Fahrenheit 7232
“The sun burned every day. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burned things with the firemen and the sun burned Time, that meant that everything burned!”
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Annie Jacobson, in her book “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” describes the first few seconds of a one-megaton thermonuclear weapon detonating over an American city as beginning “with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. One hundred-and=eighty-degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature that occurs at the center of the sun.” The fireball produced by this explosion is so intense “that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or evaporate, stone shatters, humans instantaneously convert into combusting carbon.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, addressing the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) at a meeting held in the Kazakh capital of Astana this past Thursday, declared that Russia's new intermediate-range ballistic missile, Oreshnik, which was used to strike a Ukrainian military production facility near the city of Dnipropetrovsk, possessed destructive power comparable to that of a nuclear weapon.
“Dozens of warheads, self-guided units attack the target at a speed of 10 Mach (ten times the speed of sound),” Putin said. “This is about three kilometers per second. The temperature of the striking elements reaches 4000 degrees. If my memory serves me right,” Putin noted, “the temperature on the surface of the Sun is 5,500-6000 degrees. Therefore, everything that is in the epicenter of the explosion is divided into fractions, into elementary particles, everything turns essentially into dust.”
In short, the Russian President declared the use of several Oreshnik missiles in one strike would be comparable in destructive power to a nuclear weapon.
The imagery presented in Annie Jacobson’s book is so utterly horrific as to surpass the ability of most humans to comprehend, let alone apply real-life examples that allow for a modicum of intellectual comprehension. As such, when Vladimir Putin made his analogous claim regarding the comparative destructive power of a hydrogen bomb and the Oreshnik missiles conventional warhead, one’s brain is deflected away from the unthinkable and toward the practical.
The Oreshnik missile attack against the Yuzmash factory outside Dnipropetrovsk produced stunning visual images of six separate impact “events,” each comprised of six luminescent “rods” impacting the factory grounds. The Russian government had alluded to the destruction caused by this attack as being devastating; the Ukrainians, on the other hand, have minimized the damage done as negligible.
In theory, the destructive potential of kinetic “rods” striking the earth at hypersonic speeds is enormous. A 2003 US Air Force study on what were called “Hypervelocity Rod Bundles (HRB)” speculated that 20-foot by six-foot rods of Tungsten, when dropped from a space-based platform and impacting the earth at a speed of ten times the speed of sound, would produce results equivalent to a nuclear explosion.
In 2018, Chinese researchers from the North University of China located in the city of Taiyuan, Shanxi province, working with the university's Intelligent Weapon Research Institute, test-fired a tungsten rod from an unnamed high-altitude platform. In the test, a 140-kilogram tungsten rod was fired at a speed of over four kilometers per second and produced a crater with a depth of three meters and a width of over four and a half meters—far from the effect one would expect from a nuclear weapon. Moreover, the penetration effect of the tungsten rod was reduced at speeds over three and a half times the speed of sound.
The physics surrounding the effects of the Oreshnik payload remain confusing to even those who have spent a lifetime studying the physics of such weapons. Dr. Theodore Postol, a weapons expert from MIT, has done some preliminary studies on the Oreshnik which mirror the assessment of the researchers from the North University of China.
But Russian experts have spoken about advances made by Russia in material sciences associated with the performance of materials at hypersonic speed, advances which may alter the physics in question (for instance, the pure tungsten rod envisioned by the US Air Force and tested by the Chinese may, in the case of the Oreshnik, have had a coating of an advanced alloy formed from tantalum carbide and hafnium carbide, materials used by Russia in reentry operations from space, where heat absorption is desired).
The Russians point out that the Oreshnik “rods,” whatever their precise composition, would, once heated to 4,000 degrees Celsius (7,232 degrees Fahrenheit), would vaporize steel and concrete, including reinforced concrete, on contact. “It would vaporize,” as President Putin observed, “everything that is in the epicenter of the explosion is divided into fractions, into elementary particles, everything turns essentially into dust.”
The underlying question remains, how much of an area does the “epicenter of the explosion” encompass? Ukraine has been surprisingly reticent about documenting its claims that the Oreshnik caused “minimal damage,” only noting that the warheads which struck Dnipropetrovsk carried no explosives and, as a result, did not cause significant damage. This conclusion was shared by German experts commenting in Bild Magazine. Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, in a recent interview with Reuters, commented on the Oreshnik, noting that, “This is a new capability, but this is not a new capability that represents a dramatic change in the way that conventional weapons are developed.” He continued, “It’s a series of old technologies that have been put together in a new way.”
Lewis added that using the Oreshnik with conventional warheads was an expensive means "to deliver not that much destruction,” noting that, given the expense associated with ballistic missiles of the Oreshnik class, using this type of weapon to hit Ukraine was more likely designed to achieve a psychological effect than military impact. “If it were inherently terrifying, [Putin] would just use it. But that’s not quite enough,” Lewis said. “He had to use it and then do a press conference and then do another press conference and say: ‘Hey, this thing is really scary, you should be scared.’”
While Lewis’ analysis is open to scrutiny (his claim that the Oreshnik was simply a bunch of “old technologies” that have been “put together in new ways” is refuted by Russian statements and the evidence—his analysis of the reentry system is sophomoric, and does not take into account Russian reports which suggest the Oreshnik made use of new independent post-boost vehicles, or IPBVs, known in Russian as blok individualnogo razvedeniya (or BIR). Likewise, Lewis’ critique seems to simply parrot Ukrainian battle damage assessments without any attempt to delve further into the new technologies associated with the kinetic rods used by the Oreshnik.
(It should be noted that Theodore Postol, in conducting his analysis, has incorporated these new technologies in his work.)
Therein lies the rub—while President Putin undoubtedly employed the Oreshnik as a warning to Ukraine and its western allies about the consequences of striking Russian soil with US- and UK-manufactured and directed weapons such as the ATACMS and Storm Shadow, the deterrence value of the Oreshnik depends entirely upon its ability to inflict damage of such magnitude that Ukraine and its allies, when doing a risk-benefit analysis of the consequences of continuing to strike Russia with ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles, would opt to avoid escalation.
Assessments like those produced by Bild and Reuters, when backed by the statements made by Ukrainian officials, lend credence to the notion that the Oreshnik was all bark, with little or no bite. This mindset has resulted in Ukraine, with the blessing and assistance of its US and UK masters, continuing to strike targets in the Kursk region using ATACMS missiles.
This in turn has resulted in Russian President Putin warning that Russia may hit Ukraine again with one or more Oreshnik missiles. Putin indicated that the targets could include military, industrial, and national decision-making centers, including Bankova Street in Kiev, where the seat of the Ukrainian government is located.
It is in Russia’s interest to make the results of such an attack visible to a global audience and, by doing so, negate the analysis of western experts such as Jeffrey Lewis. If the Oreshnik, fired singly or as a multi-missile salvo, can impart on Ukrainian and western leaders the futility of continuing their missile strikes into Russia, then such an escalation would be of value.
If, however, the Oreshnik’s impact is hidden or—worse, for Russia—supports Jeffrey Lewis’ less than flattering assessment, then the deterrence value of the Oreshnik will be negligible, encouraging Ukraine to increase the scope and scale of its missile attacks on Russia, and putting Russia in a position where it must, given the political capital already invested in trying to deter Ukrainian missile attacks, escalate its response. This could include using new conventional weapons possessing massive destructive capability, such as the “father of all bombs” thermobaric weapon or the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle.
But escalation begets escalation, and if Russia is not able to deter Ukraine and its western allies from attacking its soil using ATACMS and Storm Shadow (and, perhaps in the coming days, the French-provided SCALP missile), then at some point the question of nuclear weapons becomes part of the escalation equation.
The bad news for Russia is that the US intelligence community has conducted several assessments over the course of the past several months which conclude that Russia would not use nuclear weapons in response to Ukraine’s use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles to attack Russia. This conclusion has been embraced by the White House and Congress, which explains the almost non-existent pushback from within US political circles to the decision to allow Ukraine to strike Russia.
The US intelligence assessment hinges around the notion that Russia will instead seek to match the ATACMS/Storm Shadow escalation with escalations of its own—of which the use of Oreshnik was the first.
As things stand, Russia appears to have two, perhaps three, rounds of conventional escalation left in terms of its retaliation for continued attacks. These could be exhausted by mid-December, which means the possibility—indeed probability, given the apparent mindset in Kiev, Brussels, and Washington, DC—of a nuclear exchange preempting Christmas is quite real.
The inability and/or unwillingness of Ukraine’s western masters to understand the consequences of deterrence failure makes nuclear war seem inevitable. The collective ignorance of the US and European leaders in this regard reminds one of the mindset of Guy Montag, the “fireman” in Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451:
“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.”
Life, however, isn’t a novel. And when the modern-day incarnations of Guy Montag decide to “flick the igniter,” all life as we know it will “blow away on a wind turned dark with burning.”
There will be a “No Nuclear War” event held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on December 7, where the danger of nuclear war and the options available to prevent it will be discussed by leading experts such as Larry Wilkerson, Theodore Postol, Melvin Goodman, Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil, Margaret Kimberly, Garland Nixon, Dan Kovalik, Wilmer Leon and others, including the author of this article.
The National Press Club venue can accommodate 400 attendees. For those who cannot attend in person, the event will be streamed live. Go to NoNuclearWar.com for details. #NoNuclearWar
the depravity is so deep i pray we in the West wake the F up before another second of atrocity. im so sorry for this demonic decimation of humanity at every turn. We are so lost to evil profiteering
It may be Scott is alarmed for no reason. I see the Dawn of the Hypersonic Age as a source of hope. It seems Oreshnik has rendered Nuclear Weapons and Bunkers OBSOLETE! Avangard seems even more devastating. I'm ecstatic at the prospect. The Oligarchs, War Mongers and War Profiteers now have no place to hide!
It's checkmate, game over for the ZATO🇺🇸🇫🇲🇮🇱. Damn those Russians are good at Chess!