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Comment by madaxe_again | Hacker News Reader

Two strategic points off the top of my head:

One, the railhead. Afaik it’s operational and modern, as they used it for moving material for constructing the sarcophagus. Goes straight to Kiev. Makes for easy onwards transport of materiel from Belarus.

Two, a gun to the head of Europe. They could threaten to destroy the containment, and/or to bomb the reactor building to aerosolise as much radioactive material as possible.

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> Two, a gun to the head of Europe. They could threaten to destroy the containment, and/or to bomb the reactor building to aerosolise as much radioactive material as possible.

If they wanted to go that extreme, they always had the option of just launching nukes. Capturing the reactor and blowing the sarcophagus just seems like a lot of needless extra steps.

Maybe I read too much scifi, but can't nukes be intercepted in key locations? They might be able to land them in more remote places, but wouldn't hitting cities be difficult? I was under the impression developed nations have missile interception technologies. But yeah, I've read books not based in reality and watched some netflix in my days, so I could be in fantasy land. Kind of sobering to write this out and realize how clueless I am.

intercepting few (up to few dozen) missiles sure.

Intercepting hundreds potentially thousands ? Not really.

I didn’t realize thousands was a possible measurement of missiles to intercept.

The US and Russia long had a treaty which prohibited the development of anti-ballistic missile systems with narrow exceptions. While the treaty agreement effectively ended in 2002, it did effectively stop most ABM work in both countries for an extended period of time. Further, the problem has proven to be exceptionally difficult. The Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as "Star Wars," was an effort towards a comprehensive defense against nuclear ICBMs that was famously declared to be beyond the realm of the possible by some technical groups. While US ABM work as resumed in earnest over the last couple of decades or so, it remains an extremely hard problem and progress has been slow. The prominent GMD system, for example, has the ability to counter only "tens" of warheads (and at tremendous expense, having to fire many interceptors per inbound missile in order to raise the probability of success). Other systems like Aegis are generally even more limited.

So while various countries do possess ABM systems with varying levels of efficacy, in general we could expect only a very small portion of inbound ICBMs to be successfully intercepted... if any. These types of systems have consistently under-performed expectations as field conditions prove to be more challenging than expected, and that's with limited knowledge of the countermeasures an adversary like Russia might employ.

Thanks for this, it’s very eye opening. Definitely cranks up the anxiety during these uncertain times.

Aside from the numbers game, ICBMs used to be the fastest way to deliver a warhead, with the obvious drawback that anyone watching the horizon can see it coming from half a world away.

Nuclear warheads have been further miniaturized since the cold war, it is now possible to fit them into cruise missiles.

> The deployment of Kalibr missiles, long-range, low-flying, capable of carrying conventional or nuclear warheads, available in land-attack, anti-ship and anti-submarine variants, was said to have altered the military balance in Europe and potentially compromised the NATO missile defence system under construction in Europe. [0]

There's also the rumored/propagandized hypersonic, nuclear powered cruise missiles (skyfall [1]) that are meant to defeat missile defense and circumvent MAD by enabling undetected first strike.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine-launched_cruise_mi...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik

Disclaimer, I'm just a web developer with access to wikipedia yo

Like you I’m also a web developer with access to Wikipedia, but you did the legwork which I really appreciate. Thanks!

Plausible deniability is a good reason not to use nukes. They could have a military accident, or blame a saboteur for some sort of weapons cache exploding in-situ and claim it was not intentional.

It gives some deniability. "In desperation, the Ukrainian government has shelled the Chernobyl site."

> Two, a gun to the head of Europe. They could threaten to destroy the containment, and/or to bomb the reactor building to aerosolise as much radioactive material as possible.

Does the wind only blow west? This seems pretty far fetched.

Does Putin care, he will just say the West or Ukraine did so to hinder Russia and then use the damage to Russia as an excuse to act even more ruthless.

I don't think the second is realistic, as that might be considered an attack on NATO countries, which is likely not a scale of war Russia is looking for.

Why blow up a dirty bomb when they have 1000 real bombs?

Nuking someone is a definitive, MAD-triggering event. Causing a radiological disaster "accidentally" would be entirely consistent with the "stop hitting yourself" diplomacy Russia has undertaken since moving against Ukraine in 2014.

Additionally to what was already said in other threads about this:

Why wast money?

Why do you care about saving money when you are planning on ending the world in the next hour?

They won't blow up Chernobyl. Ukraine is a top grain exporting nation. Without wheat, Ukraine's economy would be even worse and there would be no way to feed the people.

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