For a fleeting moment on May 22nd, the world may have come closer than ever in history to a catastrophic nuclear war. This was due to a reckless Ukrainian drone attack on two Russian strategic nuclear early warning radars at Armavir.
When I first heard about the attack on these radar installations that are located beyond the curvature of the earth away from Ukraine, I was puzzled. Beyond demonstrating that “Ukraine” could attack targets far away, what strategic value was there in attacking these installations? These radar installations cannot provide coverage in Ukrainian airspace.
Dr. Theodore Postol says that this attack was the dumbest thing “Ukraine” could do.
Who is Dr. Postol?
Theodore Postol is Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. He did his undergraduate work in physics and his graduate work in nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After receiving his Ph.D., Dr. Postol joined the staff of Argonne National Laboratory, where he studied the microscopic dynamics and structure of liquids and disordered solids using neutron, x-ray and light scattering, along with computer molecular dynamics techniques. Subsequently he went to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment to study methods of basing the MX Missile, and later worked as a scientific adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations.
After leaving the Pentagon, Dr. Postol helped to build a program at Stanford University to train mid-career scientists to study developments in weapons technology of relevance to defense and arms control policy. In 1990 Dr. Postol was awarded the Leo Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society. In 1995 he received the Hilliard Roderick Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 2001 he received the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility for uncovering numerous and important false claims about missile defenses.
Let’s just agree that Dr. Postol knows a thing or two when it comes to the science of missile defense and national security. And that would be everyone’s national security, not just America’s. And let’s agree that his reference to Ukraine attacking these installations is a stretch at best. NATO personnel are needed to target installations this far away.
When the Ukraine war started, we were all treated to the narrative in the western media, that Russia’s military was hopelessly antiquated. The armchair quarterbacks in WaPo and the NYTimes were gleeful in their anticipation that Russia would soon be chased back to Moscow and forced to sue for peace. NATO’s superior weaponry was no match for Russian weaponry.
How did that work out? I digress.
Postol notes:
The Ukrainian attack at Armavir was a big deal. It shut down both Russian radars immediately. And it’s likely that within minutes of the attack, an emergency meeting took place with the commander of the Russian strategic rocket forces along with his highest-level officers.
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Even after decades of expensive Russian attempts to build a space-based early warning system that could provide global surveillance of U.S. submarine missile launches, Russia has been unable to marshal the extremely specialized high-technologies needed to build such a system.
To in part deal with this serious shortfall in Russia’s nuclear early warning capabilities, Vladimir Putin himself initiated and publicly supported a highly visible national effort to build a dense and capable nuclear strategic early warning radar system that utilizes numerous giant radars (typically about 30 to 35 meters high).
Since these radars basically form the singular foundation of Russia’s strategic nuclear early warning capabilities, any tampering with their functions in any unpredictable global situation is accompanied by very grave risks of misinterpretations of intentions that could lead to a massive launch of Russian nuclear forces.
A technical view of the situation:
Let’s be reminded that, although Russia leads in the development of hypersonic weaponry, Russia trails the West in satellite-based early warning systems. Why is this important?
Let’s suppose for a moment that a Trident ballistic missile is launched at Moscow from the Indian Ocean at about the same latitude as Bombay on the West Coast of India (20° North latitude). Travel time to Moscow would range from 18 to 22 minutes depending on “loft angle” used to fire the missile.
With the radar systems not working at Armavir, Moscow radar would not detect the missile for some 8 to 10 minutes after launch. It would take a minute or two for those systems to issue an alert. This would reduce decision-making time for the folks in Russia to 6 to 8 minutes.
While decision making times would be short if Russia had a capable space-based system (18 to 22 minutes), without such a system, decision-making times are horribly short. Do we want the future of the world dependent on the idiocy of those who are supporting such craziness as attacking these installations? Could such an attack lead to a panicked decision to launch a “counter-strike” because of some unidentified blip on a radar screen?
The attack on Armavir meets the conditions the Russian government laid out publicly in 2020 for actions that could trigger a nuclear retaliatory strike.
Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence:
“The conditions specifying the possibility of nuclear weapons use by the Russian Federation” include any “attack by an adversary against critical governmental or military sites of the Russian Federation, disruption of which would undermine nuclear forces response actions.”
Do the idiots in Washington who support such craziness really want a world-wide nuclear war? Are the war-mongering idiots in the West trying to create a scenario in which Russia is led to overreact to an event, or, the public is led to believe Russia is a legitimate nuclear threat to the west? Do these idiots really believe that anyone would win such a confrontation? Should we be looking carefully for a false flag operation? Is this what Ukrainian aid is buying the world?
And then there is this. This is a clear signal from Putin that his patience is running out.
