Just days after China announced that it would double its nuclear arsenal to more than 1,000 warheads by 2030, Pentagon officials revealed plans Tuesday for a new nuclear gravity bomb that would be 24 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. By Thursday, President Vladimir Putin had signed a bill withdrawing Russia from its inclusion in a global nuclear test ban — which was followed this week by a test launch from one of its submarines of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. That means, by default, the U.S. is also no longer part of the treaty, meaning we could once more begin dropping bombs in the New Mexico desert, à la “Oppenheimer,” though (thankfully) no such plans have been announced.
What (and I say this with all due respect) in the actual f**k is going on here? Is the world teetering off the edge? The hows are easier to explain than the whys when it comes to all this madness, so let’s start there.
The plans for a new nuke were rolled out almost exactly a year after the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review was published, which advocated for a bigger US nuclear flex to compete with the stockpile they estimated China would have built by 2030. As it turns out, that Chinese stockpile is getting much bigger, much faster than we thought — with “more than 500 operational nuclear warheads” as of May.
“At a time of rising nuclear risks, a partial refurbishment strategy no longer serves our interests,” the DOD said in the report. “We must develop and field a balanced, flexible stockpile capable of [competing with] threats, responding to uncertainty, and maintaining effectiveness.”
And the grand strategy announced this week to address these concerns? A brand new nuclear bomb — a “free-fall bomb” or “dumb bomb” known as the B61-13 — that, with the twist of a dial, would be capable of delivering instant mass destruction even deeper underground than previous bombs. And it would cost a mere $10 billion to develop if approved by Congress.
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“While the B61-13 will provide the President with additional options against certain harder and large-area military targets, the Department of Defense will separately continue its work to complete and implement a comprehensive strategy for defeat of hard and deeply buried targets, as directed in the Nuclear Posture Review,” the DOD said in an Oct. 27 release.
The biggest difference between the B61-13 and the US current stockpile of B61-12s (which the new bombs would partially replace) is in the 13’s ability to kill thousands more people in the blink of an eye by offering more kilotons if desired.
A brand new nuclear bomb that, with the twist of a dial, would be capable of delivering instant mass destruction even deeper underground than previous bombs.
What’s a kiloton? It’s roughly how much explosive force a bomb provides compared to a ton of TNT. Bombs can be dialed before being dropped, and the B61-12 can be dialed to cause an explosion anywhere from 0.3 to 50 kilotons in force. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, and killed upwards of 146,000 people between its immediate impact and after effects. America killed another 80,000 people when we dropped our 20-kiloton bomb on Nagasaki. The B61-13 is designed to yield an explosive force of anywhere between 10 kilotons to 360 kilotons.
As Popular Science’s Kelsey Atherton reports in her surgical explainer, a 50 kiloton warhead in lower Manhattan would kill an estimated 273,000 people. A 360 kiloton bomb would kill about 778,000, injure about 1,045,000 and have a radioactive plume that would stretch as far as Lowell, Mass.
Right now, the US’ overall stockpile of nukes is at 5,428 according to the Federation of American Scientists. Meanwhile, it estimates that Russia is holding about 5,977. The two account for 89% of the world’s total stockpile. Even if China has 500 nukes right now, in what hell-world would the US President need “additional options” for mass destruction while Russia is so visibly on edge?
As Francois Diaz-Maurin writes for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists — the keepers of the famous Doomsday Clock — the real danger is perhaps less in the Chinese stockpile than it is in the US’ obsession with being able to kill the most people with a single bomb.
“In aggressively pursuing capability surges alone, the United States may end up on the wrong side of the stability-instability paradox, risking escalation to nuclear war — intentional or not — through an overreliance on introducing untested or provocative technologies,” Diaz-Maurin writes.
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“Instead, a stronger US strategy for responding to the challenge posed by China’s growing arsenal should be for the United States to supplement military capability by building multiple levels of mutual understanding and routes toward risk reduction across the Pacific. These measures must be implemented urgently and certainly before a crisis forces China and the United States to seriously test their nuclear deterrence relationship.”
I’m with Diaz-Maurin here. A brand new, $10-billion world-ender isn’t the “additional option” the US needs if it wants to ensure national security. Or world security.
You don’t have to nuke a country to watch it collapse.
America’s homeless population ranges between 500,000 and 600,000 depending on who’s counting, with roughly two-thirds of houseless people sleeping in shelters. Across the world, we’ve been able to count 6,974,473 deaths from COVID-19, with at least 1.1 million of those deaths on US soil. Meanwhile, our maternal mortality rates are barbaric, our infant deaths are surging, and the leading cause of children’s death in the US are the guns we refuse to regulate. If the kids make it into their teens, they’re twice as likely these days to kill themselves — and so are we, with suicide now the second leading cause of death among most adults.
You don’t have to nuke a country to watch it collapse. All you have to do is give its citizens’ taxes over to corporate profiteering instead of building a safety net with them, then deregulate and privatize every sector and industry you can. If Russia and China want to see the US fall from power, they don’t have to fire a single shot. All they have to do is what they’re best at: playing the long game. Given the way the U.S. treats its people and its democratic institutions, any country that wants to see us fail only has to sit back and watch.
If we are solving for issues of global security and stability, the “additional option” we need isn’t the ability to commit an unprecedented war crime and indiscriminately murder more than a million people in an instant flash of blinding nuclear devastation; it’s a $10-billion investment in food, shelter, medicine, clean air and water — and, apparently, conscience.
An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.
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