I came of age – emerging into young adulthood, liberated, it seemed, from teenaged concerns by entering my 20s – during what we were told was the Cold War’s end. A year before the Soviet Union fell in 1991, President George H.W. Bush, in a speech that was once infamous but is rarely discussed today, delivered to a joint session of the US Congress September 11, 1990 declared that a ‘new world order’ was born (Bush went on to repeat this phrase – a leitmotif of his foreign policy – during a speech at the UN in 1991). For those of us who grew up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation, what macabre war planners called Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD, this provided a form of comfort or at least, the prospect of release from modernity’s prime terror.
Fear inspires a variety of reactions, among them, real or pretended ignorance of danger or the opposite: a desire to know more, to feel, some sense of, not control, always an illusion, but awareness. If I was destined to die, vaporized by a luminous ball of atomic fire, at least there’d be a millisecond of knowing the infernal mechanism’s workings. Growing up in the latter stages of the MAD era, to get this sense of awareness, I studied nuclear weapons and nuclear war doctrines (at least, what was made public). If, on a given Sunday, during lunch, you wanted to know about hydrogen bombs and turned to me for an answer, I could take a sip of vodka and give a solid, well studied non-specialist’s reply.
In the collective imagination, there was a fixation on the scale of devastation. Whether in fictional depictions such as the Terminator films or grimly matter of fact Pentagon strategy documents, the total destruction of major cities – millions dead from blast, heat, radiation and fallout – was a common theme. When anyone said, ‘nuclear war’, it meant the end of the world. What most of us did not know was that just as rust never sleeps, war planners do not cease working to sharpen their blades. New types of nuclear weapons were in the minds of designers, expressed via mathematics and simulated using computation. There is evidence these abstractions have recently taken solid form to be unleashed on Syria’s tortured soil.
On December 23, 2024, Swiss physicist Hans-Benjamin Braun posted the following to his Twitter account:
Nuclear attack in Tartus (Syria):
Radioactive fingerprint of nuke (Tartus) measured in Cyprus within ~16 hours after the attack.
[Note that the dose rate peak cannot be ascribed to precipitation as higher precipitation occurred on Dec 5 with no discernible radiation increase]
The post, first in series that read like urgent dispatches, was based on an analysis of several data points: seismic, radiation and blast effects, used to present a dark conclusion: a new class of nuclear weapon, called Fourth Generation Fusion Nuclear Weapons (FGNW) by US Air Force researcher James Denton in a report titled ‘The Third Nuclear Age: How I learned to Start Worrying About the Clean Bomb’ was deployed in Tartus, Syria.
As the days wore on, more evidence appeared. In a post made on December 26, Dr. Braun posted this update::
Tartus nuke:
DoD data yield for a 99.9% clean weapon (e.g. “Housatonic”) with 0.3kt yield at 110 miles a (max) fallout of 0.035 mR/h. With the obs. time decay at 15 to 20h this yields a dose rate of 9-12nSv/h.
This agrees with observation of 11.55 +/-1.27 nSv/h (>8 sigma signal).
A great deal of technical terrain is covered in this brief post so let’s walk through it.
By “DoD data yield” Dr. Braun is referring to the calculations of nuclear weapon outcomes derived from a US Department of Defense document, ‘The Effects of Nuclear Weapons’ (originally published in 1977). Using these calculations, Braun determined that the Tartus detonation’s characteristics were in line with what was calculated for the last of the 31 test explosions in the 1962, Operation Dominic series, the “Housatonic” detonation of Oct 30, 1962. This explosion was declared 99.9% ‘clean’ , that is, the amount of radiation was significantly less than what is usually produced by nuclear explosions. The reduction of radiation, while retaining other nuclear effects, was the result of the use of a design approach called Ripple.
The impetus for the Ripple program is described in the document, ‘Ripple: An Investigation of the World’s Most Advanced High-Yield Thermonuclear Weapon’. Here is an excerpt:
Operation Redwing and “Clean” Weapons
To help explain the significance of the Ripple concept and the context in which it was devised, we begin with this 1955 letter from then Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson:
Until the CASTLE (1954) tests confirmed the feasibility of megaton yields at comparatively small cost, military economy in the atomic weapons field had been largely dominated by blast effects and means of maximizing these (effects) in relation to design and delivery costs. As important as these blast considerations still are, we are now confronted with perhaps even more important considerations in the radioactive by-products field. Stated broadly, the problem appears to be that of maximizing the military effect at the desired time and place, and minimizing such effects where they are not desired. While blast effects are essentially instantaneous and local, the radioactive effects may cover very large areas and may persist for very long periods ranging, in fact, from days in the local fallout effects to many years in atmospheric contamination effects. In other words, radioactive effects force us to bring time in as an additional dimension in dealing with this problem. Moreover, the areas subject to lethal radiation are so large, that in planning the use of these weapons we must carefully weigh the damage to friendly as well as enemy installations.
[…]
“Stated broadly, the problem appears to be that of maximizing the military effect at the desired time and place, and minimizing such effects where they are not desired”.
Unsurprisingly and appropriately, Dr. Braun has faced objections, which, when offered in a spirit of scientific inquiry, he seems to welcome. Social media is an arena, where attempts at conversation or debate are as likely to come to the attention of people who are uninformed, yet confident in their ignorance as a peer who knows what you’re talking about. Among the informed challenges (as opposed to random objections and, potentially, IDF bots) were questions about the radiation levels; shouldn’t they be much higher? Dr. Braun’s answer, based on his understanding of the effects of more advanced designs – the ‘Housatonic’ class – is no, the Tartus detonation represents the first use of a new type of weapon. If he is right, we have entered a more dangerous phase of the nuclear era in which the use of nuclear weapons becomes more attractive because the goal of ‘maximizing the military effects while minimizing undesired effects’ has been achieved.
The March 6, 2022 edition of the BBC’s ‘Point of View’ radio program featured British novelist and essayist, Will Self, reading his work titled ‘Return of the Bomb’. Self used the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then only a month old, and statements President Putin made at the time about Russia’s readiness to use nuclear weapons to discuss what Self called the ‘60th year of the Arkhipov age’. Arkhipov, as in Vasily Arkhipov, the Soviet naval officer who, at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, prevented the firing of an atomic torpedo on US naval vessels, which surely would have led to a full nuclear war and an end to all things. This decision, Self accurately tells us, earned Arkhipov a special place of honor (a place he has not been given, certainly not in ‘the West’).
Discussing the contradictions of the MAD doctrine we were told maintained a sort of nervous equilibrium, Self stated:
“One of the curious things about the doctrine [of mutually assured destruction] is that it assumes nation states, and even empires, behave as rational, self interested individuals, while the Arkhipov incident tells us that in fact, armageddon is often only averted by actual individuals who will rebel against groupthink. Another paradox of MAD besides its worrying acronym, is that it relies on hostile powers’ motivations and dispensations being transparent to one another. However, what we know from the record, is that both the possibility of nuclear war and its avoidance during the Cuban crisis were a function of ignorance and misreading of intelligence.”
If Dr. Braun is correct and, a precision type of nuclear weapon was used in Tartus, Syria, a productionized refinement of what was deployed in the ‘Housatonic’ test of 64 years ago, we have exited the MAD era (perhaps, as Self notes, we were never in it) and entered an age in which nuclear weapons become a regular part of military action.
New world order indeed.
References
George H.W. Bush New World Order Speech
https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/public-papers/2217
The Third Nuclear Age
The Effects of Nuclear Weapons
https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/effects/glasstone-dolan/index.html
Operation Dominic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dominic
An Investigation of the World’s Most Advanced Nuclear Weapon
Will Self: The Return of the Bomb
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014xyd
Video of Tartus Explosion:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1872739489858371867
Dr. Braun’s Bio
https://www.geophysical-forensics.ch/about.html
Vasily Arkhipov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov
Cuban Missile Crisis
Computational Impacts 