Up until the 2009 modernization program, the only way to do that was to use the much more powerful - but limited in numbers - W88 warhead. But taking out a reinforced missile silo requires a warhead to exert a force of at least 10,000 pounds per square inch on the target. If the aim is to blow up a city, such precision is superfluous. The technical breakthrough that suddenly makes this a possibility is something called the “super-fuze”, which allows for a much more precise ignition of a warhead. Anti-missile systems would then intercept a weakened retaliatory strike. The strategy behind a first strike - sometimes called a “counter force” attack - isn’t to destroy an opponent’s population centers, but to eliminate the other sides’ nuclear weapons, or at least most of them. However, there was no guarantee that such an attack would so cripple an opponent that it would be unable - or unwilling, given the consequences of total annihilation - to retaliate. A “first strike” attack has always been central to U.S. This is the idea behind the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, aptly named “MAD.”īut MAD is not a U.S. The next most common, the W88, packs a 475-kt punch.Īnother problem is that most of the public thinks nuclear war is impossible because both sides would be destroyed. arsenal today, the W76, has an explosive power of 100 kt. In contrast, the most common nuclear weapon in the U.S. Between them, they killed over 215,000 people. The Nagasaki bomb was slightly more powerful, at about 18 kt. The Hiroshima bomb exploded with a force of 15 kilotons, or kt. In any case, the two bombs that flattened those Japanese cities bear little resemblance to the killing power of modern nuclear weapons. We’ve only had one conflict involving nuclear weapons - the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 - and the memory of those events has faded over the years. If Russia chose to retaliate, it would be reduced to ash.Īny discussion of nuclear war encounters several major problems.įirst, it’s difficult to imagine or to grasp what it would mean in real life. The upgrade - part of the Obama administration’s $1 trillion modernization of America’s nuclear forces - allows Washington to destroy Russia’s land-based nuclear weapons, while still retaining 80 percent of U.S. military has vastly expanded the “killing power” of its warheads such that it can “now destroy all of Russia’s ICBM silos.” Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists, Matthew McKinzie of the National Resources Defense Council, and physicist and ballistic missile expert Theodore Postol conclude that “Under the veil of an otherwise-legitimate warhead life-extension program,” the U.S. At a time of growing tensions between nuclear powers - Russia and NATO in Europe, and the U.S., North Korea, and China in Asia - Washington has quietly upgraded its nuclear weapons arsenal to create, according to three leading American scientists, “exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.”
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