181–190 of 221 posts
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It's like everyone is afraid of stopping the bully beating up on a weak kid because the bully also threatens to respond to intervention with a gun. Yet the bully also knows if they actually use the gun they'll be put down like a feral dog before they have time to reload.
No that’s not quite right. Nobody is going to do anything if the bully shoots the weak kid.
How can we be sure of even a conservative estimate of current warheads. Why wouldn’t US/Russia have significantly more nuclear war heads than they are a) allowed and b) saying they have? Surely it’s in their interest to have more than the other.
What do you gain from having additional warheads? If you have enough to kill all enemy decision makers and effectively destroy the enemy nation then having more doesn't do anything for you. The big cost is that your enemy will discover you are secretly amassing nuclear weapons and will escalate against you. Incentives seem to align to keeping relatively low numbers of nukes to me.
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> The financial hub of the world is definitely a much higher value target than another port in an armageddon type scenario. What? So civilisation is collapsing around you, and instead of a port and ships that can move grain and life-saving goods, you would rather have an army of bankers so that they can trade triple-A rated collateralized debt obligations for newly radiactive real estate?
But actually, why not target both? There are thousands of warheads from what I understand. It doesn’t seem like they need to be choosey.
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> I think humans would probably be able to build back pretty quickly given the tech and manufacturing capability we have today. I’m not trying to be rude, but I don’t think that you have any knowlegde of the logistics and the advanced electronics, biology, chemistry and processes that is necessary for the current manufacturing we have to work. If you look into this and learn how complex even the production of the mos…
I'm quite acquainted with said knowledge. A small community surviving with a garage full of machine tools, some glassblowing, and a bookshelf of dusty encyclopedias, could easily bootstrap back to the early 20th century. A bit of steam reforming and the gigatons of plastic trash gives an ample source of chemical precursors to replace petroleum for chemical uses, and biofuel/gasification for energy. Not to mention mil…
Running a machine show would be a practice in slow decline to some very basic levels as you expend your specialized materials dependent on more complex supply chains. You could easily starve while trying to bootstr
I would guess some humanity would survive, but it would be a huge dice role wether you had the basic food and energy resources available in your area, as well as the sheer luck to avoid death from environmental poisoning or missing any of a thousand civilizational inputs (like basic medicines).
A lot of people like to playact like they would survive. I think it would be horrific.
- Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
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I don't think so, I think humans would probably be able to build back pretty quickly given the tech and manufacturing capability we have today. Yeah, 95% of it may have been destroyed worst case, but even at The biggest problem I see is the amount of habitable land on the Earth. For short periods of time, people wandering in nuclear wastelands will mostly be OK, however it's not safe to inhabit so we'd have to move t…
I think that having 5% manufacturing capacity almost might as well be zero given the kinds of things we manufacture today. For example, a car used to have a carburetor that was relatively simple, just a few metal parts. Now we have very sophisticated high pressure fuel injection systems with exotic pumps and valves, all controlled by chips. All of these parts come from different places, and if you don't have a single…
Note that diesel engines were made with rather low-tech.
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Sounds like it could be a classified source considering he’s referring to contemporary war plans
Elsewhere in this thread he links to David Teter's OPEN-RISOP as his source. [1] The quality of OPEN-RISOP is generally pretty good, and the author worked at Sandia National Labs about 10-20 years ago. Targeting at least is pretty consistent with what I'd expect as high value targets. OPEN-RISOP's counterforce + countervalue scenario only tallies about 60M fatalities (~20% of US population) from the original attack.…
There are some good points here mixed with some large assumptions. The good points: - Weapons fuzed for high-altitude air burst, which maximizes the damage area at the expense of not being able to kill hardened targets, are not going to produce dangerous fallout. - The typical warhead now is significantly smaller than the multi-megaton ones that were typical during the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The large assum…
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How do you prepare for the complete breakdown of society and 200 million survivors competing for resources that will support maybe 15 million people in a blasted, utterly destroyed landscape with no infrastructure or production.
I thought the author argued there wasn’t enough nuclear weapons to utterly destroy all the infrastructure, even in major cities. No doubt it would be really bad with tens of millions dying in the aftermath. But there would still be intact smaller cities, roads, trains, smaller airports and some industry that wasn’t targeted. Plus a shot ton of farmland and ranches. Setting the Western world back a century is probably…
Don't just believe random bloggers with no expertise in the things they're bullshitting about. Even in the open source world, there is an entire body of expert information on this topic that contradicts what this guy is saying.
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ABM is hard. Evading ABM is much easier. Russia has some amazing tech for space based ABM interception evasion. ABM stuff works okayish against very small numbers of incoming warheads. ABM is completely ineffective against large numbers of inbound warheads.
Russia also claims that Moskva wasn't hit by Ukrainian missiles. Evading ABM isn't easy. You need to generate delta-V to move out of the way, and then be able to get back into target, all the while not knowing if an interceptor is actually going to be coming or when. ABM is harder than it used to be, but that's because we decided we didn't want to use nukes on interceptors. And that's because we don't want to have to…