Today, Explained - Small nukes

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Vladimir Putin keeps threatening to use smaller nuclear weapons to win his war. Author J. Peter Scoblic says “there’s no such thing as small nukes.” This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sir, I have a plan. Vladimir Putin wants the world to think he'll use nuclear weapons in his war with Ukraine. He keeps saying he'll do it, and he keeps saying he's not bluffing. I am not bluffing. Coming up on Today Explained, we're going to try and figure out a number of things, including why he's making this threat now. I mean, he's been trying to steal back chunks of Ukraine for almost like a decade now. What kinds of weapons he's talking about using here, specifically what are small nukes anyway?

What the world might look like if he really does go through with this madness, and why, even if he is bluffing, this is perhaps a very sound strategy for him. I am not bluffing. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs? And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals.

Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from. We wanted to help you understand what's going on with Russia, Ukraine, and nuclear weapons. So we reached out to Peter Skoblik. Not just because he published a piece on Vox.com this week titled, Russian Nuclear Threat Explained, though that was certainly part of our thinking, but it's also because he's a real authority on this stuff.

He's written a book about it. He's been talking about nuclear weapons for years and years, and now so is the rest of the world. The whole world is talking about nuclear weapons because Vladimir Putin is not very subtly threatening to use them. The most recent threat came on Friday when he delivered a very belligerent speech in annexing illegally four Ukrainian regions. We will defend our land using all forces and means at our disposal, and we'll do everything we can to protect the security of our people. And then made an allusion to the use of nuclear weapons, using nuclear weapons to win a conventional conflict. The United States is the only country in the world to use nuclear weapons twice, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Actually, they set a precedent. He has made threats like this before, including about two weeks ago when he announced partial military mobilization

and saying if there's a threat to the territorial integrity of Russia, he'll use all weapons available to him. What he's effectively done now by illegally annexing these territories is saying they're part of Russia, and therefore the logic would be we will use nuclear weapons to defend our own territory. Territory that, of course, Ukrainian forces are trying very hard and actually successfully to retake. Tonight, Ukrainian soldiers reclaiming more territory just seized by Vladimir Putin in the south and in the northeast, reclaiming that territory that Putin annexed just days ago, raising the Ukrainian flag once again. What does Putin's nuclear arsenal look like?

Here we have to think about a distinction that is both useful and somewhat not useful between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. Strategic nuclear weapons are those that the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War focused on because they could target each other's homelands. Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium and intermediate range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no? Don't wait for the translation, yes or no? So they were long-range weapons, often very high-yield weapons. That is, they had a lot of explosive power, have a lot of explosive power. We're talking about ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. During the past decade and a half, the Soviets have built up a massive arsenal of new strategic nuclear weapons, weapons that can strike directly at the United States. Those weapons are limited

by the new START treaty. We have roughly equal numbers of those deployed, about 1,500 warheads each. Then you have tactical nuclear weapons, which are ostensibly smaller, of shorter range, and intended for battlefield use. These are casually known as small nukes, I guess. Tell us more about these. The casualness is perhaps part of the problem because what might be considered a tactical nuclear weapon today can frankly be used to take out a large chunk of a city. We refer to them as small simply by virtue of their relative size to the quote-unquote strategic weapons, which have at times ranged into the megaton level. So, though they're called small nukes,

we should not underestimate how much damage and destruction they could cause. There is no such thing as a small nuclear weapon. We have created weapons that have very, very low yields in the past, relatively speaking, for nuclear weapon. We have created weapons that have very, very low yields in the past, relatively speaking, for nuclear weapons. But we should not think of a, quote-unquote, small nuclear weapon as an insignificant nuclear weapon. And this raises the point, nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. There's a strong international norm against their use in any fashion except to retaliate against a nuclear strike. Using any nuclear weapon, no matter its yield, would violate the so-called nuclear taboo and would radically change the international

strategic situation. There would be enormous ramifications for Russia. We would be living in a different world. Why is there so much talk about small nukes or these tactical weapons right now? Is it because this is what people think Vladimir Putin might use, or is it because he has specifically mentioned these kinds of weapons? He finds himself in a military situation where, despite a lot of talk about Putin being irrational or unhinged or a little bit crazy, it might not be irrational if his sole goal were to win the conflict in Ukraine or somehow end it on terms favorable to him because they do provide an immense amount of

power. What he may be failing to account for is the tremendous negative consequences that would accrue from doing that, meaning the response of the United States, NATO, and the international community. We should be clear here that Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons, strategic or tactical, correct? That is correct. There were nuclear weapons based on Ukrainian territory during the Cold War, Soviet nuclear weapons, because Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine voluntarily denuclearized after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Your decision has made the Ukrainian people, the American people, and the entire world much safer and more secure. It has no nuclear weapons now. Of course, it does have powerful friends who do. What are those friends saying right now

to counter Vladimir Putin? Jake Sullivan, President Biden's national security advisor, has warned of, quote unquote, catastrophic consequences. We have communicated directly, privately to the Russians at very high levels that there will be catastrophic consequences for Russia if they use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. We have been clear with them and emphatic with them that the United States will respond decisively alongside our allies and partners. We don't know exactly what those consequences would be. It's unlikely that the United States or NATO would respond in kind with nuclear weapons. I think the goal would be to leave the onus of having violated the nuclear taboo on Putin and, frankly, ostracize him

for that. And what those consequences and repercussions would be would vary, to be fair, depending on how Vladimir Putin chose to use a nuclear weapon. There are more and less destructive ways he could do that. He could fire what is known as a demonstration shot, where you detonate a nuclear weapon in a relatively, you know, unpopulated area, say over the Black Sea, and that would be to signal resolve. It would be a, frankly, sign of desperation, but that's what it would be. On the other hand, if he takes out Keeve, that's a very different story. That is mass murder, and we'd be looking presumably at a different set of responses. And what does this say about the relationship between these two superpowers? It's been 30 years since the end of the Cold War, and all of this until relatively recently seemed like ancient history, worrying about a nuclear winter. And here we are in 2022, a Top Gun movie just came out, and we're talking about the threat of Russia dropping a nuclear bomb on an ally. One of the things that frustrates nuclear experts, I think, is that the threat from nuclear weapons never went away with the end of the Cold War. It subsided

significantly when relations between the United States and Russia were doing better. The problem now is that Putin has declared that Russia is in an existential struggle with the West. Do we want in our country, in Russia, instead of a mother and a father, that we should have parent number one, parent number two? They've gone mad. That is the way that, frankly, both sides viewed the Cold War. So, you know, what is old is new again. The threat from nuclear weapons never went away, but the threat is dependent

not simply on the existence of the weapons, but on the relationships between the countries that possess them, obviously. To the extent that we are now in an existential struggle, the threat generally has gone up. You mentioned this nuclear taboo a few times now. Does a moment like this change how you feel about that taboo that maybe got us through nearly 80 years without using a nuclear weapon? One of the problems, and again, maybe put this in scare quote with nuclear weapons, is that we have so little data on

their use because they haven't been used since 1945. And trying to demonstrate why they haven't been used is actually a really difficult proposition. It's difficult to figure out what the causal link is. Were they not used because there was a moral taboo, a norm against their use? Were they not used because everybody recognized the potential for escalation up to nuclear apocalypse? Or were they not used because we just got lucky and we've managed many decades without them being used? That doesn't mean they won't be used tomorrow. The truth is we don't actually know. And we have faced nuclear crises before. We have come through

them all. That doesn't mean we come through the current crisis without them being used. That was Dr. Peter Skoblik. He's a fellow at Harvard. He's a senior fellow at the International Security Program at New America. And he is the author of U.S. vs. Them, kind of like us vs. Them, Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror. More Today Explained after this. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Thank you. Wirecutter AuraFrame to make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself.

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Nuclear! What's that? Sorry. Brian Walsh, you edit Vox's Future Perfect section, which is all about how to make the world less bad. You also recently wrote about the decidedly dystopian possibility of a nuclear winter on planet Earth. We're talking about nuclear winter today because of Russian President Vladimir Putin's growing threats to attack Ukraine with nuclear weapons.

But that isn't why you wrote your piece. Is that right? No, I wrote my piece back in August because there was a new study that came out in the journal Nature Food that tried to update estimates about what a nuclear winter would really do to the climate and especially what it would do to food production. And it's got some pretty scary conclusions. Thanks for the warm welcome, but I'm here to tell you about something terrible. Let's talk about them. I mean, first of all, let's talk about nuclear winter. What is a nuclear winter in an actual textbook definition? So nuclear winter is a theory that was first devised back in the early 80s when climatologists actually mostly looked at

the fires that would result from a full-scale nuclear war. You can imagine cities, forests just burning, and the soot and other kind of debris that would release into the atmosphere. Now, all that smoke goes up. It actually would create something like a blanket around the atmosphere, and it would block a lot of incoming sunlight such that the climate would actually cool really drastically. That's the winter in nuclear winter. Not only would it be extremely cold, it would be very, very difficult to grow food. You wouldn't have sunlight coming in for photosynthesis. And back in the 80s, they thought, well, this could really lead to not just the billions who would die or hundreds of millions who might die in the actual nuclear war, but far more who would die because simply there would be no food around.

It would lead to mass starvation. The environmental effects would be so great, even of launching only a quarter of the world's strategic weapons, that the large-scale climatic effects would eventually come back to get the original attacker. Now this new paper kind of took some really updated climate models, some really updated crop models, and put some hard numbers on what we would actually experience in the event of both what we think of as a full nuclear war between Russia and the U.S., where you saw most of the warheads being used during that war would be much worse than the explosions of said nuclear war themselves. That's the theory, basically.

And it's important to know when we say fallout, people often associate that with nuclear war with radioactive fallout. And obviously, that would be an issue for sure in the aftermath of any kind of nuclear exchange, nuclear war. But we mean fallout here, we mean literally the fact that you would get really drastic cooling such that, you know, it's not just the winter we would have here, but imagine a winter that went on for seasons, for years potentially. And then you would just be having total loss of crops. So in this new nature food study, they suggest that a war between the US and Russia with most of those nuclear weapons being used would lead to as many as 150 million tons of soot being ejected into the atmosphere via all that smoke. That would then really cause the climate to cool and they believe it would actually reduce the amount of calories that

agriculture around the world could produce by something like 90%. In many countries, especially at higher latitudes, it would be hugely devastating after years of bulk food. Basically, we'd have only one-tenth the amount of food we had before the war. And they then go on to estimate that could leave up to 5 billion people around the world eventually dead of starvation. So it wouldn't be human extinction, but most people would die. That's an existential event that is the end of the world, really, as we know it by any measure. I mean, it's a terrifying picture, but I guess to a lot of people, it feels abstract or like

something out of a movie. That being said, though, this paper isn't the first time you read about nuclear winter. This is something we've been talking about for decades, right? Yeah, the origins of nuclear winter theory go back to the early 1980s when scientists began to use what were then fairly basic climate models to kind of try to understand what a nuclear war would do to the climate. They worked on those papers. They really pushed them out publicly. Carl Sagan, who you might know from the show Cosmos and just being someone who was a really major public intellectual figure back then, actually really pushed this hard. It really made a difference to the public. Conventional wisdom, no matter how deeply felt, may not be a reliable guide in an age of apocalyptic weapons. It got heard in Congress.

President Reagan at the time talked about it. Certainly we don't want such weapons for their own sake. We don't desire excessive forces or what some people have called overkill. Basically, it's a matter of others knowing that starting a conflict would be more costly to them than anything they might hope to gain. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the Soviet premier at the time, it really made a meaningful difference in pushing us away from that risk. I mean, obviously, fast forward more than 30 years on from the end of the Cold War, I don't think this kind of paper, this kind of science really has that same effect. Partially,

we've just grown so used to the idea that nuclear war was something we had to worry about, you know, in the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, not anymore. It's only now that we're beginning to kind of reawaken to that possibility. But it's going to take a long time to really make a difference in that way. I mean, we are coming up against the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A lot of experts believe that we are closer to the use of a nuclear weapon in warfare now than we have been at any time since that crisis. But I don't think that message has really gotten down to the public. I mean, I would hope as scary as the science is, it does begin to do so. But, you know, I don't feel like we're living under that same shadow,

even though that never really went away. And now suddenly it's gotten a lot darker. And when you say we're closer now than we were then, is it because of Russia's incursion in Ukraine or is it other conflicts as well? It's a couple of reasons. One, primarily, it is because of Russia's incursion into Ukraine, which breaks all international norms. And then on top of that, of course, we have President Putin really threatening the use of nuclear weapons in a way we haven't ever seen before. And if he does use a weapon, it will be almost certainly on that limited scale. But we don't know what happens next. We have no real playbook for how the US should respond to that kind of comparatively in quotes, small scale nuclear strike. So what you really worry about in this kind of case is that things

just get out of control. There's a response leads to a counter response, so on and so on. And very quickly things can get out of control. We have a scenario like we might see in this paper. But in addition, you know, we now live in a world where there are multiple countries that have nuclear weapons. We see North Korea continuing to test missiles. It wouldn't be surprising to see them test another nuclear weapon. That just is an inherently less stable world. Now, there is one good thing here that overall, there are far fewer nuclear warheads now than there was at the height of the Cold War, which makes a difference here. Like the more warheads there are, the more potential strikes there are, the bigger the chances that we actually have a nuclear winter.

But right now, like we just live in a very unstable moment and no one knows what will come next or exactly how we should respond. How do we get rid of even more of them, Brian? I mean, you know, the superpowers of the world, United States and Russia, namely, have historically agreed to lower their arsenals. But of course, they've also kept a fair amount of their arsenals as deterrence, right? But what would it take for them to just do away with them all? I mean, if I had the answer to that, you should just give me the Nobel Peace Prize right now. But unfortunately, I don't really. What we've seen in the past is that when

relations between the major superpowers are better, you can get arms control treaties where both sides will agree to cuts over time. That's really what we had in the post Cold War era. And that's what brought those warheads down. The problem is, of course, with tensions as bad as they are, arms control treaties have really just ground to a halt. We are not seeing any advance there. In fact, they might be going backwards, which is pretty scary. At the same time, the U.S. has played some role in this as well. The U.S. has spent a lot to upgrade its nuclear arsenal. It wants to maintain that power. What I think we should be really concerned about beyond the idea of like, you know, rogue states like in North Korea, having larger and larger arsenals and what they could do with that is that if we see Russia use

a nuclear weapon here, it creates a precedent where potentially every country or any country that could get nuclear weapons would say, well, wait, like the one way you guarantee that you are free from those kinds of consequences way you guarantee that you are free from those kinds of consequences where you take that existential pressure off yourself, I'm not going to be invaded and so forth is by having an arsenal of your own. You know, it would be very easy to look at that and say, you know, you're Japan. Like, well, I can't really trust in the U S nuclear barrel. We need our own weapons or Saudi Arabia or take your pick. Really? That means we're headed towards a world where we could have

a dozen, two dozen countries with nuclear weapons. It becomes so much more difficult to control it and you get really another arms race. And, you know, I think many people thought and hoped that we'd left those days behind. But what happens, I think, in Ukraine over the next two months, the remainder of the year, will be really important in determining whether we live again under a threat of nuclear destruction that is as terrible as our parents and grandparents lived under in the second half of the 20th century. Blink AF. Yes, very. I have a plan. We'll meet again Don't know where

Don't know where But I know we will Read Brian Walsh and Peter Skoblik, whom you heard from earlier in the show, at Vox.com. Our show today was produced by Miles Bryan and Amanda Llewellyn. They had help from Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, and Paul Robert Mouncey.

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