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Radio War Nerd #349 — Tactical Nukes (Patreon)

Published:
2022-10-14 21:42:45
Imported:
2026-06
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Recorded: October 12, 2022

The Nerd & Ames discuss tactical nukes — such as they are a thing — from the Cold War, through Putin's maybe/maybe not-bluffing.

Total time: 1:42:48

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Mark Ames

We talk about it in more detail in ep 110 (if I'm not mistaken)

Yairo Martis

Look at that Davey Crockett...

grey

Everything new thing that Russia has tried i.e. the mobilization, has me scratching my head as to why didnt they just do it on day 1? Like you'd think the disasters in Chechnya might've taught them something. Its also kind of embarassing for Russians to be outnumbered. Like dont they have a reputation to uphold? At least to their neighbours? Is it 2022 and countries are still seriously doing the whole 'we'll be home by christmas/one swift kick and the enemy army will just collapse'.

NYCM&AHole

The way the krauts bundle up at 55 degrees, they’re gonna turn into krautcicles this winter

etienne

the cool thing about Origin is that it's so over the top that even normies *get it*

NYCM&AHole

I saw them at some bar almost 20 years ago. Good stuff.

etienne

I found out about them while participating in a double decker wall of death

William

How many wars started with people thinking it would be over soon

William

The Ukraine -Russia conflict is difficult to follow, mostly because you want to balance out the Russian accounts with Ukraine ones, but the Ukraine/NATO accounts all so incredibly shitty you never get any info let alone balanced

xxx

Denial is a hell of a drug

Jon

Good conversation but for an hour 42 minutes recorded on Oct. 12 it felt like there is a lot you guys are avoiding discussing despite the episode largely dealing with current events. Hopefully next time you'll release the elephant herd before it fills the whole room.

PW

Happily only the Northern Hemisphere would be uninhabitable after a Nuclear Exchange. So brush up an your Spanish and prepare to drag South America into the 21st Century fellow Colonists!

Your Guide AL

Didnt Baltimore get nuked in Tom Clancy's Sum Of All Fears?

Jacob Kreier

Yeah it's really weird that all these Eurasianist/anti-globalist quasi fascists of the russian right wing offer vastly more reliably information than any liberal media source

Of course

That's called "urban renewal"

Of course

There's not much to follow. No need for data as such. The nature of things is pretty obvious. A collapsing and delegitimized capitalist state haplessly run by a quasi-demented gerontocracy deeply resentful of its oncoming personal and collective demise spitefully wishes to take everyone to the grave with them. Europe's declining aristocracy right before WW1 had much the same death drive. The Ukraine, Taiwan, Pussy Riot, Uygurs, Cloudstrike's report, computer chip supremacy... so many great justifications for ending it all.

WarOn WarOff

As an Army brat in (West) Germany (1967-197 I) I had the distinct impression we were cannon fodder.

William

According to the pro/leans Russia folk, the mobilization and the installation of the new general in charge of the SMO (also guy in charge in Syria around '17ish?) Is going to align with Ukraine being in a position where they've lost a lot of armor, vehicles, and artillery. With Ukr weak and Russia strengthened, the tides will turn. Will they? Who knows, but Russian accounts giving a lot more to go off of than brain dead lib accounts crowing, "stick a fork in him, Putin's DONE" whenever 1 HIMARS missile hits Russian occupied territory

Jacob Kreier

The Davy Crockett had a yield of 20 tons of TNT, not Kilotons, the explosive radius was pretty negligible, it would probably blow up one or two buildings around ground zero, but the radiation would have killed everyone within a 200 meter radius of the explosion. The idea was to shoot it at a group of tanks and hopefully kill everyone inside.

William

Addendum to the cheerful note the episode ended on: American elites don't even understand everyday Americans

xxx

You can find bad takes on both sides. RWN hasn't been an exception unfortunately.

Wooobie

John/Gary, As a child I once had a fever dream in which I was an ordinary framed house, equipped with a cellar door, and seen in the third-person outside my "body" as if by night vision camera. A pack of gray wolves gathered in the yard around me. I reassured myself with a reminder that my foundation was built unusually deep so the wolves could not dig into the basement.

Bryan Nicholson

Great episode, fellas. John is always at his best contemplating mass murder and Cold War idiocy, and Mark’s designation of Ukraine as the “graveyard of predictions” is a keeper. The thought of nuclear immolation warded off the pre-dawn chill of a Midwestern autumn while I walked my dog. But lol, have Brendan edit out the dig at 1997’s Peacemaker film if you ever plan to invite the Cockburns back to the show.

j

Germans loving the greens more really?? No one I know…. But that is what NATO would love you to believe…. The Duran and Tom Luongo have interesting versions on geo politics and economics, would love to hear a discussion with them to get even better overview.

Elliot Gorokhovsky

Mark and John don't understand why Putin would bring out tactical nukes. He would use them to take out bridges etc in Western Ukraine which are used for transporting military aid from the West. Too expensive to take them out with conventional missiles, you have to send a huge number of missiles to take out one bridge.

William

Seems like you don't know either - using a nuke is "cheaper" than conventional missiles? The only way you could think that is of you ignored every intangible cost and only added up cost of materials, fuel, etc.

xxx

I thought this was a really good episode. The point about the struggle to not normalize nuclear weapons was a really good one. We'd be in a totally different world if MacArthur got his way and the US used nukes just because. Also: Tactical nukes are small, in the double digit TONS of yield, not kilotons. The Davey Crockett nuke, pictured above, was a 20T yield nuclear weapon.

Elliot Gorokhovsky

I'm not an expert. This is just what I heard. But it makes sense if they have a limited supply of missiles. If you have to send 20 missiles at each bridge that would add up

Elliot Gorokhovsky

Ya I think they said in the episode that Davy Crockett is 20 KILOtons, more than Hiroshima. 20 tons is the same order of magnitude as the MOAB Trump dropped in Afghanistan

xxx

Right exactly. That's a good comparison with MOAB. (Such a stupid name BTW.) A tactical nuke could blow up like a city block, a bridge or a small segment of trenches vs. a kiloton nuke which would take out a city center. Hiroshima: ~15000T Nagasaki: ~20000T Davey Crockett: 20T

J P 3

Even if Russia just does a nuclear demonstration on a place like Snake Island, my sense is that it would probably be sufficient to push countries like India and China from a position of passive disagreement over the war, to one of open condemnation against Russia. Victor Orban's position inside the EU would almost certainly become untenable. It's not really clear how Russian war aims inside Ukraine would be made more achievable by an even higher degree of diplomatic and economic isolation.

Jackm

re whether a winter-long energy crisis will shift German public opinion in the direction “the Russians are hoping for”—does John and Mark’s take here assume the Russians blew-up Nordstream? Honest question because I don’t know whether they addressed the sabotage in an earlier episode. I think the best way to defend the NATO side of this gigantic human catastrophe is by giving the USA credit for pulling off such a complex, multifaceted maneuver to breathe life into their waning hegemony. A surprising number of my most loved sources have been fudging the characterization of the conflict. Kudos, Sleepy Joe?

radiowarnerd

Your dreams are much more fun than mine! All I get is angry scribbles.

Dan Kolbert

Loose nukes! The memories come flooding back.

Jason Thompson

About psychedelics: idk, though I’ve only taken LSD once (not counting one time that didn’t really take hold) I thought it was pretty great! I was sure some dark evil stuff was going to come up from my subconscious but it was a pleasantly weird experience of disassociation and ‘literalized metaphors.’ I could see how it would have been terrifying if you’d been dosed without knowing though! I guess I rolled the dice well. 🤷‍♀️ Anyway *ecstasy* is the one greatest drug in creation IMHO

Doug Cartel

Maybe the NATO bureaucracy is united, but everything I see about the EU looks messy as hell. Poland is arguing with everyone, Scotland's talking about another referendum, hungary is bowing out of every EU sanction, turkey is being Turkey- if europe holds together it will be in spite of all the drama everyone is stirring up.

Hans Anders

There was a real sense of inevitability about nuclear war in Europe in the eighties. Dutch ska band Doe Maar had a song called “the Bomb” which was about the futility of making a career if the bomb was going to fall anyway. https://youtu.be/Jw9i0bu7PyQ

P. Shaver

Mark did make a prediction. He said Russia was setting the stage for an eventual withdrawal.

Nick B.

The brother who would have refuted the "I am become death" quote would have been Frank Oppenheimer, a peer of his on the Manhattan project and the founder of the famous bay area museum, the Exploratorium