It has been suggested that a nuclear warhead could be smuggled into a harbor and detonated to cause a destructive tsunami. There have been reports that Russia may have planted nuclear warheads on the bottom of the ocean off the coast of the U.S. There have also been recent stories that claim that Russia is perfecting underwater swift stealth drones that could carry nuclear warheads into U.S. harbors undetected. What are the realities of such threats? Gregg Sprigs, a nuclear-weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said “It would be a stupid waste of a perfectly good nuclear weapon.”
Underwater tests of nuclear bombs were conducted by the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s. The bombs detonated were in the fifteen kiloton range, relatively small by today’s standards. Still, the fireballs generated by the explosions sent out powerful shockwaves and threw seawater more than a mile into the air. Warships had been placed near the explosion to measure their destructive power. Some of the closest ships were totally vaporized and others were quickly sunk in the turbulence. Those further away from the explosions had their hulls cracked, engines crippled and sustained other serious damage. Small tsunamis flooded inland areas of nearby islands.
Spriggs said that “the energy in a large nuclear weapon is but a drop in the bucket compared to the energy of a [naturally]-occurring tsunami. So, any tsunami created by a nuclear weapon couldn't be very large.” As an example, a 2011 earthquake in Japan generated a tsunami that was equivalent to almost ten million megatons of TNT which is millions of times greater than the nuclear bombs and warheads in the world’s nuclear arsenals. Spriggs went on to say that “because of the small solid angle that would subtended by a nuclear-induced tsunami (in the direction of the shoreline), most of the energy would be wasted going back out to sea.”
In reality, an enemy intent on inflicting maximum damage on an enemy’s cities would get a lot more “bang for the buck” by simply dropping a nuclear bomb on an enemy city rather than trying to drown it by detonating an offshore underwater explosion. According to Spriggs “if they dropped a 10 megaton nuclear weapon directly over a city, they could kill millions of people as opposed to a small nuclear-induced tsunami that may, at best, kill only a few thousand people that may be within a few thousand yards of the beach.”
So if the idea of using nuclear weapons underwater near an enemy’s port cities is so ridiculous, how did it get into circulation in the world media? This last February, an opinion piece written by Viktor Baranetz, a former spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, was published in Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian tabloid. Baranetz was responding to a statement by U.S. President Donald Trump to the effect that Trump wanted to increase the U.S. defense budget by almost ten percent from six hundred billion dollars to six hundred and fifty four billion dollars. Baranetz said that this amounted to almost ten times what Russia was spending annually on defense.
Baranetz stated that Russia had found a variety of ways to counter the U.S. military buildup that did not cost nearly as much. One of the “asymmetrical” responses that Baranetz mentioned was the “seeding” of unmanned nuclear “mole” missiles along the U.S. coastline that would lie there quietly until needed. British tabloids began publishing articles based on a translation of the Baranetz in March. By late April, some of these stories mentioned the idea that the Russian “mole” submarines could launch nuclear torpedoes which could be detonated to cause tsunamis. Refutations, including by Baranetz himself, immediately began appearing to counter these claims.
Baranetz went on to clarify his report on the “Status-6” Russian project to station unmanned nuclear submarines off the coast of the U.S. and other potential enemies. The task of the unmanned submarines would be to use nuclear torpedoes and nuclear missiles to wreck havoc on U.S. ports and create large areas of radioactive contamination. There was no mention of any intent to trigger tsunamis with underwater detonations.
