Enter the New Nuclear Era?
We may already have clean nuclear weapons (Free)
Like I have noted, I have been building a model of a tactical nuclear first strike since May in an effort to understand what can come out of Ukraine. My analysis led us at GnS Economics to issue a warning of a tactical nuclear strike in Europe at the end of May. Whether this came to be in Toropets, Russia, in the early morning of 18th of September remains an open question. My model actually implies that credible deniability that a nuclear strike has not occurred, even if it has, is a crucial element of modern nuclear deterrence.
I have detailed the (possible) cataclysmic effect of the Oreshnik to nuclear deterrence in my two previous pieces. While we wait more information, possibly in the form of another strike, on the Oreshnik weapon system, I briefly comment a highly secretive topic: “clean” nuclear weapons. Such low-radiation nuclear devices have been under stealth development for some time.
Lieutenant Colonel James Denton of U.S. air force states in his 2013 article, The third nuclear age: How I learned to start worrying about the clean bomb:
Fourth generation nuclear weapons [FGNW] represent a significant improvement in nuclear weapons technology and suggest the potential for small, clear, low-yield nuclear weapons. These weapons will be difficult to monitor, present significant challenges to treaty verification, begin to approximate conventional explosives with nuclear effects and are a potential deterrence stabilizer.
While his paper considers the future, he also makes remarks on “clean fission weapons”, which release considerably less radiation that the older fission-based weapons, and that these were in arsenal already in 2013. Andre Gsponer and Jean-Pierre Hurni noted in their review already in 1999 that
The conclusion stresses that considerable research is underway in all five nuclear-weapon States (as well as in several other major industrialized States such as Germany and Japan) on ICF and on many physical processes that provide the scientific basis necessary to develop fourth generation nuclear weapons.
ICF is a short for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), where nuclear fusion reactions are inacted by compressing and heating targets filled with fuel. I don’t have competence to comment such processes any further at this point, but you can find a lot of information by googling.
Moreover, nuclear scientists Ernest O. Lawrence, Edward Teller, and Mark Mills told to President Eisenhower, in 1957, that:
We now know how to produce nuclear weapons in which the fallout would be essentially negligible. We are convinced it is possible to produce nuclear weapons that are in a sense just like TNT, except tremendously more powerful.
The question that arises in my head is, how close are we of developing a FGNW, and if we have those already, have they been used (e.g. in Toropets)?
The secrecy surrounding the issue is massive. I’ve been in contact with an U.S. based doctoral student, who has been trying to uncover information on a certain type of FGNW, which I will not detail here. He noted that he has had serious difficulties in accessing this information through the Freedom of Information Act. It looks that the U.S. government tries very hard to keep this information classified. It hints to active development of such weapons or even to breakthrough that they want to keep in secret.
I don’t think I have to stress, what kind of cataclysmic change a clean nuclear weapon would bring. Colonel Denton notes in his conclusions that: Once achieved, FGNW will forever end the notion that nuclear equals strategic as these weapons become common warfighting tools. Any country discovering such a weapon, would naturally try to hide it till to the point, it uses them.
I also note in the current (unpublished) version of my article:
Nuclear deterrence is a policy presented not just to your opponent, but also to your public. It's meant to shield your (nuclear) nation from devastation. Strikes with tactical nuclear weapons can be concealed with suppression of information and propaganda. Moreover, research suggests that that so called Fourth generation fusion nuclear weapons, FGNW, leaving only a very concentrated (likely localized) radiation footprint can soon enter the arsenal of modern nuclear powers and the modern tactical (low-yield) nuclear weapons are already magnitudes cleaner than the old bombs. Essentially, all that is required for the nuclear deterrence to hold is plausible deniability.
This is meant to say that if you have been hit by a tactical (low-yield, low-radiation) nuclear weapon, but you refuse to enter a nuclear exchange, all you need to do, is to (plausible) deny that you have been struck by a nuclear weapon. With the modern low-radiation weapons, this is likely to be easier than before. This returns us to the question, what actually happened in Toropets on 18 September? Also, like I noted before, the Oreshnik may have already pushed us into this era, where nuclear-like devastation is created through non-nuclear weapons (the destructive power of the Oreshnik is still in question, though).
What this short introduction to the topic boils down into, is the notion that we may be really close of entering the era of nuclear warfare. We envisaged such a dark world at the end of October in a GnS Economics Special Report. I and we will return to that later, if (when) the need arises.
I will keep digging around the topic, while I keep building my game-theoretical model. I report everything I find here.
Have a great weekend!
Tuomas
The date of the Toropets incident corrected on 12/25/2024.
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