The Decibel - A nuclear scientist on Russia’s threat of nuclear war

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

Russia has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world, and Russian President Vladimir Putin and those in his inner circle have threatened to use nuclear weapons if Russian territory is threatened. Similar comments have been made before, but many experts are looking at these threats differently in light of the so-called referendums taking place across four regions of Ukraine.Cheryl Rofer worked for more than 30 years as a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Now, she writes about national security and about the war in Ukraine. She’ll explain what kind of nuclear weapons Russia has, and what it would mean if Putin decides to use them.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. Russia is holding so-called referendums this week in four regions of Ukraine that it's occupying, asking people to vote if they want to be part of Russia. In early results, over 96% of voters said yes. But these referendums have been denounced by Western countries. According to local officials, people were forced to vote under the watch of armed men. These so-called referendums are especially important because Russia has said it might use nuclear weapons to defend the territories that it considers part of Russia. The sense a lot of us have of what Putin is doing is that he's using them as a scare mechanism.

But would he actually use them? Well... Cheryl Rofer worked for more than 30 years as a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is run by the U.S. government to design and maintain nuclear weapons and materials. Now, Cheryl writes about national security, and she's written a lot about the war in Ukraine. She's here to help us understand what kind of nuclear weapons Russia has and what it would mean if Russian President Vladimir Putin decides to use them. This is The Decibel. Cheryl, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I'm glad to be in the conversation.

Just to get started, how many nuclear weapons and then maybe another 1,000 or 2,000 of what are called tactical or non-strategic nuclear weapons. Okay. And we'll get into those details in a sec. But I guess how does that compare to other countries that have nuclear arms? Is that a lot? It's about the same number of strategic weapons that the United States has, but the United States does not have tactical nuclear weapons in the same way Russia does. The United States has maybe 100 or 200 of what could be called tactical nuclear weapons. Russia has a great variety of tactical nuclear weapons, and we don't know the details on all of them. The strategic nuclear weapons are covered by treaties, and so the countries, Russia and the United States, have to enumerate what weapons they have and what kinds and how many.

But that has not been true for tactical nuclear weapons. So we don't know a lot about Russia's non-strategic nuclear weapons. So is it fair to break it down like the strategic nuclear weapons are bigger essentially and then the tactical nuclear weapons are the smaller ones? More or less, but no nuclear weapon is really small. Even the smallest nuclear weapon is far larger than any conventional weapon. I think when a lot of us hear about nuclear weapons, like we think of the bombs that were dropped at the end of World War II on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How do, I guess, the current nuclear weapons that we're talking about compare to those ones? Some of the tactical nuclear weapons are about that size. So that's maybe a convenient way to think about tactical nuclear weapons, although they can vary quite a bit in size.

That's the smaller version, isn't it? That's the smaller. The tactical nuclear weapons are the smaller ones. Yep. Okay. That is the smaller version. And the strategic nuclear weapons are much larger than that. Okay. So if the smaller version of our current nuclear weapons is what was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we're still talking about something that's very big there.

What kind of damage would the larger strategic nuclear weapons then actually do? Typically, it would take one of the larger nuclear weapons to pretty much destroy most of Manhattan. Wow. Okay. Cheryl, what are the differences between the damage that is done by a nuclear weapon and the damage done by other powerful military weapons? As far as the blast goes, they're the same. But nuclear weapons also are radioactive. matter from the ground, buildings, dirt, that kind of thing, and mix it in with the products of the nuclear explosion, which are radioactive, and form a molten set of things that can

aggregate in drops or a finer dust. and that's what we call fallout. And why is nuclear fallout dangerous? It's radioactive. It can be breathed in. It settles on surfaces. It can get into food supplies, and it exposes people who may use that food or be in the area to radiation. Unless we were in the middle of a nuclear war and there was really a lot of fallout, it probably would not cause immediate damage to people, but it would cause cancer in some people later on. And once an explosion does, a nuclear explosion happens, how long would that fallout last and hang around for?

Radioactive material can be detected down to very small amounts. So I think maybe a more relevant question is how long would it be dangerous? The period of danger might be months or it might be years depending on how much cleanup you do, what the area is going to be used for, that kind of thing. The area closest is going to be the most affected, and the areas further away will become safe after some period of time. All right, let's bring this back to the current conflict at hand, Russia and Ukraine here. If Putin did decide to use a nuclear weapon, how much warning would the rest of the world get that this was happening? There's been a lot of talk.

But in order to use nuclear weapons, they would have to be taken out of storage. They are stored in very secure areas. So there would be activity around those areas. And the kind of activity would be people moving things in and out of the storage areas, specialized trucks coming up to receive whatever is being moved in and out. We now have satellite ways to look at those areas. So if there were activity there, that would be the most serious kind of warning for us besides the talk.

And so from everything that you've seen, has any of that activity happened yet? No. Okay. In fact, early on in the war, Putin said something about putting the nuclear forces on some sort of special alert, which was not a term that was generally used. So everybody started looking at the areas where the nuclear weapons are stored at that point, and there's been no activity. Besides the government agencies that watch such things,

there are also open source groups that watch these things, and they will let us know on Twitter for sure, and otherwise, if they see anything. We'll be back in a minute. Cheryl, I'm just wondering, how did you get into all of this? I know you've been thinking about nuclear for decades now, but how did it all start for you? I grew up during the 1950s, and the 1950s were really a time of nuclear terror for all of us. It was very frightening. I had nightmares as a child.

We had air raid drills in our school and went into the halls and curled up in little balls. 1960s, I came to Los Alamos and had a variety of jobs ranging from, oh, a method of destroying nerve gas through canning plutonium from old nuclear weapons to environmental cleanup, for which I went to Estonia and Kazakhstan. So it's been a part of my life for pretty much all my life. I want to ask you about a piece that you wrote a couple of weeks ago saying that Putin wouldn't want to use nuclear weapons because it would essentially be admitting that things are not going very well for him in this war and that he can't defeat Ukraine in any other way. But of course, last week, we saw Putin mobilize some reservists, you know, 300,000 troops, which many are kind of seeing as an

admission that he's losing this war. So I'm curious, how do you feel about his threats now that this has all happened? I think I agree with an article that came out this week saying that now that he's mobilized, or halfway mobilized, or whatever he's calling it. Partial mobilization. Partial, yeah. Now that he's mobilized, he has less reason to use nuclear weapons because he now has something in progress that he may believe will improve Russia's chances in the war. So basically, I would say that that move has bought us time. I think there's also a good argument to be made that no leader wants to use nuclear weapons.

And the sense a lot of us have of what Putin is doing is that he's using them as a scare mechanism. But would he actually use them? Well, he would become a global pariah. He doesn't have a lot of allies in this, and using a nuclear weapon would probably decrease those allies still further. It's very hard to read what Putin is thinking and what is important to him about this war. And all that flows into judgments of whether he would use nuclear weapons or not. I think the bottom line is that we really

don't know. And I'm making guesses just like everybody else. Yeah. There's also the looming threat of the Zaporozhye nuclear plant, which Russian forces have taken over and there has been intense shelling around it as well. And there's pretty widespread concern about potential nuclear disaster with this plant. What do you think Putin is doing here? It has seemed to me up until the last week or two that Putin has either rattled his nukes or he has had his people shelling the nuclear plant. So he's using it as a psychological tool. But if he really wanted to create a radiological disaster, the shelling would be to the spent fuel ponds, which are more vulnerable than the reactors themselves and have the potential to spread some radioactivity.

The spent fuel ponds hold the very radioactive fuel that has been taken out of the reactors. They are not protected. They're in industrial-type buildings. They're not protected the way the reactors are. The reactors are contained by those big concrete buildings that you can see. So they would be vulnerable to shelling. If that happened, it would be nothing like a nuclear bomb in terms of total danger and disaster. But the shelling has concentrated on the electrical connections into and out of the plant, which could lead to a meltdown ultimately in the reactors. Russia has also expressed an interest in taking the plant and the electricity it produces for the Russian energy grid. So if Putin, if that's what he wants, then blowing up the plant certainly seems like a bad idea.

And that seems they have avoided the worst of it so far. Yeah. So this is, it's almost kind of a different kind of nuclear threat that Putin's kind of using here in a way with this power plant. I want to ask about, I guess, the response to a potential attack. So on Sunday, the U.S. government said that there would be, quote, catastrophic consequences if Putin did use a nuclear weapon. How do you think the U.S. would retaliate if Putin decided to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine? My first guess is that it would not be a nuclear response. There are many conventional ways that the United States could retaliate. The political part of that equation is harder to figure out. Would they strike targets in Russia? Which targets would they strike? That gets a lot harder to figure out. It would be much better, and I'm sure that the people in Washington understand this, not to use a nuclear weapon. Then there also is the problem of escalation. They nuke Ukraine, we nuke them. They use a strategic nuclear weapon and we're all in bad trouble.

Yeah. On Tuesday, a close ally of Putin's, Dmitry Medvedev, said on Telegram that if Russia did use a nuclear weapon, NATO countries, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, they probably wouldn't retaliate because they're afraid of a nuclear apocalypse, which is what we were just talking about here. Isn't it concerning, though, that people in Putin's inner circle seem to think that they can just launch nuclear weapons with impunity. What has been particularly unfortunate is all the talk out of Russia on nuclear weapons from Medvedev and others. The Russian TV has been full of it. There's been sort of a rule that nuclear weapons powers don't talk about nuclear weapons. And just threatening it this way is dangerous. It does make it more likely that nuclear weapons will be used. Cheryl, before I let you go, I just want to ask you, you've spent a long time studying and writing about nuclear science and dealing with nuclear materials. So I guess I'm just curious

how you think about all of this. Like, what does the prospect of nuclear war, nuclear weapons being used in this day and age, what does that mean for you? I have been thinking lately that we really need to think differently about nuclear weapons. The best thing would be not to have any. But how we get there is a real question, and that becomes a little more difficult now that Russia has decided that it is going to embark on wars of territorial expansion. Does the threat of nuclear war, does it scare you given everything that you know about it? Yeah, it scares me. Right now, I don't feel like it's particularly likely. So it's not an all-the-time fear.

But I really think that a general nuclear war of the kind that is envisioned in the movies is extremely unlikely. Cheryl, thank you so much for taking the time to walk us through all of this today. Okay, I'm glad to help, and thank you. That's it for today. I'm Nainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor.

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.