Senior Russian military officials are studying when and how to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, the United States says. Putin was not part of the meeting, but the US believes that Moscow can prove its threats It’s not just hollow wordsAccording to information from The New York Times.
Nuclear weapons fall into two main categories: tactical and strategic. Enough strategic packs of power to settle a large city thousands of miles away from any battlefield. However, there is speculation in Ukraine the use of much smaller tactical nuclear weapons.
These are small atomic weapons with explosive power ranging from 0.3 to 100 kilotonsCompared to the 1.2 megatons of the largest US strategic nuclear warhead or the 58 megatons bomb that Russia tested in 1961.
Tactical bombs are designed to have a limited impact on the battlefield, while strategic weapons are designed to fight and win all-out wars.
However, the destructive power of most of these small charges exceeds that of the atomic bomb used by the United States against the Japanese city of Hiroshima, which had an explosive power equivalent to about 20 kilotons of TNT.
According to ABC, since the Cold War, Russia has kept about 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads, which can be used as aircraft bombs, missiles, torpedoes, depth charges, artillery, and possibly land mines. With the possibility of installing them in different systems, they are usually used to launch conventional explosives such as Kalibr cruise missiles or Iskander-M ballistic missiles. According to the Pentagon’s calculations, a one-kiloton warhead would have to explode 300 feet from a tank to inflict massive damage.
