An unearthly spectacle – The untold story of the biggest nuclear bomb (2021)
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Yep. Some similar grandstanding by the Chinese Army in 1960s accelerated the Indian nuclear weapons programme (overriding the utter lack of political will of its then primary leaders). After, buoyed by newly acquired capabilities, in 1980s, the Indian Army conducted largest ever military exercise (Operation Brasstacks) providing much needed impetus & driving consensus in Pakistan to push forward no matter the cost, embodied in this notorious quip by their ex Prime Minister, "[Pakistan] will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own [atomic weapon]."
The untold stories of these godly bombs are the devastation they wreak without needing to be ever "used". Devil's greatest trick...
I've read about the Indian military and how it's so disorganized. I mean really as in each branch does not even have the capability of communicating with the other branches. And that's now in 2024 I can only imagine in the 1960s.
SK probably wouldn't mind receiving some NK refugees, to make for their ~0.7 fertility rates.
Iraq, Libya or Lebanon don't have that advantage (and Kiev would get that advantage only if switches to being pro-Russian).
Aside from either, how many nuclear states have been invaded in the past 80 years? Apart from Ukraine's incursion into Russia's Kursk oblast last summer, the answer is a big fat zero. Finally (and this also applies to my post), social media is the worst place for any foreign policy discussion because it offers asymmetric returns to a foreign actor attempting to subvert a country's policy who happens to speak the country's language, and English is a very popular international language spoken by many people abroad at this point in history.
The answer is Israel was subject to a full-scale invasion in 1973, despite having nuclear weapons since 1966. There have been regular border skirmishes between India and Pakistan since long after they both went nuclear. We also have Argentina's seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1982.
None of the conflicts between India and Pakistan since either of the powers got Nuclear weapons (1974 and 1998, respectively) could be reasonably characterized as invasions.
The Falkland islands are a British overseas territory. They are self governing, but the UK is responsible for their defense and foreing affairs. Classic protectorate. Obviously invading the Falklands is very different from invading the UK.
I guess you could look at their non-admission as evidence to the contrary, but it's not like they're selling enriched uranium as a souvenir to tourists at Ben Gurion international.
Further, while it was widely suspected Israel had a nuclear weapons program, that's a very different thing than having a bomb. Iran is believed to have had a nuclear weapons program. So have many countries.
Sure, but I don't think you understand what goes into keeping nuclear weapons ready. Even assuming Ukraine can manufacture the complete supply chain required for ICBMs, they still have to make and maintain their own warheads. That means either refining nuclear material domestically (where it will get destroyed at any cost by Russia) or importing it from an ally a-la the United States who has no desire to deal with the consequences of that. Ukraine is a strong country, but they cannot sabre-rattle the way Russia can.
Also, I don't think you can cherry-pick Mearsheimer so easily. Even in Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent we see him discounting NATO as an impotent defense, an assumption that that very much isn't true today and one that he (somehow) still seems to believe in. I think his essay is showing it's age, and then some.
Great Britain was, in 1982 (the Falklands War). It that such a fat zero?
How? Are you saying the median person in any of those making an informed decision would swap places with a random person in North Korea?
Besides nukes are cheap compared to fielding 20 tank divisions as the Europeans did for 50 years in West Germany.
Edit: fixed family name
Project Sundial was the ultimate expression of power, a bomb so big it would detonated here in the US, to kill everyone on the planet.
I think that the "dead hand" system[1] built by the Soviets, and still operational today, might have incorporated a copy of this idea. This would nicely explain the hesitancy/restraint of the US in the Ukrainian conflict.
Nobody wants a 10+ Gigaton bomb going off.
We also have experience with large amounts of fallout released into the atmosphere. For comparison, in a 12 month period from 1961 to 1962 there were 340 Megatons worth of nukes detonated in atmosphere. While I would recommend against detonating a few times that much all at once, it's a few percent increase in global cancer rates scenario, not a nuclear hellscape scenario.
Fires, not fallout. Volcanoes don't spark continent-wide fires. Sundial would. That sooty matter lofted into the stratosphere is what makes it unique from a volcano. Not the radioactivity.
So these conscious people were building several 100 Mton weapons AND detonated one of them on the surface of the planet! Knowing that it would kill and destroy life and atmosphere around it and contaminate earth. AND they were starting a program for building a Gigaton weapon??
It is just surreal that anyone would even think of doing such, let alone doing so.
"When you merely wish to bury bombs, there is no limit to the size."
I think a world without defenses would not exist. To me it is just a law of nature that defenses need to exist for life to be present. Attacks are part of nature.
However in that comparison I would call the gigaton bomb a self destroying auto immune disease.
We had Project Sundial levels of nuclear weapons on Earth during the Cold War. The only difference in consolidating it into a single weapon is fault tolerance.
How do you apply that? To countries? Cities? Schools? Homes? Individuals?
It gets ugly fast.
If you destroy a city, shoot up a school, kill a family, or kill an individual, someone with weapons will likely come to retaliate even if your victim is dead
as long as children are trained to be highly, aggressively, competitive and benefit at the loosers expense, calling it sport, the mentality will continue.
You would have to simultaneously train every child to be a pacifist, and do it with 100% success rate
The less evolved, the more aggressive.
You could argue that humans are more "civilized" , but not more evolved. But to claim that humans are less aggressive than other animals is amusing to me. Humans are the only ones capable of (and willing to commit multiple times) war and genocide on a large scale. We may be less aggressive on an individual level, normally, but in the sense we're discussing what matters is the collective aggressiveness, of which humans are in my view the greatest by far.
Indeed humans have the high score in collective aggresiveness. Group think and influencing large amounts of people appear to be the greatest strength and greatest vice at the same time of humans.
The problem of making such a bomb comes down to the problem of economically producing deuterium.
A bomb so big, you did not even need to deploy it to enemy territory. You just set it off in your own back yard. It was going to destroy the entire planet anyway.
Edit: Good video!!
Now do it as a fraction of real disposable income.
(You're not wrong. American eggs are pricey [1]. But they'll always be pricey relative to Russia's simply because the dollar is strong.)
[1] https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/egg_prices/
"helping" other nations is one way of spreading wealth, to those in need, with incumbency to pay it forward.
please be gentle.
The main reasons most observers are not super worried about nukes in the context of their invasion of Ukraine, is that MAD is still an effective policy against an all-out attack against NATO, and NATO (especially the US) has a credible red line of any attempt at a 'small-scale' use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine that will bring them into the war.
The main effect of nukes, though, is to make Ukraine's allies nervous about the collapse of the russian government, because that is a plausible situation in which nukes could be used. The US, especially, seems to by trying to help Ukraine win, but not win so hard that Russia collapses, and it's not obvious that a level of support exists that would satisfy both outcomes.
Do you feel that USA red line is still credible post election? I'm genuinely curious how you see it. To me it sounded like the new commander in chief wants nothing to do with the whole conflict there.
My sense is it's not that they don't want Ukraine to win that hard -- they just (very reasonably) don't see how anyone can expect that to reasonably happen within any meaningful time frame.
So they fall back on the next-best alternative, that Ukraine not lose, as a sibling commenter already pointed out. Much more definable, and infinitely more achievable -- if there's a broadly shared understanding (and consensus reality) in place as what that would necessarily entail.
Only problem is -- there's still been a lot of noise among those who run things in the US/West about pretending to believe in the former ("Ukraine must simply win") as a stated goal. Leading inevitably to reduced confidence in what the US/West says, and to the further erosion of public discourse as we're seeing here.
I've always thought the US wanted Ukraine not to lose. Tying up Russia's armed forces in an endless war of attrition seems like an ideal result on all grounds except humanitarian ones.
European countries have slightly different incentives because they would also like to stop the refugee crisis, but the US is basically the marginal supplier of arms here - if Estonia finds it can lend another 5 fighter jets, the US can just provide 5 fewer.
What level of US support would allow Ukraine to win by way of Russia collapsing?
Absolutely nobody is happy about the war in russia, from the very bottom all the way to the top. So nobody really knows how far the theoretical tipping point is, of course oligarchs with dictator promptly kill any emerging threat.
I don't really go on Reddit much anymore these days, but the last time I was on there there were several subreddits where you could find people who were rather gleeful about the affair, trading anecdotes about Russian losses/deaths.
Just look at instantkarma, clevercomebacks, murderedbywords, fightporn, facepalm, leopardsatemyface etc etc etc. Most of the content is at the expense of someone else, and everyone is out to "score points".
I wonder if this has something to do with why all Humans have a strong innate aversion to discussing absolute scales outside of physics, and will not talk about the proposition of whether they do.
How likely this is depends on who you ask, but the US seems to be trying to trying to avoid taking any risks at all there.
With the new President, who knows what the US's goal will be. Given the messaging from Trump and the head of "DOGE" it's looking ominous for Ukraine. (personally I'm baffled as to why making America great would require rewarding Russian imperialism, so I can't really get my head round their attitudes. Is it just contrarianism?)
No, it just goes back into its corner with its tail between its legs for a while, like all colonial powers do. Whenever they choose to enmesh themselves in conflicts that are definitely not existential to them, or even in their coldly calculated rational interests.
Just like the French, the British, and the US have all done, and as it has itself done, countless times (and quite recently).
The US has given Ukraine over 80 billion US Dollars, I believe. It also applied every possible sanction it could on Russia, to the point there's nearly nothing left to sanction, from what I have read on the topic. Biden has also been about as clear about the US being on Ukraine's side, for as long as it takes, as he could've been without declaring full on war on Russia.
Do you really believe that's a "timid attitude"? The way I see it, the only way for the US to do more is to send troops on the ground, which amounts to full on war with Russia and the prospect of nuclear retaliation.
Putin is saving his own life first and foremost with his actions, so he's not suicidal. But then secondly if you listen to the man it's apparent he believes he's rebuilding the Soviet Union as he imagined it when he was stationed in Berlin as a young KGB officer, and that belief is powered by a very specific lens he casts over Russian history.
Which is to say: he doesn't want to destroy the empire he see's as his legacy (which is notably different to whether he actually cares at all about the Russian people in it - the Russian government historically does not overly concern itself with dead Russians unless politically convenient to).
EDIT: The third element of course is that there's not literally "a button". No leader has unilateral release control of strategic nuclear weapons, so the reality is one "mad man" can't fire them - orders have to be issued, codes input etc. If Russia was going to launch it's ICBMs, then you can't do it by waking up in a bad mood one day unless at least a few of your top generals agree with you.
I didn't say that's his plan now. But if he got cancer or something I could see him doing it as a defiant act.
> he believes he's rebuilding the Soviet Union as he imagined it
I agree with that. But people who are corned can act out.
Russia has nothing in common (as a state) with the Soviet Union.
World leaders don't do bad things "because YOLO". They do bad things as a means to some other end.
Aren't you (yet) tired of dreaming about this?
Unless you want to argue that Putin is immortal, he'll die of something. Unless that something is very sudden (possible) it will be fairly described as a terminal illness.
Those were all factual claims. Everybody will die, of course. But this belief "Putin is dying" seems to be a kind of spirituous ritual.
No, this is a hypothetical.
Great many people are concerned about that.
There are similar concerns that some boastful and bellicose messaging from him might be misinterpreted by adversaries and that triggers a nuclear exchange. This is the plot of the speculative fiction novel titled "The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against The United States" by Dr Jeffrey Lewis for example.
> I don't think that U.S. corruption is something to be ignored either.
Thorrez's comment is correct. It appears that you mean "corruption" in a different sense than the one discussed.
Corruption here is not about the politicians being up to no good, but in a more specific sense. For example if a significant percentage of the missiles don't launch because the grease which should have been used to lubricate the turbopumps have been sold on the black market. Or the metal body of valves was replaced with cheaper inferior kind which causes those valves to seize up.
And of course the answer here is not binary. It is not that every missile will fail, or every missile will succeed. It is about the probabilities. Will 5%, 10% 45%, or 95% be a dud? Obviously the Russian state is trying to work hard to push that percentage down, while entropy and corruption is "working" to push it up.
A far better use of ones time is to wonder where all the diplomacy has gone.
Currently, Ukraine and Russia's diplomatic goals are still incompatible, and both believe they will be able to shift the balance of the war in their favor.
War starts when the cost/benefit analysis of violent means comes up better than the alternative (peaceful) means. War ends when the opposite happens, and the cost/benefit of the continuation of violence starts to come down in comparison with peace.
The benefit component is for the most part a zero-sum game (fixed land area), while the cost component is variable and growing with time. One way to force peace is to impose great costs on one or both warring sides.
More people like to glibly quote Clausewitz than have actually read and understood Clausewitz.
It's still a useful way to look at how the world works.
You can ask - was Putin's decision to invade Ukraine rational given his values, priorities, risk aversion, willingness to bear the costs and information he had? Apart from the last, they're all subjective and thus it doesn't make sense to judge them as (ir)rational. The last one is objective, but having wrong information is not irrational either.
Can you make some examples of war where fighting itself was the primary goal?
> that definition would make every action 'rational'.
As mentioned above, goals themselves are not something we can evaluate as rational or not.
But given you have a goal, you can question whether the actions you undertake to achieve that goal are rational. Let's say you want to start a family and want to buy a house. Going into a casino and throwing money into the slot machines is not a rational way to achieve it, esp. since there is plenty of information available explaining in painstaking detail that this won't work.
It's possible that we're seeing one now in Ukraine. The Russian army isn't exactly made up of economic elites, being composed largely of men from outlying territories who are either a possible long-term threat to Putin's vision of Soviet-era revanchism or impoverished people who are literally more trouble to feed than they're worth. From Putin's point of view, a meat grinder may be just what the (mad) doctor ordered.
Certainly that dovetails with Kim's motivation to send his own hungry soldiers to the Ukraine front. Now that he has nukes, what does he need such a large army for? Like the ragtag derelicts and criminal elements who make up the Russian armed forces, those troops are more of a liability to Kim than an asset.
See also concerns about China's surplus of young men who will never find mates thanks to the effects of the regime's one-child policy. A literal incel army. It's not hard to imagine that Beijing might find a war to be a convenient way to rebalance the population and remove a potential source of agitation.
Sorry but that is just plain nonsense. The purpose of diplomacy is to avoid war. War destroys any reason for diplomacy.
Diplomacy is distinctly not "just talking nicely".
What? We've already seen a real-world test of Russia's military prowess. It's why every customer of Russian military kit that has the option to replace them is.
Another rumour is that a peace deal of some sort deal was available to Ukraine but "the West" advised otherwise.
Who knows what the truth of the matter is, but what can be known is that we don't know, although that requires certain skills and some conscious effort, which seems to be a bit much to ask of people when the war drums are banging (state propaganda, 2nd order citizen propaganda like on HN, etc).
Wikipedia has a list of all of them so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russ...
Imagine if someone was to weaponize, and then scale, this simple trick.
For example had NATO countries all offered 50% of their GDP for the next decade as gifts to Russia in return for Putin calling all his troops out of Ukraine, it's very likely he would have ended the war on day two.
Of course, that's not an offer NATO countries would have been willing to make (and even if they had made a deal like that, at a price less ridiculously high than 50% of GDP, it could easily lead to Russia starting the exact same war a decade later, now with much better funding).
I'm not suggesting the above as a serious "this should have been the way to deal with it", just as a random, over-exaggerated example that there are diplomatic options above and beyond preventing wars that stem from miscommunication / misunderstandings.
This nuance is important, because sometimes people blame "weak diplomats" etc, but it's not their fault, they can't find equilibrium of strategic interests where there's none.
But it's also something that's much less likely to become public knowledge. Slow and tedious efforts over years and decades contains plenty of discussions of the sort that often can be made public to make both sides look good (or for each side to make themselves look good to their domestic audience), while last minute, last ditch deals to prevent a war that was about to happen is much more likely to involve deals/threats/whatever that one or both parties require remain classified for many decades.
I mean all of them? Today the USA is not bombing London, Berlin is not bombing Paris, Switzerland is not bombing Sweden, Finland is not bombing Norway, Turkey is not bombing India.
If you only count the wars which happened then you ignore all the ones which were prevented.
Not to be confused with the way democracy, love, and science produce beautiful, useful and eco-friendly nuclear weapons.
'The concept was originally developed by the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was seen as a "cleaner" bomb for use against massed Soviet armored divisions.'
It's worth reading up on.