42 Comments

Really interesting article. Especially appreciate the technical specs you included. Cheers thanks mate.

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author

Thank you.

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Here is a related sarcastic take:

«Western Leaders Suddenly Remember Putin Is, In Fact, President of Russia, Following Minor Nuclear Scare»,

https://complexiathesinker.substack.com/p/western-leaders-suddenly-remember

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David Cameron is a sissy - Russia seems unstoppable. US has zero practical experience these days. Except stealing oil

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Beta male Cameron the dead pig fucker looks like an apple doll. What is with these Western 'leaders'? Zel plays piano with his dick and Cameron sticks his in the mouths of dead pigs. Don't they like women?

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Thanks for a great article by the way.

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Thank you - could you perhaps put a hot link to your ‘buy me a coffee’ option?

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Sir, if I may ask Your assessment, as Your History as a pro military guy allows You to know better than us civilians on such matters... assumed that "our" puppets are only idiots... how much are them idiots?

And, more important, Do You feel that the military counsellors can stop any idiotic politic move?

As long as the puppets only blabber... we are accustomed to that... but God forbid... any real move...

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author

Through the Cold War, there was always a chance for nuclear confrontation, however, those in charge of the nuclear weapons on the military side and those on the political side were sane enough to know that in the case of war, there is no winner. Nowadays, the political "elite" in the West consists of lunatics who believe in supremacy. The moral compass is skewed and the whole Western civilization is going down the hill in a cart without breaks. They have brilliant planers which made two brotherly nations fight each other on their behalf but they miscalculated and the tide turned toward them. As losers, they may not hesitate to provoke much wider war. For now, there are those in uniform who realize the situation and they are the ones who may keep those in suits on leash. No need to name those lunatics, just look who are most present of the politicians in Western MSM.

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Thank You again Mike, for a fine piece.

It does seem like current western elites are playing a game, and see themselves as immune from consequences. Many of them are clearly narcissistic/sociopathic, so threatening their "loved" ones won't work, either.

The problem is that the game is financial, and they are used to playing financial games, not actual war that affects their own world.

It seems that part-2 of the 2008-2009 financial crisis is coming soon, and cannot be papered over. There will be vast defaults on debts, vast devaluation of speculative assets (Tesla, Apple) and the elite "owners" really need an emergency context and somebody to blame, in order to maintain their positions of power. This is the game they are "playing".

Vladimir Putin is no savior, but he is perhaps the most skilled bureaucrat in today's world. He is getting older. He is tired, but I think he'll see Russia through to the other side of this. He knows that the "enemy" is basically BlackRock, if it should be given any name as a marker.

And also, I wonder about this story: Russia has an anti-satellite NUKE currently in orbit that could render lower orbit UNUSABLE

https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-05-08-russia-anti-satellite-nuke-orbit-space.html

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> It seems that part-2 of the 2008-2009 financial crisis is coming soon, and cannot be papered over. There will be vast defaults on debts, vast devaluation of speculative assets (Tesla, Apple)

Wanna bet it will be hyperinflation this time? :)

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There will need to be a gold-standard again, I suspect.

The $US may be devalued to $20,000/oz or so to accomplish the task. The world of central banking is always prepared to do this kind of reset.

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Gold standard is nonsense: who owns gold mines would the own the money supply. Money can easily work on trust, as Graber points out (Debt 1st 5000 years). The issue that current fiat is privately owned, simply nationalise the money supply like China. Job done.

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Everybody has to agree on something. Gold is what all the central banks are pre-agreed on. They all keep at least a certain amount to harmonize back to a gold standard.

They always have, notably after Nixon defaulted on gold in 1971.

A gold-standard is already and always in place.

Gold is the back-up plan, "nonsense" or not.

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When money dies...

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Thanks Sir... we are on the same page indeed... let's call them "Voldemort's ilks"?

But I have bad feelings about most of the western top brass as well... no idea if they only have the need to posture (to have better jobs when dismissed) or are really insane as they seem... :(

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May 9Edited

Perhaps western aid in nominally Ukrainian attacks on RF nuclear infrastructure were threatened. I'm taking all the various posturing by France and UK with a grain of salt. They'll send over fools by the hundreds, and they'll return fewer but wiser

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​It is a good idea to get some cash and get shopping done during the day today. This will likely disturb power grids and electronic transactions; the biggest event since 2005.

SIX SOLAR STORMS ON THEIR WAY TO EARTH | S0 News May.10.2024​ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGlGCIiyZE

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Thanks to the author for a very informative article. One area where my understanding differs slightly from his concerns Russia’s nuclear first strike doctrine. “Key elements [of the doctrine] include a no-first-use (NFU) policy, wherein Russia has stated not to employ nuclear weapons unless first attacked by an adversary with nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction.” I have read statements attributed to senior Russian officials that put the matter a little differently. In those statements the ‘trigger’ that could prompt Russia to use nuclear weapons first is an attack that threatens the existence of the Russian state. Such an attack could be nuclear or by other mass destructive means, and practically speaking likely would be. However even a conventional attack could trigger Russia’s nuclear response if that attack was of such severity that it threatened Russia’s existence. It’s a sensible doctrine in my view. The continued existence of the state is paramount, and Russia will use any means it has to prevent an attacker from destroying it, regardless of the means the attacker employs.

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I'd just like to remind everyone that the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, by standard, tactical nukes.

> The majority of this ammunition was destroyed in precise Russian strikes and the traces of radioactivity after the strike were detected as far away as Germany.

AFAIR, this is disputed. Once upon a time, Moon of Alabama posted a graph of the radioactive measures from the area and the graph witnessed against the idea I quoted. After a lot of searching I managed to track down the post: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/05/ukraine-sitrep-explosion-in-khmelnytsky-bakhmut-evacuation-longer-range-missiles.html The critical quote is this: "The chart seem to show an increase in Gamma radiation but that increase happened during May 11/12, not in the early morning of May 13 when the explosion happened."

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I invite you to read John Helmer's post on this topic: https://johnhelmer.net/the-british-gift-that-keeps-on-giving-uranium-irradiated-wind-and-rain-for-poland-germany-denmark-netherlands-and-london-too/

...as well as this article by Chris Busby (referenced in the post above), who shows how Uranium weapons employed in Ukraine since the start of the war in February 2022 have significantly increased Uranium levels in the air in the UK, i.e. regardless of what happened in Khmelnitsky on 13th May 2023.

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Clean and straight just as I would expect from Black Mountain.

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Thank you.

We posted the article on our X-account news-channel.

Sander

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Great article, Mike. The F-16 is certified to carry the B-61, 400 kt when they crank the dial-a-blast knob to 11.

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What are the effects (if any) of using a tactical nuclear weapon - say of one kiloton - on the area (and surrounding regions) of the strike?

How much are permanent and how much are temporary and for how long?

Sorry Mike longish question but just wondering..

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author

There are plenty of options. One may be to use let's say 1KT tactical nuke to hit the troop concentration, airfield, or command structure. For the sake of exercise, let us assume that a regiment of the Foreign Legion is taking a portion of the front line, and French missiles launched by Ukrainian planes hit the targets on Russian territory. Targeting was performed by a joint NATO team. NATO artillery crews are involved in combat as well. Russia has means to counteract these events and NATO's positions will be covered with overwhelming fire. The next may be that F-16s taking off from the Ukrainian airfields and they are capable of carrying "dirty" nuclear bombs filled with radioactive material and explosives. If intelligence can confirm that there are those kind of weapons or in the worst-case scenario one of them hit anything under Russian control, that gives legitimate reason to strike back to the source of these planes meaning deep into Ukrainian rear and for example the Khmelnitsky airfield may be hit with few Iskanders that will wipe out everything there and let the area contaminated for the next 10+ years. Again this is just an exercise. Casualties can be hundreds or even thousands.

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@Mike Mihajlovic

"Dirty bombs" or "radiological weapons"(explosively dispersed nuclear waste) are even more worthless than chemical weapons. Just as much at mercy of winds & environment but with a far longer duration before ones own troops could take ground they contaminated...

USA and USSR both tested such dispersions and both concluded they offered no worthwhile advantage and so never fielded. The primary use of this idea has been as a scare tactic/propaganda feature.

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NATO better not make any unwise move in order to keep it just an “exercise”.

This sounds horrendous (for them).

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@The Phoenix

The primary effect of a 1kt weapon fired as an air burst is from PROMPT RADIATION. Anyone not better shielded than most armored vehicles provide within a radius of about 500 meters would be killed by 5,000 rem + of highly penetrating neutron/gamma radiation. People in the open out to about 850 meters would receive an LD 50 + dose of 500 rem or more. The blast and thermal effects would be deadly at ranges rather LESS than that of prompt radiation for such small devices, even if the device were not deliberately engineered for enhanced radiation. Basically, anything up to about 2.5 KT fired as an air burst can be considered equivalent to a neutron bomb in effect. As such, they can kill many armored crews without tipping over their vehicles, possibly without so much as scorching of their paint.

Blast will certainly wreck ordinary buildings out to nearly 500 meters and thermal effects will set vulnerable things on fire about that far as well. If the fireball (about 90 meters in radius) does not contact the ground, fallout effects will be fairly minimal unless it is rained out quickly nearby before dispersion & dilution.

Modern tanks may include a layer of depleted uranium in their armor (as both ballistic and radiation shielding)- Neutron activation on the U238 in such armor will make the vehicles more or less too radioactive to re crew and use safely in the long term as well.

I suggest Carey Sublettes "Nuclear Weapons FAQ" for further reading:

https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html

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Amazing! Thank you.

That’s exactly what I was looking for.

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Daddy was a high energy physicist... I learned odd things as a kid.

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"and have a yield of as little as 1 kiloton (the energy equivalent of one million kilograms of TNT)"

I believe you mean that one kiloton is equivalent to one thousand kg of TNT.

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author

Nuclear bomb yield is measured in kilotons, each unit of which equals the explosive force of 1,000 tons of TNT.

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Convention is the KT and Mt are based on the metric "tonne", not the USA customary unit (short ton, 2,000 lb.). Energy of 1 tonne of TNT is considered to be 4.184 gigajoules or 1 gigacalorie. AKA, a metric fuckton.

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@Crocodile Chuck

Those bloody decimal points, harder to keep track of than a redback and even more deadly...

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1000 tonnes > 1000 kg

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yes and 1 tonne (metric) = 1000Kg

(US ton is 9% smaller, UK ton is 2 % bigger)

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...And in conclusion, 1 (metric) kiloton equals 1 million kg, like originally stated.

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