Tag: Nuclear Weapons

Review: Cataclysm

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Cataclysm: A Matt Sheridan Novel

Robert Cole’s Cataclysm is a story of post-apocalyptic survival as a man and his family struggle in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange-I mean, terrorist attack. I have to mention this “night of the war” (to use the Survivalist’s term). Because not since the beginning Fuldapocalyptic days of The Red Line have I seen a setup so contrived when it didn’t have to be. In fact, The Red Line can at least be excused as commercial editors wanting it to be contemporary for sales reasons.

This independent novel has no such justification. Anyway, might as well tell this. So nuclear weapons destroy many American major cities in a strike that’s more than Arc Light but less than a classic Strangelove/North Star wipeout. That’s not so bad and I’d even call it somewhat refreshing to have some semblance of a government left. Except it’s not the obvious normal nuclear war. No, its setup goes like this: Islamic terrorists snuck nuclear bombs into said cities and detonated them. In response, the American government launched an immediate retaliatory strike against the fifty largest Muslim-majority cities across the world before concentrating on licking its worlds.

It feels gratuitous, and even for me a little insulting a setup. Like you could have just had say, Iran go nuclear, get several ICBMs, and have a “normal” exchange with them and no one would bat an eye.

Anyway, the book itself has a lot of exposition about every single slightly relevant thing. It also has constant references to the author’s protagonist’s “past wargames”, which makes this turn into the Survivalist-Kirov (this is not a bad thing).

The next arc is terrorist weaponized mega-smallpox, because one cheap thriller cliche wasn’t enough and Cole had to include another one. All he needed was VX gas for the Cheap Thriller WMD Triple Crown. But he goes for the second-best thing, and a tried and true literary device: When in doubt, have your characters fight a bunch of crazy bikers. In fact, such a super-biker gang becomes the main antagonists, a delightful change from the terrorists I was expecting.

The literary and action fundamentals are adequate. This sounds like passive-aggressiveness, but it’s not. Thankfully, the whole leaning so much into “Postapocalyptic Kirov” and huge expositions come across as endearing and not annoying. I had a lot of fun reading this book, and that’s what matters.

Review: Inheriting the Bomb

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Inheriting The Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine

I’ve looked forward to few nonfiction books as much as I anticipated reading Marina Budjeryn’s Inheriting The Bomb, about how nuclear weapons were removed from Ukraine after the USSR’s breakup (the word choice is deliberate). I was not disappointed. This is an amazing book that can for all intents and purposes clear up the “could Ukraine have kept its nukes” confusion.

I’ve already posted about WMDs and the non-Russian SSRs. Short answer is “They never had control or the necessary pieces to maintain the arsenal of nuclear weapons on their territory, but they nonetheless had the raw technical ability to make an arsenal”. Raw technical ability but little else. Budjeryn doesn’t go into that much detail on counterfactuals (though she does wisely defer to credible experts in that regard and cites them).

She does go into lots and lots of detail on the political twists and turns and not just for Ukraine itself. Yet it was far more reticent than Belarus or Kazakhstan were and viewed itself as a legitimate holder of the weapons. Factors from the fact that Russia was threatening Ukraine almost literally from day one (and by Yeltsin officials and not Zhirinovsky-ist fireeaters) to the desire to preserve jobs in the giant Dnepropetrovsk missile plant are mentioned. This is a great, indispensable book about a very important topic, and I cannot recommend it enough.

A Thousand Words: Fat Man And Little Boy

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Fat Man And Little Boy

Before there was Oppenheimer, there was 1989’s Fat Man and Little Boy, a far less well received movie about the development of the nuclear bomb starring Paul Newman as Leslie Groves and Dwight Schultz as Robert Oppenheimer. Knowing its reputation and knowing my interest in the subject matter, I felt I had to check it out.

Most of the critiques are accurate. The movie does treat the making of the nuclear bomb as a hokey war movie with Newman and Schultz as the cliche general and scientist right out of central casting. The movie is VERY clear on what side its makers are taking in the debate about nuclear weapons (it’s uh, not that of Curtis Lemay) and is not subtle in its points. And yes, it’s historically inaccurate in many ways.

Yet it’s still better than I thought it would be. For all those legitimate issues, it’s a technically well made movie. It may be a hokey war movie, but its direction and (especially) sets are solid. Even the final scene when the bomb finally detonates (spoiler) is interesting in that the filmakers obviously knew they couldn’t do the explosion justice with the effects of the time so they chose an indirect vision that’s surprisingly effective.

It’s not the best film ever, but it doesn’t quite deserve the scorn its gotten. Plus Ennio Morricone’s score is typically amazing.

Nuclear Terrorism Cont.

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Back to my “hypothetical nuclear terrorism” reading, and some of the analyses have given me this impression.

So there are some ifs beyond the norm that actually make it more likely. Besides the usual “if you have the resources and personnel for the job”, there’s two things that make the job of the would-be nuclear terrorist easier and their opponents harder.

  • Being willing to take the hit of large and likely fatal amounts of radiation during transportation and construction. This is pretty self-explanatory, especially when using comparably “fresh” (and thus high radiation) spent power reactor fuel as an input.
  • Being willing to detonate the bomb in a target area closer to the assembly site, even if it’s less damaging and/or prestigious.

However, this narrows the personnel pool even more. It may be a slight narrowing, but it’s still a narrowing. It’s also worth noting that the first point makes a “factory accident” a lot more likely, perhaps countering the advantage of fanaticism.

How To Nuke

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How much nuke-metal can you get out of Reactor X? As it turned out, nuclear proliferation scholar David Albright came up with an oversimplified rough formula, which he wrote in a briefing.

You need:

  1. The thermal energy created by the reactor. Note that thermal megawatts are different and greater than electrical megawatts.
  2. The capacity factor. As I’m not any kind of scientist, I would say just go with Albright’s recommendations or make it even lower than 0.5 if you’re using a press-ganged power reactor to simulate the extra work needed.
  3. The conversion factor. This is obvious in the slide for purpose-built production reactors, but for adapted ones, you need to look a little deeper. Fortunately, the same presentation has a comparative slide.

(Again, do not quote me on this. The very presentation says “this is for production not adapted reactors”, but oh well.)

So:

200mw production reactor: 200×0.6x365x.85=37kg of weapons grade plutonium in a year.

Adapted LWR power reactor: 1,400 mwth, wastage: 1400×0.35x365x.51= 91.2 kg of weapons grade plutonium in a year.

A Fat Man-level warhead is estimated to need anything from 6.5 kg (very low technology, used in said bomb itself) to 3kg. See here and here.

Review: Nixon’s War

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Nixon’s War

Rick Kester’s Nixon’s War is one in an “alternate presidents” series of alternate history novels. How is it? Well, uh, not very good.

This alternate Cuban Missile Crisis gone hot starts in a conference room. And continues in a conference room. I can sympathize trying to balance exposition with storytelling (after all I’ve had to do it myself many times). This doesn’t really strike a balance. Especially as it jumps to everyone from Lee Harvey Oswald to Elvis Presley to random civilians. All of whom talk like they were in a conference room.

(There’s a lot of exposition, ok?)

Anyway, the B-59 goes ahead with the nuclear torpedo launch that it avoided in real life, and World War III begins. This is at least a slight improvement over the conference room mania, simply because you can’t make a nuclear war completely boring. However, the exposition continues apace. Worse, it’s not even accurate as constant references to “5.7mm” bullets are made, a caliber that didn’t come into being until decades after the events of the book. And apparently the US Army is adopting the Browning Hi-Power (I guess the author likes FN weapons?)

The last third of the story propery after the (realistically) skewed war is mostly just people bumbling around in an uninteresting fashion. The reader is treated to philisophical debates and infodumps on everything from child care policy to plutonium reactors. In fact, the final section of the book is nothing but historical exposition. And this isn’t a small afterward-it’s about a quarter of the whole thing!

I don’t want to be too hard on this book. It does sincerely try to have a wide variety of characters reacting to World War III, does have a large number of battles, and tries to be a good “big war thriller”. It just doesn’t really succeed, which is a shame.

Review: Cody’s Return

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Cody’s Return

Stephen Mertz was the main man behind the “Jim Case” pen name adorning the front of the Cody’s Army books in the 1980s. Since he didn’t have the exact rights to the men’s adventure stories featuring John Cody, he made a new character named (brace yourself) – Jack Cody! Who also had thrilling action adventures! What a coincidence! The late Chet Cunningham did something similar with “SEAL Team Twenty”, and it predates self-publishing by quite a bit when authors worked for multiple firms. (In fact, there were times when the throwaway series couldn’t even keep the main character’s name consistent!)

Cody’s Return, in spite of what the name implies, is not the first book in the series. It is, however, the first book in a self-declared trilogy that centers around a crazed arms dealer and his even more crazed girlfriend/cult leader.

The thing about the original Cody’s Army was that, with some exceptions, it was very much a middle of the road series that had all the weaknesses of its format. Which is to say that something like a classic men’s adventure novel is extremely shallow even by cheap thriller standards. And this is the case here as well. This isn’t always a bad thing, but it does make it hard to pick one over another.

What makes this worse is that the book is aiming for a huge plot that it’s trying to stuff into too few pages. I get it’s the intended beginning of a trilogy where the author has complete control, but even in that circumstance it still feels too poorly done. Which is a shame. The plot of nukes, crazies, and colorful characters is something that almost needed a meatier book to do right.

Mertz is a champion of the genre, but he’s done better.

The Non-Russian SSRs and nuclear weapons

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There is one argument, especially after the 2022 invasion, about Ukraine (and the other non-Russian ex-SSRs) and nuclear weapons. This goes: They gave up their nuclear weapons in exchange for largely meaningless and unenforceable diplomatic agreements, which was a mistake that Ukraine paid for and Kazakhstan might have.

Many informed nuclear commentators have pointed out that the launch codes/infrastructure were still in Russian hands, that Ukraine had no actual control, and that the ICBMs in particular were ill-positioned for deterring their former owners. This is all accurate, as is the staggering cost of making a usable nuclear program during a time of massive political and economic upheaval (Ukraine’s implosion in the 1990s made Russia’s look like a modest recession, and Kazakhstan had effectively no army of its own immediately after independence)

But there is another opposite fallacy, which is that the decision was more or less out of their hands. Because all the nuclear weapons were under Russian control, there was no real choice involved. This is also flawed. The nuclear weapons weren’t immediately usable, but to act like there was a Ward Of Russianism on them is wrong. Ukraine had extensive infrastructure and science on its territory (including a missile plant), while Kazakhstan’s uranium industry meant that it was already over the biggest hump for a usable bomb-the materials.

So it was not technically impossible for the non-Russian SSRs to maintain a nuclear weapons program. You can argue that it was politically and economically so, and probably correctly. But it was not a technical issue. The republics had agency, and they likely prevented a far earlier Russian invasion by relenting.

Review: C3

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C3: Nuclear Command, Control, Cooperation

Written by former Strategic Rocket Forces officer Valery Yarynich, 2003’s C3 is an in-depth look at Cold War (and beyond) nuclear war command systems and their hazards. Although having access to then-secret info in Soviet times, Yarynich was no Viktor Suvorov and did not sensationalize (in fact, he provided one of the first detailed and level-headed descriptions of the infamous Perimetr/Dead Hand system). The result is one of the best nonfiction books on nuclear war that I’ve read.

As it is written by a former Soviet officer, you do get waves and waves of charts and equations that attempt to quantify something relating to military technology. But you also get lots of clear, simple explanations that make a layperson able to understand this well. In terms of everything from organizational charts to what the “nuclear briefcase” even is to why scissors were found to be a weak link in the command chain (seriously), it’s incredibly illuminating.

If you have any interest in nuclear war or command systems whatsoever, I highly recommend this book. I’ll also just say that it’s an excellent research resource…

Review: The Death of Russia

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The Death of Russia

It’s uncommon but not unheard of for a book to have its premise done better by something else in more or less every single way possible. So is the case with The Death of Russia, an alternate history story told through exposition and snippets about Yeltsin dying in the early 1990s and the world sinking into chaos. AH enthusiasts will also know that Zhirinovsky’s Russian Empire was another alternate history story told through exposition and snippets about Yeltsin dying in the early 1990s and the world sinking into chaos. Both started off as forum timelines and then were commercialized.

The first issue one notices is the writing style. Namely, giant breathless blocks of text. The timeline tries to do the “snippets from in-universe books and the like”, but this falls flat because all the “sources” read exactly the same. The second issue is the relentless grimdarkness. While based on stuff that sadly did happen, this just feels gratuitous. There being no real characters or anything but pure exposition makes both problems all the worse.

Eventually things spiral into a nuclear World War III. However, it’s worth noting that a fake interview with Evangelion’s producer starts off the chapter in question. Since pop culture is an obsession of the online AH fandom, this is not exactly a good start. The strike itself is no Arc Light or Red Hammer 1994. I actually fell annoyed at how a (mostly) survivable nuclear war, a topic that fascinates me, was handled so badly. It’s handled with all the grace of a minor league sportsball game report. Namely, a minor league game report written by an basic computer program that saw the box score.

In fact, what’s honestly interesting about the final nuclear exchange, besides the teeth-gritting “it doesn’t work like that” inaccuracies, is how it demonstrates a critique I’ve had for a while now. In the footnotes, the author doesn’t cite those two novels, or any real study on a limited/counterforce-heavy big nuclear strike that would leave society survivable. No, it’s another timeline, an earlier one called Able Archer 83.

But for any normal reading, I’d just say “read Zhirinovsky’s Russian Empire instead”.