Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, although as with most military write-ups of this nature perhaps a bit thin on the introspection. Ever wonder just how much damage one nuclear submarine could do?

> "Rising between levels in the missile compartment, 24 large orange trunks fill the nuclear ballistic submarine like an apocalyptic orchard."

Probably (wiki) these are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-133_Trident_II

Each probably (wiki) carries four of these independently targeted warheads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W88

Now, if you want to basically wreck human civilization with one nuclear submarine, drop one of each warhead over each of the 100 largest nuclear reactor sites on the planet. Fukushima for example had six reactors and >1500 tons of fuel rods on hand at the time of that disaster.

This will cause a complete meltdown and aerosolization of much of the fuel, it'll go into the atmosphere and rain down for thousands of miles downwind from the site, creating no-go conditions for human beings (unless you want massive radiation poisoning and birth defects etc.) Multiply that by 100x around the planet and you can see what a mind-boggling disaster it would be.

Now, that's just one nuclear submarine; there are many in operation. Plus the land-based and bomber-based nukes. And this is all done because otherwise, every single international conflict since Hiroshima would likely have escalated into the kind of crazy WWII tank battles and aerial bombardments of cities that took millions of lives. Probably has prevented full-on land/air/sea battles between India and Pakistan, for example. And yet... all it takes is some accident, some breakdown, some misunderstanding and the nukes start flying.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Some people will argue that this is why there are no alien civilizations, they all torched themselves once they reached our level of technological development.

> [A nuclear blast] will cause a complete meltdown and aerosolization of much of the fuel [of the reactor and storage]

Cann the blast from a nuclear warhead realistically be positioned such that it would aerosolise significant amounts of nuclear fuel? And given the location of nuclear reactors, would it matter in a full nuclear war? Your comment sounds like a good fictional story, but does it actually make any sense?

Yes. The so called "fireball" of a nuclear explosion is the spherical region of space where everything is completely vaporized in miliseconds. It's between 500 m - 5 km diameter depending on yield.

At the same time, the long term danger of nuclear winter was supposedly overstated to scare the politicians into not using nukes.

It's the secondary effects that would likely cause this. Having read a good deal about the Chernobyl (Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly) and Fukushima disasters, basically it's the loss of coolant in the reactor cores and the evaporation of water from the cooling ponds for the 'spent' (i.e. too hot to handle) reactor fuel that lead to a runaway meltdown event and associated fire.

So, a 500kt blast over a reactor site will destroy all the surrounding infrastructure, evaporate the water from the cooling ponds, and while perhaps the steel reactor containment shell itself might not be completely obliterated/vaporized at once (or it might), the whole zone is going to be unapproachable, and the kind of heroic efforts employed at Chernobyl (notably a graphite core reactor that burned, Fukushima having no flammable graphite) and Fukushima are not going to happen. So, total meltdown of reactor core, hydrogen explosion, venting to atmosphere, some fraction of the core liquifies the rest vaporizes. The spent fuel in the ponds, all the water flashes to steam, they burn / melt. Nobody comes rushing in to manage the situation, it's full-on runaway.

So Chernobyl IIRC lost about 1% of one of its reactor mass to the atmosphere, and that was one of four reactors at the site. This resulted in significant fallout across Europe and a 30-km radius long-term exclusion zone. Now let's say instead oh, at least 50% of each reactor mass + spent fuel goes into the atmosphere, the rest melts into the ground... I don't know how this would scale. A 300-km radius exclusion zone perhaps at minimum? To get accurate estimates you then have to do a bunch of modeling, atmospheric fluid dynamics, etc.

I can't imagine there aren't top-secret studies in some military branch or other on how this would all pan out, but they've never been publicly released to my knowledge.

There's a fellow on Reddit who has been doing some interesting work modeling a notional RISOP — basically, what the Russians would do to us in various counterforce & countervalue scenarios. He cannot comment on SIOP planning as he used to work on it (civil engineer by training), but he can conjecture a RISOP based on open sources.

This person makes a point of targeting American dry cask nuclear waste storage sites. It takes out the power plant they're next to and ruptures the casks, resulting in Prolonged Suck downwind of the site. He also targets dams in a cascading manner, so even if we did "win the war", certain major cities would have been underwater for a sustained period of time.

FWIW, when asked where he'd go to hide out he said he wouldn't, that the loss of food supplies, medicine, etc. would be catastrophic no matter where you ended up in CONUS. Re: food, even if the grain fields of the midwest were intact, you've got no transportation, no power to process the grain into food products, no antibiotics to take care of that scratch you got from the combine, no fuel for the combine, etc. Many would survive but it wouldn't be fun. He lives in San Francisco, FWIW.

The pandemic disruptions to the supply chain showed us how vulnerable we all are. Since we don't really have general purpose family farms anymore, I expect a global catastrophe that cut the supply chains would kill 90% of the population from starvation. How many of us can butcher a hog? know when to plant? how to make soap? Even if we did, we'd die anyway because the world food supply depends on fertilizer.

Sounds like we should bury deep those casks. But we can't because of NIMBYs.

What guy on Reddit? Would love to follow his work!

https://www.reddit.com/user/dmteter/

Are you just hypothesising, or do you have some reliable sources to base your narrative on?

Here you go, see references within as well. Apparently the DOE did some studies about the effects of nuclear weapons on reactors and oil refineries in the early 1970s:

> "...the staggering radiological consequences of destruction of a nuclear reactor by a nuclear weapon...put the radiologic damage potential of a fair-sized nuclear arsenal into the hands of any nation or terrorist group with a single, ten-kiloton bomb (170)"

https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/RMI_Brittle_Power...

Thank you. The relevant section starts at page 161. The book suggests the worst case scenarios:

1. vaporisation of the core* by a small highly targeted terrorist nuclear bomb (most relevant to reactors near large population centres).

2. vaporisation of the core* by a larger nuclear bomb.

A standard meltdown (a la Fukushima or 3 Mile Island) would likely not be a problem (relative to the explosion of the nuclear missile itself). Can a nuclear missile from a sub cause vaporisation of the core or stored spent rods? I am sure the military wonks have the answer, but it is a hard question to answer as a civilian. The book you referenced doesn’t answer that question (it hypothesises some worst case scenarios, and it does not investigate what could be realistic scenarios based on realistic limitations).

* or stored spent rods I presume.

> perhaps a bit thin on the introspection

Surely the one thing you don't want these people to do is to think for themselves about whether they should kill tens of millions of people! (the joke is that I'm completely serious and that's morbidly hilarious)

"This is the American Submarine crew. On their own, they may be goofy and socially awkward, but as a crew, this band of misfits becomes the best warfighters I have ever had the honor of serving with. [And the couple dozen people in this picture could at any time unilaterally choose to end all human civilization.]"

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