Given: Nuclear war would be a bad thing.
And please believe me when I tell you that every possible nuclear war scenario has been wargamed out 20,000 times, and continues to be, multiple times annually, in multiple countries, particularly the nine (so far) acknowledged to have functional nuclear arsenals. And we usually assign our brightest strategists to play the OPFOR's side, just to keep everyone honest.
And what is the result, in every one of 20,000 scenarios?
It's that if one nuke flies, from anywhere, to anywhere, ALL of them fly, worldwide, times every country that has them, generally within about 72 hours of Event Zero. Every. Single. Time.
Go back and read that again in case you missed it. I have no need to bullshit anyone on this; it's findable in a hundred open-source articles. You could look it up.
So knowing that, you have three things to occupy your time.
1) You either have access, within minutes (measured in single digits) to a fallout and/or blast-proof nuclear shelter, with the necessaries to ride out the actual apocalypse. Or, you don't. Either way, you have nothing to worry about. For different reasons, in each event.
2) If you feel the need to Chicken Little anywhere on the internet, to any degree, about decisions around the world which would unleash a nuclear weapon, over which you have less than zero control (and I'm not naming any names or pointing any fingers here), your posts and bloviations generally aren't going to age well. Because
3) Either nothing is going to happen. (And for but one example, if you're Rootin' For Putin, his life expectancy if he reaches for the nuclear option can be measured in the draw time for any one of a dozen Makarovs pointed at his head from phone booth range. Which is why he's rattled that saber 57 times in the last three years, with zero intent to ever do anything, because he reads the same wargame studies from his guys.) Or pretty much all life north of the equator will be snuffed in a very short period. And you're back to Point 1, above.
Either way, nothing you could say or do on the topic is likely to make any difference for you, or anyone you'd reach, unless they live in Australia, or had 8-figure disposable incomes to establish a zombie apocalypse warlord base of operations - and did exactly that YEARS ago.
Neither you nor anyone reading your stuff is on the Nuclear Football phone tree, and our first clue about things will likely be when the weekend football feed goes all snowy with zero warning, followed by an annoying tone coming out of the tube.
If they even bother. It will be even less useful than anything else FEMA has ever done, which is saying something. Learn that now, and wrap your head around it ahead of time. If you're not 20 feet from a long-term shelter you control, you may as well just bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.
Sorry to piss on your apocalypse party, but there it is. Some of us went through this before you were born, for decades on end, and figured all this out before you got out of plastic pull-ups.
See if you can guess why we're less than impressed with it the second time around.
If anyone really cares, there are great books on the whole topic, most of them free online as pdfs, and so old most of the authors have already long since died. (That right there should serve as a hint about how timely this information is.)
So at the end of the day, all you're accomplishing, by running to and fro on the topic, is advertising your Baby Duck status to all and sundry, because you just started noticing a subject that was old news by about 1960. (For Common Core grads, that would be 64 years ago.) That's not a good look, nor a great resume-builder.
And unless you own one of those old Atlas or Titan missile silos (in which case, why bring the topic up at all?? You don't need more drop-in guests come the day...), and have converted it into a plush nuclear war retreat long before now, all you're doing is killing electrons and wasting bandwidth, and you're not going to be one of the 1%-of-the-population surviving nuclear mutants who comes out of the other end of that pipeline, should the unthinkable happen, to a statistically inarguable 99% certainty.
So stop flapping your wings, squawking, and shitting everywhere.
It's kind of embarassing.
For you.
So maybe less clickbait, and more utility, over something that actually matters.
18 comments:
Consequently, the only possible reason to be screaming about WWIII is to scare people. It's brinksmanship on the parts of the two sides, each one pushing as far as they think they can go - like the other day when Putin launched "the first hypersonic ICBM ever" but not one with a nuclear payload. It's pushing the envelope but the biggest risk is one of the sides has a DEI hire that doesn't know what they're doing and makes a mistake. It might, might make a difference if everyone knows it was a mistake and breaks the instant retaliation response loop.
FWIW when I saw that headline (the world's first hypersonic ICBM) my reaction was, "WTF? All ICBMS are hypersonic and always have been." Which means it was the first time any "ICBM" had ever been thrown and they just added "hypersonic" to add more scariness.
When someone in media talks incessantly about WWIII, it's to scare up an audience. It's probably the same with lower level sources like CA at WSRA.
Some useful information here - http://www.ki4u.com/guide.htm
Nods in former resident of multiple SAC bases in the 80s,
The hardest part for me of discussions involving nukes is trying to remember what I saw in open sources, and what I learned from other sources that have lifetime NDAs. So generally I don't participate at all.
As a Boomer I remember all the duck n' cover hijinks at school. Like squatting under a desk as a 5 megatoner goes off is a survivable event, is worse than a sick joke. We (the USA) abandonded Civil Defense measures back in the late 60s. Any attempt to revive them now would be a waste of funds. Though I do know that the Russians still do CD drills, such that it is.
Guess if it comes to it, permit me to be at the epicenter with a decent chance to give a handshake to Major Kong.
As a old retired OPFOR guy, you are mostly correct. The OPFOR always won until .GOV got tired of being whipped every scenario and changed the rules so they win any time they feel like it. Ask LTG Van Riper on that one. I got to watch the Gen dog cuss a CENTCOM 4 star general at MC 2 for changing the rules after he got beat in 3 scenario tries.
As I listened to a STRATCOM Navy Admiral Buchanan last week comment on what appears to be policy not his opinion on how we know how to destroy Russia with a limited strike and have "acceptable losses" on our side, whatever the fuck that means, and still have missiles left over to rule the world, I had flash backs to the exercises and the level of incompetent leadership of the Western countries. But WTF they want to cull the worlds population anyway, so why not kill 2 birds with 1 stone...
Some of us are on round 3... https://youtu.be/9KkYN9I7RYw?si=1f88yApofDdHhjzn
The big question mark that some of the people who gamed this out some years back were concerned as to whether the canned sunshine would actually appear, or simply make like a child's(radioactive) sparkler.
I'm long out of the loop on this, but even so, I wonder how many of the decision makers, uniformed and civilian, are having sleepless nights these days? And not only the firecrackers themselves, but the delivery vehicles themselves?
Dude: I have my desk from elementary school. Best protection possible.
No control, no use worrying about it. (memes past the graveyard)
Not only the history of war games support Aesop's thesis. (BTW, the movie with that title, tho a bit of a wry comedy, beautifully illustrates his point.) The history of physics long before any of those games emphatically does so.
This past Spring I finished a two-season read of 6 or 10 or so bios of physicists dating from the mid 1800s to the early 2000s. Part of rethinking quantum theory in decades long discussions and ponderings with a childhood friend. I enjoyed the details of the math/physics development, the intertribal debate about the unresolved puzzles of quantum mechanics. The bios highlighted small details I had forgotten about the physics. Every bit as fascinating were the stories about the debates, both about the theory and its implications.
Especially of interest were the records of the before-the-fact debates about atomic weapons. The giants of physics believed their theory, believed the predictions their math suggested. That conviction existed even before multiple small, seemingly utterly unrelated experiments supported the predictions. For example, the uninitiate might see no more than an esoteric connection between an atomic bomb and a watch hand with a radium-paint glow. The scientists not only made the connection. They calculated--sometimes mentally without pencil and paper--and visualized the results. And lost sleep thinking about what they knew would inevitably develop. Somebody somewhere would figure out how to get around the engineering obstacles to create that thing which is from 1945 on a newspaper level everybody knows idea: a critical mass.
This reality which had not yet happened but which their minds believed would certainly happen illustrates a scientist's confidence in their theory. It drove discussions about morality of developing such power where what one can hold in one's hands and drop out a window could demolish, even eradicate a city. On the other hand, the scientists involved knew enough about humanity, about wars, that they knew bad folks would eventually have that ability whether they developed it or not. What we can easily expect as the sorts of discussions that they had actually happened. And with savage, divisive intensity.
The central resulting conclusion happened not only before another country--the USSR--exploded a bomb, but even before the first test bomb, even before the Manhattan Project that produced that bomb. The conclusion even had its own name, the acronym MAD (mutual assured destruction) so commonly known now. Once other nations had any nuclear weapons, the only restraint on their use would hinge upon the inevitable result of the use of even a single one.
Given what we know about mankind's insane meanness, an insane proposition. But since 1945 it has worked. Yet there is no assurance it will continue to work.
If the missiles fly, *you* will have, as you say, single digit minutes. You live in a city.
The rest of us, who live outside of the cities, will have HOURS. Big difference. A tiny bit of preparation can make the next few weeks bearable, and survivable.
Choices we all make.
If it happens, there will be two kinds of people. Prepared and dead.
As you point out, if one goes, the rest will likely go too.
There is, as pointed out above, some question as to whether the russian nukes will do more than fizzle, if the missiles fire at all.
The Chinese are a crapshoot. We simply do not know.
Australian here. Even as far away as we are from the rest of the world, I don't think it would be a cakewalk for us, or any other survivors on the southside. Bummer.
Not that it's much comfort, but there are genuine concerns about the overall effectiveness of US nuclear devices (can't speak for anybody else) due to their technical complexity, the massive safety precautions built into the weapons and the inability to test the full operational chain, among other things. It's really complex and difficult to make one of those things go bang at the best of times. Chinese devices, being built by Chinese, probably detonate if you speak too loudly nearby. Same same I imagine for the Indians, the Pakis etc.
I was involved in quite a few conventional weapon system tests during my career, and even under ideal conditions on a test range things would go awry on the regular, so who knows how things would work out when it came to button pressing time.
B,
Anyone who has even hours has my sincere best wishes on that undertaking.
The trouble is, for anyone who'd like to be around even until the fallout decays to tolerable levels, they'd need months to years, which they still aren't going to have.
So once again, either you have a blast and/or fallout shelter ready to hand, and fully stocked, already, or you do not. Either way, there's nothing for folks to worry about in the short term.
For them what do have such access, the real fun starts in about 3 months, once everyone has expended everything and stops bouncing the rubble.
For the rest of us, the pointlessness of the effort is an academic question inside an hour, for about 99% of the entire U.S. population.
Of the 1% who remain, probably 90% of them would die within a year, from every imaginable cause. In fact, mostly from causes they never imagined.
Those are frightfully stiff odds to beat, and anyone who does so will have earned the right, but I really wouldn't want to consider what that world will resemble.
The sniper's line about running, and just dying tired, comes to mind.
Or worse, being Burgess Meredith in Time Enough At Last.
More people than you might think have the facility, or one that will work in a pinch.
Tornado shelters in Texas and Oklahoma come to mind. Where I am, a decent basement will work well .
Stocking it take a bit of forethought, but many have 2 months worth of food at hand. Again, not like the folks in the city.
What happens after that 2 months is a mystery.
But don't compare the cities to the rural folks when it comes to shit like this. You really do not know what you are talking about in this case.
It isn't 99%, just 99% of the city folks. Say 65-70% of the people.... in the cities and burbs.
half of what is left survives after 60days, for whatever value of survive you wish to use.
I, for one, actually DO have a fully stocked shelter, with radiation measuring tools, water source (and filtration to use that source even if contaminated), food and sanitation. Sanitation is the hardest part, actually.
As to the question if I can stay inside that long and not get homicidal, well, that remains to be seen.....
I spent many a summer in the Midwest and Ozarks with family. Including a dairy farm that had been in the family long enough that an ancestor inadvertently fed the James gang between jobs, and the next day, the posse that pursued them. I know exactly whereof I speak.
Most rural folks don't even have a serious tornado shelter, and most of those that do are fit for about 6 hours' occupancy. The number fit for 41 days' occupancy (past the last impact - which could be several weeks' time after the initial exchange) can be counted on one's fingers in most counties.
The US urban population is 80% of everyone. Write 99.9% of all of them off.
Even the ones not dead of sudden sunshine will die of starvation by D+40 or so.
So will most folks in rural locations, because they'll run out of food as well, and/or come out too soon, and the REMs they don't see will accomplish whatever the food and water they don't have doesn't.
Throw in what happens in normal times regarding unsanitary conditions, plus a radiation-compromised immune system in many cases, and we're down to that 0.1%. A thousand-plus ground bursts, coupled with 4X that airbursts, is an awful lot of hate, and that wouldn't even exhaust the cupboard.
Subs will probably be launching SLBMs daily for weeks.
As is documented more places than are worth listing, going back to the 1950s and 1960s.
The problem with a massive exchange isn't imaginary "nuclear winter", it's heart-attack serious "nuclear desert" when an entire hemisphere is covered in fallout, and stripped of everything alive but some plants, and a lot of bugs. And then, next springtime, more radioactive waste gets washed into the near-shore ocean. Fun times.
The one thing the military was crystal clear on during NBC training, was that the means to survive it was a lot like 4WD on a vehicle: it's there to get you out of the Hot Zone, not to use to stay and play in it.
Right now, the best nuclear shelter would be a bunker in the Amazon rainforest on a few acres of cleared farmland.
When Britain stocked stay-behind shelters for in-country resistance, both pre- and post WWII, they only ever bothered to put about 30 days' rations for a few men in them, because they knew they'd all be dead in a month anyways, best case.
The calculus, in a total nuclear exchange, is that life in the Northern Hemisphere reverts to that in about 20,000 B.C. within a year.
If any future release is somehow in explicably limited to one or two weapons, it will be a miraculous event on the order of divine intervention.
Either way, it's a pointless dead-end rabbithole to explore, unless people are following Commander Zero's advice about all disasters: Be Somewhere Else.
In this case, Bracken's sailboat, or an Amazonian retreat, are both better options than anything north of the Equator, if one is truly concerned about nuclear holocaust. There are a whole host of problems where the outcome isn't nearly so dire, but that particular one is an extinction-level event for anything worth saving.
Charlton Heston's final lines in Planet Of the Apes about sums it up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWphqA1Slrw
There are certain parts of the country where a significant number of people will survive the actual detonations and depending on the vagaries of the weather and prevailing winds may suffer little if any fallout. These people may, if properly prepared survive long enough to see the return of society to what it was pre electricity. How many of these will survive the following year is not predictable, but many won't. But once the canned sunshine is brought out to play society as we know it is over and humanity itself may not survive.
Communists have always viewed nuclear war as a "survivable event". Not for many of their citizens but for the communists in power. Thus they view it differently. To them most of the citizens who are provided shelter is so they will survive to continue being enslaved for the convenience of those in power.
MAD is only a functional doctrine if those involved aren't suicidal or insane.
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