As his invasion of Ukraine threatens to destabilise Europe, and Russia retreats, Vladimir Putin has begun to threaten nuclear war. To gauge reaction in the UK, YouGov has carried out a national poll to explore public attitudes to the possibility of war.
A less peaceful world
They found that people are deeply pessimistic about our future security: 35% think the world will be less peaceful in 50 years, compared to 10% who think the reverse. Nearly a quarter are not confident of the ability of our army to defend us. A third of people of military age (under 40) say they would not get involved even in the case of a military invasion.
Half of respondents think the country will be directly involved in war in the next five years. Four in ten think that the UK should go to war if its interests are threatened, while another four in ten think we should only do this if directly threatened.
A critical issue is the role of nuclear weapons. Twice as many people (34%) feel safer because the UK has nuclear weapons than the reverse (18%) but, oddly, six times as many people think countries should give them up (72%) as retain them (12%).
After the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and subsequent tests, no nuclear weapon has been used in anger for 80 years. It is worrying that now a quarter of people think that a nuclear war is likely in the next five years. So do they understand what it might mean?
The threat of nuclear war
Those who grew up during the Cold War remember how it felt to be under the threat of all out nuclear war. The USA and the Soviet Union each had enough nuclear weapons to exterminate human life on the planet. Even the UK’s tiny nuclear force could have done irreparable harm.
The doctrine was un-ironically known as ‘MAD’ – mutually assured destruction. Both sides knew that a nuclear first strike was likely to immediately attract a comparable response. This made a nuclear war was unwinnable, so both sides were careful to avoid confrontations, limiting their conflicts to ‘small’ conventional proxy wars in ‘third world’ countries. The biggest concern was usually war by accident or technical failure.
Recognising the futility of all out nuclear war, treaties were agreed to reduce the number of weapons, and to avoid their further spread. But although a non-proliferation treaty was signed in 1968 by the USA, Soviet Union, UK, France and China, this has not stopped Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea from acquiring them.
What a nuclear detonation does
Nuclear weapons are different from conventional bombs, not just in their destructive power, but in what they do. At the core, a large fireball vaporises everything. There is then a blast radius: all structures are destroyed in the immediate area, with damage and fires beyond that. The explosion creates large quantities of radioactive dust (‘fallout’) which is very long lasting and is carried by the wind. Humans and animals exposed to the fallout are vulnerable to illness and death from radiation poisoning. If the bomb is large enough, fallout rises high into the atmosphere, where it blocks sunlight and affects crops and potentially life.
How big the affected area is, depends on the size of the weapon, whether the explosion is in the air or on the ground, the terrain and the weather. High winds can carry fallout over large areas. The nearest we have ever been to a real life test was the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine in 1986. The fallout blew across much of northern Europe, contaminating grazing land. Welsh sheep grazing in the open were still failing safety tests 25 years later.
How big is a bomb?
The power of a nuclear explosion is measured in kilotons (kt) or megatons. One kiloton has the explosive power of 1000 tons of TNT. The bomb which completely destroyed the city of Hiroshima in 1945 was 15 kilotons.
The largest nuclear weapon ever created was 50 megatons. If that were to be exploded at Mildenhall in Suffolk (an obvious target, as the largest US Air Force base in the UK), the damage area would extend from the North Norfolk coast to Cambridge and Colchester. Over 100,000 people would die, and half a million be injured. A more modest weapon, like one of the forty 450 kt warheads carried by each of Britain’s Trident submarines, would destroy Thetford, Diss and Attleborough, with 12,000 immediate deaths, and 10,000 injuries, with fallout extending across Norwich to the coast.
Kinds of weapons
The major nuclear powers all retain these large weapons. But since the 1950s, countries have developed much smaller, so called ‘tactical’, or ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons. It is estimated that Russia has about 2,000 of these. The aim here was to create nuclear weapons which could be used to destroy targets like airfields or transport interchanges, or to cause mass casualties, but with less risk to those who fire the artillery.
In the context of Ukraine, a single ‘small’ (100 kt) ‘tactical’ bomb could destroy the whole city of Kyiv, or Odesa.
Putin’s intentions in Ukraine
Some commentators believe that Putin is bluffing: his threats are designed to deter the West from intensifying their support for Ukraine. They believe that he would step back from actual use for fear of escalation into all-out war (which no one could win). Others believe that a desperate man may take desperate measures.
Although US comments have become tougher recently, it is (perhaps deliberately), unclear what would trigger a serious response from the West. It is difficult to imagine that a direct nuclear attack on a Ukrainian city would not provoke a direct intervention by NATO, with the risk of all out nuclear war. How the West would respond to a smaller nuclear attack on a transport hub or large military concentration might be another matter.
Still more alarmingly, one Russian supporter of Putin recently argued on the Today programme that, since Russia’s quarrel is not with the Ukrainian people, but with their Western allies, the targets should be Western. This is probably bluff, but it makes East Anglia, nearer to Moscow than the USA, and the home of the main US Airforce base in the UK, a clear target.
For those of us who lived through the Cold War, these are not happy thoughts.
