Small Bomb That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone

In destructive power, the Cold War giant dwarfed the American atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Washington's largest test explosion was 1,000 times as large. Moscow is 3,000 times. On both sides, the idea is to prevent attacks with the threat of major retaliation - by mutual destruction, or MAD. The psychological bar is so high that a nuclear strike is considered unthinkable.

Today, both Russia and the United States possess far less destructive nuclear weapons — they are only a fraction of the power of the Hiroshima bomb, their use perhaps less frightening and more plausible.
Concerns about these smaller weapons have increased as Vladimir V. Putin, in the Ukraine war, has warned of his nuclear powers, has put his atomic forces on alert and has put his military on risky attacks on nuclear power plants. The worry is that if Putin feels cornered into conflict, he might choose to detonate one of his smaller nuclear weapons — breaking a taboo that was established 76 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Analysts note that Russian forces have long practiced the transition from conventional to nuclear warfare, primarily as a way to win after losing on the battlefield. And the military, they added, which has the world's largest nuclear arsenal, has been exploring various escalation options that Putin might choose.
“The chances are small but increasing,” said Ulrich Kühn, a nuclear expert at the University of Hamburg and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “War is not going well for Russia,” he said, “and pressure from the West is increasing.”

Putin may have fired weapons at uninhabited areas, not troops, said Dr. Kuhn. In a 2018 study, he outlined a crisis scenario in which Moscow detonated a bomb in a remote part of the North Sea as a way of signaling an impending deadly attack. "It feels terrible to talk about these things," said Dr. Kühn in an interview. "But we have to consider that this is a possibility."

Washington expects more atomic moves from Putin in the days to come. Moscow will likely “increase its reliance on its nuclear deterrent to signal to the West and project power” as war and its consequences weaken Russia, Lieutenant General Scott D. Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Service, told House Armed Services.

source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/science/russia-nuclear-ukraine.html