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FrozenVent posted:Wouldn't that be High Expansion foam, or whatever that's called? I remember AFFF as that filmy, stinky stuff. Could be? I just remember my fire suppression days checking out those setups in hangars at PDX, and them being marked clearly with AFFF. Also one of my buddies does construction contracting for the military in Anchorage and told me about the AFFF systems at Galena, so I assumed those systems were relatively universal in the USAF.
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May 15, 2012 04:56
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Groda posted:This is absolutely false. The issue's not Pu241, it's Pu240, which undergoes spontaneous fission and releases neutrons, which means predetonation if you try to build a light gun-type weapon out of plutonium. The reaction that turns U238 into Pu239 at Hanford is exactly the same as the reaction that turns U238 into Pu239 in a civilian power plant. The difference is that the U238 targets in a reactor specifically intended for that transmutation are irradiated for a shorter period of time, so not as much of the Pu240 side-product accumulates. It would not be *efficient* for the Japanese to modify the fuel cycle of a PWR or BWR so that they're inserting new fuel elements and removing old ones each month, but it could produce plutonium with sufficiently low amounts of Pu241 to be used in a bomb. quote:Japan on the other hand has tons of uranium enrichment capacity, so why would it need plutonium? Also, that.
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May 15, 2012 05:27
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SyHopeful posted:Could be? I just remember my fire suppression days checking out those setups in hangars at PDX, and them being marked clearly with AFFF. Pretty sure that the ones in the larger hangars (at least for the military) use high expansion foam, which is different than AFFF. It would make sense that Galena would have AFFF though since that's just an alert facility so (I would assume) the facilities there are just relatively small alert cells vs. a large hangar, where the need to rapidly fill a large space isn't really a requirement since the cells are so small.
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May 15, 2012 08:29
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Dumb question, what happens to any people still in there? Breathing foam doesn't look fun, and it's not like this is a server room or something where you can fairly easily see that everyone is out before hitting the halon button. Do you have to do a head count before hitting the fire suppression system? stealie72 fucked around with this message at 14:15 on May 15, 2012 |
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May 15, 2012 14:10
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When I did firefighting training, they told us you could easily breath in hi-ex foam. The instructor said they'd once filled the burn building with it and walked around for kicks. I never tried, and I don't know if the military uses the same stuff, so who knows.
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May 15, 2012 14:13
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I have a historical Cold War question - France's withdrawal from the unified NATO command - WTF? 1) Why did they leave? According to Wikipedia, it was a combination of DeGaulle being mad that NATO wouldn't help him oppress the Algerians and retarded French nationalism  Was there something else at work or was it mostly DeGaulle being a butthurt drama queen?2) How were things expected to work in a time of war? Again, according to the Wiki, the French army withdrew to France and was basically a theatre-level reserve, but how would that have worked in practice? Apparently there was "a series of secret accords between U.S. and French officials, the Lemnitzer-Ailleret Agreements . . ." but I haven't found detail as to how they were to work. One imagines that relying on a reserve that would have to integrate itself by the seat of its pantalons rouge (and might give you all the finger instead) would be less than ideal.
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May 15, 2012 15:08
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Myoclonic Jerk posted:1) Why did they leave? According to Wikipedia, it was a combination of DeGaulle being mad that NATO wouldn't help him oppress the Algerians and retarded French nationalism DeGaulle being a drama queen is part of it. After World War II, French national pride was at an all time low. They were unhappy with their quickly declining international prestige and importance as their colonies disappeared and the United States became hugely influential in the 1st World. National pride was further dampened by their failure in Indochina and the Suez Canal Crisis* and the increasingly bloody and unpopular Algerian conflict. Their relative unimportance compared to the US or Soviet Union was highlighted and underscored throughout the 50s. Finally, the refusal by the United States to support or condone the war against the FLN in Algeria was probably one of the last straws. Internationally; Rather than be seen as being fully in the American sphere, they chose to withdraw from NATO in an attempt to reinforce French independence and agency. Nationally; it was an move by DeGaulle to gain support from certain voters, specifically the Army, who were active politically in a big way, and French Nationalist partys. But yeah, saying the French were butthurt isn't too far off the mark in many respects. * The Israelis were supposed to attack across the Sinai and then a joint British/French paratroop force was would jump in, ostensibly to ensure free passage of the canal. Afterwards, the Israeli army would advance on Cairo and overthrow Nasser. After the war, the British/French were supposed to administer the canal to ensure free passage of shipping. The Americans intervened, at the behest of the Soviet Union, and slapped the British and the French on the dicks for loving around in Egypt.
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May 15, 2012 16:48
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stealie72 posted:Dumb question, what happens to any people still in there? Breathing foam doesn't look fun, and it's not like this is a server room or something where you can fairly easily see that everyone is out before hitting the halon button. FrozenVent posted:When I did firefighting training, they told us you could easily breath in hi-ex foam. The instructor said they'd once filled the burn building with it and walked around for kicks. Pretty much that. It's not like you'd want to spend your whole life walking around in the stuff, but it's not like it prevents you from breathing to the point of suffocation if you're caught in it. You can easily make your way out if it goes off. Which brings up another good point, a lot of these systems will be automatic so they go off at the first sign of a fire, so you wouldn't be able to do a "head count" or anything because you aren't going to be setting off the system, it's going to go off automatically. Veins McGee posted:who were active politically in a big way  , understatement of the day right there. And yeah, basically what he said. As far as how they would integrate, remember that France still had troops stationed in Germany for the duration of the Cold War. Also remember that it's not like NATO forces would be this melting pot of soldiers at the platoon level or whatever, the bulk of the coordination between nations was at the division level and higher...which is what the Lemnitzer-Aillert Agreements laid out in detail. French forces continued to exercise with NATO forces throughout the Cold War and would have integrated into the military structure just like any other NATO country's forces.
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May 15, 2012 17:27
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iyaayas01 posted:
France in the 50s and 60s was probably a pretty crazy place to be. The army, and specifically the paratroopers, seemed to have been constantly planning a coup(would have been amusing since a fair amount of the FFL were former Wehrmacht).
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May 15, 2012 18:02
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Wasn't there also some idiotic idea to merge France into the UK that England basically laughed at?
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May 15, 2012 18:08
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iyaayas01 posted:As far as how they would integrate, remember that France still had troops stationed in Germany for the duration of the Cold War. [...] the bulk of the coordination between nations was at the division level and higher...which is what the Lemnitzer-Aillert Agreements laid out in detail. French forces continued to exercise with NATO forces throughout the Cold War and would have integrated into the military structure just like any other NATO country's forces. So, let me get this straight - the French withdrew from NATO command, but still had troops near or on the front line in Germany, conducted joint exercises with NATO, and had plans to closely coordinate with/subordinate command of their forces to NATO in the event of a war . . . How is this different in practical terms from staying in the NATO command structure?  You'd think the French had an unusually strong attachment to symbolic gestures or something . . .Veins McGee posted:France in the 50s and 60s was probably a pretty crazy place to be. The army, and specifically the paratroopers, seemed to have been constantly planning a coup(would have been amusing since a fair amount of the FFL were former Wehrmacht). One of my history professors explained it best. Paraphrasing from memory: The history of France since the Revolution is the story of swinging between binary opposites, from Liberalism, to Conservatism, from Empire to Republic. There is no middle ground. France is schizophrenic. The Army, in particular, has had a weird disconnect and separate tradition from civilian France, particularly urban Paris. Witness the weird spectacle of portions of the French military collaborating by serving under the Vichy regime, going so far as to fight the Allies in North Africa, the Eastern Front, West Africa, Madagascar, and other places.
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May 15, 2012 18:20
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Myoclonic Jerk posted:
This was less "weird spectacle" and more "officers who have sworn to obey the orders of their civilian leadership actually doing so." The Vichy issue is way, way more complex than just being a puppet state of Hitler's. The far more bizarre thing is all the officers who essentially deserted after they were ordered to stand down and insisted on continuing to fight a lost war. Given that they were on the right side of history with that one they're considered heroes today, but in any other situation they would have been seen as dangerous anti-government radicals. The fact that de Gaulle was put back into power in 1958 by a military coup doesn't help with this assessment either. Really the only way to understand french political history is to understand the French revolution. It, and the subsequent decades of turmoil it spawned, created a whole bunch of social and political tensions which have been reverberating through French history to this day. Calling the country 'schizophrenic' is bit much, though.
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May 15, 2012 18:36
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If anyone is schizo, it's the US. While we were isolationist we were practicing Manifest Destiny and starting an empire, and after WWII when we were the bastion of democracy we installed dictators throughout the world.
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May 15, 2012 18:48
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Cyrano4747 posted:This was less "weird spectacle" and more "officers who have sworn to obey the orders of their civilian leadership actually doing so." The Vichy issue is way, way more complex than just being a puppet state of Hitler's. The far more bizarre thing is all the officers who essentially deserted after they were ordered to stand down and insisted on continuing to fight a lost war. Given that they were on the right side of history with that one they're considered heroes today, but in any other situation they would have been seen as dangerous anti-government radicals. The fact that de Gaulle was put back into power in 1958 by a military coup doesn't help with this assessment either. That reminds me: About 10 years ago I was working as a cameraman and we were interviewing a local (German) police chief about crowd control preparations for some big protest thing. And since we were shooting for arte, a tv station that's some sort of German/French cooperation, he brought up differences in French and German crowd control doctrine. He said that thanks to the French Revolution, the French police had a lot of respect for civil disobedience and protest and would act accordingly: German doctrine at the time was to basically try to encircle and contain everything while picking out and detaining ring leaders, but the French would always try and leave some escape routes, especially for leaders. Now that was quite a long time ago, so things might have changed by now (assuming it was true in the first place), but still. The "schizophrenic" thing made me think of this interview.
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May 15, 2012 18:57
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Nations only look after their own interests and are simultaneously composed of a massive amount of groups and individuals with wildly differing agendas and ideologies. Its in their natures to be Schizophrenic. My native Sweden was even worse than France during the Cold War. On the one hand, we were officially staunchly neutral and domestically went by the tune of "it takes two to tango", referring to NATO and the Warzaw Pact as equally belligerent. On the other hand, everyone knowing anything about Swedish defence knew that it all hinged on NATO assisting in the case of a Soviet invasion, and after the breakup of USSR secret documents were declassified that revealed that Sweden had in fact essentially been a part of NATO all along, both sharing military intelligence and even trading the right to buy US military equipment in exchange for a pledge to participate in warfare against the Pact in the case of war, ever since the 50s. It's not much better today. On the one hand, Sweden prides itself on being active in diplomacy to preserve peace and in having stayed out of war for 200 years - most Swedes (and many foreigners) basically consider the country as pacifist. On the other hand, Sweden is the world leading weapons exporter on a per capita basis.
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May 15, 2012 19:29
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Sweden: willing to fight to the last Finn 
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May 15, 2012 19:41
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Cyrano4747 posted:Sweden: willing to fight to the last Finn And don't you forget it    
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May 15, 2012 19:44
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Cyrano4747 posted:Sweden: willing to fight to the last Finn You're getting quoted.
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May 15, 2012 19:51
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Phanatic posted:The issue's not Pu241, it's Pu240, which undergoes spontaneous fission and releases neutrons, which means predetonation if you try to build a light gun-type weapon out of plutonium. Absolutely correct--typo. We call it "double capture." Phanatic posted:The reaction that turns U238 into Pu239 at Hanford is exactly the same as the reaction that turns U238 into Pu239 in a civilian power plant. The difference is that the U238 targets in a reactor specifically intended for that transmutation are irradiated for a shorter period of time, so not as much of the Pu240 side-product accumulates. It would not be *efficient* for the Japanese to modify the fuel cycle of a PWR or BWR so that they're inserting new fuel elements and removing old ones each month, but it could produce plutonium with sufficiently low amounts of Pu241 to be used in a bomb. This goes beyond not efficient. The fuel cycles would be much shorter--on the order of days--and would constitute a naked ambition to develop nuclear weapons. In which case, it would be much easier to go develop centrifuges, gas diffusion facilities, or South African uranium whistles just as publicly. I could grind coffee with my Volvo's back wheels, but it would be insanely impractical, my neighbors would complain, and everybody would wonder why I didn't just get a Braun.
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May 15, 2012 19:57
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Groda posted:You're getting quoted. Wish I could claim this one, but it was shamelessly stolen from some other goon who was talking about Swedish defense policy either in this thread or another one.
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May 15, 2012 20:10
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Cyrano4747 posted:Wish I could claim this one, but it was shamelessly stolen from some other goon who was talking about Swedish defense policy either in this thread or another one. For a second I was wondering if it could have been me (I'm certainly hard at work typecasting myself as the Swegoon) but it was probably this guy. But yeah, it's definitely a thing. Googled the Swedish version some and apparently some people (Finns) are claiming it actually has a long history too - dating back to the war of 1802, where Sweden did indeed fight Russia to the last Finn, with the war ending in Finland being conquered by Russia (and Sweden never getting involved in another war again)
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May 15, 2012 20:29
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VikingSkull posted:Wasn't there also some idiotic idea to merge France into the UK that England basically laughed at? If you're talking about 1940, it was the British who proposed union, and the French (at least Petain and Co.) who laughed at the idea. e: link joat mon fucked around with this message at 20:32 on May 15, 2012 |
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May 15, 2012 20:29
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Nah, it was in the 1950's. Here's a BBC article on it. loving Suez crisis.
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May 15, 2012 20:43
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VikingSkull posted:If anyone is schizo, it's the US. While we were isolationist we were practicing Manifest Destiny and starting an empire, and after WWII when we were the bastion of democracy we installed dictators throughout the world. John Lewis Gaddis wrote a book about the first point you bring up, essentially arguing that the US has always been expanding their influence (or empire) and the only difference between the 1920s and the 1820s was scope, such as expanding influence over the North American Continent vs expanding influence over the western hemisphere.
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May 15, 2012 22:15
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So here's a neat relic of the cold war I didn't know about : Apollo 15 left a grim Moonmorial to everyone killed in the pursuit of spaceflight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Astronaut
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May 15, 2012 23:32
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The Proc posted:So here's a neat relic of the cold war I didn't know about : Apollo 15 left a grim Moonmorial to everyone killed in the pursuit of spaceflight.
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May 16, 2012 00:25
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So since the DPRK thread is gone, and North Korea still seems stuck in the Cold War, I'll ask this here: What's the deal with DPRK? I know that North Korean leadership is often portrayed as batshit crazy, but I doubt that one gets to be - and stays - leader of any country for long unless one is very intelligent. What is North Korea after when it engages in its occasional saber-rattling? Is this its way of getting material aid from the West?
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May 16, 2012 01:14
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Basically they are the best extortionists on the planet. They bluff some threats, we send them grain, things cool down for half a decade. It lets them focus what little money they have on what passes for a military.
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May 16, 2012 01:49
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It let's them focus what little money they have on living the life of reilly. The top of the DRPK have plenty salted away in overseas accounts, kids at top european boarding schools and so on.
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May 16, 2012 02:07
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Myoclonic Jerk posted:So, let me get this straight - the French withdrew from NATO command, but still had troops near or on the front line in Germany, conducted joint exercises with NATO, and had plans to closely coordinate with/subordinate command of their forces to NATO in the event of a war . . . Eh, it's a bit more than a symbolic gesture...a good chunk of what NATO did/does is political in nature (some wags would argue that ALL of what NATO does is political in nature, and they really wouldn't be wrong), and by withdrawing from the command structure they stepped outside that. I mean, you could argue that anything political is "symbolic" compared to cold military force, but I think there's a difference between "withdrew from a command structure for over 40 years and thereby significantly affected the political relationships between governments in Europe" and "took a dump on SACEUR's lawn." Both are arguably "symbolic," but one has quite a bit more concrete impact than the other. VikingSkull posted:Basically they are the best extortionists on the planet. They bluff some threats, we send them grain, things cool down for half a decade. It lets them focus what little money they have on what passes for a military. Basically this. The country is roughly equivalent to what would happen if you gave a country to a bunch of gangsters. In other news, the CNO explicitly came out the other day in support of the AF's Long Range Strike Bomber. Dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria!
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May 16, 2012 02:26
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Besides, the worst kept secret about NATO is that the European forces were just a speedbump that would hopefully group up enough tanks in one spot to hit with a tactical nuke. Both sides knew that ground forces were a formality. Being in NATO really didn't matter to that.
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May 16, 2012 03:41
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grover posted:Why is Yuri Gagarin on that list? And others killed in plane or car crashes unrelated to spaceflight? It's a list of people killed while involved with spaceflight, whether or not they died in space or in training or other ways, so you got your name on there if you died while flying in space, flying your t-38, or just flying down the road in your car. If I remember right there was a big issue with that memorial because they tried selling copies of the figurines after the fact too.
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May 16, 2012 04:01
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NATO also formally kept its members from snapping at each others throats for the most part, yielding a 60+ year pax that's fairly unheard of in European history and (for better or worse) trailing into the European Union. It certainly helped keep the rest of Europe convinced that Germany was now housebroken without the need for crippling sanctions. It did have other purposes than just being the bone in the Bear's throat.
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May 16, 2012 04:02
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Normal negotiation strategy: Ask for best-case offer A Get back lowball offer C Haggle your way to acceptable offer B North Korea negotiation strategy: Act completely crazy and bugfuck, demanding A, X, Rho, Eszett and (clicknoise), randomly. Then break off negotiations entirely. Threatening to scour the world with fire is optional, but always entertaining. Repeat until everyone else is exhausted dealing with you and you being crazy bugfuck is the new normal. Suddenly act reasonable and ask for A. Watch as everyone scrambles to give you A before you turn all crazy again. Sit back and enjoy your Hennessy. Neophyte fucked around with this message at 04:18 on May 16, 2012 |
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May 16, 2012 04:14
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Snowdens Secret posted:NATO also formally kept its members from snapping at each others throats for the most part, yielding a 60+ year pax that's fairly unheard of in European history and (for better or worse) trailing into the European Union. It certainly helped keep the rest of Europe convinced that Germany was now housebroken without the need for crippling sanctions. It did have other purposes than just being the bone in the Bear's throat. Keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out. Neophyte posted:Sit back and enjoy your Hennessy. That reminds me, have we heard what the Outstanding Leader prefers to drink?
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May 16, 2012 04:37
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iyaayas01 posted:Keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out. Came here to post this. gently caress.
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May 16, 2012 04:54
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iyaayas01 posted:That reminds me, have we heard what the Outstanding Leader prefers to drink? Clearly Mountain Dew Code Red.
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May 16, 2012 18:17
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Didn't see it, so I hope I'm not doubleposting, but the F-22 is grounded until backup oxygen systems can be installed. Obviously, I don't know poo poo about poo poo, but that's not exactly the same as fixing the primary system. Are F-22s in such need that they can't be grounded until they put an O2 system in them that works? http://www.washingtonpost.com/world...ry.html?hpid=z9 Washington Post posted:Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta ordered the Air Force Tuesday to curtail flights of its F-22 Raptor fighter jet and accelerate the installation of backup oxygen generators in response to pilot complaints of wooziness and fainting spells in the cockpit.
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May 16, 2012 20:56
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Neophyte posted:Normal negotiation strategy: Ah, so the nation is not *actually* schizophrenic, it just appears to be.
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May 16, 2012 21:49
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stealie72 posted:Didn't see it, so I hope I'm not doubleposting, but the F-22 is grounded until backup oxygen systems can be installed. When the ground crews start getting dizzy around your parked gold-brick aircraft you got issues. Issues that obviously require lots of money to fix. Who cares if those things actually fly? They practically print money for Lockheed.
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