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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35190 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Firstly, tactical nukes would be used against formations in the field, not cities. That's what strategic weapons are for (of which Russia has 4000).

In the context of anything except a global thermonuclear exchange, there is effectively no distinction to be made between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. Either would be a massive escalation of force and perceived risk. And even the yields on smaller tactical nukes make large civilian casualties/devastation inevitable. Little Boy would qualify as an unusually small tactical nuke in the modern context, and it killed 100k+

Little Boy would qualify as an unusually small tactical nuke in the modern context

I don't think this is correct. Browsing wikipedia indicates that if anything, Little Boy (15 kt) is slightly on the higher side of yields (many which can be dialed down to around 1 kt or less).

Let's bring this to the concrete level.

The Iskander can be mounted with a 10 kilotonne warhead. If you fire that at a city it will obviously do a lot of damage. Most people within about a kilometre and a half radius die of burns, shockwave and radiation. If the city is made of paper and wood, it will obviously burn down and cause a huge number of deaths.

If you fire it a military target like an airbase, it will destroy the airbase but not much else.

Go into nukemap and see what sort of casualties you get dropping 10 kt nukes on random parts of the countryside in eastern Ukraine. I get 10 deaths, 120 deaths, 150 deaths, 190 deaths, 700 deaths... We are not talking about huge numbers of deaths here. The Saudi bombing of Yemen (assisted by the US) has apparently killed 20,000 Yemeni civilians. Many hundreds of thousands more have starved to death, though direct responsibility is hard to ascertain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemeni_Civil_War_(2014%E2%80%93present)

Now if you drop an 800 Kt SS-25, a strategic weapon, on Kiev you get 600,000 dead, which is a large number! These are genuinely different issues. You can't say they're the same.

Ya its actually kinda surprizing the norms around nukes have stayed "No nukes ever" Vs. Nothing above a certain Yeild, no civillian targets...

a 1-5 kiloton over-pressure would be so bloody usefull for taking out reinforced bridges, bunkers, and airbases... Conventional explosives generally suck at airbases especially, they're so spread out and they're constantly moving the planes around so its impossible to really take out an air wing without a whole operation with lots of scouting

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