24 September 2022

By The Numbers - part the eighteenth

Vlad the Imbecile is waving the nucular threat wrt Ukraine. Not the first time for Vlad, of course. By this one surmises he's talking about, so called, tactical nukes. So, what is a tactical nuke?
For example, the U.S.'s newest version of its B61 nuclear bomb can release 0.3, 1.5, 10 or 50 kilotons of explosive energy. In comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was about 15 kilotons.
-- here
Would Sleepy Joe and the fractured European NATO folks reply in kind?
[S]ome 2,000 of Russia's nuclear warheads are short-range, so-called "tactical" nuclear weapons kept in storage facilities throughout the country.
-- here
Sleepy Joe has: 230. So it happens that Sleepy Joe does have some amount of missile-delivered tactical nukes:
We estimate that one or two of the 20 missiles on the USS Tennessee and subsequent subs will be armed with the W76-2, either singly or carrying multiple warheads. Each W76-2 is estimated to have an explosive yield of about five kilotons.
If you tldr; the link, the USS Tennessee is a missile sub.

For comparison, the biggest chemical bomb has a yield of a mere 11 tons. OTOH, the largest bunker-buster (aka, penetrator weapon) carries 5,300 lbs of explosive.

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