![]() Chances of surviving such a blast (along with any heavy equipment) are pretty good once you get beyond that distance, and beyond two kilometers even better. “A five-kiloton nuclear explosion will be an effective killer - but only over a relatively short distance, probably less than 1 or 1.5 km. The total amount of land still occupied by Russia is almost the size of Portugal and the Ukrainians are fighting on multiple fronts, not in the sort of concentrations that would lend themselves to targeting by such a weapon. “It is still hard to think of many targets that might be ‘worthy’ of use of nuclear weapons as just another battlefield explosive, albeit a big one,” he wrote.Ī lot of that has to do with the enormous size of the battlefield. Michael Frankel, one of the 2017 paper’s authors and a former fellow at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, told Defense One via email, “The immediate (prompt) effects would be pretty horrific if you were caught unprotected within a few kilometers, and the military application would presumably be intended to annihilate local concentrations of enemy troops (if they were stupid enough to concentrate in a way that provided such a target), or perhaps important supply depots and such like.”īut Frankel said such a weapon, used on the actual Ukrainian battlefield against military forces, wouldn’t yield a big advantage for Russia. Even those numbers may be a big underestimation. The online tool NukeMap suggests that a 20-kiloton attack on Kyiv would kill more than 31,000 people and injure another 65,000 within 24 hours. ![]() How much damage could one of these do? The answer depends greatly on where it was used. “Recognizing that nuclear weapons were the only affordable means to offset the superior conventional weaponry of NATO, Russia continued to invest in a robust research and development program focused on low-yield nuclear weapons,” its authors wrote. Russia chose a different path, according to this 2017 Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab paper. ![]() inventories of these peaked in 1967 and fell afterward, especially when the Cold War ended. These are sometimes referred to as “tactical” nuclear weapons, which technically refers to the delivery system but also speaks to their likely use as part of a conventional conflict rather than to deter one. But both the United States and the Soviet Union had a number of smaller nuclear weapons in the one- to 50-kiloton range throughout the Cold War. You might be used to thinking about nuclear weapons in terms of the civilization-destroying half-megaton-class warheads atop intercontinental ballistic missiles. But it would not help Russia win the war. As Russian officials up their nuclear saber-rattling and the Pentagon games out what might happen if Russia were to use one of its 2,000 or so lower-yield nuclear weapons, experts caution that even a relatively small nuclear blast would have far-reaching political and environmental effects.
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