Traitor Thump’s threat last Wednesday to restart the testing of nuclear weapons has raised panic across the planet - in nations large and small- while exposing "numerous knotty questions about national and global security." This latter according to one NY Times piece (10/31). But that issue of knotty questions is mostly your classic 'macguffin' and arises only because we have an irresponsible nitwit heading our government.
True, the United States "spends tens of billions of dollars every year on its large arsenal of the world’s deadliest weapons" and the infrastructure that supports it. But that expenditure pays off in terms of obviating the need to actually detonate nuclear weapons to test them. (The last underground explosive blast at the Nevada Test Site occurred on Sept. 23, 1992. Its power was reportedly quite small — a third of the Hiroshima bomb’s — and no public information seems to exist on the test’s purpose.)
That same year, at the Cold War’s end, the United States voluntarily gave up the explosive testing of nuclear arms and eventually talked other atomic powers into doing likewise. Then, in 1993, President Bill Clinton announced plans for a treaty in which all nations would forgo all nuclear blasts. This meant banning tests even underground, the last permissible zone.
This extension of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban treaty was reasonable given the amount of radioactive material - such as Strontium 90 and Cesium 137 - released in each nuclear test explosion and affecting the health of citizens. The most obviously coming from the largest megaton weapons such as the Tsar bomb exploded by the Russians.
Although the 1996 test-ban treaty never officially went into force, it created a global norm. The long, hard process of hammering out a global consensus on the merits of a ban, embraced by all the thermonuclear states at the time, led to a more stable era. Gone were the shock waves that had regularly radiated from underground test sites and ricocheted around the globe.
Enter Trump, aka Capt. Bonespurs, who plans to wreck all of that. Evidently, from a recent (Oct. 31)WSJ article ('Trump Nuclear Test Vow Puzzles Experts', p. A6) the Dotard got hysterical after learning of a new Russian cruise missile. According to the WSJ piece:
"Trump posted his vow to resume testing after Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted about the successful tests of a nuclear powered, nuclear-tipped cruise missile that NATO has dubbed Skyfall."
The actual name of the missile is the Burevestnik and a cross section graphic of it is shown at the top (underneath Trump's hysteria). According to a WSJ side article ('Putin Warns West With New Claims of Cruise Missile'):
"If the Burevestnik performs as Putin claims, it could deliver a nuclear warhead to the far side of the planet using a unique propulsion system. It could stay aloft almost indefinitely - hugging the ground or sea and swerving to evade missile defense systems".
Adding:
"The new missile could also pose a potential threat to Trump's proposed 'Golden Dome' missile defense system, which is designed to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles that have a much higher trajectory than the low flying Burevestnik."
So being one-upped in weapons, no wonder Trump lost it and proceeded to bark out new weapons testing. Which he never clarified but which aides believe he meant actual explosive testing of warheads.
Worse, according to a piece in today's WSJ ('Putin Paves Way To Resume Nuclear Tests', p. A8) we learn:
"Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his top security officials to draw up plans for potential nuclear weapons testing should President Trump follow through on his suggestions that the U.S. resume testing its nuclear arsenal."
Likely hurling us back over 60 years to the era before the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty went into effect. The pity of it is the deranged orange turd is likely ignorant that the U.S. doesn't even rely on explosive tests any more. Instead, it includes hundreds of machines and devices and many thousands of workers and scientists. The devices include room-size supercomputers, the world’s most powerful X-ray machine and a laser system the size of a sports stadium. No other nation possesses such an extensive array of tools for the nonnuclear testing of nuclear weapons.
Currently, the complex of facilities employs 65,500 people at eight main sites from coast to coast. Just at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, the total work force has grown by 50 percent since 2018, to nearly 18,000.
The U.S. arsenal includes roughly 3,700 warheads (compared to Russia's 4,700), with about 1,700 of them currently deployed, according to the Federation of American Scientists. The group, which has long scrutinized the highly classified topic, recently updated its estimates. Nuclear weapons can be carried on warplanes like the B-2 or B-52, launched from missiles in silos on U.S. territory, or heaved from rockets on submarines.
According to one WAPo report, the U.S. is currently into a modernization program that seeks to replace every warhead with an updated version and to upgrade their carriers. The overall cost of the sprawling program over three decades is estimated at $1.7 trillion. Among the enhancements is the new W-93 warhead, see e.g.
Full ahead for the W93 | Los Alamos National Laboratory
Meanwhile if Dotard Bonespurs really wants to resume explosive testing he should know- as per a NY Times report: a) the nation’s nuclear test site is a desolate expanse of the Nevada desert bigger than the state of Rhode Island.
And (b): Nuclear experts see great difficulty in preparing it for new underground tests because much of the key equipment at the sprawling site has fallen into disrepair or been lost.
Nonetheless, a 2013 document from the Energy Department, which oversees the nation’s nuclear arsenal, stated that “a very limited test to signal the readiness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent or to respond to another nation’s test could be conducted in six to 10 months.”
Top U.S. officials say new bomb designs are already in development without underground tests. Also, the directors of the national labs in charge of the arsenal have repeatedly testified to Congress that the United States has no need to return to nuclear detonations.
During the Cuban Missile crisis in October, 1962, many of us were terrified that an all -out nuclear war could be triggered, See e.g.
- Remembering The Cuban Missile Crisis 60 Years Ago ...
- But JFK had in his then arsenal nearly 200 Atlas ICBMs, each fitted with an MK 2 (Mark 2) or MK 3 warhead, of respectively 1.44 and 3.84 megatons. Just one used against Cuba would have blown that island to smithereens and deposited radioactive fallout all the way though Florida and the Gulf.
- But Kennedy did not wish to push those buttons. He argued vociferously to Gen. Lyman Leminitzer to back off, turning to a naval blockade instead. He understood that even one Atlas hurled at Cuba would invite a massive retaliatory attack by the Soviet Union.
- Still shaken by how close the U.S. had come to nuclear war with the Soviets, JFK and Khrushchev agreed to the first ever Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed in Auguust, 1963. It was driven not only by the risk of nuclear war but also public concern over radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing, which had deposited significant amounts of strontium 90, Cesium 137.
- For perspective, the total released radioactivity before the 1963 treaty from Sr -90 was 16.8 million curies from high-yield atmospheric tests. (High-yield tests in locations like the Pacific Ocean and the USSR injected debris into the stratosphere, leading to worldwide fallout.) By comparison, 216,000 curies of Sr -90 were released accidentally in the Chernobyl reactor disaster in April, 1986.
- And now Trump wants to resume such testing? (He has not made it clear that he desires atmospheric testing but no one should put it past him. Let us hope he has at least one higher IQ advisor to dissuade him from this folly. All of it sprouted from a Putin boast for a missile - according to some experts - that may not even be feasible.
See Also:
President Trump has often thrived on vagueness,
demonstrating a deep unwillingness to be pinned down on specifics and forgo
maximum leeway in future actions.
But one area where precision matters, a lot, is when
presidents talk about their plans for America’s nuclear weapons. And this
weekend, the president and his energy secretary, who oversees the development
and maintenance of the nuclear stockpile, contradicted each other on the
critical question of whether the United States is about to break the
three-decade taboo on explosive testing of nuclear weapons.
In short, Mr. Trump has doubled down on the concept that he
has ordered a resumption of explosive nuclear testing — which the United States
has refrained from for 33 years — to match what he contends were secret nuclear
underground detonations, presumably by Russia, China, and other nuclear-armed
states. But that claim has been rejected by many nuclear experts and Mr.
Trump’s own nominee to lead the U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible
for America’s ground-based, undersea and bomber-launched nuclear weapons.
The next time they have the opportunity, one of the right-wing influencers who now dominate the White House press corps should ask President Donald Trump if he happened to watch “House Full of Dynamite,” Academy Award-winning director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, when he was traveling this week. It’s a chilling movie about a nuclear strike on the United States, and since he seems to be suddenly concerned about America’s nuclear arsenal for no apparent reason, it would be fair to ask if the film was behind his startling announcement on his way back from Asia that he was ordering the immediate resumption of nuclear testing after a three decade moratorium.
Don’t laugh. It’s as plausible an explanation for his confusing order as anything else, because his stated reason — that other countries are testing their nuclear weapons — is simply not true. The only country to hold such tests in recent times is North Korea, where Kim Jong Un continued to evaluate his nuclear capability, despite all the happy talk and “love letters” between Trump and his good buddy. None of the nuclear powers have tested any weapons since the 1990s.
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