Press
Russia tests its nuclear force; a normal maneuver. “Pretty boring,” says one analyst. What’s new is that Putin is openly stirring up fear.
Moscow – “I didn’t want to be responsible for the Third World War,” said Stanislav Petrov afterwards. The colonel of the Russian air defense was on duty and ignored the alarm from his computers on the night of October 25th to 26th, 1983. Nuclear missiles had been reported to him from the West; He classified it as a hoax – fortunately.
Around this time, the West conducted the Able Archer exercise in the Cold War; so realistic that the Soviet Union put its nuclear weapons on alert. Now Vladimir Putin is openly playing with nuclear weapons. Because he feels threatened by the French announcement that they will send European troops to the Ukraine war. Russia is driven by naked fear.
Russia is planning a secret weapon that promises miracles
He gives the all-clear Defense Express with reference to “special ammunition developed just in case of such exercises”: “the nuclear explosion imitators IAB-500 and IU-59”. However, she knows Tass to top this – with a simulator whose name the Russian news agency is still keeping secret – the secret weapon is still being patented, but promises real miracles: “The purpose of the model is to simulate what a nuclear strike looks like – the shock effect, the flash of light and mushroom cloud of a ground-based nuclear explosion,” writes the Tass. The two predecessors are simply outdated and should actually no longer be used.
Putin is certainly not a madman or madman, as Germany’s current foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, described him, but rather a person who returns to the beliefs of his childhood in the backyard in Leningrad in order to emerge victorious from conflicts.
The exercise on tactical nuclear weapons is not an exceptional case, Ulrich Kühn recently said ZDF expressed to. The new quality would consist in the public announcement of the tests and the comprehensive justification with French President Emmanuel Macron’s cheeky proposal to send NATO troops to Ukraine – that’s what the foreign policy expert says Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg. When it comes to the maneuver itself, he remains extremely relaxed: “To be honest, what’s happening isn’t that exciting,” he says.
“Fire show” without radiation: Troops should learn how to act after a nuclear strike
The magazine speculates that the IAB-500, its predecessor IU-59 or a similar simulation, are essentially a large firecracker Defense Express – a “fire show” without radiation: “When detonated, the IAB-500 is intended to produce a fireball 90 to 120 meters in diameter within 3.5 seconds, followed by a ‘mushroom’ up to a kilometer high from a distance of 30 kilometers should be visible,” he writes Defense Express. Or to put it another way: a kind of Molotov cocktail made from three quarters fuel and phosphorus.
The Russian soldiers should learn what awaits them after the detonation of such a force – “to better prepare the ground forces for combat operations after the use of nuclear weapons as well as to train the personnel of the radiation, chemical and biological ground reconnaissance forces,” such as Tass writes. Tactical nuclear weapons affect a narrow regional area and are primarily directed against troop concentrations or military or critical infrastructure, i.e. significant larger command posts, depots, power plants or industrial facilities. In principle, this is a completely normal military maneuver procedure, says scientist Kühn. The special thing lies in connecting the warheads with the delivery systems, for example the Russian Iskander missiles.
Logistical exercise: Warheads have to be approached and screwed on
According to Kühn, Russia stores its warheads decentrally in twelve storage facilities spread across the entire empire. In addition, there are 35 other camps near air force bases. The 12th (Main) Directorate in Moscow is the master of the process and every single piece of nuclear ammunition. The maneuver procedure itself is simple, explains Kühn in the ZDF: The intended warheads would be taken out of the warehouses and delivered to the delivery systems, for example the trucks of the mobile Iskander missiles – which would possibly be in the middle of a forest area. The nuclear warheads would then be screwed onto the rockets. Ultimately, the exercise would be to learn to master the process as smoothly as possible. Ultimately, it is irrelevant whether the warheads are nuclear or conventional.
So perhaps the announcement alone is the purpose of the exercise: “Tactical nuclear weapons achieve little militarily. But they are definitely useful for the ruler in the Kremlin when it comes to threatening,” wrote the The New Zurich Times already a year ago, when Putin switched to nuclear rhetoric. So the topic may have only apparently acquired a new relevance – and the announcement of a new “simulator” initially represents propaganda. Warheads can contain up to 50 kilotons of TNT (trinitrotoluene) – a nuclear ground detonation with an explosive force of ten kilotons of TNT would a circular area “with a radius of just over a kilometer was heavily contaminated and affected by medium to severe pressure damage,” writes the NZZ.
Nuclear exercise: part of Russia’s warfare – “and it works”
The paper thinks through various scenarios, whereby any escalation below the apocalypse would inevitably result in a reaction from NATO: If Putin were to spark even a slight nuclear escalation in the Ukraine war, NATO could, for example, destroy the Black Sea Fleet in response, it is speculated the NZZ. Putin would therefore have gained nothing. In this respect, the Russian nuclear exercise would be less like a drill by its own troops than a provoked simulation of the behavior of the Western population – which now seems to have grown tired of the Ukraine war: “He can still speculate that this will result in certain NATO Countries allow the population to mobilize against supporting the Ukrainians’ defense struggle,” writes the NZZ.
Then the press announcement of his exercise made sense: the “fire show” is not for his own troops, but one for the Western audience. Julian Wucherpfennig and Felix Lemmer argue similarly: Putin does not threaten politicians, he threatens the population, the two researchers at Hertie School of Governance opposite in Berlin Time online expressed: “Russia’s military is practicing with nuclear weapons, Vladimir Putin is stoking fears of a nuclear war. This is part of his psychological warfare – and it works.”
Nuclear threat as childhood trauma: Putin only knows “winner or loser”
The nuclear threat is probably pure psychological terror from a former street boy, as Stephan Herpertz suspected last year. The psychotherapist considers the Russian dictator to be neither a madman nor a lunatic. In his essay for the magazine The psychotherapy he describes him more as “a person who returns to the beliefs of his childhood in the backyard in Leningrad in order to emerge victorious from conflicts. To be defeated means disaster in the form of humiliation and degradation.” According to Herbertz, for Putin there is only the dichotomy between “winner or loser or friend or traitor”.
So Vladimir Putin apparently lives in a binary world – as it was almost 40 years ago. The “Able Archer” maneuver may have been little more than a “finger exercise” by Western forces, but it was a maneuver with which the West “made the Soviet Union believe that a nuclear attack actually seemed possible. “The allies obviously underestimated the Soviet Union’s fear of a nuclear first strike from the West,” as the Mirror wrote about this historical event.
According to the psychotherapist Herpertz, Putin is the prince of a run-down empire; shrunk in regional size and economic importance. That scares him. Fear of people. The then Air Force Colonel Stanislav Petrov was less afraid of people than computers. Otherwise the Third World War would be history long ago. But the Russian dictator may have to build up his ego above all else: with shock effects, flashes of light and mushroom clouds. (Karsten Hinzmann)
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