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Radio War Nerd EP #382 — Brief History of Nukes, feat. Annibale (Patreon)

Published:
2023-06-13 02:21:57
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2026-06
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Content

Guest: Annibale

Recorded: June 8, 2023

Last year, Conventional Wisdom had it that Putin might drop a nuke on Ukraine as Russia's military seemed to implode; this year, Conventional Wisdom says only dupes worry about Russian nukes. We talk to RWN favorite Annibale about the history & science of nukes so that you know whether you can sleep easy on those nuke fears, or freak the fuck out (spoiler: you should do both, simultaneously).

More episodes with Annibale:-EP #348 — Italian Elections, Giorgia Meloni & Neofascism-EP #284 & #286 — The XB-70 Valkyrie-The Years Of Lead Series:-EP #134: Post-War Italy: Prequel to Years Of Lead-EP #135: Years Of Lead, Part 1-EP #136: Years Of Lead, Part 2: Red Brigades & Aldo Moro-EP #139: Years Of Lead, Part 3: Ustica Downing, Bologna Massacre & the Radical Implosion

-Also check out RWN EP #44: Nukes, with Dr. Sunil Sainis 

Total time: 1:40:36

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

*NEW!! Buy John Dolan's comic memoir "Pleasant Hell" now available in both audio and ebook format here.

Sound production by Telescope Audio Studios

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

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Comments

Neil Jones

😮😱🤩😳😽😭🚬🚬🚬

NYCM&AHole

Damn I wanted annibale to weigh in on Berlusconi going to the great bunga bunga Party in the sky

Dongo

Hearing that Annibale is a 40K fan is great. Hearing him say “Everybody Gangsta till the Cathedral starts to move” is just pure joy lol

Gordon Schmidt

Nuclear weapons are the scariest thing mankind has invented. From time to time- not regularly, but maybe a couple times year- I have dreams about nuclear war. And that's no Cold War nostalgia- I was born in 97. The more you read about what a nuclear war would look like the scarier it becomes. We'd be so much better off without the damn things. That said, I don't think we need to worry about Putin (or anyone else) using them anytime soon. There's very little to be gained and an enormous amount to be lost in doing so, especially for Putin. China has been explicit that they do not want to see the war in Ukraine go nuclear. I'm no fan of the CCP but the warning they gave Russia over that was very refreshing, and I respect them a lot for it

blazed uncle

I’m not a nuclear physicist but I studied physics, did nuclear physics lab research, and have done a great deal of reading about nuclear weapons and so far as I can tell Annibale really knows his stuff.

NYCM&AHole

I know way too much because not much of this is new to me. Go weird childhood obsessions.

CR

I’m sure there’s an innumerable amount of us dorks who can advise you on a decent modem situation.

HarshMalarkey

Excited to find out which country Annibale thinks should be nuked.

Ander Pierce

I appreciate 'non-first use' policy.

Annibale

I make a mistake at certain point calling Caesium 137 "Caesium 132" and Strontium 90 "Strontium 30". Sorry about this!

a clash of purple

No, there's a couple of brands of ideology that are scarier than nukes. Capitalism topping the list. We've somehow managed to avoid nuclear armageddon so far, after all, but we're well on track to destroying ourselves thanks to the logic of capitalism.

a clash of purple

Sees a new RWN episode > "Oo, have to listen to that when I have a chance." Sees "feat. Annibale" > Smash that play button (well, actually I always listen to the direct link .mp3), is immediately rewarded by Annibale's take on Warhammer 40,000.

a clash of purple

You know, it might be unironically worth RWN doing an episode on Warhammer 40,000. I'm not just saying that because I want to hear their reactions to the Eldar (Tolkien Elves in space) and the Orks (what if the football hooligans they discussed with Aamer reproduced via spores and made deadly war machines out of scrap metal and garbage).

Lo

MOTHERFUCKING TITANS

Al Goehring

Habemus imperator: Annibale!!!!

Doug Cartel

The only good thing about this new assault by Ukraine is that we get some funny twitter posts of guys who sat in MRAPs for 12 hours a day in Afghanistan going "we didnt tell them to do that!" when they see pictures of whole companies of Bradley IFVs just singed and rusting in the open. The Russians and Ukrainians are the only ones to ever fight a war like this and here NATO doofuses are like "well if it were me I would have just driven over the mines."

Matt McCartney

I don't think that anybody on the planet would have predicted that the third use of a nuclear weapon in anger would be by Belarus, but here we are. Putin's loophole: "Don't blame me. It was that nut job Lukashenko."

Al Goehring

I misheard “st***zium” as in you have to be a “jerk” to even use such materials for warfare

NYCM&AHole

I guess that’s why we took the jupiters out of Turkey? Also then he has the nickname nukeashenko

Jaime Christley

I believe someone on a previous RWN episode recommended American Midnight, and I just wanted to say thanks! Also whew Nellie it’s grim. Taking breaks to watch some Bela Tarr movies to lighten my mood.

Karl Childers

https://youtu.be/8uIPQBOCJ64 ^ supplemental video, by far the most comprehensive and approachable explanation of nuclear weapons technology for the layman that i've ever seen, strong recommend if you have the time and interest.

Demented Avenger

I'm just burnin', doin' the neutron dance. I couldn't help it; I grew up in the Eighties.

Jonathan Penn

Unfortunately not the strongest of the Annibale episodes. Isotopes, as in U238 and U235, could have been more simply and more clearly explained. The difficulty in obtaining fissile material- Uranium is mostly U238 and enriching it to military levels of U235(85%+) is a difficult and expensive proposition- should have been discussed. Getting PU from irradiated slugs of U238 is chemically difficult, incredibly dangerous and leaves a huge, un-cleanable mess (see the recent NYT article about cleaning up the Hanford Reservation in WA-not going to occur in the next 100 years!) The ABM treaty and its abrogation was a disaster for both the US and Russia, but no one is afraid that the current US anti-ballistic missile systems would actually suffice to defeat any reasonable first strike. There are not that many interceptors (I believe the total is still less than 70 over all sites and their performance in tests has been awful on a good day- I doubt that Russia will hang a radar reflector from their warheads, which is the only time these interceptors seem to hit anything!) Airbursts have less fallout than ground bursts, but there is definitely fallout from both. Hiroshima was a well-placed airbursts and tens of thousands of people died from radiation in the weeks thereafter. The real terror of nukes is both that we have become very blase about their existence and their possible use and that they are under the control of people like Trump and Putin. Sooner or later, people like that make bad mistakes.

T

All the nuke talk is just to keep the baby boomers reading the failing news papers. If the life of the baby boomers is a story, then “The Bomb” is chekovs gun, hung on the wall in act one that must go off in the third act. The boomers are now in act three, and all the talk of nuclear war is tickling the part of their brains that respond to the three act story structure.

Bryan Gross

ngl hearing Annibale talk about Warhammer put a huge grin on my face, been a fan for years for the unfamiliar I thought they would get a kick out of the opening text that appears in every core rulebook for the tabletop game and every novel published in the universe: "It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor of Mankind has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the vast Imperium of Man for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day so that He may never truly die. Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defense forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat to humanity from aliens, heretics, mutants — and far, far worse. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."

Annibale

Hi Jonathan 1) any difficult subject like nuclear weapon could be explained more thoroughly, but given the time limit there was only a certain amount of detail we could give, and while going through the details of the periodic table or the the gaseous diffusion enrichment process could be interesting, it wasn't simply possible 2) Radiation casualties in Hiroshima had almost nothing to do with fallout: they were overwhelmingly people who got lethal/severe doses of "prompt radiation", thus highly penetrating gamma rays and neutron radiation emitted at the moment of the blast that can be fatal if you're close to the explosion and in the open. Prompt radiation poisoning is an effect of any low yeld nuke but it becomes less relevant when the yeld increases (for the simple and grim reason that the blast and the thermal radiation will kill anyone who's close enough to ground zero to get irradiated. Nuclear fallout is a completely different type of hazard, as it's alpha particle emitting material either activated by neutron bombardment or residual fissile material mixed with solid particles suspended in the air. Alpha radiation has very low penetration (a piece of paper or your own skin will stop it) but it's incredibly nasty if alpha emitting material is ingested or inhaled in large quantities. This is a long term hazard that was not seen in Hiroshima if not in very modest quantities 2) Uranium refining and plutonium manufacturing are complex and potentially dangerous processes if done sloppily, but their technology is now well understood and cannot be compared with what was done in Hanford 60 years ago. It's still a challenge but a very different one 3) ABM treaties work in the opposite way as you describe. An ABM system doesn't prevent your opponent to launch a first strike, but could (at least in theory) take most of the sting off a retaliatory second strike if YOU are the one who's striking first. This used to be a very unlikely possibility, but fast increase in technology have changed that landscape and the certainity of MAD it's not a dogma anymore. The problem as usual is political, not technical: if you're retiring from an ABM treaty it means you're considering seriously an ABM strategy, and ABM works to prevent a second strike, not a sneak first strike. It's a strong political signal 4) I've no simpathy for Putin or Trump, but for what we currently know nor the US president nor the Russian one can order a first strike against another country in full autonomy. They can both authorize a second strike if their respective countries are under attack, but it's not a one man show were the president push a button and that's it. The escalation danger is very very real, but it's systemic, not dependent by the whims of a single individual (this is more true for Russia than the US because they inherited the Soviet nuclear activation system, which was designed to minimize the possibility of a single individual irrevocably initiating or escalating the launch procedure)

Jonathan Penn

Annibale- I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on the purpose of the U.S.' current ABM systems. It was billed as a way of countering a strike from a "rogue nation" (read North Korea) and was never going to be large enough or competent enough to affect any of Russia's nuclear strategies. Further, as I state in my first email, and recommend following in Aviation Week and Space Technology, the various tests of the system have been something of a long-running joke. Indeed, in some of the early tests, radar corners were placed on the targets. Would that Russia would be so cooperative. The ABM system is primarily a defense boondoggle-never meant to be used but a wonderful way to shift another slew of billions to defense contractors. With respect to "one man" activation, I can recommend the book "Thermonuclear Monarchy" by Elaine Scarry. The US Constitution was never designed to handle a surprise attack by nuclear forces and the power to respond lies largely in the president. Considering the mediocrities we have had as president in the past decades, not a good situation. Re) processing materials- very little has changed since Hanford vis-a-vis PU refining. The only reason it is less of a problem currently is both Russia and the US have such vast amounts of PU available from decommissioned older weapons that no new refining is needed. Old warhead cores are simply going to be re-manufactured, which will create quite enough new mess. Still the same old messy process otherwise and still no way to clean up the resultant witches' brew of radionucleotides, toxic chemicals, etc. And even the airburst of Hiroshima resulted in a vast amount of soil, ash, etc. being swept up and becoming irradiated in the resultant mushroom cloud. There are many things nukes are, but clean is not one of them and people were dying of fallout induced radiation illnesses for years after the blast. Yes, most of the radiation casualties were from the initial burst but fallout even in the relatively clean airburst was still a matter of thousands of deaths. A discussion of nuclear war strategies would be interesting, but I still think the best summation of such a discussion comes from the computer in the mediocre film, "War Games." After running through thousands of different strategies in virtual simulations, the computer states, "This isa strange game" in which "the only winning move is not to play." I hope we take that conclusion seriously.

Jason Thompson

I know. My love for Annibale just leveled up (and I’m more a D&D than 40K guy)

William

Anyone who thinks Trump is worse than Biden is not only severely mistaken, but just hasn’t been paying attention. The real terror is that people like you will find a way to talk themselves into believing their country is justified in the use of nuclear arms for stupid reasons

St. Leibowitz

Hey Dr. Dolan mentioned my favorite book

Jacob Kreier

"Nuclear War Survival Skills" by Cresson Kearny

Jack Rogers

I loved Annibale until he mentioned Warhammer 40k. Now I love him wayyyy more

Doug Cartel

Bill Clinton regrets not letting Ukraine keep its nukes. "Expanding NATO, helping Yeltsin shoot protestors and blasting Serbia were very cool ways to piss off the Russians though." I'm not sure which is worse, that Poland and the Baltics want to get in on the fight, or that the US is certain that 1- Putin will use a nuke if he's losing and 2 - he's losing, which he's not (but if the west thinks that's what's happening, maybe they'll feel less guilty launching their own?) In any case it would be funny to see War Nerd's reaction to the Astartes video

Doug Cartel

One of the things I've heard NATO maniacs says is "Russia had no reason to fear a hostile Ukraine, if Ukraine invaded them then they could just defend themselves with nukes", which is about as an insane a view of nukes as I can imagine.

Annibale

Particularly the scene with the possessed Inquisition Psyker

Doug Cartel

One of the best videos and scenes I ever saw with zero diogue.

a clash of purple

If it helps make Warhammer 40,000 more legible, it's basically a big old science fiction pastiche mixed with fantasy elements and satire of real life stuff: the human Imperium is Dune (complete with mutant Navigators and anti-A.I. laws) mixed with the British Empire in space, the Eldar are Tolkien's Elves in space, the Orks are football hooligans in space, the Tyranids are the Alien franchise, the forces of Chaos are demons and hell in space, the Necrons are ancient Egyptian mummies in space, the T'au are Japanese anime plus communist China in space, the Leagues of Votann are Tolkien's Dwarves in space, etc., etc.. What makes it an interesting and fun setting is, first, that the writers like to push everything to the most ridiculous extreme imaginable for the sake of humor, horror, and drama, and, second, they do a good job of taking advantage of the sheer enormity of space, so there's lots of room for all kinds of weird little details or side stories.

Annibale

I think that another interesting departure from other franchises is that there's no attempt at a ready-made moral compass. Everyone is against everyone else, and so when the Space Dune + British Empire meets the Space Japanese + Communist China, Communist China wins (I'm thinking about the Taros Campaign) and the authors make clear it's just because they were a better army, and they are able to hold the Taros system because the Tau Empire is slightly less insane and inefficient than the Human Imperium. But if you prefer to cheer the Imperium, it's up to you. There's never any attempt to sentimentalize it.

Hans Anders

It’s ok. I never got further than giggling in high school because ‘stront’ means ‘shit’ where I live.

WarOn WarOff

Seymour Hersh just put out a similarly depressing piece on how we're just walking into our doom.

Mark Ames

Jonathan, you wrote: "no one is afraid that the current US anti-ballistic missile systems would actually suffice to defeat any reasonable first strike" — this is just patently false. The Russian military-political class takes US ABM systems extremely seriously for their first strike-winnability capability. You may argue that they're wrong to think that way, but I can tell you without a doubt they have been extremely paranoid about this, very openly, for many years now, and when they see that paranoia spelled out by Americans in US foreign policy/military journals arguing that the US is achieving first-strike winnability with its ABM systems, it only validates their fears. The problem is less who is objectively right or wrong here; objectively, they believe it, are paranoid about it, have a very high regard for US military-technology (perhaps too high), and will act accordingly. That's the problem.

Jonathan Penn

Mark- I received and read your response this morning. Let me first say that although I speak and read Russian, I have never lived there and have never had contact with anyone in the military, as I believe you have. I defer completely to your insight re) how they might see a U.S. based ABM system. I am deeply familiar with most of the arms control agreements between the US and both the USSR and Russia (long story) and note that the original ABM treaty permitted both sides to have one functional system of 100 launchers to defend one area. This was a tacit acceptance of the system the USSR already had around Moscow that offered some potential to hit something. At present the US has about 40-45 ground-based mid-course interceptors, which I discussed briefly in my response to Annibale. As far as I can determine, there are no current efforts to expand the system or update it. Its performance in test as documented in AWST over the years has been literally hit-or-miss, never much better than 50% in even the very carefully scripted test scenarios it has faced. Whether it would function at all in an EMP environment with realistic decoys and spoofing is very problematic indeed. Ship-based AEGIS systems with Standard-3 missiles also offer some ballistic missile shoot-down capability and then there's the Patriot missile system, which, like Brazil, has great potential and always will. In short, on a very good day, if 50 missiles were sent at the US, the US might destroy 25. Good enough for horseshoes, but H-bombs are a bit more destructive. Again, I cannot comment or contradict anything you say about how Russia's military view these systems. In any rational universe, their minor capability would not be seen to complicate a first or second strike by Russia, which has thousands of nukes and hundreds of missiles. I readily concede that there is nothing rational about any of this- I still think the line from "War Games" that I quoted in my response to Annibale the most accurate and wise statement of nuclear strategy that one is likely to find. Further, it is not beyond possibility that Russian positions on the modest ABM systems that the US has deployed are also just posturing. In any event, you know I am both a supporter and big fan of the show and have no intention of being disputatious simply for the sake of being disputatious. I think this topic deserves several long discussions, and perhaps even a discussion of how we might get the US and Russia back to significant nuclear arms reduction talks, as well as engaging constructively with China on the same topic. When I think of how much money and engineering talent is devoted to these things, when the world desperately needs to address climate change, I get very, very depressed.

Jimothy Realname

in warhammer 40k, a space marine who dies in battle is sometimes entombed in a walking tank and kept on in an eternal half-alive half-dead state, forever serving the emperor

James Whale

The best! I'm gonna start reading warhammer now !

Jake Palmer

R.e. the psychological phenomenon Mark mentioned, on overexposure to the non-negative side of risky decisions and subsequent underestimating of risk. It's related to "risk compensation", so I'd probably either call it a form of "irrational risk compensation" or maybe "risk normalisation". There is the term "normalisation of deviance" which seems to capture almost exactly what Mark means, but I don't love the way that term feels like it was invented by a conservative moralist!

jack flowers

wondering if Mark knows that one of the biggest fusion research spots in the country is in Rochester. one of my good friends works there.

Mark Ames

Jonathan, the most memorable freakout while I was in Moscow was in response to this article in Foreign Policy in 2006, "The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy": https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2006-03-01/rise-us-nuclear-primacy The hysteria from the security-political intelligentsia was unlike anything I'd seen up till then, aside from the freakout over the US introducing Green Berets into Georgia in 2002. They took the article as a declaration, like reading something in an official party organ, as if confirming all their worst fears (and overestimations). I remember thinking at the time, "they can't be serious" — assuming something else was going on. Then I investigated it more and, well, it was as real as any hysteria, a real paranoia based on both lived/historical experience and paranoia and the sense of being repeatedly betrayed and boxed in by the US. But this was an acute freakout. I don't think it was staged, that wouldn't make much sense. It made Putin and the military look vulnerable and weak the way they were talking about it, and this was a time when Putin was enjoying his political peak. Also, sorry if I came off a little too strong, I blame the coffee.

Jonathan Penn

Mark- thanks for the follow-up. The level of insanity and paranoia that surrounds nuclear weapons and their potential use is always orders of magnitude greater than I can understand. One of the group of scientists who worked out quantum mechanics is credited with saying, "The Universe is not stranger than we imagine. It is stranger than we can imagine!" I won't try to paraphrase but I think it applies nicely to nuclear strategy. "Through the Looking-Glass," indeed. A pleasure to kibbitz with you. Jon P.

Mark Ames

Yes. Funny story. I met a nuke scientist in a fusion research project here, and without getting into details here, this scientist did not rate fusion's actual chances of working very highly compared to the large sums of funding it was receiving.

jack flowers

Yeah to my friend it is pretty clear that the funding is largely because it's useful for nuclear weapons.