THE FOURTH HORSEMAN
The Search
By the end of the nineteenth century, physicists had little doubt left that mass and energy were interchangeable, and at the start of the twentieth century Einstein cemented this relationship with his pithy equation E=MC2. One wonders how famous this equation would be if C was not such a large number. Certainly, the world would be a much safer place. Sadly, for our planet, C is very large and C square is enormous. It is not rocket science to realize that if we could convert even a little M into E, we would get a very big bang. Given our perpetual hunt for more effective ways to kill each other, the search was on for a chemical reaction that would lose a little M.
Late in 1938 while bombarding Uranium with neutrons German physicists (Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman) were surprised to find Barium amidst the Uranium. Those were innocent days, and there was a free exchange of information between scientists, and this finding came to the attention of Lise Meitner. Ms. Meitner was a German scientist who had fled Hitler’s Germany because there were traces of Jewishness in her ancestry. She and her cousin Otto Frisch – a fellow scientist – deduced what had happened. Uranium atoms had split into two smaller atoms, one of which was Barium, and the resulting mass was less than that of the original Uranium atom. She even calculated how much energy was released by this process. It was now inevitable. Germany, Great Britain and the USA started a race to exploit this reaction and make a bomb.
The Race
Uranium exists as three isotopes. The most common non-radioactive U238, and the rarer, radioactive and fissile U235 (there is an even rarer isotope U234.) In nature U238 is about 140 times more prevalent than U235, and it would take a lot of engineering research to perfect techniques for separating U235 to the levels required to sustain a fission reaction. Further, by bombarding U238 with Neutrons, a new artificial element was produced - Plutonium 239 - which was also radioactive and fissile. So, a second project was set in place to use reactors to produce weapons grade Plutonium.
After just a short time, both the US and the UK combined their resources into a single effort – The Manhattan Project. It would take this team several years to complete the design and accumulate enough fissile material to make the first three bombs. By then Germany and Italy had been defeated and Japan was the only remaining enemy. Too late the Allies would realize that Germany was so far behind that its nuclear program had never been a threat. Had the Allies known this earlier, there was at least the hope - however improbable - that they might not have built the bomb, and our planet and species had a real chance for true world peace. But, we built the bloody thing, and now psychopaths all over the world have got dozens and some have hundreds of copies.
Back to WWII. The Japanese were refusing to surrender unconditionally, and the closer the allies got to the home islands, the more ferocious, fanatical and suicidal the Japanese defenders became. After the battle for Okinawa there was little doubt that an invasion of the Japanese mainland would cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and millions of Japanese lives, almost half of whom would be civilians. As cruel and callous as this might sound, the two bombs ended the war with the least number of casualties on both sides.
The first bomb “Little Boy” was very uncomplicated and inefficient. The design was simple enough that it was not felt necessary to test it. It basically shot two subcritical masses of U235 into each other at high velocity and showered them with Neutrons. It is estimated that less than 2% of the available fissile material actually contributed to the resulting explosion, but efficiency was not important. It just had to work with devastating effect, and it did. It produced an explosion equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT, destroying almost everything in a half mile radius from ground zero, and killing everyone within a 1-mile radius. A good estimate of the number immediately killed and wounded is 100,000.
The other two bombs were more efficient and used Plutonium 239 as the fissile material. To verify that this design worked, one of the two was exploded at the Loas Almos proving grounds, and its brother, named “Fat Man” would be dropped on Nagasaki. Because of the geography of the region, it resulted in only half the casualties of Hiroshima. Nonetheless, together they achieved their objective. Despite objections from the armed forces, Emperor Hirohito agreed to an unconditional surrender.
Making Like Gods
It could have ended there. It should have ended there, but human nature being what it is, it did not. Some of us were now demigods with the biggest stick in the neighborhood, and it was impossible to not use it to win arguments with our neighbors. If the stick is so big that one only has to threaten to use it, the temptation is irresistible. The problem is that the neighbors are now so irate at losing the argument without even daring to put up a fight, that they become determined to get their own even larger sticks, and the madness continues.
While the communist bloc was racing to develop their own bomb, the Western allies refined the size, efficiency and power of these weapons, resulting in yields ranging from 20 tons to 170 kilotons. Thousands (not exaggerating, thousands) were manufactured and deployed in everything from artillery shells (The Davy Crocket recoilless rifle) to torpedoes and cruise missiles.
Meanwhile, spurred on by Russian development, the demigods were aspiring to full godhood status. A second race started to utilize the very power of the stars. Could the pressure and temperature created by a fission bomb be used to fuse atoms of Hydrogen into Helium with an even bigger bang? Why not? The Gods do it in the stars, why can't we? And we did. We created the fusion or Hydrogen Bomb. Now, destructive power 100 times greater than that of the Hiroshima bomb was available, and our “civilization” and our spaceship home were just a small misstep away from extinction.
Compared to the destructive power of the Hydrogen bombs (strategic weapons,) the old fission bombs were so underpowered that they were now relegated to the secondary role of “low yield” and “tactical weapons” more suitable to be used on battlefields, and not adequate to decide the outcome of a full-scale war. The first letter in all the acronyms for the various arms limitation treaties is always “S” for Strategic. Tactical nukes are not even counted as part of any arms limitation treaties.
It is a harsh indictment against our civilization that a weapon that merely 80 years ago was sufficient to end the greatest conflict we have ever known, is now considered to be inconsequential.
The scope of our MADness
The Russians were - and still are - obsessed with size as a means of intimidation. They wanted there to be no doubt that whether via a first or second strike, in the event of an all-out nuclear exchange, Western societies would be decimated. In the 60s they manufactured ICBMs aptly named SATAN by NATO (SARMAT by the Russians.) These carried a single warhead with a yield of 18+ megatons. Thankfully, we have no empirical knowledge of the impact of such a monstrous weapon. But we can extrapolate what might happen based on the much smaller 10 KTon explosion at Hiroshima.
Hiroshima demonstrated that a 10 KTon yield weapon will kill 100K humans when used against a typical city. Extrapolating this linearly, an 18 MTon monster has the potential to instantly vaporize 180 million humans. In 1965, the total population of the US was about 194 million. If we had been obliging enough to all congregate to one central spot, a single one of these could have wiped us all out. The only formula for Western survival was to match the Russians, weapon for weapon, and the MADness continued.
Two factors made such a weapon obsolete. Firstly, rapid advancements in computational power made the interception of simple ballistic trajectories easy. More importantly, its sheer destructive power was impractical. There is no target that justifies such destructive power. Even 60 years later the largest cities in the world only have populations of about 20 million and most of them are in China! So, Russia (and the USA) developed the MIRV (multiple independent re-entry vehicles) ICBMs. These start out as ballistic missiles, but mid-flight they start spitting multiple independent warheads and decoys, each heading for a different target. These are very hard to intercept.
My Stick is bigger than your Stick
Russia’s obsession with massive destructive power peaked in 1961 when they created a bomb with a potential yield of 100 MTons (the Tsar Bomba.) In a surprising show of restraint, they decided that such a large explosion might be too dangerous and lowered the yield to 50 MTons before detonating it. In theory such a bomb would have a kill zone larger than most of the continents.
Holding Hands on the Road to Hell
By 1962 both the superpowers had accumulated enough destructive power to decimate the whole Planet no matter who struck first, and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was fashioned. Basically, if either side was attacked for any reason, the other could retaliate or escalate until both sides were annihilated, taking the whole Planet to hell with them. As we will see later, a total nuclear exchange will leave no survivors.
This doctrine achieved the pinnacle of obtuseness in 1972 with the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Its basic premise was that to avoid another weapons race, both parties agreed to not defend themselves against the other parties' existing weapons!! Each party was allowed to build a defense system to protect just one city and one retaliatory launch facility. Everything else was to be left undefended. Surviving by allowing annihilation, who knew lunatics could be so clever.
President George W Busch withdrew the US from this treaty in 2002, and the asylum doors were now wide open. The loonies were set free to find new and better ways to kill us all, and they have.
SUPERORUZHIE (Super weapons)
In March 2018 Putin announced the creation of a family of five new super weapons. The first was the RS-28 Sarmat. Intended to replace the earlier SATAN ICBM. It is a liquid fueled super heavy ICBM. Each one can carry 10 independent warheads each with a yield of at least 750KTons. A few decoys would be thrown in to make interception harder. It is estimated that 20 of these would be enough to completely obliterate the entire US. They were scheduled to enter service in 2022. A notable feature of its warheads is the use of a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS.) In theory, these would use a low Earth orbit (about 90 miles high) and approach from over the South Pole thus avoiding the extensive detection methods pointing at the North Pole.
Unlike the ballistic and predictable trajectory outside the Earth’s atmosphere of a conventional ICBM, the Avangard Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) spends most of its time travelling at very high speeds (about Mach 20 at launch) in the upper atmosphere. Its ability to maneuver at these high speeds may help it to evade interception.
Then there is the Poseidon, a nuclear-armed, unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV). Basically, a large, nuclear powered, autonomous, and fast (maybe 70 knots – faster than anything could catch it) nuclear tipped torpedo. Supposedly, it can dive to depths where manned submarines can't follow it. Some analysts suggest that depending on its yield, it could create a Tsunami about 1000 feet high and when salted with Cobalt 59 could render vast swaths of coastline uninhabitable for decades.
How many times do they want to kill each of us?
For obvious reasons the exact size of the various arsenals is a closely guarded secret, but analysts on both sides have reasonable estimates of the number of deployed and standby warheads available to Russia and the US. Remember we are only counting the Strategic (Fusion bombs) weapons. A good estimate of the total number of deployed and ready to use strategic warheads is 3,000. There are about 6,000 more that are stockpiled, but we can ignore them. Keeping it simple, let’s assume each of these has a destructive yield equivalent to just half a megaton of TNT. This means that when the shit hits the fan, the equivalent of about 1.5 billion tons of TNT is going to go BANG. The human population is currently at 8 billion, which suggests that on average there are 375 pounds of TNT out there with each of our names on it. Given how much damage a hand grenade can do, it would seem that 5 pounds of TNT would be more than enough to blow any one of us to smithereens. 375 pounds would blow each of us up 75 times. Do the loonies think any of us will care after the first time!
When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the Earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the Earth.
— Revelation 6:7–8 (New American Standard Bible)