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The John Batchelor Show

#NUKES: The madness of Theater Nuclear Weapons, 1953-2024. Henry Sokolski, NPEC.

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.5 β€’ 2.8K Ratings

πŸ—“οΈ 10 February 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary


#NUKES: The madness of Theater Nuclear Weapons, 1953-2024. Henry Sokolski, NPEC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie
1953 MV65 Atomic Cannon

Transcript

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0:00.0

Like some kind of Pizza Ninja, Domino's are slicing their prices.

0:05.0

Domino's Price Slice.

0:07.0

Small pizzas now 8 quid, medium now 10 quid, and large now 12 quid.

0:12.0

Yet we're making cuts too.

0:14.0

In 11th of February 24, minimum delivery spend, charges and areas may apply.

0:18.0

To and see see Domino's dot code. UK. Yeah. the Executive Director of the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center, also the author of Best

0:36.3

of Intensions, America's Campaign Against Strategic Weapons Proliferation.

0:41.7

This book has helped me focus on a puzzle that's come up recently and

0:46.0

Henry's going to guide me through this because he's very familiar with

0:49.8

proliferation, counter-proliferation, strategic weapons, and the treaties of the 20th century.

0:56.3

I am most familiar with where this all started.

1:00.6

And the driver for this is the news report from the United Kingdom that the US intends to station nuclear weapons called theater nuclear weapons at an RAF base in Suffolk of the United Kingdom

1:18.8

in the event of a conflict with the Russian Federation between NATO and the Russian Federation.

1:25.3

And I puzzled about where are we going to use such a weapon.

1:29.2

So it drove me to look up the beginning of something called a theater nuclear weapon, not a strategic

1:36.1

nuclear weapon, not a city buster, but a theater weapon to be used, I can imagine, against troops, invading troops, armor concentrations, command

1:46.2

headquarters. It begins with something called Operation Upshot Nothol

1:51.6

Gable. This is May of 1953, a nuclear weapons test site conducted

1:56.8

by the United States in the Las Vegas Range.

2:01.4

It was fired by an artillery weapon, an M65 atomic cannon, and within 10 seconds of the,

2:09.4

or 20 seconds of the firing, there was a detonation that you could see the mushroom cloud.

2:14.9

This was the thinking in 1953, the beginning of the creation of what we now call theater weapons.

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