What Are Tactical Nuclear Weapons, and What if Russia Uses Them?

[0] From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is the Daily.

[1] If Vladimir Putin ever follows through with his threat to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, he's likely to use a very particular kind of nuclear weapon.

[2] Today, I talk to my colleague Bill Broad on what that weapon is, how it works, and what it would mean to deploy it.

[3] It's Friday, October 7th.

[4] So, Bill, two weeks ago, we did an episode with our colleague Anton.

[5] And he told us that Putin had effectively declared a chunk of Ukraine Russian territory.

[6] And he said that if it was attacked, he would fight back.

[7] And he kind of hinted that, you know, he would use his nuclear arsenal.

[8] So this whole week, the Ukrainians are making a lot of military advances in that very area that Putin was talking about.

[9] And so everyone, you know, I'm in D .C. here, is talking about this and kind of on edge.

[10] you know, are we in a new, more dangerous moment in the world?

[11] So we wanted to ask you, Bill, what would an attack like this look like?

[12] I mean, when I think of nuclear weapons, I think of a mushroom cloud.

[13] Is that what we're talking about?

[14] We're not, although that tends to be the thing that, you know, we all conjure up in our minds, right?

[15] These big, horrible things we saw one over Hiroshima.

[16] We've seen pictures of tests around the globe where these frightening huge things would scare and intimidate everybody into all these unthinkable scenarios.

[17] What we're talking about now is extremely different.

[18] It's a whole different dark universe that grew up in parallel to this ginormous scary world of mushroom clouds.

[19] Okay, different universe.

[20] They grew up in parallel.

[21] So tell me about that.

[22] that bill?

[23] I mean, how are the nuclear weapons of today different from the ones that we have in our mind?

[24] They're fundamentally much, much, much, much smaller.

[25] They call them tactical nukes.

[26] They are tiny fractions of the strength of the Hiroshima bomb and tiny, tiny little fractions of the super bombs and the city busters that everybody worried about during the Cold War.

[27] In comparison to all that into everything we've known and thought about publicly for a long time, they are minuscule.

[28] So how did these smaller ones in this new world you're talking about come to be?

[29] Well, they all grew out of the very first atomic weapons.

[30] The one we all remember was Hiroshima, right, 1945, ended World War II.

[31] The city of Hiroshima lies prostrate after the withering blast which wiped out 53 ,000 of its population.

[32] The big mushroom cloud over this Japanese city and one over Nagasaki, too.

[33] Four square miles of buildings leveled by the first of two small bombs that decided the fate of Japan.

[34] That's what's indelibly imprinted on our minds.

[35] Right.

[36] Another evidence of the enemy's final inability to wage war.

[37] Well, after that, we went into the next chapter of the Cold War, where there was this global race for bigger and better and more terrible weapons.

[38] History turns its most ominous page far out in mid -Pacific, where in the enemy talk atoll the world's most awesome weapon is readied for detonation.

[39] And they got enormously large compared to Hiroshima.

[40] They were called H -bombs.

[41] Here on Illurgilab Island, the cab or housing for the first hydrogen bomb take shape after months of preparation.

[42] And we popped our first one in 1952.

[43] The pictures you are about to see have been released by the the Department of Defense under presidential order.

[44] They put a device on an island in the South Pacific, and they tested it.

[45] There is three miles across as it shatters both land and sea.

[46] And it was 700 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, with a mushroom cloud that just went into the stratosphere.

[47] In seconds, the fireball erupts into a geyser that towers 25 miles.

[48] into the stratosphere, spreading into a 100 mile wide mushroom cloud.

[49] I mean, it was so big.

[50] It just blew people's minds.

[51] Rising with the cloud are millions of cubic feet of radioactive ash, a virulent byproduct of the fusion bomb that will shower down over the area in approximately one hour.

[52] But the Soviets not wanting to be outdone in this great race...