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Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
81–90 of 172 posts
Re: Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Muammar Gaddafi was a terrible person. But when he died, things in his country got even worse.
Muammar Gaddafi is a complex personage, a cruel dictator and a efficient benefactor. He was a force for the greater good with the Great Man-Made River Project, a project would not have been possible without him. And it was gratious cruelty from NATO to destroy the pipes fabrication plant during the first Libyan civil war.
Nearly all dictators do some beneficial civil works and other actions though. After all how else can they keep the population just happy enough to avoid rising up?
You're also assuming that the GMMR would not have been commissioned by another Libyan government, and perhaps even been completed more efficiently, had Gaddafi not seized power and held onto it for decades.
While NATO's bombing of the Brega plant was controversial, it was in my view justified by Gaddafi's forces staging rocket launchers at the location. If you're staging active military assets inside civilian locations, and they're part of hostilities, those locations lose their protection under international law.
The Brega plant was also not critical to the ongoing operation of the GMMR, as there was a second plant at Sarir that was able to make the pipe sections and had sufficient capacity to handle maintenance and sustainment needs.
Re: Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
while I'm sure it's been poorly maintained, there only needs to be enough nukes to ruin global civilization, and it doesn't take that many. a few hundred, maybe, and back in the day they had thousands.
I think it's an open question on how many it would take to ruin civilization. Probably need to first define what 'ruin civilization' looks like. The idea of nuclear winter has already been pretty thoroughly debunked, we don't have anywhere near enough weapons to make that happen. But even one nuke would be enough to wreak havoc economically.
the UK's Strath report from the 1950s found that all it really took was 10 x 10-Megaton nuclear warheads to effectively send the UK back to the 1700s.
hit the 10 largest cities and it's basically over. big cities are also primary transport hubs of food and fuel, and with those gone everything else collapses. most people aren't farmers, and even if they were, no one is using pulled plows in the First World these days, so without gas and farming everyone starves. most of your best educated, most likely to govern smartly, are also in those 10 big cities; everything turns into Riddley Walker pretty quick.
the US or Europe or Russia or China are a big larger, but that just means you need 20-40 instead of 10. 100 nukes is enough for basically all of the West, or Russia, or China, etc. 1000 if you want to be sure, and have some redundancy / second-strike capability.
Re: Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
NATO and Russia go at it and everyone is screwed, there will be no winners, nobody on the sidelines, no picking through the spoils.
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, there would be nations that survive a NATO/Russia war. Namely, any nation in the Southern Hemisphere not called Australia or New Zealand. Mother Nature's winds and Father Physic's half lives combine to give unaligned southern hemisphere nations the break of a lifetime. (Or of a species' lifetime I guess?) All that said, you are absolutely right about "spoils". No one is…
why would Australia get hit? no where near Russia, not in NATO, no nukes, and too small of a military to mount a serious offensive
for that matter they're not going to be able to supply much relief effort, either. hopefully they'll pick a side - India or China - and ride out the eventual hegemonic war between those 2.
Re: Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's an open question on how many it would take to ruin civilization. Probably need to first define what 'ruin civilization' looks like. The idea of nuclear winter has already been pretty thoroughly debunked, we don't have anywhere near enough weapons to make that happen. But even one nuke would be enough to wreak havoc economically.
the UK's Strath report from the 1950s found that all it really took was 10 x 10-Megaton nuclear warheads to effectively send the UK back to the 1700s. hit the 10 largest cities and it's basically over. big cities are also primary transport hubs of food and fuel, and with those gone everything else collapses. most people aren't farmers, and even if they were, no one is using pulled plows in the First World these days,…
>the US or Europe or Russia or China are a big larger, but that just means you need 20-40 instead of 10.
I haven't inquired about the UK, but that is not even close to true for the US.
For one thing, at any given time, there's enough food stored on US farms to feed half the US population for about 3 years, which is probably enough time to restart mechanized agriculture or failing that re-open enough port facilities to import enough food from our friends to keep most survivors alive.
(This food stored on farms is mostly intended to be fed to farm animals, but it is food humans can live on even if they probably cannot thrive on it.)
A nuclear attack leaves most internal-combustion vehicles intact. The US produces all the oil it needs, and the attack necessarily leaves most of the wells intact because (like the vehicles) the wells are too spread out for an attack with even 3000 warheads to get even half of the wells.
The vast majority of comments on nuclear war on the internet are wrong, and it offends me that people are being so careless about spreading falsehoods. (Spreading these falsehoods does not make us safer.)
Re: Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
#86I just watched Patlabor 2 last night, about a civil war in post-Cold War Japan. The main theme is the following: The thing about one-in-a-million events is that they are eventually going to happen once the other 999,999 occur. Thus a government which does not plan for one-in-a-million scenarios is truly derelict and incapable of survival.
> The thing about one-in-a-million events is that they are eventually going to happen once the other 999,999 occur. Nitpick: I get your point, but phrasing it like this is basically the gambler's fallacy. That's not how probability works. You could ask though if, given the changed environment, the one-in-a-million event still has the odds of one-in-a-million. Or if one-in-a-million is really such a rare thing if you…
The movie asks what is the point of JSDF if Japan isn’t under any threat … then somebody in an F-16 fires a TV guided missile into the Yokohama Bay Bridge. It’s a good movie, you should watch it.
Re: Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
#87[flagged]
Unlikely. Putin is a product of russia, not the other way around.
That's the way it seems to me as well. I've heard it remarked that one thing which never changes in Russia is the gulags. The Czars had them, the Bolsheviks and Soviets had them, now Putin has them. I think its worth considering that there might be some fundamental attribute of Russia, perhaps the geography, that gives rise to this repeating pattern in their leadership and social organization.
Re: Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Ask historians: you may get surprised.
What they will tell you is -- up until the genocide against the Tatars (and other groups), the majority of its population was always solidly non-Russian.
And that its prior ownership by whichever colonial powers is entirely irrelevant to its current legal jurisdiction.
Which is unambiguously Ukrainian.
Re: Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
#89Nothing new here, the Swedish government has been publishing this guide since the second world war [1] and updates it regularly. It is not directly related to an increase in international tensions and would have been published even if Putin and his cronies were out on the pony farm. The last update was published in 2017/2018 by the previous labour-led government, now that Sweden is part of NATO it needed an update to reflect that fact. Previous versions were published in 1943, 1952, 1961, 1978, 1983, 1987, 1989, 1991 and 2017/2018.
Re: Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
#90Nothing new here, the Swedish government has been publishing this guide since the second world war [1] and updates it regularly. It is not directly related to an increase in international tensions and would have been published even if Putin and his cronies were out on the pony farm. The last update was published in 2017/2018 by the previous labour-led government, now that Sweden is part of NATO it needed an update to…
I still have mine from 2017 in a kitchen drawer, as an immigrant it was quite informative, it's how I've learned that Sweden will never surrender and any messaging about it is enemy agitation to be ignored.