American Military News by Patrick Maloney - The Record 3/20/2022
Beneath the commercial and recreational vessels and island-bound ferries that navigate Puget Sound on any given day, something else swims secretly armed with a payload sufficient to permanently reshape a continent.
Eight hulking Ohio-class nuclear attack submarines, each nearly as long as two football fields and armed with a spectrum of nuclear weapons, call Naval Base Kitsap at Bangor on the Kitsap Peninsula home. At any given moment, seven of them are armed with nuclear warheads and discreetly traversing the Pacific Ocean while one refuels at Bangor.
These warheads make Washington state host to the globe’s third-largest arsenal of deployed nuclear weapons — an estimated 1,120 — behind only Russia and the United States as a whole, whose stockpiles still number in the thousands, despite decades of reductions, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
One weapon in particular on those subs is at the apex of relevance in its short life: The W76-2, a reduced-payload nuclear warhead designed to counter Russia. It was rushed into production by the Trump administration and greenlighted by Congress in anticipation of a moment precisely like this one — a Russian invasion of a friendly nation, where President Vladimir Putin’s “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine could inch the world’s nuclear superpowers closer and closer to an exchange.
Bellevue’s U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, a Democrat and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, worries that the warhead’s reduced yield would make it more tempting for a president to use. Even if the rival nations refrain from trading nuclear strikes, Smith knows well that every twitch from a nuclear superpower creates a cascade of ripples to other nuclear-armed states, and could kick-start a new arms race.
“It’s an important moment for the entire country and the entire world, including Washington state,” said Smith in an interview last week after being briefed by the Pentagon on the situation in Ukraine. “It’s a more dangerous and potentially conflicted world, and we’re all going to have to reckon with it cautiously.”
It would take many steps of escalation for Ukraine to turn into a nuclear exchange involving Russia and the U.S., according to Hans Kristensen, who closely tracks nuclear forces worldwide at the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.
Among them: Putin using a nuclear weapon in the conflict zone, or the U.S. being drawn into active combat.
“At the outset, it would require a direct military clash of some magnitude between Russia and NATO,” Kristensen said. “I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that nuclear weapons would come into play in Ukraine. That’s crazy, even for Putin.”
Putin wasted no time escalating nuclear rhetoric after his military began its invasion of Ukraine just over two weeks ago, moving his arsenal to high alert on the fourth day.
More:
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/03/what-russias-nuclear-escalation-means-for-washington-with-worlds-third-largest-atomic-arsenal/
