Tegmark is a professor doing AI research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
We know that an all-out U.S.-Russia nuclear war would be bad. But how bad, exactly? How do your chances of surviving the explosions, radiation, and nuclear winter depend on where you live? The past year’s unprecedented nuclear saber-rattling and last weekend’s chaos in Russia has made this question timely. To help answer it, I’ve worked with an amazing interdisciplinary group of scientists (see end credits) to produce the most scientifically realistic simulation of a nuclear war using only unclassified data, and visualize it as avideo. It combines detailed modeling of nuclear targeting, missile trajectories, blasts and the electromagnetic pulse, and of how black carbon smoke…
INDIANAPOLIS —Wildfire smoke blowing from Canadais causing low visibility in central Indiana and across much of the country. But the haze is the least of the problems, as the unhealthy levels of pollution can cause serious health impacts.
The good news is there are several ways to protect yourself and your family from some of the negative effects of the smoke.
But first, you need to understand the problem and why it is so hazy in Indiana.
Smoke is made of tiny particles of soot, carried in the air. It’s their size that makes them a problem. For a sense of scale, your average grain of sand is about 90 microns in diameter.
Forecasters say the only break much of America can hope for anytime soon from eye-watering dangerous smoke from fire-struck Canada is brief bouts of shirt-soaking sweltering heat and humidity.
These satellite images were taken on (from top left) June 6, June 7, June 25, and June 27, 2023. They show the wind movement from wildfire smoke in Quebec, Canada.Uncredited / AP
The only break much of America can hope for anytime soon from eye-watering dangerous smoke from fire-struck Canada is brief bouts of shirt-soaking sweltering heat and humidity from a southern heat wave that has already proven deadly, forecasters say.
And then the smoke will likely come back to the Midwest and East.
That’s because neither the 235 out-of-control Canadian wildfires nor the stuck weather pattern that’s responsible for this mess of meteorological maladies are showing signs of relenting for the next week or longer, according to…
Editor’s Note:Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 25 books, including the New York Times best-seller, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past” (Basic Books). Follow him on Twitter@julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Viewmore opinionon CNN.
People in vast swathes of America are breathing in thesmoky airfrom Canada’s record-breaking wildfires.Residentsof Chicago, Detroit and other areas in the Great Lakes regionwokeup to poor air qualitythis week. They are experiencing theunsettling fogthat New Yorkers lived through…
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 9.37 billion eggs were produced in May, up 4% from last year. David Silverman via Getty Images
First published on
Dive Brief
U.S. egg production numbers are on the rise, signaling a rebuild after bird flu decimated commercial flocks last year and sent prices skyrocketing.
A total of 9.37 billion eggs were produced in May, up 4% from last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Egg production levels were down as much as 6% earlier this year, but started to show signs of improvement in April.
Highly pathogenic avian influenza, a contagious disease often fatal to birds, has affected 325 U.S. commercial poultry flocks over the past year, but only seven cases have been reported since March. No cases were reported in the past 30 days.
Dive Insight
HPAI, often spread by migratory birds, affected more than 58 million commercial and wild birds in the past year, the country’s worst outbreak on record, according to USDA data. As cases spread, supplies tightened and prices soared, especially for eggs.
U.S. egg inventories were down 29% in December compared to the start of 2022. More than 43 million egg-laying hens died from disease or depopulation efforts last year. Wholesale egg prices surged 267% on increased holiday demand. They have since decreased as flocks are rebuilt and farmers adopt biosecurity measures as HPAI preventative.
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After last year’s outbreak, Brian Earnest, lead economist, animal protein at CoBank, said he anticipated HPAI to be a year-round issue in 2023 with a lingering expectation that it would be back in full force, but “that does not seem to be the case.”
Instead, the rate of infection among domestic commercial poultry flocks has significantly weakened, according to USDA data. No U.S. cases have been reported among egg-laying birds since December.
“It appears that maybe commercial flocks are growing some immunity to it,” Earnest said.
Two cultivated-meat companies can now sell their lab-grown chicken products in the U.S. But what does it taste like? Is it more ethical? And is this the end of factory farming as we know it?
Two cultivated-meat companies — Eat Just and Upside Foods — recently got full approvals from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to sell their lab-grown chicken products in the U.S. The federal green light comes months after both companies obtained confirmation from the Food and Drug Administration that their cell-cultivated meat was safe for human consumption.
Both companies are starting small, so it will be a while before you can buy their products at the grocery store. Upside Foods plans to sell its cultivated chicken to a San Francisco restaurant called Bar Crenn, while Eat Just’s brand, Good Meats, is collaborating with a Washington, D.C., restaurant owned by the celebrity chef and restaurateur Jose Andrés.
To better understand how cultivated meat could impact the meat industry, Yahoo News spoke with Bill Winders, a sociology professor specializing in food and agriculture at Georgia Tech and co-editor of “Global Meat: Social and Environmental Consequences of the Expanding Meat Industry.” Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Yahoo News: How will this change the way we eat meat — and food in general?
Bill Winders: I don’t think that it’s going to change that much about the way that we eat meat or food in general, in part because initially, it’ll be a really small contribution to meat production overall in the United States. In 2021, we produced about 21 million metric tons of chicken. That’s about 46 billion pounds of chicken in that one year. So Upside Foods, whatever they produce over the next year or five years — or even the next decade — is not going to be that significant in view of the overall meat industry.
What about in the long term? Is this the beginning of the end of factory farming as we know it?
From 2014 until today, the consumption and marketing of plant-based meat alternatives like Impossible and Beyond Meat has increased significantly. But it hasn’t changed meat production patterns. In fact, the big meat companies, like Tyson and others, actually got into plant-based meat. Part of that is because they saw that plant-based meats were a niche market that was profitable, and so they got into that market and made sure, essentially, that wasn’t going to interfere with the profits that they were making in traditional factory farming.
So I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same thing happen with cultivated meat — that once it becomes profitable and there’s a market niche for it, the big meat companies would get in on it as well. And in some ways, that can help to guard against those alternatives: like cultivated and plant-based meat impinging on what big meat companies really find their profits in — which is traditional or factory-farm industrial meat production.
Cultivation tanks at the Upside Foods plant, where lab-grown meat is cultivated, in Emeryville, Calif., on Jan. 11. (Peter DaSilva/Reuters/File Photo)
So could cell-cultivated meat be in competition with plant-based meat alternatives, like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat?
Plant-based meats have increased faster than I think the lab-grown meats will. Plant-based meats use pea protein or soy, and there’s lots of soybeans and other field crops that can be used for those purposes, so it was much easier for them to scale up to production relatively quickly. But lab-grown meats have the added complication that the process to produce lab-grown meat is very expensive. And it’s a very capital- and technology-intensive process, in a way that the plant alternatives are not.
Does lab-grown meat taste different from traditional meat? Is it any more or less nutritious?
I’ve never tried lab-grown meat, but my understanding is that it tastes relatively the same. What I’ve read is that sometimes the color is maybe a little bit paler, a little bit different from traditionally produced meat. But otherwise, in terms of nutrition and in terms of taste, I think that it’s almost indiscernible.
Will there be regulations around disclaiming that chicken is lab-grown? Or could I be served cell-cultivated chicken at a restaurant and not even know it?
The recent USDA ruling was that lab-grown chicken will be labeled as “cell-cultivated.” So once it hits stores, when consumers go to the meat department at a grocery store and they’re looking at different meats, if they see one that’s labeled “cell-cultivated,” then it’s lab-grown.
But I don’t know how that ruling affects restaurants serving it. I assume that since it’s hitting restaurants first, and there are chefs that are teaming up with different companies like Upside Foods to sell lab-grown chicken in their restaurants, that they’re going to advertise it, because they want people to know that they can eat this lab-grown meat.
Cultivated chicken breast created at the Upside Foods plant. (Peter DaSilva/Reuters/File Photo)
For people who don’t eat meat for ethical reasons, could cultivated meat be considered a more ethical alternative?
It’s complicated. Certainly for people who are vegetarian or vegan for ethical reasons that involve how the animals are raised and the fact that they’re slaughtered, lab-grown meat would appear to get around those kinds of issues, because there’s no slaughtering involved, and the animals aren’t raised in small cages. However, for many vegetarians and vegans, it’s the consuming of animals that’s really the issue, so I expect that lab-grown meat won’t be appealing.
I think the bigger appeal may be for people who eat meat and may be aware of the issues of inhumane treatment or may be conflicted about the slaughtering of animals when they think about it. This may be a way to be able to continue the same dietary choices that they’ve made without having that inhumane treatment or other violence toward animals.
Can cultivated meat help solve some of the bigger problems facing us today, like world hunger or the environmental impact of factory farming?
In terms of world hunger, it’s really difficult to imagine a situation in which lab-grown meat would alleviate world hunger or would increase access to meat, in part because it’s going to be expensive for the foreseeable future. I think that lab-grown meat, initially, it’s really clear how it’s geared toward a niche market that’s really upscale in the United States, because it’s centered in San Francisco, it’s centered in particular restaurants with popular chefs, and I haven’t heard any proponents of lab-grown meat suggest that it would have those effects.
Environmentally, it’s not clear how much energy cultivated-meat production is going to use versus industrial meat production. There may be environmental trade-offs. The methane that’s produced and the CO2 emissions from industrial meat productions are quite large, and eliminating those or reducing those will benefit the environment a lot, but we do need to take a moment to consider how much energy and emissions will be produced with lab-grown meats.
Share on email (opens in new window)https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ACRpR/Data: Global Forest Watch/World Resources Institute; Note: Includes countries with at least 1 Mha of tropical primary forest in 2001; Map: Alice Feng/Axios
Despite global commitments to halt the loss of tropical forests, the world lost 10% more primary rainforest in 2022 than it did the year before.
Why it matters: The world’s tropical rainforests are a vast terrestrial carbon sink, but they are in jeopardy from logging, agricultural expansion and the effects of climate change, which is altering precipitation patterns.
Tropical rainforests are also a cradle of biodiversity.
Zoom in: New data released Tuesday morning from the University of Maryland (viewable in detail via the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch platform), shows the world lost 4.1 million hectares, or about 10 million acres, of primary rainforest in 2022.
Primary forests refer to mature forests in the tropics.
A WRI analysis shows that this amount of forest loss emitted 2.7 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, roughly equal to India’s annual fossil fuel emissions.
The intrigue: Primary forest loss was higher last year than in 2021 in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which dominate the globe in primary forest coverage.
While Brazil had the highest loss of rainforest globally, greater increases in loss rates were seen elsewhere, such as Ghana and Bolivia.
Indonesia has limited forest loss rates significantly, compared with a few years ago, the data shows.
What they’re saying: “The 2022 numbers are particularly disheartening,” said Francis Seymour, a senior fellow at WRI. “Following the bold commitments in Glasgow… We had hoped by now to see a signal that we were turning the corner on forest loss,” she said during a press call.
“We’re headed in the wrong direction.”
The bottom line: Voluntary commitments aren’t sufficient to keep rainforests intact.
Share on twitter (opens in new window)
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Share on email (opens in new window)https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ACRpR/Data: Global Forest Watch/World Resources Institute; Note: Includes countries with at least 1 Mha of tropical primary forest in 2001; Map: Alice Feng/Axios
Despite global commitments to halt the loss of tropical forests, the world lost 10% more primary rainforest in 2022 than it did the year before.
Why it matters: The world’s tropical rainforests are a vast terrestrial carbon sink, but they are in jeopardy from logging, agricultural expansion and the effects of climate change, which is altering precipitation patterns.
Tropical rainforests are also a cradle of biodiversity.
Zoom in: New data released Tuesday morning from the University of Maryland (viewable in detail via the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch platform), shows the world lost 4.1 million hectares, or about 10 million acres, of primary rainforest in 2022.
Primary forests refer to mature forests in the tropics.
A WRI analysis shows that this amount of forest loss emitted 2.7 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, roughly equal to India’s annual fossil fuel emissions.
The intrigue: Primary forest loss was higher last year than in 2021 in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which dominate the globe in primary forest coverage.
While Brazil had the highest loss of rainforest globally, greater increases in loss rates were seen elsewhere, such as Ghana and Bolivia.
Indonesia has limited forest loss rates significantly, compared with a few years ago, the data shows.
What they’re saying: “The 2022 numbers are particularly disheartening,” said Francis Seymour, a senior fellow at WRI. “Following the bold commitments in Glasgow… We had hoped by now to see a signal that we were turning the corner on forest loss,” she said during a press call.
“We’re headed in the wrong direction.”
The bottom line: Voluntary commitments aren’t sufficient to keep rainforests intact.
Delores Pigsley, Chairman of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, speaks at a June 16 meeting of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.Nika Bartoo-Smith / Underscore News & ICT
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Karina Brown and Nika Bartoo-Smith | Underscore News + ICT
Two tribes in Oregon made historic agreements with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife on June 16 that affirm the rights of their members to hunt, fish, trap and gather under tribal, rather than state licenses. The agreements apply to subsistence and ceremonial activities, not commercial enterprises.
“There will be a shift where trial members already participating under a state framework will instead participate under a tribal framework,” Davia Palmeri, acting deputy director for fish and wildlife programs at ODFW, said at the June 16 meeting.
Four tribes now operate under such agreements — The Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians (CLUSI), Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians and the Coquille Indian Tribe.
Siletz Chairman Delores Pigsley compared the moment to one in 1977, when Siletz regained federal recognition of its sovereignty, over two decades after termination.
“This agreement is probably as meaningful as restoration itself,” Chairman Pigsley told the commissioners.
ODFW commissioners said their goal is to forge similar agreements with all nine federally recognized tribes in Oregon. But a fifth tribal nation found out the day before the meeting that its agreement would not be brought forward.
ODFW Director Curt Melcher removed from Friday’s agenda the agency’s negotiated agreement with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, due to objections from other tribes. The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs submitted objections to the Grand Ronde agreement. Representatives for both Umatilla and Warm Springs also testified in opposition to the Grand Ronde’s agreement at Friday’s meeting.
At the meeting, Melcher told Grand Ronde Chairwoman Cheryle A. Kennedy that the commission would bring Grand Ronde’s agreement up for approval at its next meeting in August.
“I understand your disappointment,” Melcher told Kennedy.
Later, Melcher told Underscore he is committed to that plan.
“Barring a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake or any other ginormous catastrophe, yeah, we’ll have it there,” Melcher said.
Cheryle A. Kennedy, Chairwoman of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, appeared at a June 16 meeting of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.Nika Bartoo-Smith / Underscore News & ICT
Grand Ronde agreement delayed
Objections raised by both Austin Smith Jr., general manager of the Warm Springs branch of natural resources and Corinne Sams, an elected member of the Umatilla board of trustees and vice chair of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, foreground the two tribes’ treaty rights to fish at usual and accustomed places, including Willamette Falls.
And in a June 5 letter to ODFW, Warm Springs Chairman Jonathan Smith Jr. expressed “strong opposition” to the department’s proposed agreement with Grand Ronde.
The letter outlines the rights reserved under Warm Springs’ 1855 treaty to fish off-reservation “at all usual and accustomed areas as our people have done since time immemorial.”
It’s a right that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed, and one that Warm Springs, Umatilla and other tribes with treaty-reserved fishing rights actively exercise, both in terms of harvest and as leaders of work to protect and restore salmon populations and watershed health throughout the tribes’ ancestral lands.
Smith Jr. called the inclusion of Willamette Falls in Grand Ronde’s agreement with ODFW “deeply concerning.”
“At Willamette Falls, in particular, we are the lead fisheries manager on lamprey catch monitoring and escapement projects,” Smith Jr. wrote.
Grand Ronde’s treaty rights were extinguished by the federal government in the 1950s. The tribe says the 1983 restoration of their federal status as a sovereign nation reinstated those rights. That’s a contested claim.
With the Willamette Valley Treaty, 20 tribes and bands ceded the Willamette Valley to the U.S. government. This is the treaty that Grand Ronde says gives it rights at Willamette Falls. Congress ratified that treaty in March 1855.
A century later, during the Termination Era of federal Indigenous policy, the government enacted laws based on the idea that Indigenous people should assimilate into American society and give up their tribal identities, and that the rights negotiated in treaties and codified in federal laws were preventing them from doing so.
In 1954, Congress passed the Western Oregon Termination Act, ending its recognition of Grand Ronde’s tribal sovereignty (as well as Siletz, CLUSI and all other tribes west of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon). Termination unilaterally dissolved tribal membership and ended the U.S. government’s obligations toward terminated tribes, including the services guaranteed in treaties in exchange for land. Termination policies also allowed the government to seize millions of acres of tribal lands rich with minerals and timber.
Congress quickly passed 46 laws terminating 109 tribes around the United States, including 62 in Oregon — more than any other state.
Grand Ronde leaders, including Chairwoman Kennedy, fought for decades to have their recognition restored.
“There was a core of people who managed to stay in the area, but it was the cemetery — our ancestors — who really kept us together, and we kept coming back year by year and saying we’re going to do this,” Kennedy told Underscore last year. “This wrong that has been done to us, we will fight it. And in the end, restoration was achieved in 1983.”
The Grand Ronde Restoration Act renders the Western Oregon Termination Act “inapplicable to the tribes, and restores all rights and privileges which may have been diminished or lost under it.”
But the law also states that it “precludes the restoration of any hunting, fishing or trapping rights under this act.”
Like Siletz, Grand Ronde faced the terrible choice imposed by the consent decree.
Chairwoman Kennedy says the treaties Grand Ronde negotiated are central to her leadership today.
“The treaty-signing grandfather of mine died defending that,” Kennedy said. “How can we sit here and say, ‘Oh well, it didn’t really mean anything?’”
Smith, meanwhile, said Grand Ronde “refuses to acknowledge our sovereign and treaty-reserved interests at Willamette Falls. Our ancestors have fished, hunted and gathered around Willamette Falls and the surrounding area since time immemorial, and our members continue to do so.
“There can be no doubt that the Willamette Falls area is one of our treaty-reserved usual and accustomed areas where our members fish at sites, which have been passed down through generations for subsistence and ceremonial harvest purposes,” Smith wrote.
“ODFW should have known that the draft agreement not only implicates our sovereign and treaty-reserved fishing, hunting, and gathering interests but it carries significant risk of inter-tribal conflict between us and [Grand Ronde].”
“We do not deny that [Grand Ronde] is a victim of historical injustice like all tribes, which is why our elders supported the restoration of [Grand Ronde’s] status as a federally-recognized tribe. [Grand Ronde], however, ought not be allowed, as a matter of fairness and equity, to remedy any injustice visited upon it by the United States, the State of Oregon, or others at our expense or that of other Oregon tribes.”
Smith called for a more comprehensive process that involves all tribes whose interests coincide at Willamette Falls to be part of discussions before Grand Ronde’s agreement is approved.
Grand Ronde held two public meetings in May, which representatives from Warm Springs and Umatilla attended, according to attendance lists provided by Grand Ronde. But Smith Jr. said ODFW should have involved Warm Springs before it filed its April notice of proposed rulemaking for the draft agreement with the Oregon Secretary of State.
“As a matter of respect for the sovereignty of both tribes, ODFW should have anticipated the potential conflict and developed a process that better aligns with the rule of law, which would have included timely notice to us and a meaningful opportunity to be heard,” Smith Jr. wrote.
On Friday, ODFW Director Melcher said that is his current goal.
“We have engaged with several other tribes and we’re just trying to take a small pause to take away any criticisms of process as we bring this agreement back in August,” Melcher said. “And I don’t expect that there will necessarily be any changes to the agreement between now and August.”
Ramil Beers, enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians and Chairman Brad Kneaper’s great nephew, talks to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Commission on June 16 about what the tribe’s memorandum of agreement means to him.Nika Bartoo-Smith / Underscore News & ICT
Tribes to oversee fishing and hunting licensing for tribal members
Enrolled members of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians will now be able to participate in hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering licensed by the tribe.
“Before termination, our tribe had lifetime fishing permits,” said Ramil Beers, CLUSI tribal member and Chairman Brad Kneaper’s great nephew. “But after we got terminated, in order for our tribe to be restored, we had to leave that behind. Now we have to get our permits from people other than our own tribe. I would much rather get the permits from my tribe, where I know the money pays for restoration projects, native plant restoration and much more.”
The agreements are “a great opportunity to expand the pace and scale of habitat restoration in the areas of interest for the tribe,” said Davia Palmeri, acting deputy director for fish and wildlife programs at ODFW.
While increasing opportunities for tribal members to harvest fish and wildlife resources, these agreements will also allow the state and tribes to pool finances on cooperative restoration projects.
“The intent is to increase opportunities for tribal members to harvest fish and wildlife consistent with tribal values rather than consistent with state values, which is the case under a state fish and wildlife license,” Palmeri said.
She added that in some cases, this will mean tribal members will have hunting and fishing opportunities that other Oregonians do not have, though she does not anticipate a large increase of hunting and fishing participation, rather a shift in management and licensing from the state to the tribes.
“Our intent is that it’s a perpetual agreement that’s really defining the relationship between the department and the tribe,” Palmeri said.
For members of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the agreement has additional meaning.
In 1980, the Siletz Reservation Act established a reservation for the Siletz tribe — in signing the act, the tribe also had to enter into a consent decree, prohibiting tribal hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering activities except as authorized under Oregon state law. In other words, the tribe had to give up the right to manage their own hunting and fishing seasons on tribal land in order to regain a reservation when the federal government restored Siletz’s federal recognition, post-Termination. The tribe is currently still bound by the rules of the consent decree.
During the same weekend as the adoption of the memorandum, the Siletz tribe hosted its annual solstice ceremony. Chairman Pigsley shared that the tribe had to buy salmon for the ceremony — with the adoption of the MOA with ODFW, next year tribal members will instead be able to go out and catch the fish for the ceremony.
Though the MOA does not renegotiate the terms of the consent decree, it allows the tribe to once again oversee fishing and hunting management for tribal members.
“We know things will never be the same as they were 70 years ago, 40 years ago. But we want to be part of whatever it is that we can do to preserve those resources to support our families,” Chairman Pigsley said. “With this agreement, those things would be revived. The subsistence would be wonderful for our tribal members and the ceremonial salmon.”
Between the dangerous heat baking Texas and the Southeast, and the wildfire smoke filling the skies throughout the Upper Midwest and into the Mid-Atlantic, people across a huge part of the United States have been seeking relief from the outside world in recent days.
The two threats this week aren’t connected directly. But a common factor is adding to their capacity to cause misery.
Human-caused climate change is turning high temperatures that would once have been considered improbable into more commonplace occurrences. And it is intensifying the heat…
Russia’s nuclear arsenal has long been a concern for the Pentagon in terms of both sheer size and technological capacity. Indeed, Russian President Putin could launch a nuclear strike that could surely kill everyone on planet Earth if he wished – when factoring in the size of his arsenal and radioactive fallout.
and it is now further expanding with the prospect of hypersonic nuclear weapons and new ICBM modifications enabling a single missile to carry multiple warheads.
Sheer numbers, when it comes to Russia’s nuclear arsenal, have long been a concern both in terms of tactical and conventional nuclear weapons.
Russia’s ICBM arsenal, for instance, is growing much larger and being modernized for continued relevance. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimates that Russia has 306 strategic ICBMs, able to carry as many as 1,185 nuclear warheads.
The Center further specifies that both Russia’s SS-27 mod 1 (Topol-M) and SS-27 Mod 2 (Yars) are capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads. An ICBM with multiple re-entry vehicles presents new threat dimensions as it can hold multiple targets at risk from a single ICBM. Russia also has the Sarmat SS-X-30 in development, which is slated to be larger and more lethal than previous warheads and has publicly demonstrated what could be a paradigm-changing and extremely dangerous nuclear-capable hypersonic missile called the Avangard.
There are several critical things to consider here, one of which being the presence of sheer numbers as it can present the risk of a “bolt-out-of-the-blue” kind of attack. This is a term that refers to the possibility that an adversary could simultaneously launch a large number of ICBMs in one “salvo” to obliterate defenses and overwhelm the enemy in such a way that a response or counterattack is not possible. Should an air or sea leg of a nuclear triad be rendered inoperable as a way to counter any salvo, then the remaining deterrent is to simply ensure a corresponding massive offensive ICBM response to guarantee the destruction of the attacking country. Timing is critical here, as the targeted country would need to detect an incoming salvo quickly enough to launch its own massive salvo in response. The promise of this kind of catastrophic destruction is the foundation of strategic deterrence and the paradoxical reason why the assurance of massive destruction can actually ensure continued peace.
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morning after the mutiny against Russia Russian military leaders.
Sufficient numbers of effective and operational ICBMs will be critical for the U.S. nuclear deterrence posture given the scope and size of Russia’s force. The Nuclear Threat Initiative states that Russia operates a total of 466 ICBMs and submarine-launched, nuclear-capable ballistic missiles together.
The size of Russia’s arsenal may be one reason why the U.S. Air Force plans to add as many as 400 new Sentinel ICBMs to the force as part of a massive modernization overhaul for the service’s nuclear posture. Of course the 1950s-era Minuteman IIIs, while massively upgraded and still functional, have long exceeded their anticipated service life and have been in need of replacement. Some have even expressed concern that there could be a short nuclear “readiness” gap between when the new Sentinels start to arrive at the end of the decade and the existing Minuteman IIIs become fully obsolete.
Air Force Acquisition Executive Andrew Hunter has been clear that the Sentinel is on schedule and on time and slated to arrive in sufficient time, stressing that there will be no gap. This is perhaps why the Pentagon continues to test Minuteman IIIs in an effort to demonstrate that the U.S. has a functional and effective ground-fired nuclear deterrent sufficient to extend well into the next decade.
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Exposing the Big Game 