Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen

Author:Annie Jacobsen [Jacobsen, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

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45 MINUTES

Dombarovsky, Russia

Fifty-seven hundred miles from Washington, D.C., at the Dombarovsky ICBM complex in southwestern Siberia, a patch of snow sparkles in the moonlight. It is 12:48 a.m. local time, twenty miles north of Kazakhstan. Barbed-wire fencing and land mines surround the facility, with rings of automated grenade launchers and remote-controlled machine gun installations also keeping guard. As in the U.S. missile fields in Wyoming, there are doors in the earthen floor. Steel silo lids lying flush with the night sky.

To passersby, Dombarovsky is forest service country. Where milk and paper plants supply locals with jobs. To Russian nuclear forces, it is home to the most powerful, most destructive ICBM in the world. The Son of Satan ballistic missile, as it is known in the West. Russia calls these missiles the RS-28 Sarmat, in honor of a tribe of warrior-horsemen from the fifth century BCE. In much the same way, the U.S. calls its ICBMs the Minutemen, an homage to its tribe of warrior-horsemen from the American Revolutionary War. The West calling Russia’s ICBMs Sons of Satan helps further the idea they are evil. That Minutemen ICBMs are good and valiant soldiers engineered to defend and protect.

No matter how the nomenclature is spun, these two arsenals of mass destruction are poised and ready to destroy the world. The madness of MAD is that the two sides are like a mirror. Like the myth of Narcissus but with a biblical twist: a madman stares in a pond, sees his image on the surface of the water, and mistakes himself for his enemy. Falling for the illusion, he attacks, slips into the water, and drowns. But not before he unleashes Armageddon first.

The U.S. has 400 ICBMs buried in silos across the land. Russia has 312 ICBMs, in silos and on road-mobile launchers. Unlike America’s single-warhead Minutemen missiles, some of Russia’s ICBMs can carry up to ten 500-kiloton bombs in each warhead bus. This means a single Son of Satan can transport some 5 megatons of nuclear destruction. Roughly one-half the yield of the Ivy Mike thermonuclear device, which obliterated an entire island in the Pacific, leaving behind a hole the size of fourteen Pentagons.

Russia is the largest country in the world, by far. More than 100 ICBM silos like the ones here in Dombarovsky dot its vast landscape, its eleven time zones. Russia has eleven or twelve ICBM divisions, each staffed by two to six regiments—in Barnaul, Irkutsk, Kozelsk, Novosibirsk, Nizhny Tagil, Tatishchevo, Teykovo, Uzhur, Vypolsovo, Yoshkar-Ola, and Dombarovsky.

Hans Kristensen, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, along with associates Matt Korda, Eliana Reynolds, and others, keep track of the arsenals of nuclear-armed nations, and release that information annually in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Nuclear Notebook. Arms agreements striving for parity between the two superpowers have reduced stockpiles down from the 1986 all-time high point, when there were almost 70,000 nuclear weapons between the two.

The precise numbers of warheads available for immediate launch are dizzying.

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