flattened cities, millions of people were burned to death and were further afflicted by the fallout. That dire future may seem strange to some, but that’s because no country since 1945 has detonated a nuclear weapon in a conflict. Russia has suspended its participation in the Nuclear Weapons Reduction Treaty with the United States. Thankfully, nuclear warheads most of the time sit comfortably in silos and underground vaults, still and quietly. But if someone actually tried to use it, would it work as intended?
“No one really knows,” says Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear weapons historian at Stevens Institute of Technology. In the 20th century he had more than 2,000 nuclear tests, most of them carried out by the United States and the Soviet Union. While these have demonstrated the nuclear capabilities of nations, they do not guarantee that missiles or other delivery systems fitted with warheads will work today.
Surprisingly, to our knowledge, the United States has only tested a live-fire nuclear warhead once using a live-fire missile system, dating back to 1962. It was launched from a submarine. The Soviet Union had conducted a similar experiment the previous year, and China followed her in 1966. No country has ever tested a nuclear warhead carried by an intercontinental ballistic missile. A missile can explode on the launch pad, he explains Wellerstein. No one wants to clean up that mess.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sadly brought the specter of nuclear weapons to the fore again. In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to resume nuclear testing, claiming a new strategic nuclear weapons system had been put into combat duty. I have been particularly vocal about what is being done. This also includes against Ukraine.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, a security-focused nonprofit, Russia has about 4,500 unretired nuclear warheads. Approximately 2,000 rounds are considered “tactical”. For example, a small warhead that can be used on foreign battlefields. As far as we know, Russia has not started “combining” these tactical warheads with delivery systems such as missiles. Doing so entails certain security risks, says Lynn Rasten of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a think tank.
Multiple things could theoretically go wrong with these weapons if they were operational. For one, the delivery system itself may be unreliable. Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon senior administrator, wrote about the many problems Russia has faced with missiles during its war with Ukraine. Last spring, U.S. officials said that between 20 and 60 percent of Russia’s missiles failed in that they never fired or hit their intended targets. That’s not necessarily a problem, Schneider points out, though. When launching a high-explosive nuclear warhead, “accuracy is not so important,” he says.
