The New York Times had quite the interesting piece buried in its science section on April 28. Titled “U.S. Wires Ukraine With Radiation Sensors to Detect Nuclear Blasts,” it claims sensors “can detect bursts of radiation from a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb and can confirm the identity of the attacker.” More:
In part, the goal is to make sure that if Russia detonates a radioactive weapon on Ukrainian soil, its atomic signature and Moscow’s culpability could be verified.
Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine 14 months ago, experts have worried about whether President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would use nuclear arms in combat for the first time since the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Second, about those “experts.” To expand on their worries, the Times links to an October piece titled “Russia’s Small Nuclear Arms: A Risky Option for Putin and Ukraine Alike.” In it, we get this:
The primary utility, many U.S. officials say, would be as part of a last-ditch effort by Mr. Putin to halt the Ukrainian counteroffensive, by threatening to make parts of Ukraine uninhabitable. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe some of the most sensitive discussions inside the administration.
So the experts are anonymous. Who is running this operation? The Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST), which is the Nation Nuclear Security Administration’s arm that deals with emergency response functions. The Times also notes the following:
Jeffrey T. Richelson, author of “Defusing Armageddon,” a 2009 book on the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, reported that it often teamed up with the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite military unit so secretive that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence.
The Times’ April 28 piece gets more bonkers from there. There’s this:
Public knowledge of such defensive planning, nuclear experts say, can deter Moscow by letting it know that Washington can expose what is called a false-flag operation.
For instance, Moscow could falsely claim that Kyiv set off a nuclear blast on the battlefield to try to draw the West into deeper war assistance. But in theory, with the sensor network in place, Washington would be able to point to its own nuclear attribution analyses to reveal that Moscow was in fact the attacker.
So Russia would conduct a false-flag operation in order to risk accomplishing what Kiev would want to accomplish with its own false flag?
Again, what would Moscow have to gain? It’s steadily winning the war and depleting western stockpiles.
But for the inhabitants of the alternate universe where Russia is on its last legs it all makes perfect sense. Speaking to that audience, the Times again invokes “nuclear experts” and “western experts” who are presumably the same aforementioned anonymous officials, and they put an ominous spin on Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive:
Nuclear experts say such defensive precautions could face their greatest test in coming weeks as the Ukrainian army launches its spring offensive. China has leaned on Russia to discontinue its nuclear saber rattling and Mr. Putin has not recently invoked a nuclear threat. But Western experts worry that Russia’s battlefield failures are making Mr. Putin, if anything, more dependent on his nuclear arsenal, and they worry that fresh setbacks could increase his willingness to pull the nuclear trigger.
One of the many alarming aspects of all this is that these “experts” certainly must know that the idea “that Russia’s battlefield failures are making Mr. Putin, if anything, more dependent on his nuclear arsenal” is complete fantasy, yet they’re peddling it anyways. Why? That’s an ominous thought.
Russia was warning NATO back in October that Ukraine might detonate a “dirty bomb” and blame Moscow. Washington, Paris, and London dismissed it all as “transparently false.”
Instead the West has continued to insist that Moscow might do so. The Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence state that Russia would not use a nuclear weapon of any kind unless the country is attacked using weapons of mass destruction or faces a conventional attack so severe it threatens the country’s existence.
The Times’ piece has virtually no information on what the deployed sensors actually do. Presumably they would detect radiation and then a forensics team would try to determine the origin of the weapon. Thing is, there are already institutions for that.
The European Radiological Data Exchange Platform, which monitors radiation levels, already covers Ukraine. According to its website, it “consists of data exchange mechanism and presentation website for radiological monitoring data which is collected and shared by 39 participating countries in almost REAL TIME.” But it is not a rapid alert system, and while the EU has one of those, it only covers member states.
The IAEA, on the other hand has its EMERCON system for radiological or nuclear emergencies and which does cover Ukraine. And the IAEA can help prepare for the investigation into a nuclear incident:
The IAEA supports States in developing technical capabilities by providing: Technical assistance, including, upon request, to prepare for the conduct of a nuclear forensics examination in the context of the investigation of a nuclear security event. Important considerations involve procedures to collect and preserve evidence and properly sequence non-destructive ahead of destructive analysis in the laboratory.
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