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Russians stroking their own egos

This is not a good development. I mentioned earlier that Russian failures in space, showcased by American successes, would bring about a backlash of some kind. I didn’t expect to hear of it this soon.

Ed Timperlake, writing in American Thinker, quotes Business Insider (I won’t send you to BI directly because they don’t allow ad blockers):

Russia is said to have built a new 100-megaton underwater nuclear doomsday device, and it has threatened the US with it.

The device goes beyond traditional ideas of nuclear war fighting and poses a direct threat to the future of humanity or life on Earth.

Nobody has ever built a weapon like this before, because there’s almost no military utility in so badly destroying the world.

[snip]

The weapon is said to use a warhead, perhaps the strongest ever, designed to come into direct contact with water, marine animals, and the ocean floor, kicking up a radioactive tsunami that could spread deadly radiation over hundreds of thousands of miles of land and sea, and render them uninhabitable for decades.

Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, previously told Business Insider that rather than a first- or second-strike weapon, he sees Russia’s new torpedo as a “third-strike vengeance weapon” designed to shatter NATO.

Mr. Timperlake continues,

Today, right now, President Putin is not keeping the possible end-of-life nuclear-armed sub force secret.  In fact, just the opposite: He is bragging about that capability and stating his intention to use it as needed.

When nations have their self-respect badly bruised, it rarely turns out well. Russians have a long and gory image problem, going back to when they were envious Vikings, turning to coastal raiding to steal what they did not or could not make. Today’s Russians clearly are capable of being technological wizards, but their culture still shackles them to bad governments and corrupt leaders.

Let us hope this “my ego is bigger than yours” farce can be stopped before we end up struggling to cope with an ice age and a dead ocean.

4 replies on “Russians stroking their own egos”

I actually expect most of it is pure bluster. I wish they weren’t always drawn to try to pick up bigger sticks every time they felt challenged, though.

Tsar Bomba worked, but it sure wouldn’t have fit into a torpedo.

Tsar Bomba was also only 50 megatons. 100 megatons I understand was theoretically possible with that design, but not practical, and also Russia was reportedly a bit concerned about testing even a 50 megaton device on their own soil.

Also, the ocean is a big, big place. Any sea life exposed to the blast are going to have a really bad day, but the nuclear material that leaked in the Fukishima meltdown is essentially trivial on a global scale. I suspect you’d need a significant fraction of the bombs required to just cook all the sea life to be able to lethally irradiate it all.

People have been concerned about a doomsday device for decades, but even the theorized cobalt salted nuke didn’t seem to yield the required quantity of cobalt-60. So, yeah, I suspect it’s all bluster.

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