Able Archer: The "Games" to KILL Everyone (Are Back). | Prof. Ted Postol & Rainer Rupp

## Introduction and nuclear war premise The conversation makes the stark case that nuclear weapons are not merely instruments of deterrence or abstract policy tools; they are physical forces capable of extinguishing modern civilization. What emerges from the exchange is a twofold insistence: first, that the destructive effects of strategic nuclear detonations are so extensive and irreversible that any notion of a “sensible” victory in a large-scale nuclear exchange is meaningless; and second, that misconceptions and planning shortfalls have repeatedly put the world dangerously close to catastrophe. Framing this as a factual reality rather than a partisan argument matters because it shifts the conversation from ideology to survival: the physics of detonation, thermal radiation, and blast define the stakes, and political theater can turn those facts into unintended apocalypse. The discussion uses a single hypothetical detonation over a European capital as a lens to make the scale intelligible. That deliberately minimal scenario — one weapon, one city — is presented not as likely but as minimally illustrative. Even this pared-down example shatters any comforting illusions about survivability. What becomes clear is that strategic planners, policymakers, and publics cannot responsibly debate nuclear posture without engaging the raw physical consequences these weapons inflict on people, infrastructure, and the biosphere. ## One detonation over Berlin setup To make the abstract concrete, the conversation postulates a single high-altitude airburst detonated roughly two kilometers above central Berlin. That choice of altitude is not arbitrary; it is technically optimal to maximize the damaging overpressure on the surface and to widen the radius of thermal injury. Within one second of ignition, a fireball nearly two kilometers across forms, an incandescent bubble of superheated, chemically altered air whose center reaches temperatures orders of magnitude higher than the surface of the sun. The imagery in the exchange emphasizes how quickly such an event goes from invisible threat to a visible, all-consuming phenomenon: one second to a maximum thermal pulse, a visible mushroom cloud rising within tens of seconds, and a lethal environment spreading outward within minutes. The point of anchoring the scenario in a recognizable urban map is rhetorical and practical. Urban areas concentrate combustible materials, dense populations, and critical infrastructure, multiplying vulnerability. Even if the single-detonation scenario understates the likely scale of any real exchange, it is an effective teaching device: if a lone weapon can render broad swathes of a capital functionally uninhabitable, the implications of multi-warhead campaigns become almost impossible to fathom. The conversation stresses that the lethal geometry of thermal radiation, ignitions, and blast waves—anchored to physics—does not care about doctrine. ## Fireball heat and shockwave basics Technically, the detonation produces two dominant, interrelated killers: an intense thermal pulse and an expanding shockwave. The fireball’s surface emits light and heat at fluxes many times what the sun delivers per unit area, but at distances measured in kilometers rather than astronomical units. That concentrated radiative energy instantly ignites flammable surfaces, chars flesh, and superheats the air. Simultaneously, the expanding hot bubble behaves like a gigantic piston, compressing surrounding air and spawning a shockwave that travels outward with enormous overpressure and destructive winds. An important nuance the discussion highlights is how these two phenomena interact. A deliberate airburst uses reflection and coalescence of shock fronts—primary and secondary waves meeting at the ground—to amplify surface damage. This Mach-stem effect increases the radius of severe structural destruction. Yet even where the blast does not collapse buildings, the thermal pulse can do most of the killing: fires start en masse, urban fuel loads create enormous disks of burning material, and the rising columns of heated air draw in winds that fan conflagrations into firestorms. The exchange dispels a common misconception: blast gets attention in popular imagination, but thermal radiation and ensuing fires are at least as deadly across urban expanses. ## Thermal burns and blast at 5 km Examining the effects at a roughly five-kilometer radius makes the horror visible in familiar terms. At that distance, the initial flash is bright enough to ignite materials and cause severe to fatal burns on exposed skin. Vehicles, buses, and interior spaces that would normally offer some shelter are rendered lethal by the intense light and heat that permeate windows and thin walls. Seconds later, the shockwave arrives: roofs are stripped, walls buckle, and winds exceeding storm-force velocities scour the streets. The compound effect is not sequential but overlapping, producing scenes in which people are first burned into unconsciousness and then crushed or buried by debris. The conversation underscores that these effects are not isolated to a narrow zone. While intensity diminishes with distance, thermal ignition and shattered infrastructure persist over kilometers. Fires ignite in disparate locations, stretching fire-fighting and medical response capabilities beyond recovery. The examples used in the exchange — ruined residential structures, incinerated vehicles, and burning vegetation — are chosen to translate kilotons into human experience. The picture it paints is grim: at five kilometers, survivability without extraordinary shelter is vanishingly small, and what remains of the built environment is unlikely to support rescue or recovery operations. ## Firestorms shelters and mass death Fires that start simultaneously over wide urban areas can evolve into firestorms, a self-sustaining phenomenon in which rising heat draws in more air and generates destructive winds at ground level. The discussion makes clear that firestorms are not simply large fires; they are system-level events that change the local weather, spawn fire whirls, and sustain temperatures and winds lethal to life. Historical precedents cited in the exchange—city firestorms from conventional bombing—are used to show what happens when visibility collapses, streets are choked with smoke and burning debris, and rescue workers cannot navigate familiar ground. Perhaps most unsettling is how shelters, often considered sanctuaries, can become ovens. The conversation details scenarios where shelters are overwhelmed by radiant heat and collapsing structures, trapping occupants under burning debris and hot ash. In some cases, bodies found in shelters show evidence of asphyxiation and thermal desiccation; the enclosed space magnifies carbon monoxide and heat exposure, denying those inside any meaningful protection. The implication is stark: ordinary civil defense measures are insufficient against the integrated thermal, blast, and firestorm environment produced by strategic nuclear detonations. ## Pentagon view submarines and accident risk Beyond city-level devastation, the exchange shifts to strategic posture and unintended escalation, particularly the role of second-strike systems such as ballistic missile submarines. From the planners’ vantage, submarines and other dispersed platforms are intended to guarantee retaliation and thereby stabilize deterrence. But the conversation raises a sobering counterpoint: systems designed for deterrence can become vectors for accidental escalation. The risk calculus becomes hair-trigger when combined with detection uncertainties and the fog of crisis. False alarms, sensor ambiguities, and the compressed timelines of ballistic engagements can produce decisions that outpace verification. The discussants point out that near-miss detection events and misinterpreted training exercises have in the past produced genuine fear on both sid

Able Archer: The "Games" to KILL Everyone (Are Back). | Prof. Ted Postol & Rainer Rupp This is the insane story of Nuclear War Games in Europe and the little-known story of the most dangerous moment for in Europe after the Cuban Missile Crisis: the "Able Archer" war games of 1983. It's the story of how we escaped a nuclear holocaust because of the courageous sharing of war game secretes by the spies on the continent. I’m joined by Ted Postol, an MIT professor emeritus and nuclear weapons researcher, and Rainer Rupp a former Spy in the NATO headquarters. Ted walks through the real physical effects of a single airburst over Berlin, then Rainer connects that reality to the 1983 war scare, Able Archer, and the dangerous gap between nuclear planning and what nuclear weapons actually do. Links: Able Archer 83: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Able_Archer_83 Operation RYAN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_RYAN Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com (Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic) Merch & Donations: https://neutralitystudies-shop. fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction and nuclear war premise 00:01:06 One detonation over Berlin setup 00:05:02 Fireball heat and shockwave basics 00:13:08 Thermal burns and blast at 5 km 00:22:00 Firestorms shelters and mass death 00:26:21 1983 war scare Able Archer and RYAN 00:43:11 Pentagon view submarines and accident risk 00:53:14 Leadership blind spots and short warning time 01:09:42 2026 Europe nuclear debate and closing remarks #Pascal Welcome, everybody, back to Neutrality Studies. My name is Pascal Lottaz. I'm an associate professor at Kyoto University. And today, it's my great pleasure to be joined again, on the one hand, by Ted Postol, a professor emeritus at MIT who's been researching nuclear weapons and nuclear technology for many, many years. We're also joined by our German colleague, Rainer Rupp, a former intelligence professional in Germany. We've had him on the show before. Ted, Rainer, welcome. #Ted Postol Nice to be here. #Pascal I'm very glad to have both of you here. Today we want to talk about the insanity of nuclear weapons, and especially the insanity of people who say this is something we need to prepare for— -- 1 of 16 -- nuclear weapons use that needs to be prepared for. Ted, you’ve actually prepared some slides for us to show our European colleagues what it would mean if we were talking about nuclear war on the continent. So, Ted, please take it from here, and I’ll start your slideshow. #Ted Postol Okay. Well, the point of this very brief discussion is simply to provide some factual foundation for what will follow. The hope is that we’ll have a common factual understanding of some of the issues we’ll be debating among ourselves. The basic points that need to be taken away from this discussion—assuming it’s direct enough and gives you the information you need—are, first of all, that the destructive effects of nuclear weapons are so large and extensive that a nuclear war would effectively end modern civilization. It could potentially end human occupation of the planet, but that’ s not really knowable. But it's certainly not out of the question that human extinction could accompany the large-scale use of nuclear weapons. And a second fact that will be emphasized in this discussion is that the statement I just made is an existential fact of physical reality. It's not a policy opinion—it's a fact. And because of that fact, when you sit down and talk about having a nuclear war—any kind of nuclear war among the large countries like Russia and NATO in the West—there’s no way to define a sensible idea of winning a nuclear war. It simply results in the annihilation of everyone involved. And if you can come up with an argument for winning it—and some people try to—it makes no sense in any meaningful human terms. So let me go to the next slide and start laying the foundation for my short discussion here. This is an aerial image of downtown Berlin and the surrounding areas. The little yellow circle shows a range of about five kilometers from the central point where I’ll postulate that a single Russian strategic nuclear weapon might be detonated in the event of war. Let’ s keep in mind that a single nuclear weapon is a very unlikely outcome if these weapons start to be used. There would be hundreds of them used in Europe, maybe even more. And so I'm only focusing on a single weapon, because it's difficult enough for a human being to comprehend the scale and destructiveness of these weapons. The objective here is to give you a visceral sense of the consequences of one of these detonations. I have a slightly different perspective in the next slide, just because of this figure here. In that slide, I show you where the nuclear weapon would be detonated. It would almost certainly be detonated at about two kilometers altitude, above what’s called ground zero. The reason for that has to do with technical details of blast waves. It’s not meaningful whether it’s detonated at lower altitudes or not, but this is the altitude that, with very high probability, would be chosen by the Russians. It doesn't mean that's exactly what would happen, but the general effects are essentially the same, no matter the altitude of detonation. In the next slide, we show what’s called the fireball from this nuclear detonation. The fireball is a bubble in the sky—an atmospheric bubble. The air density inside the fireball at this point is about 1% of the density of the surrounding air. So what happens when -- 2 of 16 -- the detonation occurs is that, in a very short interval of time—hundreds of millionths of a second— the internal temperature of the weapon rises to maybe 100 million degrees Kelvin, or really, 100 million degrees Celsius. And the center of the sun is about 20 million degrees Celsius. The surface of the sun is about 6,000 degrees Celsius, because the sun is much cooler at its surface. This fireball will form in about one second—it takes roughly a full second for it to develop and reach a diameter of over two kilometers. The center of the fireball will be 10,000 degrees Kelvin or more. So this is very hot. Inside the fireball, it’s so hot that nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere undergo chemical reactions, producing nitric and nitrous oxides. So the brownish cloud that you see from a nuclear detonation—I'll show you an image later—is from the nitric and nitrous oxides produced in the very high temperature of the initial fireball. Now, the surface of the fireball is about 8,000 degrees Kelvin, so it's a couple of thousand degrees hotter than the surface of the sun. And because of that, each unit area of the fireball is radiating light and heat at two or three times that of the equivalent surface area of the sun. But this is not 150 million kilometers away—this is just a few kilometers away, maybe 5 to 10 kilometers at most. And the light and heat from this fireball are by far the most destructive aspects of the detonation. People focus on the blast, and I'll talk a little bit about that, but it's really the light and heat from this fireball. It's like bringing a piece of the center of the sun down to Earth and letting it release its energy. If we go to the next slide, you can see I’ve added a little yellow spherical region around the fireball. That’s because, at the end of one second, the fireball initially expands, creating a bubble in the atmosphere. The temperature inside is so high that the air density is very low, and the pressure of this hot air creates the bubble. Eventually, the bubble reaches a size a little over two kilometers, where the pressure inside the expanding bubble becomes the same as the pressure of the outside air. So the bubble just sits there, not expanding, but it will rise buoyantly because it’s a bubble in the atmosphere—just like a bubble under water would rise, buoyantly rise. And in the process of expanding, it compresses—it acts like a giant, rapidly expanding piston against the surrounding air. So it creates a shockwave of enormous physical extent. Let me reemphasize that although the shockwave is impressively powerful, and I'll show you some of its effects, this is not the most destructive part of the fireball. It’s the light and heat produced by the fireball. If we go to the next slide, we see these bright yellow lines. The lower bright yellow line shows the shockwave as it encounters the ground and reflects upward. So you see two semi-spherical shockwaves. One is what’s called the primary shock—it’s the shock from the initial fireball propagating outward, going upward and outward. And you see a shock from below the ground propagating upward. That’s the primary shock after it’s reflected from the ground. At the corner where the primary and secondary shocks come together— keep in mind this corner is on the ground—you get an addition, a summation, of the two shockwaves. The reason for detonating at this particular altitude is to get that reinforcement of the -- 3 of 16 -- shock that occurs when the weapon is detonated at a chosen height. It gives you, uh, more ground destruction. Again, this is kind of a technical point because, um, this is a secondary effect in terms of killing, lethality, and destruction. Notice in the upper left corner, the time is now about four and a half seconds. So this is a long time. I mean, keep in mind, if you are at a distance and could observe this with the proper protection, four and a half seconds is a long time to watch this thing evolve. And the scale is so tremendously large. In the next slide, we see what happens as the primary and secondary shocks propagate farther out. There’s a stem formed on the ground. If you look at the lower right, you see a vertical shock stem of the reflected and primary shocks, known as the Mach stem, after the famous German scientist who described the effects of Mach numbers. This is where the coalescing of the two shockwaves is most effective at longer ranges. At shorter ranges, it doesn’t matter—the blast pressure is so large. In the next slide, I'll give you a sense of what happens at this five‑kilometer range. For example, in the upper left slide, we see this structure. It was built at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s in the United States. The structure is initially illuminated by the very early light from the fireball. The fireball is relatively small when it first forms, then it starts growing in size. As it grows, it cools but gets larger, and its brightness increases. It’s brightest at about one second. At 0.1 seconds, it’s not as bright as it will be at one second. If we look at the upper right side, we see what happens to the front of the house when the fireball reaches its maximum size. You can see the front of the house burning off. Of course, the light is shining into the house, and things are literally exploding into flames. It’s not just igniting—it’s exploding into flames. The light from the fireball is tremendously intense. This is one second after the detonation, when the fireball reaches its maximum size. If we wait another ten seconds, the whole thing has been burned to a crisp. The shockwave then arrives at this distance of about five kilometers. And you can see in the lower left corner the top of the house, the roof being stripped off. You can see the line of the shockwave arriving across the roof, and the front wall of the building buckling as the pressure wave envelops the house. Then maybe a second later—the shockwave takes about three seconds to pass—you see the house being crushed. Very high winds, about 300 kilometers per hour, accompany the shockwave and just tear the house to bits. So this phenomenon is at a distance of about five kilometers. There would be variations of this phenomenon out to a range of nearly ten kilometers—not as intense, but still significant—and there would be fires out to nearly ten kilomet