Re:Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
by throwaway48476 on Saturday March 01, 2025 @07:24PM
(#43225733)
You need people to arm and deploy 200k drones. With nukes you just press a button. They're also a lot cheaper if you skimp on maintenance and make up for it in quantity.
The effects on a country of 1000 or 2000 radioactive mushroom clouds seem like they'd be quite a bit larger than the one or two we've seen previously. You could see a billion people dead within an hour.
But they're very unselective weapons. The trend toward these sub-megatonne warheads is to make them more selective so they have more strategic value. The US's force of 2800-some warheads costs about US$60 billion per year to maintain, about 20 million dollars per year per warhead. US$200 million will buy you 200 000 commercial drones with which you can kill almost 200 000 individually selected people with grenades. That's enormously more strategically valuable than the million random people you can kill with the warhead.