The Ukraine war is going into week eight, if you count the invasion in February as the date the war began. There’s a solid argument that year eight is the more accurate figure, if you look at the history of Ukraine and the invasion back in 2014. Like a scab, Vladimir Putin could never walk away from it and let it heal, he had to go back in and worsen the situation.
But before we go into the newest developments of the war and how Putin is once again preparing to play his hand badly, let us look at the absurdity of the situation. I often speak of the Great Screenwriter In the Sky and how nobody could write this stuff, because it’s too improbable. The past 48 hours speak more eloquently to that concept than anything that I’ve written about in the six years I’ve been blogging.
Just for funsies, what would you say to a screenwriter who presented you a script about an autocratic madman who starts a war with a neighboring peaceful power, and his favorite war vessel, the flagship of his fleet, named after his capitol city no less, gets sunk on the anniversary of the Titanic? Yes, April 14, 1912 was when the Titanic sank and now the Moskva is joining it for drinks down in Davy Jones’ locker.
And to foreshadow that event, how about you had a soldier tell said warship, the Moskva, to “go fuck” itself and that became the image for a postage stamp? I am far and away not the only one to notice the patent absurdity of all this.
An imposing warship named “Moscow” set ablaze, taking on water, and ultimately sinking is the kind of heavy-handed metaphor for this war that I would cut from any draft except that it actually just happened.
— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) April 14, 2022
A few weeks ago I saw someone say that if this were a movie it would have, at best, a 20 percent on Rotten Tomatoea, and I had to agree. Imagine how scathing the reviews would be!
— Boleyn Books (@BoleynBooks) April 14, 2022
"We're asked to believe that the villains are both aware enough of Nazi atrocities to invoke them when they invade, yet oblivious to how much their rhetoric and symbolism resemble Naziism themselves. Is anyone actually this boneheaded? This reviewer is inclined to say no."
— Boleyn Books (@BoleynBooks) April 14, 2022
I marvel. I truly do. The history books of the future will read like a grade-Z screenplay. Oh, well. Maybe the kids will stay awake. Maybe there is a glitch in the Matrix.
Meanwhile. Putin, fresh off of this humiliation, continues to huff and puff and threaten to blow everybody’s house down. Volodymyr Zelenskyy says there is a possibility that Putin may resort to nukes.
Russia has sent a series of warnings to the Biden administration, including a formal diplomatic protest this week, demanding that it halt shipment of advanced weapons to Ukraine that could strike into Russian territory, or risk unspecified “unpredictable consequences.”
The diplomatic note, called a démarche, was sent through normal channels, two administration officials said, and was not signed by President Vladimir V. Putin or other senior Russian officials. But it was an indicator, one administration official said, that the weapons sent by the United States so far were having an effect.
It also suggested that the Russians were concerned about the new tranche of more sophisticated offensive weaponry, part of an $800 million package that President Biden announced the day after the démarche was delivered by the Russian Embassy in Washington.
American officials said the tone of the note was consistent with a series of public Russian threats, including to target deliveries of weapons as they moved across Ukrainian territory.
Officials said the note did not prompt any special concern inside the White House. But it has touched off a broader discussion inside the Pentagon and intelligence agencies about whether the “unpredictable consequences” could include trying to target or sabotage some of the weapons shipments while they are still in NATO territory, before they are handed off to Ukrainians for the final leg of their journey into the hands of Ukrainian troops. The delivery of the protest note was first reported by The Washington Post.
The weapons President Biden authorized this week for transfer to the Ukrainians include long-range artillery that is suited for what American officials believe will be a different style of battle in the open areas of the Donbas, where Russian forces appear to be massing for an attack in coming days.
While Pentagon officials were insistent in the run-up to the war in February that the United States provide only defensive weaponry that would avoid escalation, the nature of Russia’s attacks, including direct attacks on civilians and nonmilitary targets, appears to have muted that debate.
With respect to the deployment of nuclear weapons, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has changed his tune since March, when he said, “I think that the threat of nuclear war is a bluff. It’s one thing to be a murderer. It’s another to commit suicide. Every use of nuclear weapons means the end for all sides, not just for the person using them.” Now he says that the world should seriously prepare for the possibility that Putin could employ nuclear weapons.
“Not only me — I think all of the world, all the countries, have to be worried, because it can be not real information, but it can be truth,” Zelensky told CNN’s Jake Tapper when asked if he was worried Russian President Vladimir Putin might use a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukraine.
Zelensky also said Moscow could easily use either nuclear or chemical weapons, as Putin does not value the lives of Ukrainian citizens.
“They could do it, for them the life of the people [means] nothing,” Zelensky said. “We should think, not be afraid, be ready. But that is not a question … only for Ukraine but for all the world, I think so.” […]
At the time, Putin had recently ordered that his nuclear forces be put on higher alert after Zelensky repeatedly called for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over the Ukraine. […]
Zelensky’s new comments also follow those made by CIA Director William Burns on Thursday, when he said that the U.S. cannot “take lightly” the chance that Russia could use nuclear weapons as it grows more desperate in its invasion, now in its 51st day.
“Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” Burns said Thursday following a speech at Georgia Tech.
The world now watches and waits as Kremlin forces — who retreated from much of northern Ukraine after failing to take the capital of Kyiv — are regrouping for a renewed offensive in the Donbas region in the east.
And anything can happen. I don’t know what the Great Screenwriter In the Sky intends to do next, but very little would be surprising at this point. And that’s not to take any of this lightly. This is all as serious as a heart attack and the atrocities that Putin has perpetrated against Ukraine are unspeakable and they are crimes against humanity as well. My point in waxing satirical about it all, is that we have no control. It is never fun to acknowledge powerlessness in any situation and that, unfortunately, is where we are, so we might as well laugh to keep from crying.
Our best leaders are responding militarily the best that they can. If the Russian madman decides to drop a nuclear bomb, then he will. And all we can do is go into Dr. Strangelove mode and “learn to stop worrying.” We may never learn to “love” the bomb, but we need to recognize that we are powerless what a maniac in Moscow does, because he’s finding himself increasingly impotent in a war which he thought would be over in three days and his favorite toy boat just got blown up.
For improbable next thing: Vlad ends up in ICU, on respirator, with COVID.
Who is to say that has already happened and we don’t yet know it?
I’d prefer a debilitating stroke which leaves him completely incapable of communicating while totally intellectually there so he can spend the rest of his “golden years” trapped in his deteriorating body unable to even blink in response. You KNOW they’ll push him off in the Russian version of a very cheap nursing home…. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
That works for me!
On Reddit, there’s a subreddit r/HFY. An ongoing series called First Contact (currently at installment 757) has had enemies more intelligent than the Russians right now. Seriously, the tactics of the villains in this story have been exactly the same as the Russian invasion and with same results.
But do the Russians even have any nuclear weapons that actually work? A very good article on Daily Kos posits why and gives the reasons why not.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/3/23/2087736/-Do-any-of-Russia-s-Nuclear-Weapons-Actually-Work?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=
‘First, nuclear weapons have a shelf life. They aren’t like bullets and chemical artillery shells that you can wrap in grease paper and come back 50 years later and expect they will still work. They have critical parts made of radioisotopes which decay, and must be serviced to replace those components. There are probably several service items that have to be maintained but the big one I want to focus on is Tritium gas.
Modern fission weapons are boosted with Tritium gas. They have hollow cores, actually “levitated” cores with a hollow sphere of fissionable material surrounding a smaller solid sphere which is suspended by wires in the center. This is more effective at compression, like using a hammer instead of pushing on a nail. But it’s not enough to make an atomic bomb the size of a bowling ball.
To do that Tritium gas is pumped into the hollow space within the levitated core. Multiple sources agree that a modern bomb needs 3 to 4 grams of Tritium to fission properly. The Tritium fuses as it is compressed, unleashing billions of neutrons instead of the handful delivered by the initiators of Fat Man and Little Boy. This speeds up the reaction, which is critical for hydrogen bombs because they depend on using the flash of gamma rays from the initial reaction to compress and react the secondary stage before everything is blown apart by the fission trigger’s atomic blast wave. Yep, it’s like using a stick of a dynamite as a camera flash, and developing the picture before the camera is blown apart.
It’s also critical for tactical battlefield nukes which must be lightweight and portable. In fact, it’s safe to say that there are no un-boosted nuclear weapons in existence, except possibly for a few prototypes in the hands of almost-nuclear powers like (at one time) South Africa or North Korea.
Tritium has a half-life of 12.5 years, so it goes away over time. Worse, its decay product is Helium-3, which absorbs neutrons, stopping the explosion, so it’s critical to refresh the boosting gas periodically. The exact interval is a closely held secret but there is broad agreement that it is at most every 10 years, and unlikely to be much less than 5 for practical reasons. Whatever the interval, it’s a simple matter of math to work out that every bomb needs about 0.2 grams of new Tritium per year on average.
Tritium costs USD$30,000 per gram.
This means that, with 4,500 weapons, it costs Russia on the order of USD$30 million per year to maintain its arsenal. And you don’t get any discounts; even if you don’t keep the reserve weapons prepped you have to have the Tritium on-hand if you want to use them, so whether you put the Tritium in the bombs or not it’s a cost to keep them available for service. And small battlefield nukes are just as expensive as the hydrogen bombs that can knock down cities.
Now, $30M is a lot of money but I know it’s not a lot of money for Russia, even a Russia that isn’t nearly what the old USSR was. But it’s a lot of money for an individual if you can manage to steal it. And that makes what I think of as the macro case for Russia’s nuclear weapons to have been grifted out of workability.
Now let’s look at the micro case. Assuming a 10-year service interval, Russia needs to service about 2 bombs per workday to keep its arsenal fresh. The teams which do this probably aren’t large; it doesn’t make sense to send more than 4 people to service something the size of a bowling ball. And you don’t need a lot of service teams, probably two or three. This is both very highly skilled and security-cleared work. There won’t be a big crowd of people doing it.
And every time one of these teams walks in the room to service a bomb, they are bringing a canister probably about the size of a fire extinguisher with around 8 grams of Tritium in it. (You need to put enough in the bomb so that ten years later, on the next service, it will still have the requisite minimum to go boom if used.) That’s a quarter million dollars.
Twice a day.
Every work day for 25 years.
In an army where even the MRE’s have been sold on the black market so the ones in the field expired in 2015 and the APC tires are going flat because they’re cheap knockoffs that weren’t maintained properly, is it possible to believe that this service has actually been done?
Oh, I believe it’s been paid for. I just have trouble imagining that any of that valuable tritium has actually been put in bombs that, according to conventional doctrine, can never be used unless it’s the end of the world anyway.’
Hey, it’s been five… ten… twenty years, and who’s to know? Every time the team services a bomb with real Tritium that’s a quarter million dollars waiting to be picked up from the table. Why not pick it up?
Over the years, that’s at least a couple of super yachts and Italian villas for all the mistresses. You gotta keep your priorities straight.
Kamil Galeev backs this theory with his own sources, also pointing out how the nuclear personnel get as run over and exploited by the Russian state-backed thieves-in-law the way the latter does to the regular military conscripts. Put these two things together and, well, it’s not unlikely if the only nuke explosions happen on Russian launchpads.
One thing we should continue to keep an eye on: the gap between what Putin wants to do and his actual means of accomplishing it. With his economy’s balls being slowly crushed in a steel-stamp presser and the high attrition rate of conscripts and fighting equipment (not helped by the Great Skeedadle from Kyiv, where Russians left lots of rocket launchers, artillery and air defense for their “hosts”), his conventional forces have already proven inadequate to the task at hand. And we know from THAT debacle how ill-prepared he was for all but the most optimistic possibilities. So…is it out of question that he will not have similar troubles with nukes and chemical weapons?
Continuing this supposition of a Great Screenwriter in the Sky a bit further, I’ve been saying to myself that if there’s a Just God (same as the Screenwriter?) out there, the Kremlin would have been targeted by a meteorite by now. Then there’s the saying “God helps those who help themselves”. Does this lead to picking the appropriate response to ANY Russian use of a nuclear device in the current conflict? It took six years to go from the invasion of Poland to the last whimper with most of Berlin and, especially, the Hitler Bunker obliterated in 1945.