out of the south and the southeast. So the radiation got blown north to Belarus and to Russia. So it's this fickle aspect of nature that really has the final vote in all this. aspect of nature that really has the final vote in all this. So it sounds like Putin has a lot of options for how he could actually use these tactical weapons. But at the same time, there's a significant element of risk for him. Exactly right. Huge uncertainty, technical uncertainty, political uncertainty, right? He's going into this world that we haven't been in in modern times. It's full of all kinds of scary unknowns. that we haven't been in in modern times. It's full of all kinds of scary unknowns.

Well, so let's talk about that. What are the consequences if Putin actually does this? If he actually detonates a bomb in Ukraine or anywhere in the region, say, what would be the response from the rest of the world? Well, Russia's hoping that they would escalate to de-escalate, which is kind of a fancy way of saying that, well, the shock and awe of it would mean that everybody on the other side would basically throw up their hands and surrender.

And would that happen? My understanding is that the Biden administration has thought about it a lot. And they think that the civilized world would be so appalled that even Putin's best buddies, you know, China and India and these dictatorial countries that get in bed with Russia, they would all be so appalled that he would suddenly be losing huge political support. You know, sanctions all of a sudden would come in with huge force. And the administration's game plan, as I understand it, often through the eyes of my good colleague David Sanger, who reports on this stuff deeply in Washington, is that they would not respond with a nuclear detonation.

And is the reason because they don't have any of those tactical nukes anymore, the small ones, or is it because they're afraid of escalation? I think it's both those things. We don't have those tactical nuclear weapons to be able to climb that little escalatory ladder anymore, which was the thing in the Cold War. There was this whole theory of escalatory cycles, which were supposed to deter the attacks.

They pop a five kiloton bomb, we pop a five kiloton bomb. But now I think the thought process is we don't want to get into a tit for tat where suddenly one of the few tactical weapons that we have in Europe gets used on a Russian city, and Putin decides to take out Chicago or Los Angeles. So the prevailing wisdom in the administration appears to be that we would use our conventional firepower to retaliate or share that conventional firepower with Ukraine so they could retaliate. And we do have this unbelievable arsenal of conventional weapons,

which are hugely precise, incredibly smart, filled with chips, guided by satellites, and could rain down on Mother Russia in a way that she would never forget. One thing that I don't really get about Putin and the nuclear scenario is that his whole goal is to actually take over Ukraine, is to sort of have it as Russian territory. That's what he's trying to do. So why would he risk poisoning a whole lot of the territory of the country he's trying to take over? It just doesn't really make any sense.

Right. None of it really, to me, makes a whole lot of sense. The only thing that makes sense is not using it on a battlefield, using it as a shock and awe technique to say, I'm willing to cross the line. Are you? Now, the thing to keep in mind is throughout all the escalations in this war, the United States has found zero evidence that nuclear weapons that are in storage units are being taken out. Submarines in their pens are not being put out to sea with nuclear missiles, which would happen if we were facing Armageddon. nuclear missiles, which would happen if we were facing Armageddon. Special trucks are not pulling up to cruise missile batteries with nuclear warheads. But what's that telling us? It's telling us that we're in this period of bluff and bluster. There are no concrete preparations that I'm aware of, that Washington's aware of, to wage a nuclear war, not even with one of these

little babies. It's still this great drama that Putin is running, and it has to do with scare tactics. It's almost like the threats themselves are his power, right? Right. He's in peak power now, and as soon as he uses them... It goes away. And not only goes away, he as a force on the world stage collapses. Right. That's the US playbook. And I think there's something to it. Which makes me think he won't actually use them, right? Oh, I hope so. To the extent that he's a rational player, he won't. But the thing about Vladimir Putin, he's unpredictable, and he's using that to his advantage, right?

Indeed. Primarily with this invasion, which all the experts said wouldn't happen, and it did. Right. The wild card is he surprised us a lot, and that's the real danger. Right. The danger is that Vladimir Putin would usher us into an unpredictable new age. Would this start a chain reaction of events, right? Would people start rearming themselves? Would people start popping bombs? And what if it was a small bomb? And, oh, it wasn't so bad. You know, he crossed this line and maybe we should start, you know, using these in other conflicts. And who knows where that goes? You go up the escalatory chain reaction and they get bigger and bigger. And next thing you know, they're dusting

off the old super bombs from the Cold War and starting to think about vaporizing big cities. You know, it goes to so many potentially bad places, you quickly get back into that unthinkable territory, right? Which was the thing that made the Cold War work. Because on both sides, it was unthinkable. There was a game plan. And everybody knew the rules. The Soviet embassy and the American embassy people would all get together on holidays, and their children went to the same schools in Moscow, and, you know, everybody knew the game.

We were comfortable with the standoff. But now you're starting in a sort of asymmetrical situation rather than the standoff. We don't know where this game goes. And that's what makes it so frightening to me as a reporter who watches this stuff. It just seems like it's a chain reaction you don't want to start because you have no idea where it's going to go. because you have no idea where it's going to go. Bill, thank you. Thank you.

On Thursday night, President Joe Biden said the risk of, quote, nuclear Armageddon is at its highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Biden, who was speaking at a fundraiser in New York City, said that Putin was, quote, not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons. We'll be right back. On Thursday, President Biden pardoned all people convicted of marijuana possession charges under federal law, clearing about 6,500 people who were convicted between 1992 and 2021. There are thousands of people who are convicted for marijuana possession who may be denied employment, housing or educational opportunities as a result of that conviction. My pardon will remove this burden on them. is the result of that conviction. My pardon will remove this burden on them.

Marijuana is fully legal in about 20 states, and Biden said he wanted to stop sending people to jail for conduct that is already permitted in a lot of the country. The vast majority of simple marijuana possession charges are brought by the states, not the federal government. And Biden encouraged states to follow suit, noting that there were racial disparities around prosecution and conviction.

Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana. It's time that we right these wrongs. And in Thailand, a former police officer went on a shooting spree inside a daycare center, killing 36 people, 24 of them children. The shooter was a 34-year-old man who'd been fired from the police force for drug possession. The victims included a two-year-old and a teacher who was eight months pregnant. It was the worst mass shooting by a sole perpetrator in Thailand's history and exceeds the death toll of the deadliest American school shooting at Sandy Hook.

Thailand's gun homicide rate is lower than America's, but is among the highest in Asia. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Luke Vander Ploeg, and Michael Simon Johnson. It was edited by Liz O'Balin and Paige Cowett, contains original music by Dan Powell, Alicia Baitube, and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. We'll see you Tuesday after the holiday.