Is the US really this desperate to start WW3 (okay, it's likely just going to be Russia v. EU, since China is too clever to play ball) ? I guess all those trillions printed in the past two-years can't be spent easily (i.e without inflation) without a war.
You align with free democracies so your fascist, mafia-state neighbor invades you.
Your mafia-state neighbor invades, so your democratic friends give you a whole load of weapons so you can humiliate the invading army, blow them up, force them to dig trenches in radioactive mud, blow them up some more, sink their capital ship, isolate their economy and make their joke of a military the laughing stock of the whole world.
It is good and righteous to hate tyrants. It is noble to die resisting them. Once people have tasted freedom, they are willing to sacrifice everything to resist bondage. This is what authoritarians always fail to understand.
You sound like a young fanatic. Most of those words like "freedom" and "tyrants" could have been replaced with other perceived goods and evils throughout history to defend or fight for any number of causes. In the end you just end up being cannon fodder.
So Ukraine and the rest of us who value stability and national sovereignty are required to accept prima facie Putin’s conditions and proposed consequences?
It is not the US per se. But many people are eager to do it. Like with the no-fly zone. I understand that Ukraine was asking for it. They are desperate and already in war. But NATO directly attacking (SAMs inside) Russia and Belarus is probably not the best idea.
The other reason is that people of Eastern Europe either have a score to settle with Russia, or at least want to see it damaged as much as posdible so it can't hurt anyone ever again.
What Russians are doing - rapes, massacres, destroying children hospitals on purpose and so much more - in Ukraine isn't new for us, it is the same old. Pick a random nation between Germany and Russia and they likely went through this in the last 100 years.
Russians are always going to be dangerous as long as their way of thinking of Imperial Russian superiority lasts, but they are less dangerous with their planes shot down, tanks blown up, ships on the bottom of the sea and soldiers dead.
Carpet bombing of the scale of WW2 is not on the table for any modern war. The bombing campaigns of both Allies and Axis included thousands of bombers, flying thousands of sorties per month. Just London during the Blitz was hit by 18000 tons of bombs. Nobody in the world has that number of planes, crew or even bombs anymore. And any kind of large-scale bombing in a contested airspace is a very bad idea.
Same with artillery. Russian Grads are powerful, but they have range of less than 50 kilometers. Once they get in place, they can fire (IIRC) three times before needing new reload which is literally a truckload. Meaning you need surviving Grad 50 km form something you want to destroy and a secure supply line, otherwise that reload will never arrive. Non-rocket artillery has generally more compact ammo but shorter range, so it has similar problems.
That puts me in opinion of "Russians couldn't destroy everything even if they wanted to". That of course doesn't necessarily means they want to - but it also should refute the argument "they could destroy everything but didn't, so they are nice people" I've seen a few times.
EDIT2: I looked it up, and Russia has about 25 of their Tu-160 strategic bombers. Just the one S-300 air defense system that Slovakia gave Ukraine had 46 missiles on it - in addition to possibly hundreds that Ukraine already had. Carpet bombing is completely unrealistic at this point.
The technical feasibility of carpet bombing or artillery reloading is not really the point. The Russians by most accounts have the ability to level cities if they wanted to, and many people arguing that they are unreconstructed barbarians point to what they did in Grozny as an example. So the question is why aren't they doing that in Kharkov or Chernigov?
I am not in a position to know what precisely has transpired in Ukraine, but your comments are proposing either-or alternatives which are incomplete.
Selective, limited, terror tactics against a civilian population can help an occupying army by cowing them into submission. Given the "fog of war", all sort of plausible denials can address PR fallout from the few, selective, events. Carpet bombing may cow the population but there is no room for denail. This calculus holds true for any invading army, including Russians in Ukraine.
Grozny was carpet bombed because Chechens are not ethnic Russians and if they had finally managed to get rid of Russians from their homeland, the rest of the ethnic patchwork that is the Russian federation would have fallen apart.
I don't know about barbarians, but Russians constantly moan and groan about being invaded and being insecure but as far I can tell they are just as brutal and self justified as other empire minded nations. The B-Team of wanna be overlords. That's their secret shame, imho. That "Anglos" have this game figured out and they keep failing at it.
> During the call, which Ukrainian security services in the Kherson region in the country’s south said they intercepted before publishing it earlier this month, a woman can be heard giving permission to a man to rape Ukrainian women.
> “Yes, I allow it. Just wear protection,” the woman says between laughs.
It is not the US, it is the neocon falcons in the Department of State. The Pentagon in several times has shown to be a lot less eager for a war than the DoS.
They have been hell bent on using Ukraine situation as a starter on their plan of destroying Russia since the same sinister figures were in the Obama administration.
They are the Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheneys of our time, and to compound the tragedy they found in Putin, the Putin of our time.
Between they and Wladimir they form the coalition of the eager with the willing.
And nobody seems to care that Victoria Nuland and their ilk are happily leading us to the abyss of nuclear war.
Yes. USA economy is not much better shaped than the same just before 1929 and in that case there is no Roosevelt in sight, instead a neoliberist gang that sometimes call themselves "world government" [1] they push a new New Deal that instead of pushing Keynesian economies (witch was not sufficient without WWII anyway) push even worst/stronger economic crush to maximize very few actors profits.
As always they need a war for economic reason, but that's just one aspect, there are also:
- China need of food who bring them to South America, the nearest and richest reserve for USA, and to reach their goal China need to expand on the seas where USA and UK base their dominance to a point some call them talassocracies;
- both USA and UK (and Canada, even if demographically can't do much and it's still under UK umbrella) are on the brink of a civil war due to neoliberst squeeze of prosperity. A war historically unite their populations accepting no matter what just to "help the Nation", typically against their own Citizens interests as a community, so "the nation against their Demos";
- EU was about to ditch from the anglosphere accepting one of the nth proposal from Russia fed. for a partnership with mutual benefits instead of the unfair one we have with USA and UK, again the war act as an effective excuse to stop such move;
- the war hide the covid scandal, at least postponed it and lowering it possibly to a level of the equal scandals from the recent past (see the press, just after H2N2 (1957), H3N2 (1968), SARS-CoV (2003), H5N1 (2004), H1N1 (2009), MERS-CoV (2012) to read them and the pattern of the "while" part);
- Russia itself is growing and aspiring to be back as an old empire, a very fragile but very resourceful, a thing both USA and UK can't accept, China is doomed by it's location and demography, Russia is not.
The neoliberist west actually live on "monetary constipation" entirely, Europe included, and in an era of scarce resources overthrown the table (Great Reset) hoping it suffice to gain a chance does dot work much. It might work against small and poor opponents, not against growing superpowers. That's is.
Oh, BTW that's a not much accepted topic on HN but since the recent opening to not HN-proper topics like politics: many USA and UK people fail to understand what socialists also from UK and USA have well understood in the past, witch means that their ruling class is not their country and actually it's acting against them, so try to be "patriotic" is the exact opposite of what most do, witch is supporting their clepocratic rulers, acting patriotically would be for them demanding the annihilation of neoliberist institutes, private-public cancers that devour their countries not only others ones. They fear if they are not united under their ruler they'll be lost not considering that actually is the exact contrary because no matter what people in the world suffer similar pain caused by similar criminals so others have no interests against them but against their rulers, witch means others have a common enemy.
The author does not understand tactics. Babylon fell when the river Euphrates was diverted and the Medes and Persians marched under the gate and killed the sleeping garrison. Wars are won with tactics more than weapons. It is not the number of weapons that are used that makes the biggest difference but how they are used.
There are a lot of scientists here. Imagine what a hundred million volts and hundreds of thousands of bare energized light ion coulombs will do to household wiring. Think electrical fires for thousands of miles. Anything with Romex is going to glow red hot and light the walls on fire. This has never been openly discussed before. I thought you might like to know before civilization is burned to the ground.
You're saying a nuclear detonation of a single, typical, current warhead will spawn electrical fires with romex insulated wires for thousands of miles from ground zero? Or, if not, what would be the typical radius?
I have two pieces of evidence for you to consider. First in the Carrington event, telegraph wires glowed red in some places in the north. In the 1800s wires were not in buildings, they were usually routed through windows in the operator rooms so no harm come to those buildings. Building wiring came decades later. As you may know a CME is long wave radiation and would normally only affect very long wires and potentially not as harmful to household length wire.
The second piece of the puzzle is starfish prime, which was entirely unexpected. It caused transformers hundreds of miles away to burn up and of course satellites to cease to transmit near the area of the blast. Scientists are clever and they could find simple ways to greatly amplify the effect. The discussion about grids going down is good enough to get people to talk. But there is more to the story than what they led us to believe.
If you were to take a high yield weapon and encase it in something like high density polystyrene it has a high hydrogen to carbon ratio making it's ions faster. Protons are many times more massive than electrons so electrons will be stripped off very quickly and travel very far leaving two very large opposite charge bodies flowing at relativistic speeds above the victim civilization. Bare charges are notoriously hard to keep together and they expand very quickly in all directions. This causes a great deal of current above us from the negative charges and the positive charges. A single coulomb is a massive amount of charge to try to keep together. If you had a single coulomb bound and then released, the explosive effect would be enormous.
Amplifying the effect with tons of this material means hundreds of terajoules of energy converted directly into electrical current which is a very fast moving wave, much much faster than a cme. This means that it will affect short wires even only a few feet long.
There is not just one of these weapons but dozens or hundreds. With a blanket dispersal it would affect huge areas.
Unlike conventional nuclear war thinking where blast effects are considered, this tactic is based on fire damage. The result is the destruction of a civilization with moderate amounts of nuclear fallout.
I really hope these fears of mine are unfounded but electricity is not easy to argue with. When man decided to apply its knowledge of nuclear energy into weapons research it took upon it's mortal hands instruments of it's own annihilation. Please read Rev 6. And Rev 17-18. For a bonus read Dan 5. Then you will know what to do when the time comes. Peace be to you and may your flight to safety be sure.
But they're destructive enough to be awful for all of us even after you remove exaggeration, so let's not soft pedal the idea of ever justifying them in any war...
Other than that, this is a great writeup in how it dissects the technical details of a nuclear war and puts them into perspective.
Equally, if someone serially says, “let me do whatever bad things I want, or else, you know, nuclear war”, you can’t yield to that and let them do whatever.
In other words, perverse as it seems, some things are worse than a remote chance of a nuclear war.
Nuclear winter/autumn depends on the formation of a firestorm. Only a large sustained firestorm that sustains its own wind system will lift soot into the stratosphere. In the Gulf war, there were no sustained firestorms because fuel was below the ground and came from spot sources.
Today fuel loads in major cities are much lower than they were from the 60s to 80s and that makes it more unlikely for firestorms to start from cities.
There are a huge caveats to this thinking though.
1) Fuel loads from above-ground oil, natural gas, and coal storage areas are big enough to start a massive firestorm. Cushing, Oklahoma alone has enough fuel to cause severe cooling.
2) Nuclear strikes to some specific areas, California during a fire season, might create a firestorm that covers a large percentage of the state and burns everything down in just few hours.
> 2) Nuclear strikes to some specific areas, California during a fire season, might create a firestorm that covers a large percentage of the state and burns everything down in just few hours.
How would this be different from California burning by itself every year? Is this a difference of speed of burn or something?
In a firestorm spotfires interact. This interaction will increase the burning rates (forests and bushes burn more thoroughly, there is more heat and higher flames. It creates whole new local climate that throws shoot into the atmosphere.
2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Australia had some firestorms.
The EMP; the radiation sickness; the nuclear winter; the resulting famine: just because the horsemen of the apocalypse ride precisely the required horseflesh to seat a string quartet does not make the idea Bach. https://youtu.be/cW9FqU2JNBI
Well, USA are essentially the only country in the world who have a certain official idea (since decades) of "possible usage of tactical nukes" and actually are the only who have used nukes in wars and who have officially planned to use them against another country, without a formal war declaration, that country happen to be Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dropshot witch actually is the USA more modern version of an old UK WWII plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable against the very same country and at that time a formal ally. Reasons behind those emerged ops are the same: "we do not like other powers who think different then us" so I can say yes, really.
NATO itself was not born to ensure protection but to counter Soviet expansion and NATO expansion in eastern Europe, starting from the (in)famous Berlin air-bridge who led to the (in)famous Berlin Wall, was and is a clear violation of Yalta agreement after WWII, agreements the Soviet have respected and Russian Federation have respected thereafter. Who actually need a war, and Ukrainian one in particular is very clear, who have created the condition and VALID reasons for Russian ops are declared formally, for instance https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf or even more clear https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html since it's also clear they can't win, they fail in Iraq (a war done for very similar purpose, secure the now almost lost dollar dominance, remember that Saddam have decided to go for euros for Iraqis oil and remember the narrative and the admission of the initial lie about mass destruction weapons, genocide etc the same we read now)... Nuke are for last resort, and to avoid a total destruction since westerns populations, especially here in EU are not that sold to any specific propaganda and we are already on the brink on a civil war...
Make your conclusions. I suggest to read an ancient USA book: Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearny, Edward Teller also available for free for some past editions https://www.oism.org/nwss/ and you can read how the USA have always imaging nukes tactical usage.
56 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadTalk about monetary constipation.
You align with free democracies so your fascist, mafia-state neighbor invades you.
Your mafia-state neighbor invades, so your democratic friends give you a whole load of weapons so you can humiliate the invading army, blow them up, force them to dig trenches in radioactive mud, blow them up some more, sink their capital ship, isolate their economy and make their joke of a military the laughing stock of the whole world.
Actions, consequences.
What Russians are doing - rapes, massacres, destroying children hospitals on purpose and so much more - in Ukraine isn't new for us, it is the same old. Pick a random nation between Germany and Russia and they likely went through this in the last 100 years.
Russians are always going to be dangerous as long as their way of thinking of Imperial Russian superiority lasts, but they are less dangerous with their planes shot down, tanks blown up, ships on the bottom of the sea and soldiers dead.
Same with artillery. Russian Grads are powerful, but they have range of less than 50 kilometers. Once they get in place, they can fire (IIRC) three times before needing new reload which is literally a truckload. Meaning you need surviving Grad 50 km form something you want to destroy and a secure supply line, otherwise that reload will never arrive. Non-rocket artillery has generally more compact ammo but shorter range, so it has similar problems.
That puts me in opinion of "Russians couldn't destroy everything even if they wanted to". That of course doesn't necessarily means they want to - but it also should refute the argument "they could destroy everything but didn't, so they are nice people" I've seen a few times.
EDIT: TL;DR: "why didn't Russians carpet bomb Ukraine?" "with what?"
EDIT2: I looked it up, and Russia has about 25 of their Tu-160 strategic bombers. Just the one S-300 air defense system that Slovakia gave Ukraine had 46 missiles on it - in addition to possibly hundreds that Ukraine already had. Carpet bombing is completely unrealistic at this point.
Selective, limited, terror tactics against a civilian population can help an occupying army by cowing them into submission. Given the "fog of war", all sort of plausible denials can address PR fallout from the few, selective, events. Carpet bombing may cow the population but there is no room for denail. This calculus holds true for any invading army, including Russians in Ukraine.
Grozny was carpet bombed because Chechens are not ethnic Russians and if they had finally managed to get rid of Russians from their homeland, the rest of the ethnic patchwork that is the Russian federation would have fallen apart.
I don't know about barbarians, but Russians constantly moan and groan about being invaded and being insecure but as far I can tell they are just as brutal and self justified as other empire minded nations. The B-Team of wanna be overlords. That's their secret shame, imho. That "Anglos" have this game figured out and they keep failing at it.
Here's a nice article: https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-rape-russian-soldier-wife-by...
> During the call, which Ukrainian security services in the Kherson region in the country’s south said they intercepted before publishing it earlier this month, a woman can be heard giving permission to a man to rape Ukrainian women.
> “Yes, I allow it. Just wear protection,” the woman says between laughs.
I don't see how it is probably not the best idea at this point, since Russia will continue its rape and murder spree otherwise.
> Russia would not launch nukes against the US
But still can lunch few against Ukraine.
Even if USA is safe in open war - Europe is not.
As for Europe being safe - we are not. There is currently a war going on.
They have been hell bent on using Ukraine situation as a starter on their plan of destroying Russia since the same sinister figures were in the Obama administration.
They are the Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheneys of our time, and to compound the tragedy they found in Putin, the Putin of our time.
Between they and Wladimir they form the coalition of the eager with the willing.
And nobody seems to care that Victoria Nuland and their ilk are happily leading us to the abyss of nuclear war.
As always they need a war for economic reason, but that's just one aspect, there are also:
- China need of food who bring them to South America, the nearest and richest reserve for USA, and to reach their goal China need to expand on the seas where USA and UK base their dominance to a point some call them talassocracies;
- both USA and UK (and Canada, even if demographically can't do much and it's still under UK umbrella) are on the brink of a civil war due to neoliberst squeeze of prosperity. A war historically unite their populations accepting no matter what just to "help the Nation", typically against their own Citizens interests as a community, so "the nation against their Demos";
- EU was about to ditch from the anglosphere accepting one of the nth proposal from Russia fed. for a partnership with mutual benefits instead of the unfair one we have with USA and UK, again the war act as an effective excuse to stop such move;
- the war hide the covid scandal, at least postponed it and lowering it possibly to a level of the equal scandals from the recent past (see the press, just after H2N2 (1957), H3N2 (1968), SARS-CoV (2003), H5N1 (2004), H1N1 (2009), MERS-CoV (2012) to read them and the pattern of the "while" part);
- Russia itself is growing and aspiring to be back as an old empire, a very fragile but very resourceful, a thing both USA and UK can't accept, China is doomed by it's location and demography, Russia is not.
The neoliberist west actually live on "monetary constipation" entirely, Europe included, and in an era of scarce resources overthrown the table (Great Reset) hoping it suffice to gain a chance does dot work much. It might work against small and poor opponents, not against growing superpowers. That's is.
Oh, BTW that's a not much accepted topic on HN but since the recent opening to not HN-proper topics like politics: many USA and UK people fail to understand what socialists also from UK and USA have well understood in the past, witch means that their ruling class is not their country and actually it's acting against them, so try to be "patriotic" is the exact opposite of what most do, witch is supporting their clepocratic rulers, acting patriotically would be for them demanding the annihilation of neoliberist institutes, private-public cancers that devour their countries not only others ones. They fear if they are not united under their ruler they'll be lost not considering that actually is the exact contrary because no matter what people in the world suffer similar pain caused by similar criminals so others have no interests against them but against their rulers, witch means others have a common enemy.
[1] cfr: https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org
There are a lot of scientists here. Imagine what a hundred million volts and hundreds of thousands of bare energized light ion coulombs will do to household wiring. Think electrical fires for thousands of miles. Anything with Romex is going to glow red hot and light the walls on fire. This has never been openly discussed before. I thought you might like to know before civilization is burned to the ground.
Edit: Sandia Labs paper on Starfish Prime and the streetlights in Hawaii: http://ece-research.unm.edu/summa/notes/SDAN/0031.pdf
The second piece of the puzzle is starfish prime, which was entirely unexpected. It caused transformers hundreds of miles away to burn up and of course satellites to cease to transmit near the area of the blast. Scientists are clever and they could find simple ways to greatly amplify the effect. The discussion about grids going down is good enough to get people to talk. But there is more to the story than what they led us to believe.
If you were to take a high yield weapon and encase it in something like high density polystyrene it has a high hydrogen to carbon ratio making it's ions faster. Protons are many times more massive than electrons so electrons will be stripped off very quickly and travel very far leaving two very large opposite charge bodies flowing at relativistic speeds above the victim civilization. Bare charges are notoriously hard to keep together and they expand very quickly in all directions. This causes a great deal of current above us from the negative charges and the positive charges. A single coulomb is a massive amount of charge to try to keep together. If you had a single coulomb bound and then released, the explosive effect would be enormous.
Amplifying the effect with tons of this material means hundreds of terajoules of energy converted directly into electrical current which is a very fast moving wave, much much faster than a cme. This means that it will affect short wires even only a few feet long.
There is not just one of these weapons but dozens or hundreds. With a blanket dispersal it would affect huge areas.
Unlike conventional nuclear war thinking where blast effects are considered, this tactic is based on fire damage. The result is the destruction of a civilization with moderate amounts of nuclear fallout.
I really hope these fears of mine are unfounded but electricity is not easy to argue with. When man decided to apply its knowledge of nuclear energy into weapons research it took upon it's mortal hands instruments of it's own annihilation. Please read Rev 6. And Rev 17-18. For a bonus read Dan 5. Then you will know what to do when the time comes. Peace be to you and may your flight to safety be sure.
Other than that, this is a great writeup in how it dissects the technical details of a nuclear war and puts them into perspective.
In other words, perverse as it seems, some things are worse than a remote chance of a nuclear war.
Today fuel loads in major cities are much lower than they were from the 60s to 80s and that makes it more unlikely for firestorms to start from cities.
There are a huge caveats to this thinking though.
1) Fuel loads from above-ground oil, natural gas, and coal storage areas are big enough to start a massive firestorm. Cushing, Oklahoma alone has enough fuel to cause severe cooling.
2) Nuclear strikes to some specific areas, California during a fire season, might create a firestorm that covers a large percentage of the state and burns everything down in just few hours.
That is pretty impressive on the satellite map...all the white dots are oil tanks.
How would this be different from California burning by itself every year? Is this a difference of speed of burn or something?
In a firestorm spotfires interact. This interaction will increase the burning rates (forests and bushes burn more thoroughly, there is more heat and higher flames. It creates whole new local climate that throws shoot into the atmosphere.
2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Australia had some firestorms.
NATO itself was not born to ensure protection but to counter Soviet expansion and NATO expansion in eastern Europe, starting from the (in)famous Berlin air-bridge who led to the (in)famous Berlin Wall, was and is a clear violation of Yalta agreement after WWII, agreements the Soviet have respected and Russian Federation have respected thereafter. Who actually need a war, and Ukrainian one in particular is very clear, who have created the condition and VALID reasons for Russian ops are declared formally, for instance https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf or even more clear https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html since it's also clear they can't win, they fail in Iraq (a war done for very similar purpose, secure the now almost lost dollar dominance, remember that Saddam have decided to go for euros for Iraqis oil and remember the narrative and the admission of the initial lie about mass destruction weapons, genocide etc the same we read now)... Nuke are for last resort, and to avoid a total destruction since westerns populations, especially here in EU are not that sold to any specific propaganda and we are already on the brink on a civil war...
Make your conclusions. I suggest to read an ancient USA book: Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearny, Edward Teller also available for free for some past editions https://www.oism.org/nwss/ and you can read how the USA have always imaging nukes tactical usage.
We all know there are a lot of vested interests itching for WW3. So the question is...why?