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“Nuclear war is the ultimate crime against humanity“ Presentation by Steven Starr, a professor at the University of Missouri, former director of the MU Clinical Laboratory Science program Excerpt from a webinar by Diane Sare on January 8, 2023 Watch the full event Let me begin by discussing what a nuclear weapon is, and how much different it is than what we consider conventional weapons. The largest weapon that is currently in the U.S. non-nuclear arsenal is called the “mother of all bombs.” It has 11 tons of TNT explosive power. Given that a ton is 2,000 pounds, that’s 22,000 pounds of TNT. When converted to kilotons (1,000 tons), the measurement unit used with nuclear weapons, that’s of a kiloton. It’s a pretty big weapon but compared to the 15 kiloton Hiroshima bomb, it’s about 1,000 times smaller. Fifteen kilotons is 15,000 tons of TNT; that’s the equivalent of 30 million pounds of TNT. Explosive power is only one way to describe the difference between conventional and nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapon is like a piece of the Sun. When it explodes, the surface of the fireball it creates is hotter than the surface of the Sun, so anyone close to it is going to be vaporized, and it will ignite fires over large distances. Look at what Hiroshima looked like before the bomb went off and what it looked like afterward. About 4–5 square miles of Hiroshima were ignited into a giant nuclear firestorm, and it burned everything. These firestorms actually release more energy than the nuclear weapon does. We’ve gone a long way from atomic bombs. But the U.S. still has atomic bombs called “tactical nuclear weapons,” although that’s not a very precise definition. The U.S. B61 Nuclear Gravity Bomb (100 of which are at NATO bases) has a variable range of explosive power. They call it a dial-a-yield weapon; the pilot can set the explosive anywhere from three-tenths of a kiloton to 50 kilotons. Now, three-tenths of a kiloton is 50 times smaller than the Hiroshima bomb: it’s equal to 300 tons of TNT. They developed this [dial-a-yield] because the military wanted a usable nuclear weapon. They said that these bombs are too big, we want one we can use. What this does is it blurs the distinction between nuclear and conventional. And it’s very dangerous, because field commanders are going to be a lot more likely to use a weapon like this in a situation where war breaks out and they’re losing. The U.S. has about 100 B61s at NATO bases right now. The red dots on the map of “U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 2022” shows where they’re located right now. There are five nations: Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey. The black squares show where the planes are that can carry them. It’s actually a violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to share nuclear weapons with other nations, but the U.S. uses a technicality to get around that. The U.S. also has ballistic missile launching sites in Poland and Romania. It’s called Aegis Ashore. The Aegis system had been designed for use on ships, but the Aegis Ashore land-based installations are only 800–1,000 miles away from Moscow, so Russia considers them quite a danger. If the U.S. had Russian missile sites, 800 miles away from Washington, D.C., I think we would be worried about it, here. Aegis Ashore uses an MK41 missile launcher. It’s a dual-use launcher. It can also launch Tomahawk cruise missiles. The Lockheed Martin sales brochure lists the Tomahawk missile under Strike Warfare. For ballistic missile defense, there’s an SM-3. That’s supposed to be an interceptor missile, although I think it’s possible you could substitute a nuclear warhead on there. In the MK41 Vertical Launch System, the missiles are loaded in closed containers, and Russia is unable to verify the missile type. It was actually a violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty [INF Treaty] to put these in Poland and Romania, but the U.S. has abrogated that treaty now. Well, today, we don’t just have atomic bombs, we have strategic nuclear weapons, and they are usually 7–87 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
