Theodore Postol

Theodore Postol (born 1946) is an American professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to his work at MIT, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory, the Pentagon, and Stanford University.

Quotes

Interview: Nuclear War with Russia? (March 25, 2022)

"Nuclear War with Russia? 'A Wall of Fire that Encompasses Everything Around Us at the Temperature of the Center of the Sun.'", Scheerpost (blog, March 25, 2022)

• Basically the American modernization (of nuclear weapons), and Russia’s unfortunate inability to improve their early-warning system, has resulted in a situation where everything is potentially a lot more dangerous, because an accident could much more easily occur. And this is both a social, political and technical problem.

• [Putin's] afraid of the misinformed American president doing something that gets everybody killed. He’s not worried about us getting ourselves killed, but he is worried about Russia. So what he wants to do is make it clear to anybody — to a child on a bicycle — that you cannot win. They will destroy the United States in response, no matter what your defenses can or cannot do.

• We’re talking about a wall of fire that encompasses everything around us at the temperature of the center of the sun. That will literally turn us to less than ash, if this thing gets going. I can’t emphasize how powerful these weapons are. When they detonate, they’re actually four or five times hotter than the center of the sun, which is 20 million degrees Kelvin. They’re 100 million degrees Kelvin at the center of these weapons.