Vladimir Putin’s latest nuclear threat has sparked fresh fears the world may soon face a nuclear holocaust.
The Russian President has made no secret the UK is one of Russia’s enemies given its staunch support for Ukraine – raising concerns he could make Britain a target.
If a nuclear weapon was aimed at the British Isles, the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – also known as the ‘Star Wars’ defence set up by former US President Ronald Reagan in 1984 – could be used to intercept and destroy the warheads, depending on their nature.
Moreover, the RAF Fylingdales base in North Yorkshire is part of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, created by the US to detect an impending ballistic missile attack.
However, the UK would need to react quickly to a similar threat, as an intercontinental ballistic missile fitted with a nuclear warhead set off from either Moscow or central Asia could take around 20 minutes to hit London.
Alarm bells would start ringing within minutes of the launch, also because the warhead would need to cross the airspace of several NATO countries, likely to spot it and pass on the message to the British Government.
It is not known which alert system would be used by Whitehall to warn the population of an impending attack.
While, for example, the Netherlands tests its alarm systems for a bomb attack every first Monday of the month at noon, the UK doesn’t carry out similar tests.
In April last year, however, the Government launched its first UK Emergency Alerts system test, which saw millions of people across the country receiving a text at the same time.
While this system has been created to alert the population of issues such as floods and other weather-related disasters, Whitehall could resort to it to quickly warn people of a nuclear threat.
When it comes to the damage a nuclear attack could do, the scale of the disaster depends on the strength of the bomb deployed as well as on where it is dropped.
The first nuclear warhead to be dropped in history, the one that hit Hiroshima in August 1945, was 15 kilotons – powerful enough to destroy or severely damage more than 60,000 buildings – some 67 percent of the city’s structure – and kill nearly 39 percent of the population – approximately 140,000 people.
Even people living far away from where the bomb strikes would likely be affected, as radioactive particles can be carried for hundreds of miles on the wind.
The radioactive fallout would be at its most severe for around two weeks.
Putin first clearly showed he was ready to use nuclear war as a threat in March 2022, when he announced Russia’s nuclear arsenal had been placed on “special alert”.
On March 13, the Russian President told state-controlled Rossiya-1 broadcaster and the RIA news agency that his country is “of course ready” for nuclear war, from a “military-technical point of view”.
While he said there are yet elements “rushing” to nuclear confrontation, he warned the US that the deployment of American troops in Ukraine would mark the crossing of a dangerous red line.
He added: “Weapons exist in order to use them. We have our own principles.”
This chilling threat comes a few weeks after the Federation of American Scientists, which regularly analyses the nuclear stockpile of each country, believes Russia’s estimated nuclear warhead inventory amounts to 5,880 – the largest in the world.
For comparison, the US is known to have 5,044 nuclear warheads, while the UK holds 225.
Nuclear weapons are roughly divided into tactical and strategic, with the former planned to be used in regional wars and the latter reserved for a more terrifying global conflict scenario.
