I was having a conversation with a former Army Officer who served during the early 1980s and he brought up a subject that serves to illustrate the high level of morality-based thought by which our military leadership does not operate.
Part of our job was to plot nukes. Now the two we dropped on the Japs were only fifty kilotons. That is the size of our tactical nukes. The strategics are 250 megatons. That is like comparing a beebee gun to a railroad gun. We plotted mock strikes against places like Topeka Kansas, for instance and had to factor the radiation drift. It was just ridiculous. You could poison the four corners of the nation with one well-placed strategic. And although we were not privy to how many were in the arsenal, we understood that there were hundreds. And the Russians also had them!
It was the ultimate stupidity training. You can't play war with nukes and expect anyone to survive.
In Germany we had to plan for a Russian invasion. I forget how many tanks they had, but it was ridiculous—the biggest tank army in history. They were going to come through the Fulda Gap like a rolling wall of steel. We had already decided that the only way to stop them was to hit them with a tactical nuke. The Germans would have loved that!
The people in the Nevada basin, who live up against the mountains are called "downwinders." Thyroid problems develop, cancer—those poor bastards standing there with their sunglasses on watching! it was fucking stupid. The U.S. reserves the right to use strategic nukes in a first strike. The U.S. will not use biologicals, which is, without a doubt, the apogee of stupidity. Chemical weapons will only be used in the most dire circumstance.
The world should fear us. We have dropped nukes before—the only people to do so, and this dumb fuck in Korea is playing his games. The Japs are getting sick of it and arming up.
Under the God of Things
“On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.” - Alfred Nobel
“The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the United States reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't... All reactionaries are paper tigers.” – Mao ze Dong
Kate Sullivan (Penelope Ann Miller): Well, for someone who has nothing nice to say about lawyers, you certainly have plenty of them around.
Lawrence Garfield (Danny DeVito): They're like nuclear warheads. They have theirs, so I have mine. Once you use them, they fuck up everything.” - “Other People’s Money” (1991)
James, the gentleman you spoke with is misinformed. Fortunately you have a jingoistic myrmidon like me to give you the straight dope. And said myrmidon served in a nuclear capable self-propelled artillery battalion in Germany in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. It could fire tactical nuclear artillery shells of .1 to 1.5 kilotons. FYI the Hiroshima bomb had a 15 kiloton (KT) yield; the Nagasaki bomb was 21 KT. The largest nuclear bomb ever made and tested was the Soviet “Tsar Bomba” (emperor bomb) at 50 megaton (MT). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba The largest one the Soviets deployed however was 25 MT; the largest deployed by the USA was 5 MT. About average for the US arsenal were the B61 thermonuclear gravity bombs with a variable (adjustable) yield of 100 to 500 KT, recently evacuated from the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. Here’s a good illustration on what those yields mean in terms of effect on target: washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/05/what-it-would-look-like-if-the-hiroshima-bomb-hit-your-city As you can see if someone dropped a Hiroshima seized bomb on fashionable lower Manhattan the brothers up in Harlem would just be saying ”WTF was that”. The fallout would hit the middle class white folks in Long Island according to the prevailing westerly winds; fall out casualties would occur in people who didn’t know enough to either evacuate the fallout area or hide in a fallout shelter for 3-4 weeks until the radiation decayed, as the was the case in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There has been much nonsense promulgated about nukes and their effects; they are scary enough without exaggerating about them for goodness sakes. But of course the intent of the doom criers in the Leftist nuclear disarmament movement was to scare and guilt American citizens into wanting to see their country disarmed, so the more exaggerated and fatalistic the stories were the better, as far as those Lefties were concerned. Planning to defend America in any kind of war was stupid only if you thought America was stupid and evil and not worth defending. America was the bad guy who had to be disarmed not the USSR, right? Whose nukes did these people think were going to hit American cities in the event of a war with the Soviet Union? American nukes? All that is moot now as all of America’s tactical nukes, most strategic nukes and all its chemical munitions have been dismantled and destroyed by treaty with the Russians. The big war never happened. Nevertheless the Lefties have finally succeeded in turning America into a country much of its population believes is stupid and evil and not worth defending.
The 250 Megatons is incorrect. Minuteman III warhead is 300 Kilotons. Mega is 1 million and Kilo is 1 thousand. Here's a lovely online program called nuke map. You use google maps to pick a spot, pick a nuke in the world arsenal or even roll your own nuke and then detonate it. The results are displayed. Figure 5psi destroys all wooden buildings.
nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap
Did the Isrаeli's nuke Syria? This is supposedly an ammo dump the Isrаelis bombed and probably is.
youtube.com/watch?v=vm7ObVSix7w
Ukraine Ammo dump? Less clear, to me, what this is.
youtube.com/watch?v=D0lpiKLX5RU