Living in the ‘what if’ zone of nuclear war

There’s an irritating bit of news that has been floating around since nearly the beginning of the Russian war against Ukraine that erupted in earnest on February 24, 2022. Comrade Putin had a great plan in mind:

“Countrymen, the plan is to get right in, right out, and nobody gets hurt!!”

And the myriad of countrymen cried back: “Da, Tovarishch Presidente — right in, right out, nobody gets hurt!!”

All was going fine until the meddling Ukrainians barged in ruining any and all semblance of a plan and turning the whole ordeal into an obstreperous slugfest:

Ukrainian Soldier: “Look, you pig Russian, President Zelensky sends us with bats made of hard hickory wood!” — *crack*

Russian Soldier: “OW! boli mi Jako!” So what, you, Ukrainian pig, Putin sends us with even bigger sticks of hardwood!” — *SMACK*

Ukrainian Soldier: “— “OWWW, so much pain is that!! Oh, yes?? Well, the Americans gave us these metal rods of appreciable size and weight!” — *BOOOOONG*

Russian Soldier: “YOOOWWWW! — boli mi Jako Svyeti Gregogeorgević”

And so goes my slapstick description of the escalation of the war.

Related: Watch: How the Ukrainians are trolling the Russian military with the M142 HIMARS

Wars generally run the following course of events:

Provocation: Verbal Judo back and forth between potentially warring parties;

Preparation: Russia did this by moving a huge fighting force at its border with Ukraine, titling it a “military operation;”

Engagement: Combat between the two sides commences;

Escalation: The fighting spreads throughout the country with other nations choosing sides to fight with or supply with technology, information, and combat weapons systems;

End of hostilities: The eventual end of a war can be due to a final unilateral victory, pyrrhic victory, or stalemate such as exists in Korea to this day.

The media, Mother Mary bless them so, have provided us all with a portrait of President Vladimir Putin as a monster, or devil… perpetrator of some of the most grizzly crimes against humanity. Yeah, well, I’ll bet his grandmother thinks he’s innocent. You can see her stomping around St. Petersburg Square shouting to the tune: “Pu-pu is good boy, is vedy vedy good boy. Good boy is innocent — leave my Pu-pu in peace.

Some think that Putin might be threatening to conduct a nuclear strike on Ukraine. Now, that’s unnerving and horrifying. The war is already affecting large parts of the world. One nuclear detonation would likely mean, as is already clearly pronounced, a sting to the entire planet in the form of potential WWIII.

Related: Sabotage targets: A saboteur’s guide to targeting an invading force

Lord help us all

The very thought kinda makes you want to race to Walmart and hoard Charmin. Sales in single-family-style underground bomb shelters are sky-high. I don’t truly understand why anyone, in particular, would want to be the one to survive a nuclear holocaust. I surmise they envision themselves cracking open the hatch for the first time after a couple of months only to witness a barren planet blasted back to the stone age, and the unexpected Rachael Welch flailing by in a tight deer skin mini dress and blouse.

Moving now away from the indecorous musings of the Planet of the Apes, I have provided you with an example fallout simulation using an online software program. It allows us to pick any city in the world, and feed in numerous variables that simulate a detonation of a warhead over the city. Rather than use a random city, I chose to use Kiyv for the simulation below.

Kyiv-looking satellite imagery is based on the combined yield of the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs; that is 20-Kts (20,000 tons of TNT) yield for Nagasaki and 15-kts for Hiroshima for a total of 35,000 tons of combined yield dropping onto Kyiv.

The marginal data (along the right margin of the fallout indicator of the page) is important if you really want to get the best image of the event. No weather variables were factored in; such variables are of course key to the behavior of the blast fallout. Best estimates for time of year wind and weather are provided.

Air bursts occur at about 150 meters Above Ground Level (AGL) to ensure that we get the most bang for our buck from our device; this allows the bomb’s power to reach out and as far as possible. The fallout type depends on the composition of the pit which is the core of the bomb containing the fissile (explodable material), be it Uranium-235 (U-235), Plutonium-239 (PU239), or others.

We can see also in the fallout the wind direction variable is based on the prevailing wind at the time and location of the burst. This graph will show us how far downwind the fallout will travel and how far it will travel over X amount of time. Of course, the first city I used to practice with the fallout indicator was my own Albuquerque. I discovered that with all values set generically, my house fairly fully escapes the wrath of the weapon, but it will not survive the more realistic yields of modern weapons, which are more so measured in Megatons (MT).

Help us, oh Lord… don’t any of us want so much as a thang to do with no nuclear war!

By Almighty God and with Grace and Honor,

geo sends

Feature Image: Mushroom clouds of the Hiroshima (left) and subsequent Nagasaki (right) blasts reached 35,000 feet AGL and higher. (Wikimedia Commons)

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