What would a Russian/NATO nuclear exchange look like?
Assumptions:
- NATO vastly underestimates Russia's willingness to use nukes
- NATO vastly underestimates the rate Russia will escalate
- NATO vastly underestimates Russia's willingness to go to scorched-earth tactics
Russia's willingness
The US Airforce was baffled by the USSR's use of vacuum tubes in aircraft avionics and radar.
Every few years a Soviet pilot would defect to the west. Technical experts disassembled the planes and expert interviewer debriefed the pilots. The interviewers were careful to keep the questions general in nature. They suspected that some of the pilots were "plants" and the Soviets would gain advantage when the "defector" returned and enumerated the questions they had been asked.
Granted, the vacuum tubes were world-class vacuum tubes but this was at a time when kids in 5th grade in the US could purchase "Seven Transistor" radios with money they made cutting grass. Transistors were smaller, cooler, faster and more resistant to shock than vacuum tubes. It was a puzzle.
The vague generalized question was something like "I see you are still using vacuum tubes." and the response was always something like "We still haven't solved the problem. But as soon as we do, we will implement them."
The interviewer would nod sagely and them move on.
Ten or more years went by and then one of the defectors added the tiniest bit more information. "We still have not figured out how you armored your transistors against the post-detonation EMP."
While transistors and other semi-conductor devices are smaller, cooler....they are also a million or more times more sensitive to voltage spikes. Even today, vacuum tubes are used as amplifiers for outdoor Public Address systems in areas at high risk for lightning strikes. Detonating a nuke generates an electro-magnetic pulse that interacts with wiring in the plane and creates a voltage surge.
Two things snapped into focus. The Soviets fully intended to drop nukes, fly the planes home and load up with more. The other thing that snapped into focus is that the US and NATO had always approached strategic bombing with nukes as an academic problem.
Milliseconds after detonation the plane that dropped the bomb might be 20 miles downrange but it would fall out of the sky like a set of car-keys. The computer that modulated fuel injection into the jet engine would fail. The navigation would fail. Electronic warfare countermeasures would fail.
Many pairs of undershorts were soiled.
Given the US's commitment to semiconductor-based-electronics and a generation of doctrine that was based on NATO aircraft capabilities, it was decided to address the problem by replacing electrical wires with fiber optics. Glass is not a conductor. It does not generate power surges when subjected to EMP.
Sidebar: Soviet doctrine for fighter deployment was to use central RADAR to vector to the threat, gain altitude and then use very primitive , narrow-angle look-down RADAR to pinpoint the threat and then attack. It was not because Soviets are control freaks. It was because Soviet airborne RADAR lack discrimination due to the limitations on the number of vacuum tubes that could be packaged.
NATO doctrine was to use vastly more capable avionics/RADAR/Weapons systems and give individual pilots more autonomy in battle.
End sidebar.
Let me rephrase a critical part of this story: The Russians walked into the bar carrying knives and fully intending to use them before closing time. The Americans walked in with fancy firearms and were 100% sure they would be able to talk themselves out of any trouble.
I don't think that changed in the last 50 years.
Russian rate of escalation
Every Russian plays chess. If the slow game favors the opponent then you play a fast game.
Various on-line videos discussing a nuclear exchange show Russia launching nukes up to 24 hours after the first one is launched. I don't put much faith in that assessment.
Nukes are not artillery. They don't have to engage in battery-and-counterbattery.
My impression of Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles with multiple warheads is that they can be launched in waves and in rapid succession. The first wave might be 30-to-50 mile elevation air bursts to maximize damage due to Electro-Magnetic Pulse.
The second wave could be sixty seconds behind the first and be ground-contact detonations to maximize shock-waves disrupting in-ground silos and US military command-and-control.
Scorched earth
Remember how Soviet fighter/bomber doctrine was formed based on the limitations of their equipment set?
The same seems likely for their nuclear strategy. Let's say it would be possible to neutralize Chicago as a logistical center with five, small, precisely targeted nukes used in air-burst mode. Those nukes might target the switching yards that service Burlington Northern, Union Pacific, Canadian National, Norfolk Southern and CSX. There would be sufficient damage to nearby freeways and airports to take them out of the game as well.
That is how NATO/US would approach the problem.
The Russians, on the other hand, would approach it like a blind-drunk trying to shoot a wasp with a shotgun. Precision is not the first thing you think of when you talk about Soviet/Russian weapon systems. Suppose a single Russian warhead has a probable accuracy of +/- 30 miles. Would you fire five small ones when your target zone is a mile across or would you fire 20-to-40 big ones and saturate the 60 mile zone of probable hits?
Furthermore, it is convenient to classify nuclear detonations into four categories.
The first one is the 30-to-50 mile above ground detonation that maximizes EMP.
The second is the air-burst, typically at 2000ish feet to maximize the area hammered by over-pressure, air shock-wave and thermal flash.
The third is ground strike which maximizes seismic shock-wave and fallout. The dirt, concrete and steel that is vaporized is carried aloft by the mushroom cloud and then "falls out" in a plume that is carried by the winds, both aloft and at ground level.
The last kind of detonation is the "salted bomb". The dirty bomb is salted with elements that convert to radioactive isotopes at detonation and maximize damage due to fallout. They have been studied as an area denial weapon when salted with materials that convert to isotopes with short half-lives like Sodium-24 and Zinc-65. .
In as much as a nuclear detonation in wartime can be considered "clean", they are listed in their order of cleanliness.
EMP turns off the lights. Well, the lights, water pressure, sewage treatment, traffic lights....
Air-burst punches down and destroys military, strategic and logistical targets in a sort-of precise way with minimal fall-out. Fires are still a major consideration.
Ground-burst disrupts in-ground utilities, subways, topples buildings with conventional concrete foundations. Depending on the material immediately around the detonation, a single ground-burst produces an unpredictable plume of of radiation that might be 20 miles across and 150 miles long.
"Salted bombs" are horrifying because they are designed specifically to maximize collateral damages and because deaths will continue to occur long after the conflict ends.
If you are the drunk with the shotgun, you opt for ground-strikes because it maximizes the chances that you will neutralize your target. You might miss "long" but there is a good chance the wind will carry fall-out over part of your target anyway. The messy thing about ground-strikes is the (small) possibility that your warhead hit near a shed or truck filled with de-icing salt (sodium-chloride) and you inadvertently created the mother-of-all salted bombs.
Europe
Presumably, the Russians would opt for more air-bursts if wind forecasts suggested the fall-out would blow eastward over Russia.
Then again, it is hard to predict what the Russian elites will do. They might have hidey-holes in the southern hemisphere and rather than face ignominy and trial for war-crimes they might pull the trigger on ground-strike attacks anyway.
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Mr ERJ, I remember as a kid being sent home from school during the Cuban missile crisis. I hope I'm home when this happens. No kidding, I find that I'm wearing my sunglasses when I'm driving,I don't want to be blind when this goes down. No local target but enough on the horizon to be a problem.I really appreciate your blog,you are very knowledgeable on many topics.Allan
ReplyDeleteYou assume that the russian missiles will actually leave the silos. After the debacle in Ukraine that is not so certain.
ReplyDeleteMissiles require better troops than tanks. And those troops need food and fuel and tools and such. Much of which the army assaulting Ukraine seems to have sold. Will the missile troops be any better? No one really knows.
Did you get that from Pablo Escobar, Scott Ritter or CNN.
DeleteIt turns out that Moscow intended to go slow enough to avoid civilian casualties. It worked! Watch liberated areas west of the Donbas vote to leave Ukrane. The locals know who takes hostages as human shields, and who sets them free.
Of course your mileage may vary, especially if you watch CNN.
As has been observed regarding the quality of Russian equipment there is no way to know how much of their arsenal is actually functional. However they have in excess of 6K nuclear warheads.
ReplyDeleteEven if only 10% function as designed that is more than enough to end the USA and life as we know it. And the communists have ALWAYS had a different outlook on nuclear weapons. The west has always viewed them as a weapon of last resort....if at all. The commies have ALWAYS operated under the belief that nuclear was was winnable and thus nuclear weapons should be a part of all war plans. It's a fundamental difference in outlook that few westerners truly grasp. Putin ACTUALLY BELIEVES that if necessary he could resort to nuclear devices and the modern world would NOT come to an end.
...but we are the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons.
DeleteGet your head out of CNN, B, you're a victim of American propaganda.
ReplyDeleteListen to Dan, he understands. Mr. ERJ's homily about the knife fight is close. I used to see this in college when the NYC kids would square off with a townie at the local watering hole. Bumpkin is thinking about taking his coat off because it looks like its about to get serious while Brooklyn Boy jumps and starts pummeling him in the face. Local kid 'never cleared leather', down on the ground spitting out his chicklets... Vlad will level the whole East coast while we discuss sanctions. Because Potatoe Head and the rest of those floozies have never been punched in the face.
Anonymous: You must watch CNN to know what they say, I don't watch it.
ReplyDeleteI get my data from folks who know. Your estimate of 10% is about right.
Having said that, your point of LOTS of missiles flying is a good one. No one wins.
My understanding is that the Sino Soviet split in the 1960s was over this issue - the Chinese felt nuclear war was winnable, not the Soviets. But they may have changed over time.
ReplyDeleteRussia has a large number of large underground shelters, enough for a significant fraction of its population. The US has virtually no shelters. IF there was enough warning to get into shelters, they would have a chance and we wouldn't.
While I agree that Russian training, maintenance, etc means that at least some and possibly a notable portion of Russia's missiles wouldn't work, as mentioned above, even a small fraction working would be a huge problem for the US.
On a related note, I found it interesting how much Putin and Russia attacked the US missile defense system when it went into place a few years ago.
It has 2 locations on the West coast with less than 10 interceptors each - in theory this shouldn't matter to a well armed power like Russia. Does their concern mean they know many of their weapons don't work, or are they attacking whatever we do on principle?
The big difference is that Russia still seems willing to sacrifice lives of her own people to achieve an objective and the U.S. less so. Never tangle with someone with that kind of commitment gap.
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't matter which side did what, "dirty" bombs could leave millions of acres of prime farmland un-usable, causing the starvation of millions of people. The long-term effects and how it affects us all is almost beyond comprehension.
ReplyDeleteHonestly given the scorpion nature of our "Leadership" with all the oil shutdowns, fertilizer issues (fires and trains not hauling it) and outright selling our food production to China do you think Vlad just has to outwait us?
ReplyDeleteOnce real hunger is running our streets, how long before the ever-volatile EBT crowd will have our cities ablaze?
Let alone just ordinary law-abiding folks when their kids start crying "Daddy I'm HUNGRY"?
Neither Putin nor Xi want an irradiated America and their own countries destroyed. Social Unrest can be just as powerful as nuclear weapons.
Food for thought
An attack on these presently united States could look like this-
ReplyDeleteSimultaneous detonation of 2 or 3 enhanced EMP devices currently orbiting in LEO at about 300 miles up. The E1 pulse could generate peak induced voltages of 50,000 to 200,000 volts per meter. The E2 and E3 pulses would subsequently destroy all of the US power grids, frying transformers, TVSS, and lines themselves, as well as the generating sources. While some modern vehicles may survive, most would have their computers destroyed and be non-functional. I expect that US military aircraft would be damaged by this level of EMP attack and rendered mission incapable, including NEACAP. The EMP would significantly degrade and delay US command and control of our strategic response, destroying all satellites within LOS of the impacted atmosphere, which could reach at least a thousand miles into the Atlantic and Pacific. Any form of electronic communication would be disrupted. It is possible that fiber optic comms would survive, but those links have to get translated into electronics at some point.
The EMP would be the trigger for the second wave: launch of SLBMs, cruise missiles, and ICBMs targeting command and control centers and our MinuteMan silos with surface bursts. These would start to arrive within 10 to 15 minutes of the EMP and likely continue for an hour.
The third wave would be delivered by bombers launched at the same time as the missiles, delivering large yield deep penetrator type weapons intended to knock out any remaining command and control centers. Those would take several hours to arrive, and would deliver large quantities of intense fallout as well as likely destroy or render ineffective most of the deep bunker facilities they struck.
Absent any fallout, a HEMP attack has been estimated to kill 90 to 99% of the US population within a year. Surface bursts generate significant fallout, which will likely cause many deaths sooner than the societal breakdown resulting from the EMP.
Cheery, isn't it?
A good friend of mine who I went all through school with was commissioned in the USAF when he graduated in'69. He was a missileer in a Titan II silo. He told me in a round-bout way that if he launched his Titan II towards Palos Verdes, CA and it landed in Chino, CA it would still be considered a direct hit. Look at a map of SoCal and chart the distance between these two cities. And remember this was early '70s technology. Food for thought. - DTW
Deletea) we have things that make nukes obsolete. b) it won't go down that way. putin sees nukes as just another bomb. he will pop one off as a warning, maybe in europe, more likely an uninhabited area. we will over react and drop a nuke on some big russian base. he will launch cyber, followed by emp, followed by satellite kills. we will escalate further with strikes on russian cities. rooskie subs will launch from within site of our coasts. they nor the chinese wish nor need to destroy our resources. cyber/emp will do most of the work. in a month or three they can come mop up the mess and begin anew era in human history, one without the us of a.
ReplyDelete