Russia has small nuclear arms that can be risky for Putin and Ukraine

Russia is ready for the threat of nuclear annihilation: the Giant Elephant isn’t in the room for strategic nuclear weapons

With his forces withdrawing in Ukraine, Putin reached for the threat of nuclear weapons, renewing Western fears of atomic apocalypse.

“We’ve said all along, President (Volodymyr) Zelensky has said all along, that this will ultimately be resolved through diplomacy. We will be ready if Russia shows any seriousness of purpose in engaging in such diplomacy. That is because every sign in this moment points in the opposite direction.

From the moment these weapons were introduced, the world has lived with the perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation. Many people seem to forget that the giant elephant is in the room when it comes to other dangers such as terrorism.

They are fitted to intercontinental missiles that can travel thousands of miles and are aimed at key sites in the US, UK, France and Russia.

Tactical nuclear weapons have a yield of 100 kilotons of explosives, compared to the 1,000 kilotons of strategic nuclear weapons.

If a nuclear power station is fired at, it could create a chain reaction andcontamination on a scale with a nuclear strike.

It is difficult to say for certain, but I assume Russia’s strategic weapons are always ready and in good condition. Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons give it parity with the US and NATO, so I expect them to be well looked after.

But this is likely not the case for the tactical weapons. I think the missiles and warheads are in good shape, but the vehicles they are mounted on aren’t very well-equipped. Judging by the state of the rest of the Russian Army equipment on show in Ukraine, this is a fair assumption.

It is likely that these launchers would need to travel hundreds of miles to get into a position where they could attack Ukraine, as they only have a range of up to 500 kilometers (310 miles). But from a mechanical perspective it’s unlikely, in my opinion, that they would get that far.

Also, it is likely these weapons rely on microprocessors and other high-tech components which are in very short supply in Russia – given international sanctions and the heavy use of precision guide missiles by Russia, which also use these parts.

Attacks on civilians are at the heart of this move. There are attacks on hospitals, schools and hazardous infrastructure like nuclear power stations. If they are attacked, they can become chemical or nuclear weapons.

I don’t think that the Russians have a good idea of how good both the Ukrainian people and the military are.

Meteorological conditions at the moment indicate that all this contamination would also head west across Europe. If NATO were to attack one of its allies, it would be considered as an attack on all the allies, which would allow NATO to retaliate against Russia.

It is very unlikely that strategic nuclear weapons will be used. This is a war nobody can win, and at the moment it does not seem likely that this regional conflict in Europe would lead to a global nuclear war which could destroy the planet for many generations.

The checks and balances are in place at the White House and the White House is where we are most likely going to end up if we get into a nuclear war.

I hope the private talks the Biden and Putin administrations have been having are related to the idea that NATO will take the tactical nukes out with long range guided missiles. It would appear this is the case from what Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor to the White House, disclosed over the weekend.

The Russians developed unconventional warfare tactics in Syria. Russian forces entered Syria in 2015 to support the Assad regime. I do not believe Assad would still be in power had he not used chemical weapons.

The massive nerve agent attack on August 21, 2013 on Ghouta stopped the rebels overrunning Damascus. The four-year siege of the city was ended by chlorine attacks.

And it does not appear that Putin has any morals or scruples. Russia attacked hospitals and schools in Syria which it is repeating again in Ukraine. Putin seems to be happy with using any means to break the will of civilians to resist unconventional warfare.

However Soviet doctrine, which the Russians still seem to be following, allows local commanders to use tactical nuclear weapons to stave off defeat, or loss of Russian territory.

The attempted annexation of four districts through the current sham referendums makes the likelihood of tactical use very high, if these places are attacked. Local commanders are expected to defer to Putin before pressing their own equivalent of a red button.

Military sources in Western countries say Putin is getting involved in the close battle with low-level commanders getting orders from him. It is extraordinary that Putin has lost faith in his generals, and that his control and command system is in a bad way, after the Ukrainians regained big swathes of the north-east.

Even in an attack on a power station one assumes Putin would be involved, as the West would likely construe it as an improvised nuclear weapon and act accordingly.

Many U.S. officials say that the primary utility is part of a final effort by Mr. Putin to stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive. The officials spoke to say that some of the most sensitive discussions in the administration are confidential.

Military defeat can endanger dictatorial leaders. The dissolution of the Russian empire would happen before the end of the First World War and again after the fall of the Soviet Union. It could unfold again because Putin is nearing the end of his dream of seizing Ukraine.

The administration’s security officials have long considered the threat to be high and the battlefield failures have only served to elevate regular discussions and contingency planning. There was no hint of a change in Russian posture that Biden was aware of.

President Joe Biden’s stark warning Thursday night that the world faces the highest prospect of nuclear war in 60 years was not based on any new intelligence about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions or changes in Russia’s nuclear posture, multiple US officials told CNN.

He is serious about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is not performing very well.

Presidents are less guarded because they are usually not on camera during political campaign events so a press pool is allowed to attend. So it’s possible that the President’s comments – his most stark on the nuclear question since the war in Ukraine started – might not have happened in a more conventional setting like a news conference. And the White House has frequently walked back unscripted presidential remarks on foreign policy, especially on how the US would respond if China invaded Taiwan.

“We are trying to figure out: What is Putin’s off ramp?” Mr. Biden said, adding: “Where does he find a way out? Where does he find himself where he does not only lose face but significant power?”

The president might have thought of Kennedy’s speech at American University in Washington in 1963, in which he talked about the perils of weapons that could end the world and the lessons of the Cuban missile crisis.

“To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy – or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

“The fact is that President Putin and Russia have shown absolutely no interest in any kind of meaningful diplomacy. It is very hard to pursue it unless they do.

With that in mind, Biden appeared to be making an argument, which Putin will now be sure to hear about, that the idea that the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine could be contained and not lead to a wider conflagration is wrong.

Now, does that mean everybody should run for the hills? No. I believe core deterrence is very strong. The United States and Russia, and the United States and China, have enormous incentives not to end up lobbing nuclear weapons at each other’s homelands. There is a lot of work to be done to repair the nuclear order.

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden said at the fundraiser.

His presidency is centered on shepherding the world through nuclear brinkmanship in 60 years.

The Importance of the War on Nuclear Security in the United States, as Revealed by the Exclusion of a Fat Shirt in the Biden Room

Senior US officials were surprised by Biden’s blunt assessment, due to lack of new intelligence and the grim language he used.

An administration official said Biden spoke candidly in his remarks to a Democratic crowd in New York, reflecting heightened concern about the risks posed by Putin.

Biden gives a window into a very real, very ongoing discussion inside his administration as they try to calibrate the response to that environment.

His comments are usually 15 minutes in length, but in the past he has stretched it to an hour or more, talking about various topics. After the remarks, reporters are ushered out while Biden takes a few questions from the donors.

Biden’s comments about the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon were not scripted and aides in Washington first learned about him through news reports and dispatches from the pool in the room.

Armageddon was used by the President as an example of the point that there is no escalation ladder when it comes to nuclear weapons. Any move in that direction sets off a cascading response that only has one outcome.

Multiple US officials told CNN that the warning was not based on any new intel, but it was still unnerving for a nation to hear from the commander in chief. Whether one lives in red or blue America, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is something that transcends partisan lines.

One official characterized the speech as “insane,” and while that bolstered the US view of Russian weakness and isolation, it also further increased concern about Putin’s willingness to escalate beyond the level of a rational actor.

There are no plans for the White House to speak about the remark publicly until Friday morning. If Biden wants to address it himself, it will be apparent when he departs for his Maryland event later in the morning, one official said.

More broadly, the most important element remains that US officials have seen no change in posture or specific intelligence that raises the threat level above where it has been.

In the last few weeks, the US has been in contact with Moscow about the scale of the response should Putin choose to go that route. Those details remain closely held, and officials say that won’t change any time soon.

The Early Years of Cold War: The Power of Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and the Status of Nuclear Freeze and Arms Absorption in the United States

Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including, “The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.” Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Fears of nuclear war then accelerated. Ronald Reagan caused Americans to be on edge, with his rhetoric and rapid successions of Soviet leaders. When ABC broadcast the movie, “The Day After,” in 1983, which depicted a fictional war that escalates to nuclear Armageddon, millions of viewers were terrified. In his diary, Reagan wrote, “It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed.” The 16-year-old who watched the film told a reporter that he thought the show was not as scary as thinking about it after.

Although Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter continued to pursue more agreements, namely SALT II, those efforts stalled in the late 1970s. The conservative movement in America, with Ronald Reagan at the helm, made détente and arms agreements a focus of his political attacks. In his challenge to Ford in 1976, Reagan stated that it was a one-way street. We are making the concessions, we are giving them (the Soviet Union) the things they want; we ask for nothing in return.” Although Ford defeated Reagan, the attack stayed power, and he backed away from the policy of détente, avoiding even saying it in public. After conservative Republicans did well in the 1978 midterms, with many candidates running on platforms that called for being tougher on communism, a new treaty became even more difficult, politically.

Soviet aggression didn’t make things easier. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, Carter admitted, “My opinion of the Russians has changed most dramatically in the last week than even the previous two and one – half years before that.” Carter had already signed the SALT II treaty in June 1979 after seven years of negotiations, but he asked the Senate to postpone action on it after the Soviet invasion. (While the treaty was never ratified by Congress, the US voluntarily observed the arms limits for several years.)

A massive, international nuclear freeze movement that emerged during the 1980s reflected the zeitgeist and created renewed pressure on elected officials to engage in negotiations again.

In 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, President George H.W. Bush and Gorbachev signed Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) I which made deep cuts in each nation’s nuclear arsenal.

But when Donald Trump became president, he pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018 (subsequently, Iran has escalated its nuclear arms program). In 2019, the United States also withdrew from the INF Treaty. One year later, Trump did the same with the Open Skies Treaty, which had enabled participants to conduct surveillance flights to foster transparency and reduce the risk of war.

New START limits Russia and the United States to 1,550 strategic warheads each, but has been facing challenges for years. The COVID-19 pandemic forced a pause in weapons inspections, and they have not restarted since Russia invaded Ukraine last year. The treaty was violated by Russia because it would not allow inspectors to come back, according to the US government. However, Russia’s official suspension of the inspections is another blow to international efforts to control nuclear weapons, say experts, who worry that the world’s largest nuclear powers will not be subject to any arms-control obligations once New START expires in three years — or even sooner.

Gorbachev, like Reagan, thought that the world was safer if the weapons were deployed. As the world is facing the real possibility of those weaponry being deployed, let’s remember Gorbachev’s words and make it safer.

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Biden and the Saudi-Arabisian War on Energy Use: An Analysis of the Economic Impact of the OPEC and Oil Cutbacks

Yes, we’ve been here before, at least if you take President Joe Biden at his word. The first time since the Cuban missile crisis that we have a direct threat of use of a nuclear weapon, if something continues down the path it is going, said Biden at a New York City event. The President said that he does not think there is the ability to use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.

“The OPEC production cutbacks could – indeed, should – backfire for Saudi Arabia and its complicit partners,” wrote Andelman. In Congress, there is growing sentiment to reexamine the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia.

In the US, gasoline prices have risen after a number of weeks of decreases, making it harder for Democrats to hold onto control of Congress.

Higher oil prices come on top of Europe’s emerging energy crisis, with Russia sharply reducing its export of natural gas to the continent. As a result, Germany is among the nations that have instituted tough new curbs on energy use, wrote Paul Hockenos.

“Step into my Berlin office today and you’ll find everybody is wearing sweaters – I wear two, with wool socks and occasionally a scarf. … At home, my little family has sworn off baths (swift showers please), and lights are on only in the rooms we’re occupying. We’ve invested in a wool curtain inside our apartment’s front door to keep out the draft.”

“My friend Bill … hasn’t turned his heating on yet this year – no one I know has – and wears a sweater at home. He uses a new way of showering, one minute under warm water, turns it off, lathers up, and then rinses off.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/09/opinions/biden-eye-opening-warning-weekly-column-galant/index.html

The American Pandemic Lockdown and Inflation: CNN Business Perspectives, Report of Linda Stewart, M.A., Editor, November 17, 2003

It works in reverse as well. Just ask Linda Stewart, a New Mexico educator in her 60s who decided to retire one year into the pandemic lockdown. She said in the new CNN Opinion series, that she felt confident that she would be able to handle it because she had some outside projects that would supplement her income.

Stewart added that money was getting tight at the end of the first year of the lock-down. Soon I was in the red each month, just trying to keep up. The usual suspects were food and gas which meant cutting back on more expensive items and cooking meals at home.

I stopped driving for things other than essentials. The ceiling of utility bills went through with the continuing drought in the Southwest. I cut back on watering my garden and turned the furnace down a few degrees in the winter and the air conditioning up a few in the summer. The dishwasher wasn’t being used as much so I switched to washing clothes in cold water and running it once a week.

There are no easy solutions to the inflation spike because Americans are most concerned with the economy. CNN Opinion had a variety of views on how to help people deal with higher costs.

The Federal Reserve Bank is raising interest rates as a way to fight inflation. The rapid wage growth it has spurred is causing inflation to be more entrenched, according to an economist for CNN Business Perspectives. The Federal Reserve is likely to cause the economy to go into a recession in the next few years to curb the increase in prices.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/09/opinions/biden-eye-opening-warning-weekly-column-galant/index.html

The 2008 Florida Hurricane that Saved Our Nation: A Case Study in the Insights of Herschel Walker and his Uncertainty about a Democratic Senate Candidate

Cara Cuite and Rebecca Morss shared that the storm went towards Florida at a rapid pace. “Emergency managers typically need at least 48 hours to successfully evacuate areas of southwest Florida. However, voluntary evacuation orders for Lee County were issued less than 48 hours prior to landfall, and for some areas were made mandatory just 24 hours before the storm came ashore. This was less than the amount of time outlined in Lee County’s own emergency management plan.”

“While the lack of sufficient time to evacuate was cited by some as a reason why they stayed behind, there are other factors that may also have suppressed evacuations in some of the hardest hit areas.” Few people are aware of their evacuation zone, and some websites carrying that information crashed in the leadup to the storm’s arrival, Cuite and Morss wrote.

A Republican lieutenant governor in Georgia is uncertain about Herschel Walker’s chances of being elected. The Republican Senate candidate has denied reports alleging he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009.

One of the nation’s closest midterm races has been thrown into turmoil five weeks before Election Day by the October surprise, but it never had to be this way. The Republican Party shouldn’t have found a chance to regain a majority in the Senate because there shouldn’t be two Democrats representing a center- right state like Georgia.

“Walker won his Senate primary not because of his political chops or policy proposals. He was the one who dominated his opponents because of what he did on the football field-40 years ago and his friendship with former President Donald Trump.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/09/opinions/biden-eye-opening-warning-weekly-column-galant/index.html

Signs and actions of a supervising professor, Maitland Jones Jr., to be hired in chemist education: the case of Ethereummax

Students who want to go to medical school must take organic chemistry, a very difficult course. Maitland Jones Jr., a master of the field and textbook author, taught the course at NYU – until 82 of the 350 students taking it “signed a petition because, they said, their low scores demonstrated that his class was too hard,” Jill Filipovic noted.

The NYU spokesman told the New York Times that the professor was the subject of complaints about condescension and transparency about students and that he had been terminated. The students expressed surprise at the firing of Jones, which was not included in their petition.

There may be valid student complaints, but there are important questions raised, among them how much power students who think of themselves as consumers should have in the hiring.

The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Kim Kardashian nearly $1.3 million for failing to disclose she was paid to promote a crypto asset, EthereumMax, noted Emily Parker.

The case reflects a bigger problem in the Cryptocurrencies industry, where celebrities are using their influence to promote cryptocurrencies, a notoriously complex and risky asset class which can lead people to invest in coins or projects that they don’t understand.

Until recently, the late-night television formula ruled, as Bill Carter noted. “On the air after 11 p.m. with a charismatic host, some comedy, a desk, a guest or two, maybe a band and then ‘Good night, everybody!’” The late-night shows were holding their own despite the moves to streaming.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/09/opinions/biden-eye-opening-warning-weekly-column-galant/index.html

What are the chances that nuclear wars will kill us? Forecasters and micromorts of a nuclear conflict in Japan, and what they can do about it

It was a good choice. Following Stewart was always going to be a potentially crippling challenge. Noah took it on and remade the show to his own specifications. The show became a lot more diverse.

What is the chance that your hobby will kill you? If you love knitting, this isn’t an issue you need to think about, but most base jumpers will have felt the same fear when they jumped each time. Intuitively, we know that some hobbies really are way riskier than others.

The reason we have micromort estimates for these activities is because we have pretty good data on how people die. The risks are harder to quantify. Take, for example, the prospect of dying in a nuclear war. It is not something that most people like to think about but we know that the risk is real. Nuclear weapons were used to kill people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and since then there have been a handful of close calls. John F. Kennedy estimated that there was a one in three chance of a nuclear conflict during the Cuban missile crisis. The possibility of nuclear conflict has been brought back to mind with the war in Ukraine and the rhetoric from Putin. Whether or not we like to admit it or not, the worry behind every discussion about nuclear war is the same: How likely is it that a nuclear weapon will kill me?

Micromorts can help us here, too. Talking about the possibility of a nuclear war could be callous, but getting to grips with probabilities may help us make better decisions about our own lives and give us hints about how we can avoid a future nuclear conflict.

There’s a whole field of research that deals with trying to assign probabilities to hard-to-predict future events. It’s called superforecasting, and it really started to take off in the mid-2010s after the Canadian academic Philip Tetlock coauthored an influential book on the topic. The general gist is that even experts in a particular field are quite bad at knowing what will happen in the future, but some people are unusually good at making verifiable predictions across a broad range of topics. Governments are interested in tapping the expertise of these people, who are often labeled “superforecasters.”

One group of superforecasters wanted to figure out if the war in Ukraine would lead to a nuclear war that would kill someone in London. The majority of the forecasters are members of a group called Samotsvety that has a good record of predicting future events. The winning team of the Samotsvety group won one of the top forecasting competitions in the world in 2020 to predict the number of O-1 US visas given to Chinese nationals as well as the revenues of the top tech firms. The group won the competition again in 2021, and currently holds the top place in the ongoing 2022 competition. In late February, the forecasters bet around $14,000 that Russia would invade Ukraine by the end of the year. They won just over $32,000.

Putin spoke at a news conference. He described the preemptive nuclear strike as “applied to the control points, deprive the enemy of these control systems and so on,” implying that it could even prevent a retaliatory strike.

Some background: On Wednesday, Putin acknowledged that the conflict is “going to take a while,” as he also warned of the “increasing” threat of nuclear war.

“As for the idea that Russia wouldn’t use such weapons first, it means we wouldn’t be the second to use them either – since the possibility to do so in case of an attack on our territory would be very limited.”

The consequences for use of nuclear weapon in the war have been warned to Moscow by the Biden administration.

“So if we’re talking about this disarming strike, then maybe think about adopting the best practices of our American partners and their ideas for ensuring their security. We’re just thinking about it. No one was shy when they talked about it out loud in previous times and years,” he said.

The idea of a preventive strike is not something that anyone believes it is possible to do.

On Monday, Russia unleashed a fresh wave of drone and missile attacks targeting energy infrastructure across Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes caused extensive power outages in several regions, including Kyiv and Odesa.

It’s another important step undermining the future of arms control. The New START treaty expires in February of 2026, with no talks under way on a replacement. The New START treaty may fall apart and we may find ourselves in a world where US and Russian nuclear forces are unrestricted. That would increase dangers to all of us.

I am involved in the nuclear arms-control dialogue between the United States and Russia. We’ve explored a lot of the key issues that would be required to be addressed in the next round of nuclear arms-control negotiations. I won’t say those discussions have been easy, and we have not found it very productive to spend much time talking about who’s right and who’s wrong in the war, but that dialogue is ongoing and both governments have asked us to continue.

Since the war in Ukraine, he has lost many relationships with Russian scholars, nuclear scientists and military officials, and that has created a level of hostility between the two nuclear powers that hasn’t been seen in over 50 years. The situation is becoming increasingly precarious across the board, he says, but there are still reasons for hope.

Almost all US–Russian communication is cut off, and many non-government dialogues have been cut off. The kinds of conversations that I used to have with Russian colleagues have stopped because current and retired people involved in the nuclear-weapons complex in Russia have not been allowed to participate.

I am one of the final optimists, but I am worried. If I had to bet, I would bet that ten years from now, we will have no new nuclear-armed states. Only 5% of the states in the world have nuclear weapons, and that was also true 35 years ago. That’s an amazing public-policy success story, but there is a lot of work to do and a lot of rethinking to do to reduce the nuclear dangers that have been growing in the world in recent years.

A. In my office, an assistant of mine once put up little labels to show parts of the bookshelves and especially the drawers in my files. And my wife came down and saw “genocide,” “torture,” “massacre,” “terrorism,” you know, “bombing civilians,” and she said, how can I be married to somebody who has files like this in the office? A bunch of her friends came to Berkeley and burned my office. Since I started work at the RAND Corporation in the fifties, that has been my life. I think about nuclear war not because I find it fascinating but because I want to prevent it, to make it unthinkable, because I care about the world that it would destroy.

Q. Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense during the Cuban missile crisis, once said, “The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.” Why haven’t we seen nuclear weapons used since 1945?

A. We have seen nuclear weapons used many times. They are being used by both sides in the country. They are being used as threats like a bank robber uses a gun if he doesn’t kill himself. You’re lucky if you can get your way in some part without pulling the trigger. We have done that many times. A gambler knows that your luck runs out eventually.

Living as if it’s my last but I can’t tell you that I’m sorry to tell you, but I know that the future is coming

A. Great. After having a second CT and M.R.I, I was told that I had three to six months to live. It has been said that it is good to live as though it are your last but it is not practical. I have found that living this month as though it’s my last is working out very well for me. I thought it was pretentious to say publicly, you know, well, I have pancreatic cancer.

It was my chance to encourage my sons and friends to continue their work to care for the planet, and they both thought I should let them know. As I said, my work of the past 40 years to avert the prospects of nuclear war has little to show for it. But I wanted to say that I could think of no better way to use my time and that as I face the end of my life, I feel joy and gratitude.