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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2843 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Wasn’t the 1979 bomb South African?

I’m going to call BS on the Ukrainian nuke- if they had one, they’d hit Moscow.

@cablethrowaway @hydroacetylene

But notice that there was never any kind of official statement on who did it by any of the countries that were capable of investigating and verifying. They were content to leave the public in the dark.

I’m going to call BS on the Ukrainian nuke- if they had one, they’d hit Moscow.

It wouldn’t necessarily have been a Ukrainian nuke. But yes, that puzzles me too, I don’t know why you would drop one tactical nuke on some warehouse complex in Toretsk without elaboration or credit or apparently any further strikes, and apparently no response from the Russian government. Maybe it was a foward-deployed 380 KT Russian nuclear weapon that fizzled when it got hit by a conventional strike and produced a 15 KT yield.

I don’t buy the official explanation either, which is that an entire warehouse of S-400 interceptors were sitting in a warehouse five miles from the front line. And even accepting that, it seems like way too big of an explosion. Fire storms 12 kilometers wide, picked up on satellites for monitoring wildfires.

1979 was believed to be either South African with Israeli help or Israeli with South African help. The explosion appeared to be only a few kilotons-equivalent, though, so it could have been a fission bomb rather than a "hydrogen bomb", and if it was a fusion bomb then it was almost certainly a neutron bomb, designed for "low" explosive yield in favor of radiation.

I can't imagine Ukraine would invite nuclear reprisal by nuking Moscow, not unless the tanks were literally rolling into Kyiv at the time, but Toretsk would be an even less likely target.

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