The 12th Main Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense operates a dozen central storage facilities for nuclear #weapons. Known as “Object S” sites and scattered across the Russian Federation, they contain thousands of nuclear warheads and hydrogen bombs with a wide variety of explosive yields. For the past three months, President Vladimir #Putin and other Russian officials have been ominously threatening to use #nuclearweapons in the war against #Ukraine. According to Pavel Podvig, the director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project and a former research fellow at the #Moscow Institute of #Physics and #Technology, now based in #Geneva, the long-range ballistic missiles deployed on land and on submarines are Russia’s only nuclear weapons available for immediate use. If Putin decides to attack Ukraine with shorter-range, “tactical” nuclear weapons, they will have to be removed from an Object S site—such as Belgorod-22, just 25 miles from the Ukrainian border—and transported to #military bases. It will take hours for the weapons to be made combat-ready, for warheads to be mated with cruise missiles or ballistic missiles, for hydrogen bombs to be loaded on planes. The United States will most likely observe the movement of these weapons in real time: by means of satellite #surveillance, cameras hidden beside the road, local agents with binoculars. And that will raise a question of existential importance: What should the United States do?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/russia-ukraine-nuclear-weapon-us-response/661315/ #war #usa #crisis #biden #zelensky #nato #uk #china #france #uno #cuba