Full screen recommended.
"How A Nuclear War Would Actually Go Down"
"Edging Closer to Armageddon?"
by Tom Engelhardt
"These days, no kids in school are ducking and covering under their desks. American magazines don’t have stories about families (with the money) building private nuclear shelters to guard against an attack on this country. And I can walk the streets of New York City without normally seeing one of those ancient yellow signs of my childhood indicating a fallout shelter (that you could quickly enter in case a war suddenly broke out and the Soviet Union - yes, can you even remember that? - lobbed a nuke our way). In truth, it’s hard to believe anymore, but all of that took place in the previous century, when those of us living in New York actually feared a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.
And yet, so many years later, with not two but nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons (and undoubtedly more to come), nuclear war seems strangely not part of the conversation anymore. It’s true, of course - and one of the great miracles of our history - that, 80 years after the first atomic bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such a weapon has never again been used. Still, given this increasingly strange planet of ours, don’t count on another 80 years like that.
In fact, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare makes grimly (and strikingly) clear, at this very moment both our country and Russia (the Soviet Union being long gone) seem to be abandoning the basic nuclear restraints of so many decades and potentially expanding their already gigantic nuclear arsenals, already easily capable of wiping out several Earths. Fortunately, there are still groups organizing against such a nuclear nightmare, though you don’t hear much about them these days. But if you want to know more, check out the websites maintained by the Arms Control Association and the Friends Committee on National Legislation. And then, if you’re feeling anxious, instead of ducking and covering, check out Klare’s latest piece below on the all too strange world we now find ourselves in."
"Plunging Into the Abyss"
Will the U.S. and Russia Abandon All Nuclear Restraints?
by Michael Klare
Excerpt: "For most of us, Friday, February 6, 2026, is likely to feel no different than Thursday, February 5th. It will be a work or school day for many of us. It might involve shopping for the weekend or an evening get-together with friends, or any of the other mundane tasks of life. But from a world-historical perspective, that day will represent a dramatic turning point, with far-reaching and potentially catastrophic consequences. For the first time in 54 years, the world’s two major nuclear-weapons powers, Russia and the United States, will not be bound by any arms-control treaties and so will be legally free to cram their nuclear arsenals with as many new warheads as they wish — a step both sides appear poised to take.
It’s hard to imagine today, but 50 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia (then the Soviet Union) jointly possessed 47,000 nuclear warheads - enough to exterminate all life on Earth many times over. But as public fears of nuclear annihilation increased, especially after the near-death experience of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the leaders of those two countries negotiated a series of binding agreements intended to downsize their arsenals and reduce the risk of Armageddon.
The initial round of those negotiations, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks I, began in November 1969 and culminated in the first-ever nuclear arms-limitation agreement, SALT-I, in May 1972. That would then be followed in June 1979 by SALT-II (signed by both parties, though never ratified by the U.S. Senate) and two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I and START II), in 1991 and 1993, respectively. Each of those treaties reduced the number of deployed nuclear warheads on U.S. and Soviet/Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers.
In a drive to reduce those numbers even further, President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in April 2010, an agreement limiting the number of deployed nuclear warheads to 1,550 on each side - still enough to exterminate all life on Earth, but a far cry from the START I limit of 6,000 warheads per side. Originally set to expire on Feb. 5, 2021, New START was extended for another five years (as allowed by the treaty), resetting that expiration date for February 5, 2026, now fast approaching. And this time around, neither party has demonstrated the slightest inclination to negotiate a new extension.
So, the question is: What, exactly, will it mean for New START to expire for good on February 5th? Most of us haven’t given that a lot of thought in recent decades, because nuclear arsenals have, for the most part, been shrinking and the (apparent) threat of a nuclear war among the great powers seemed to diminish substantially. We have largely escaped the nightmarish experience - so familiar to veterans of the Cold War era - of fearing that the latest crisis, whatever it might be, could result in our being exterminated in a thermonuclear holocaust.
A critical reason for our current freedom from such fears is the fact that the world’s nuclear arsenals had been substantially diminished and that the two major nuclear powers had agreed to legally binding measures, including mutual inspections of their arsenals, meant to reduce the danger of unintended or accidental nuclear war. Together, those measures were crafted to ensure that each side would retain an invulnerable, second-strike nuclear retaliatory force, eliminating any incentive to initiate a nuclear first strike. Unfortunately, those relatively carefree days will come to an end at midnight on February 5th."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
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"How Russia Could Destroy the Entire World"
"In today’s world, the threat of global annihilation is a very real possibility. Among the nations with the power to end all civilization in a matter of minutes, Russia stands out as number 1. With advanced weapons systems capable of unparalleled destruction, Russia could trigger the end of the world in just five minutes and bring humanity to its knees."
Full screen recommended.
"This Is What a Nuclear War Would
Look Like Minute by Minute"
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"Russia Puts Advanced Sarmat
Nuclear Missile System On ‘Combat Duty’"
"Moscow has put into service an advanced intercontinental ballistic missile that Russian President Vladimir Putin has said would make Russia’s enemies “think twice” about their threats, according to reported comments by the head of the country’s space agency. Yuri Borisov, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, said Sarmat missiles have “assumed combat duty”, according to Russian news agency reports.
“The Sarmat strategic system has assumed combat alert posture,” the state-run TASS news agency quoted the Roscosmos chief as saying. “Based on experts’ estimates, the RS-28 Sarmat is capable of delivering a MIRVed warhead weighing up to 10 tons to any location worldwide, both over the North and South Poles,” TASS said in its report.
Putin said in February that the Sarmat – one of several advanced weapons in Russia’s arsenal, is deployed now. In 2022, some two months after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Putin said the Sarmat would “reliably ensure the security of Russia from external threats and make those, who in the heat of aggressive rhetoric try to threaten our country, think twice”.
The Sarmat is an underground silo-based missile that Russian officials say can carry up to 15 nuclear warheads, though the United States military estimates its capacity to be 10 warheads. Known to NATO military allies by the codename “Satan”, the missile reportedly has a short initial launch phase, which gives little time for surveillance systems to track its takeoff.
Weighing more than 200 tons, the Sarmat has a range of some 18,000km (11,000 miles) and was developed to replace Russia’s older generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICMBs) that dated from the 1980s. Russia test-fired the Sarmat missile in April 2022 in the Plesetsk region of the country, located some 800km (almost 500 miles) north of Moscow, and the launched missiles hit targets on the Kamchatka peninsula, in Russia’s far east region."
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RS-28 Sarmat
15 warheads per missile, 11,000 mile range, hypersonic speed of 15,880 mph.
One Sarmat can destroy an area the size of Texas or France.
A hypersonic nuclear missile launched from Russia will hit Washington, DC in 23 minutes.
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The Poseidon Torpedo
Full screen recommended.
Fully operational and deployed, the Poseidon torpedo with a 100 megaton warhead explodes deep underwater, causing a 1,600 foot high tidal wave which destroys everything on the U.S. East Coast as far inland as West Virginia. England would simply disappear beneath the waves...
It would look exactly like this, only twice as high...
Do we really want to do this? Pray to God we don't...
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