If they've not been maintained properly, I doubt they'd get out of Russian territory: it's not just the warhead, the delivery system probably hasn't been maintained either. I think Russia still has a sizeable number of nuclear warheads for delivery by plane, mind. But planes are arguably easier to shoot down.
Ukraine
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There's always by truck in advance, though, to give someone a surprise when they try to take/retake territory. Or discretely leaving something on the seabed to give a city a radioactive steam cleaning, that was something they mentioned in 50's training films.
And a device that doesn't work properly might still initiate at less than its intended yield, which can still be not much fun. Or just spray radioactive material around.
Not that I see any of this happening any time soon, though.
I don't think anyone has nuclear artillery anymore. They were mostly proposed for battlefield use, and (outside the absurdly impractical) even a really, really long-range cannon only has a range of about 40km.
There are forms of nuclear "bunker buster" missile - these are I think fired from planes, and actually have quite modest warheads: the idea is to penetrate lots of concrete and then the explosion doesn't need to be that big.
Russia allegedly destroyed its chemical weapons years ago - at least at battlefield quantities. As the recent novichok poisonings might suggest, they've still got some.
Well...just guessing here, but they might have small devices that are compatible with artillery or rockets, even if that wasn't their primary intended role.
And even if that was true, how hard would it be to create more? All sorts of things that have been used as chemical weapons are also things that people have to be careful to avoid accidentally creating in industrial or domestic purposes. Not the later, most nasty stuff, though.
That's something I'd wonder about. If Putin decides to burn the world down, would Shoigu agree? Or would he decide that Putin has gone bleedling mad, Shoigu doesn't particulary want to die or lose his 15 vacation homes in a nuclear fireball and coincidently, Putin accidently shot himself him the back of the head during the argument, per Shoigu.
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I think there's a certain type of ideologue who'd rather burn their country down than admit defeat. That was pretty much Hitler at the end - a drug-addled madman willing to turn his country to ruins rather than accept the inevitable. I can see his fellow Nazis not shooting him and surrendering because they were all so complicit in the worst crimes imaginable that they too had nothing to lose.
Is Putin that kind of person? I don't think so. I think Putin likes being in charge too much to risk it all. I doubt many of his inner circle are zealots either, and in terms of consequences they probably aren't even up for prison if Russia loses, never mind a noose. Would even Putin's bodyguards consign everyone they know and love to a fiery death with Russia at no particular peril, either?
No, I don't think this is ever going to come to nukes.
Is Putin that kind of person? I don't think so. I think Putin likes being in charge too much to risk it all. I doubt many of his inner circle are zealots either, and in terms of consequences they probably aren't even up for prison if Russia loses, never mind a noose. Would even Putin's bodyguards consign everyone they know and love to a fiery death with Russia at no particular peril, either?
No, I don't think this is ever going to come to nukes.
Yeah but they were developed by the same sort of people who developed the nuclear torpedo, the nuclear landmine and the nuclear air-to-air missile so I think they were just running with the idea of 'what can we stick a small nuke on?'
Which to be fair was basically the US's approach for a while during the cold war as well.
The Cold War was weird.
Oh yeah, not implying this was purely a Soviet thing. I guess when you reach a certain number of low yield nukes in the inventory you just start looking for things to strap them on to.
Also most of these weapons, if not used at extreme range and in perfect conditions, would have been suicidal to use... especially naval shit like the nuclear depth charges, torpedos and anti-sub rockets.
That's an understatement.
For a nation state like Russia, extremely easy..
Maintaining chemical weapons are much less about storing a fixed number of warheads and more about maintaining the capability to make the chemicals involved. While modern chemical weapons are very stable and can be stored for a long time (as opposed to older ones which would decay extremely quickly), there's not much reason to do so as they supposedly only exist for research purposes and no government would ever admit to stockpiling them for use as weapons of mass destruction.
But in the 80s it was possible to make sarin using commonly available industrial and agricultural chemicals using a fairly basic chemical lab setup, provided you didn't mind an extremely high risk of accidentally poisoning yourself. It would be a lot harder today because a lot of those chemicals were taken off the market or restricted after the Aum Shinrikyo incident (in which they did exactly that). That said, the so-called Islamic State had a chemical weapons program, and while it seems like it didn't go anywhere there is really no obstacles to an entity the size of a state throwing together chemical weapons quite easily.
Adding to this, chemical weapons are one of the few areas in which Russia actually is kind of a world leader. The Soviet Union had a really advanced chemical weapons program. However, the goal of this program was primarily to make poisons that would be hard to detect and could be used for the assassination of individuals.
As battlefield weapons, chemical weapons (well, nerve agents anyway) are a bit questionable. Because even tiny doses can really mess people up, there's a very good chance that anyone using them is going to end up poisoning their own side too. The primary utility of chemical weapons is as terror weapons, because they are absolutely terrifying, extremely cruel and very, very difficult and expensive to protect yourself from but this means there is also a massive, massive taboo against their use, and doing so is going to come at a massive diplomatic cost.
That feeling when you realize the Fat Man from the Fallout games wasn't just a funny joke and basically existed.
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I was gonna say Fallout borrowed a lot of ideas from the real cold war and just added some jokes.That feeling when you realize the Fat Man from the Fallout games wasn't just a funny joke and basically existed.
Counter example, Albert Speer. Hitler wanted Germany reduced to the stone age (I think in those words) to spite the allies, Speer argued for "temporarily disabling" factories so they could be retaken, and then later flat out ignored orders so that he would be on better terms with their new allied overlords.
I'd also add that if you have chemical weapons and the enemy thinks you might use them, they have to take measures against them, whether you do or not. Any time a plane overflies an enemy position or there's a nearby artillery strike, everyone is supposed to stop whatever they are doing, put on their masks and try to continue work wearing the things until the all clear, and that makes everything more difficult.
As part of the Russian government's lurch to the right in the social/cultural area, it plans to outlaw sex reassignment surgeries. This goes hand in hand with how the party and state media have portrayed the war as a fight against Western "decadence", and have explicitly pointed to LGBT+ people as an example of such.
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Yeah, now that you mention it.
But...should patriotic westerners support LGBT people for the purpose of spiting Russia?
State-sponsored discrimination, a ban and prison time for talking positively about LGBT+ people in public, and government acquiescence in Kadyrov's kidnapping and murder of gay people in Chechnya, but until now there hadn't been an outright ban on GRS.
Touche
Russia's own economic figures show a steep drop in industrial output amid a record labor shortage
Russian industrial production fell 5% in April from the prior month, according to the Kremlin's economy ministry.
markets.businessinsider.com
So apparently Russia is having a labor shortage FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON and also their industrial output dropped like 5% in a month. Per Russian numbers. I might add.
I'm not an economist but for some reason 5% sounds bad. I'm sure someone with more expertise on the subject could put this into better perspective.
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