Don't trust the radiation monitoring system, the actual monitoring system has been destroyed by a rocket impact three days ago.
The monitoring system has been shot down on 1 Sep.
Here is the statement from the Nuclear Agency in Ukraine:
On March 1, 2022 at 11:40 as a result of rocket impact, the communication network of Zaporizhzhya NPP was damaged. As a result, the Automated Radiation Monitoring System (ARMS) of the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant lost its full functionality and stopped the transmission of data to the international radiation monitoring network IRMIS. IAEA has been informed about the incident.
This statement, while true, changes denotation depending on the scale at which you view this conflict. If you view it as a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the existential threat is to Ukraine. If you view it as a conflict between Russia and NATO, the existential threat is to Russia.
But when they were accepted Putin didn't feel strong enough to do anything about it.
Russia has been advancing it's "sphere of influence" political theory, whereby independent countries with that "sphere of influence" don't get the right to make their own alliances. That "sphere of influence" includes all Eastern European countries that border on Russia at least.
It hasn't been widely reported on, but the initial demand that led to this war was that NATO withdraw all infrastructure install in post 1997 expansions:
Russia published two lists of demands — for Washington and for NATO — the latter calling for the removal of all NATO military infrastructure installed in Eastern European countries after 1997, effectively attempting to rework the consequences of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, which left Russia weakened for years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/17/ukraine-russ...
Putin is a ham-fisted dictator, and the world will be better off without him, but his motivations here aren’t mysterious.
Moscow from Latvian border: ~620 km
Not to mention full control of a Black Sea (and therefore entrance to Mediterranean) coastline with multiple ports. As well as a major agricultural products. As well as a huge transit country for Russian energy pipelines.
Except the farm land. But it’s not 1444 — trade is vastly more profitable than agriculture nowadays.
It’s for the gas pipelines, but 100 year perspective. Sure.
I think you could say in the wider scale it can be interpreted as an existential threat to Putin's Russia?
Second, no, it is definitely _not_ a total war. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war for background.
Third, the theoretical threat of NATO is not so much to Russia: I agree that NATO is not a threat to Russia. However I do also see that NATO and EU are a threat to Putin's long term vision for a renewed Russian Empire.
To be clear, I agree that this vision is bogus and that a threat to a bogus vision is not a valid excuse for a war.
Please also be careful with accusing people of being fascists or Nazis. Putin and his predecessors in the USSR employed the same tactic. And whether anyone does or does not fulfill the textbook definition of a fascist is besides the point here.
(1) Not WMD like chlorine, or nuclear, of course, nor biological weapons except coronavirus released by accident from Vector lab in Siberia on Sep 16, 2019, just conventional weapons designed to maximize damage to civilian infrastructure.
Glad we agree.
> Second, no, it is definitely _not_ a total war. See
It’s a total war.
> Third, the theoretical threat of NATO is not so much to Russia: I agree that NATO is not a threat to Russia. However I do also see that NATO and EU are a threat to Putin's long term vision for a renewed Russian Empire.
By this logic all conflicts are both sided. England is equally justified in bombing India because they “threatened” the British empire by rejecting being under its power.
> Please also be careful with accusing people of being fascists or Nazis. Putin and his predecessors in the USSR employed the same tactic. And whether anyone does or does not fulfill the textbook definition of a fascist is besides the point here.
I’m well aware of the importance of being precise and cautious with this term and I chose it carefully.
Air temperature 0 ℃ Wind N Wind speed 0 m/s Relative humidity 0 % Atmospheric pressure 0 mm Hg
... I hope that low pressure isn't from a vacuum bomb.
with the HN meme of AWS status pages reporting everything fine while AWS is down, here we have good evidence we cannot rely on this website reporting reliable data.
Here is the European Commission Radiation Map: https://remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
And here a volunteer map from Geiger counter manufacturer GQ Electronics: https://www.gmcmap.com/
Here is the statement from the Nuclear Agency in Ukraine:
On March 1, 2022 at 11:40 as a result of rocket impact, the communication network of Zaporizhzhya NPP was damaged. As a result, the Automated Radiation Monitoring System (ARMS) of the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant lost its full functionality and stopped the transmission of data to the international radiation monitoring network IRMIS. IAEA has been informed about the incident.
I think any monitoring system close enough to see 0 mm Hg pressure will have been destroyed by the shockwave before it could report that complete vacuum.
Do you know if these really show a significantly different pressure effect from conventional bombs?
I saw a chart showing a fatter tail on the shockwave, but it wasn't really that dramatic. I'm curious because I can imagine all kinds of vacuum effects in my mind's eye, but this is also informed by a _lot_ of the now-doubtful PR-style efforts on selling these things in years past.
The classical excuse (see Operation Opera) is that it is part of an enemy weapons program from an enemy intent on nuking you. It would only be a small step from current propaganda for Russia to make this claim, having recently added the claim of an offensive Ukrainian nuke program to their propaganda.
Maybe the steam just vents? Or bypasses a turbine? Hopefully it can operate without being connected to the outside, but I’m not sure.
The same as any other power plant: the generator is automatically shut down by its safety systems (if it didn't shut down, the generator would overspeed and violently break apart). Once the generator shuts down, the safety systems for the reactor itself should either automatically shut down the reactor too, or somehow bypass the steam to the generator and reduce power to idle (I thought they would always shut down, but recently there was a failure on the generator of the nuclear power plant near where I live, and the reactor went to idle instead of shutting down, so it seems nuclear power plants have this mode too).
The issue is what happens after a shutdown; as seen at Fukushima, the cooling pumps in the reactor need external power for a couple of days until the decay heat reduces enough that passive cooling is sufficient. Without power from the outside, the emergency generators take over; if these are damaged or out of fuel, and backup generators can't be brought by truck from outside after a couple of hours, disaster happens.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/ukrain...
What rubbish. This looks like Putin found a way to tactically deploy dirty nukes within the West’s red lines.
Given the widespread reports during this war of Russian equipment in poor condition, I've been thinking about this possibility for a while:
* Putin fires tactical atomic weapon at some empty plot of Ukrainian land, and announces it as a "demonstration" of Russian might.
* The weapon is a dud.
I'm not sure whether this outcome might not be worse in the long run, in terms of geopolitical stability, than if the weapon performs as expected!
The time between Russia being the second country to use nuclear weapons and our current concept of countries becoming totally irrelevant would be measured in minutes.
Having said this he might still do it.
You say that nobody will went crazy when a tactic nuke will be used against RF army. Right?
Can you draw the line, please? When this war between two nuclear states will be nuclear, if even use of tactical nuke is not enough for you?
[1]Budapest Memorandum was not fulfilled, so Ukraine regain their status of nuclear state.
No idea what salami tactics means.
A tactical nuke used against Kharkiv would certainly lead to either a Ukrainian dirty bomb strike against Moscow and or a NATO intervention. Why would Russia stop at one nuke when fighting NATO? For each tactical nuke against NATO you would expect at least one in return, or worse a megaton +x% for megaton exchange.
This spirals into full nuclear war very quickly once one side believes that they are going to lose without strategic weapons, or one side believes they have been or will be the victim of a strategic attack.
Speaking of, how long until the country with all of the old Soviet weapons facilities decides to re-enter the nuclear club?
AFAICT, the person you were responding to wasn’t talking about a nuke being used against NATO forces.
If "tactical" nukes are a thing why hasn't anyone used them since 1945? Seems like they could have been handy in Syria or Afghanistan. There's no shortage of examples of nuclear powers going to war with non-nuclear non-NATO countries in the last 77 years. None of them involved nukes in any capacity.
If Putin decides to escalate to nukes as a final act of failure then the de-escalation would be the complete annihilation of Russia as a country. In minutes.
The idea of getting away with a tactical nuke strike is insane.
to strengthen their negotiation position "We give you back X, you give back Mariupol"
> complete annihilation of Russia as a country
you think US would die for some village in Ukraine? They were plenty of US politicians and generals which were against nuclear umbrella for West Germany.
If the Ukrainians can push Russians back why wouldn’t they do the same everywhere? Crossing the border becomes an act of aggression, only Russia has acted aggressively here. Everyone else is trying to avoid conflict.
If Russia detonates a nuke in Europe the entire country will be obliterated immediately.
According to the website above.
I think “officials” are reporting increased levels, but if the website source above is good, I’m not seeing high values. I didn’t look at Wayback, so it could be “increased”, thus my comment for reference.
It’s a Geiger counter. It’s cheaper than having an oscilloscope, which wouldn’t be “understated” either.
We'll see if it actually ships; seems lots of people have the same idea right now.
Fukushima disaster levels were 400,000 μSv/h at peak. Short term dose of 10,000 μSv causes radiation sickness but probably not death. Beyond that it gets worse.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold_model
However this model is contested. And the analysis on the cancers incidence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Chernobyl seems to indicate that this model is flawed. The exact model is difficult to estimate because of the low number of extra cancer is lost in the noise.
Automated Radiation Monitoring system: https://www.npp.zp.ua/en/safety/arms