Well then, how dangerous are nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons, if they weren't their own category, would be classified as incendiary weapons. They set stuff on fire. They set a lot of stuff on fire. In fact, they can set things on fire as far as two miles away from the actual detonation. Besides this, nuclear detonations are very bright, capable of blinding people 20–30 miles away. This is only constrained by the curvature of the Earth. They also create hurricane-force winds as the air around the detonation expands and contracts. If you are outside and unshielded and within a mile of a nuclear detonation, you are going to die!
Regarding Ukraine, it is really big. Cities there tend to be spread out in modern times, and their larger ones cover over a hundred square miles. The average nuclear detonation only burns 2–3 square miles of territory. A city the size of Kiev would take on the order of 200 warheads to cover the whole thing.
Which brings us to our next point. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable to incendiaries. Modern city centers and industrial areas are made of concrete and steel. Most of the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done because almost all the buildings were made of wood and paper. The initial blast set the city centers on fire, which spread and ended up burning down most of the city. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable. In Ukraine, despite millions of rounds being poured into their cities, not one of them caught fire and burned to the ground.
This leads to the most surprising revelation about nuclear detonations: If you are not outside, you stand a good chance of surviving even within the blast zone. Nuclear blasts are mainly line-of-sight killers. The vast majority of “radiation” created by a nuclear detonation is infrared radiation, or heat, the same as a gas stove or fireplace makes. Unless the building you are in collapses due to the wind, or you fail to leave if it catches on fire, or you happen to be in front of a window with a direct line of sight to the detonation, there is a good chance that you are going to be fine.
Thus, we get to the real reason why Putin will not use nuclear weapons: they're just not all that effective compared to the boogeyman that is in our collective imaginations. Were a nuclear missile to detonate over central Kiev, no one would believe that it was an actual nuclear blast because the city is still there and all the major buildings are still standing.
Secondly, he doesn't have very many of them. The second problem here is that nuclear warheads have a very short shelf life. Nuclear warheads require a detonator made of conventional explosives and a mechanical trigger. These nuclear triggers are some of the most precise pieces of engineering in the history of mankind. A series of explosives has to go off in such a way that the core is hit by the same amount of pressure from all directions simultaneously. If any of those explosives are even slightly off, the nuclear warhead will not go off. You now have an extremely precise machine sitting around a core of material emitting hard radiation. Hard radiation is not friendly to machines. Nuclear warheads need to be rebuilt a least every five years and maintained a lot more often than that. Even with that, a twenty-year-old warhead is a piece of junk.
Who knew? I think they are very useful as bunker blasters.
