Enter the New Nuclear Era?

We may already have clean nuclear weapons

From Tuomas Malinen on Geopolitics and the Economy.

Like I have noted, I have been building a model of a tactical nuclear first strike since May in an effort to understand what can come out of Ukraine. My analysis led us at GnS Economics to issue a warning of a tactical nuclear strike in Europe at the end of May. Whether this came to be in Toropets, Russia, in the early morning of 18th of September remains an open question. My model actually implies that credible deniability that a nuclear strike has not occurred, even if it has, is a crucial element of modern nuclear deterrence.

I have detailed the (possible) cataclysmic effect of the Oreshnik to nuclear deterrence in my two previous pieces. While we wait more information, possibly in the form of another strike, on the Oreshnik weapon system, I briefly comment a highly secretive topic: “clean” nuclear weapons. Such low-radiation nuclear devices have been under stealth development for some time.

Lieutenant Colonel James Denton of U.S. air force states in his 2013 article, The third nuclear age: How I learned to start worrying about the clean bomb:

Fourth generation nuclear weapons [FGNW] represent a significant improvement in nuclear weapons technology and suggest the potential for small, clear, low-yield nuclear weapons. These weapons will be difficult to monitor, present significant challenges to treaty verification, begin to approximate conventional explosives with nuclear effects and are a potential deterrence stabilizer.