Why Putin Can NEVER Use a Nuclear Weapon

Novaya Zemlya might seem to be just some lonely collection of islands in a region that nobody ever goes to.

And in a sense, that's true.

But it turns out, that's exactly what makes it so important.

If you were one of the lucky, or perhaps unlucky, few humans to ever visit the islands here, what you would find would mostly consist of snow, ice, rocks, and something else.

A whole lot of residual nuclear radiation, which mostly sits within large glaciers that are now rapidly melting off into the Arctic Ocean.

If you then looked past this radiation to find its source, it wouldn't be long until you found it.

A long abandoned, but recently reinstated, Soviet Union nuclear testing site.

A site which, at this moment, seems to be completely lacking in sufficient air defenses.

But more on that in just a moment.

Over the years, at the hands of this nuclear facility, the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago has been blanketed in nuclear radiation from over 220 different nuclear blasts, which have released an energy equivalent to 265 megatons of TNT.

That's a lot of explosives, and those numbers might not mean much to you.

They certainly didn't mean much to me.

But for comparison, during World War II, all of the combined explosives used, even including the detonations of the two U.S. nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, amounted to a total of only 2 to 5 megatons, potentially over a hundred times less than what has been seen on just this remote Russian archipelago.

And of all this explosive power on Novaya Zemlya, 50 megatons, or close to one-fifth, came from just one bomb, the infamous Tsar Bomba, which produced by far the largest human-made explosion in history, alongside one of history's largest fear campaigns, which would help contribute to the Cuban Missile Crisis almost exactly one year later.

That becomes very relevant for today's discussion.

Because looking at these details, it's easy to see why people were so terrified of this and other Soviet nukes.

For decades.

Nobody would blame them.

But analyzing that fear in hindsight teaches us some incredibly important lessons.

And leads us to ask a question.

Were the nukes themselves ever the actual weapon? Or was the actual weapon the fear that the nukes generated? And in practice, which of these weapons has truly caused the most damage? Let's consider the Tsar Bomba again.

This was a ferocious weapon, if ever humanity created one.

Its mushroom cloud was approximately 40 miles high, seven times higher than Mount Everest.

The width at the top of the cloud was 59 miles, and the bottom was 25 miles wide, an almost unfathomable scale.

The flash from the Tsar Bomba was so powerful that it was witnessed from over 1,000 kilometers away, and could have caused third-degree burns to any humans or animals within a 100-kilometer distance.