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Someone's been playing at least a bit of KSP it seems 
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Apr 29, 2014 13:05
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I think at this point it would take some sort of extra-special leadership for there to be a nuclear exchange. I can't imagine anyone with anything close to sanity can believe that there is a 'winner' to a nuclear war. I mean sure, there's something a bit wrong with someone who starts a regular war to begin with, but there's a big gap between conventional/proxy/whatever and 'Mushroom Clouds for Everyone!'
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Apr 29, 2014 13:08
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Taerkar posted:I think at this point it would take some sort of extra-special leadership for there to be a nuclear exchange. I can't imagine anyone with anything close to sanity can believe that there is a 'winner' to a nuclear war. I hope you're right. Looking at someone like Assad though I just don't know. Dude's trying to run for 're-election' less than a year after gassing his own people. Would be scary if someone like that had a nuke.
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Apr 29, 2014 14:15
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Assad is definitely hosed up, but as far as he's concerned he's safe since the people he's using those weapons on can't retaliate in kind.
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Apr 29, 2014 14:23
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Davin Valkri posted:So how come no one is calling for expanded PGM stockpiles/"making more of the weapons we've already got" or whatever if all signs point to "what we have reserved right now won't last us a week"? WE ARE But seriously though we're in bad shape with this stuff. It just got a whole lot worse now that our entire stockpile of MRLs is useless (this is a good thing, but it still sucks). Literally every experiment/wargame I've been a part of over the last few years basically turns on munition expenditure, and this goes for both sides. This is leading to all kinds of amusing sub-strategies like "opponent munition depletion" and so on where you do weird things like fly around on the edge of opponent's airspace and try to get them to shoot at you, or present juicy surface targets to try and get them to shoot BMs.
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Apr 29, 2014 14:28
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bewbies posted:WE ARE others posted:It's not politically viable. Huh. And here I thought "expand PGM manufacturing" would be an easier sell than "make a new fighter/destroyer/whatever that might blow up in your face when deployed." Especially in tricky economic times, and especially when you've seen the results firsthand. You'd think something like (for example) Odyssey Dawn would have told the British military establishment to stop worrying about Astute and whatnot when budget cuts come around not two years later. Talking about "paper tiger risks" and having to go to an ally to bum off their ordnance stocks feels like they should be related somehow. Davin Valkri fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Apr 29, 2014 |
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Apr 29, 2014 15:03
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Koesj posted:Someone's been playing at least a bit of KSP it seems Guilty, but it's an obvious point, when the ASM-135 could be carried by an F-15, while it's target needed an enormous launch vehicle to get it up there. I mean, the Navy killed a satellite with a missile that launched from a standard VLS cell. 
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Apr 29, 2014 16:23
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bewbies posted:WE ARE Does this have any implications for saturation attacks?
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Apr 29, 2014 17:34
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FATWOLF posted:That was an amazing read, thanks. I had no idea the extent of the plans and preparation for chemical and biological warfare in ww2, pretty amazing that it didn't happen. http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p12_Weber.html http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1998-01/most-deadly-plan If anything, the one man who benefited most from the use of the atomic bomb was George C. Marshall. Because of it, he's known for the Marshall Plan, not for a Japanese Holocaust. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Apr 29, 2014 |
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Apr 29, 2014 22:53
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BIG HEADLINE posted:http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p12_Weber.html  Jesus H Christ. edit: seriously, it takes a lot to phase me at this point, but a sourced article that has US military planners talking about gassing 5 million people will still do it. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 29, 2014 23:58
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it's that kind of stuff that makes me chuckle when people use hindsight to condemn the atom bombs
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Apr 30, 2014 00:56
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Just FYI, the Institute for Historical Review is probably the biggest pseudo-scholarly Holocaust denial site out there.
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Apr 30, 2014 00:56
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Space Gopher posted:Just FYI, the Institute for Historical Review is probably the biggest pseudo-scholarly Holocaust denial site out there. Surprised I missed that URL, I was too busy looking at the other link. Yeah, those guys are mega-asshats. Huge ties to David Irving.
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Apr 30, 2014 01:00
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit: seriously, it takes a lot to phase me at this point, but a sourced article that has US military planners talking about gassing 5 million people will still do it. I wasn't going to say anything, but since you posted a self-described "douchey language jab" in another thread, I'll point out that it's "faze", not "phase".
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Apr 30, 2014 01:08
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Craptacular posted:I wasn't going to say anything, but since you posted a self-described "douchey language jab" in another thread, I'll point out that it's "faze", not "phase". point
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Apr 30, 2014 01:15
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Not sure if this is the best place for it, but since most of the TFR people who give a poo poo about history are in here why not? Interesting article about the first archeological dig at the site of Treblinka, the death camp that alone accounted for a bit less than 1/6th of the Jewish Holocaust fatalities. Apparently there's going to be a documentary about that dig. Should be interesting.
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Apr 30, 2014 01:32
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Interesting, he says. 
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Apr 30, 2014 01:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Sperglord Actual posted:Interesting, he says.
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Apr 30, 2014 02:33
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Dead Reckoning posted:Pretty sure if the plans of the U.S. military's cold war bio/chem program from before we gave up our weapons ever get made public, your head is going to explode. Yeah, but that's the cold war. Somehow that stuff just loses its impact when you've got people like Thomas Power setting the general mood.
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Apr 30, 2014 02:55
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The UK contaminated an island so badly with weaponized anthrax that it was rendered uninhabitable until the 90s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruinard_Island during testing in WW2.
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Apr 30, 2014 02:55
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Cyrano4747 posted:Not sure if this is the best place for it, but since most of the TFR people who give a poo poo about history are in here why not? Half the comments are holocaust deniers.
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Apr 30, 2014 04:00
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GulMadred posted:The GPS denial strategem seems a bit far-fetched, though: I like this letter more than words can say
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Apr 30, 2014 04:09
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MrYenko posted:Guilty, but it's an obvious point, when the ASM-135 could be carried by an F-15, while it's target needed an enormous launch vehicle to get it up there. In both the ASM-135 and the SM-3 satellite kills the satellites were in Near Earth Orbit. The ASM-135 intercepted the satellite at an altitude of around 555km. The SM-3 intercepted its target at an altitude of 247km. GPS satellites are up at around 20,000km. That makes it a very different ballgame.
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Apr 30, 2014 04:12
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Space Gopher posted:Just FYI, the Institute for Historical Review is probably the biggest pseudo-scholarly Holocaust denial site out there. Yeah, and that's why I hunted down the USNI article which contains citations. Warbadger posted:GPS satellites are up at around 20,000km. That makes it a very different ballgame. Not really - all you really need is a launch vehicle capable of making orbit, then have the technological know-how and capability to boost a relatively small ASAT vehicle carrying a fragmentation warhead to ~20,000km. The *difficulty* comes from the fact that the GLONASS constellation orbits very near the GPS constellation (19,100km vs 20,200km), and there would be no way, once the device is detonated, to ensure it ONLY hits GPS satellites, especially if a domino/Kessler effect kicks off. The GPS constellation is protected not only by its orbit height, but by the fact that any act against it would be an act (however unintended the consequences) against GLONASS as well, and all that that implies. EDIT: The Galileo constellation is ~23,222km as well - so again, any strike on GPS would basically be an act of war against the EU nations and Russia as well. Not even North Korea would be dumb enough to muck up MEO - although they'd need a delivery system that can reliably make *LEO* first. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 04:21
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Started reading Alas, Babylon tonight. I do believe it would be right up the alley for most posters here in this thread.
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Apr 30, 2014 04:54
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BIG HEADLINE posted:Yeah, and that's why I hunted down the USNI article which contains citations. Making orbit isn't easy and isn't something you're going to do with something even remotely like the SM-3 or ASM-135, even without involving a payload. For light payloads to LEO you're still looking at poo poo like the ASLV, Antares, Athena II, or any other number of light carrier rockets. The ASLV is about as small as orbital launch vehicles come and even still you're looking at a 40+ ton rocket about the size of an ICBM to put just 150kg in orbit. For comparison Athena II is a brand new launch vehicle that can put right around 1 ton into LEO. It weighs 133 tons, about a third larger than a peacekeeper ICBM. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 05:25
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It would be much easier to nullify PGMs by being hard to find, than by somehow nullifying the GPS system.
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Apr 30, 2014 05:38
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hailthefish posted:It would be much easier to nullify PGMs by being hard to find, than by somehow nullifying the GPS system. Or attracting them with elaborate maskirovka in the spirit of the inflatable tanks used before d-day to fool Hitler.
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Apr 30, 2014 06:44
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Azipod posted:Or attracting them with elaborate maskirovka in the spirit of the inflatable tanks used before d-day to fool Hitler. Or more recently the "junked car with a pole on it" used to fool NATO.
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Apr 30, 2014 06:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah, but that's the cold war. Somehow that stuff just loses its impact when you've got people like Thomas Power setting the general mood. Why? The plans to commit widespread genocide on the Japanese islands are fairly well documented. Is it morally different to do it with gas instead of fire? A reminder that while this wasn't official policy (or physically possible) this is the late war zeitgeist you're talking about :  In Fog Of War McNamara talks about essentially how LeMay and his crew believed if it took war crimes to end the war with the fewest American lives lost, then war crimes it would be. Similar sentiments were echoed by some of the Manhattan Experiment guys. It seems to me like the decision whether or not to use bio/chem weapons had more to do with maintaining the integrity of treaties for the post-war world than any real ethical concerns - that, and that fire was doing the job just fine.
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Apr 30, 2014 08:52
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE06ECcimb8 I'd been looking for this video for a while. Now I just have to find the one where some General says that an officer as low as a Major could have "at least ten atomic weapons under his command," with the number scaling upwards the higher the rank. I've never been able to find it again ever since seeing it initially, but it had the smuggest-looking guy in uniform I think I've ever seen. We were really dumb. Also, before you think Admiral Blandy was a good guy and was just getting poo poo on for doing his job, he also said this about the animals they let languish on the test ships during Crossroads: "The animal merely languishes and recovers or dies a painless death. Suffering among the animals as a whole was negligible." He also refused to halt the decontamination process of the otherwise seaworthy test ships until the chief medical officer showed him a surgeonfish that had absorbed enough radiation that it x-rayed itself in front of him. BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 09:56
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Reminder that the US went from "only bomb military targets" to "drop fire on every city" in about the same time it took for Iraq to go from "Thunder Run" to "IED's for everyone". And somehow we spent a similar time in Vietnam and Iraq and never really bombed North Vietnam. War is weird.
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Apr 30, 2014 11:35
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BIG HEADLINE posted:We were really dumb. quote:Physicist Edward Teller considered another possibility. The huge temperature of a fission explosion -- tens of millions of degrees -- could fuse together nuclei of light elements, such as hydrogen, a process that also releases energy (later, this insight would be the basis for hydrogen bombs). If the temperature of a detonation was high enough, nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere would fuse, releasing energy. Ignition of atmospheric nitrogen might cause hydrogen in the oceans to fuse. The Trinity experiment might inadvertently turn the entire planet into a chain-reaction fusion bomb. Yeah we were pretty dumb. Most of the physicists involved with Trinity didn't really believe they were going to set the atmosphere on fire, and were of course vindicated when it went off and did what they expected, but in Hans Bethe's book he mentions that people were definitely still worried about it enough to voice their concerns to Washington.
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Apr 30, 2014 13:30
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Its been mentioned before in this thread, but the first nuclear reactor was created in downtown Chicago, unshielded, and uncooled. Fermi was just like "yeah my calculations are probably correct" 
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Apr 30, 2014 14:39
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Warbadger posted:In both the ASM-135 and the SM-3 satellite kills the satellites were in Near Earth Orbit. The ASM-135 intercepted the satellite at an altitude of around 555km. The SM-3 intercepted its target at an altitude of 247km. I understand that. The point I'm trying to make is that there is a world of difference between hitting something in an orbit, and putting an interceptor in a matching orbit. holocaust bloopers posted:Started reading Alas, Babylon tonight. I do believe it would be right up the alley for most posters here in this thread. That was the only book I was ever required to read in high school. There's a joke about the Florida public school system in there somewhere.
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Apr 30, 2014 15:06
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bewbies posted:It just got a whole lot worse now that our entire stockpile of MRLs is useless (this is a good thing, but it still sucks). :wouldyouliketoknowmore:
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Apr 30, 2014 16:53
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BIG HEADLINE posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE06ECcimb8 It's really easy to see that in hindsight but high-level military commanders have had really difficult times adapting to major shifts in military technology throughout history. The Hardcore History podcast is going through World War 1 right now and the senior leadership of France, Germany, and Britain knew fuckall about how exactly all this new artillery weaponry would impact the battlefield. So their plans just incorporated them without any thought that they may be game-changing. This goes doubly-so for the use of chemical weapons. The Germans first experiments with Chlorine gas were in early-1915 on the battlefield (and they just opened some tanks on the lines and let the gas flow with the winds to the allied trenches  ). They had no idea the gas would kill the numbers it did early on because they couldn't put 2 and 2 together (one being the sheer concentration of soldiers on the front lines and the other being how seriously hosed you were in a trench as gas came pouring down on top of you).So when Alamos developed the atom bomb, the top brass has no clue, despite any and all warnings the scientists could provide, what exactly this new weapon would do to warfare. So then you get these statements about 10 nuclear weapons to every major and it sounds ridiculous now. But then, I bet he knew fuckall about what putting that many weapons in the field (or in an arsenal, period) would do. Just like the loving Germans fifty years prior.
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Apr 30, 2014 18:15
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Thwomp posted:The Hardcore History podcast is going through World War 1 right now and the senior leadership of France, Germany, and Britain knew fuckall about how exactly all this new artillery weaponry would impact the battlefield. So their plans just incorporated them without any thought that they may be game-changing. Wait, what? Can you go into any more detail on this? I'm middling at best with my military history, but it's not like WW1 was the first place modern artillery was employed by European armies. Things weren't quite what we'd call "modern" in the franco-prussian war (no hydrolic recoil mechanisms that I can think of) but we're solidly into breech-loaded howitzers and out of Napoleonic-era cannons. Prussian artillery in particular was pretty important at both Sedan and the siege of Paris. I'll believe that their artillery doctrine was a tad outdated (like many doctrines) but I'm not quite sure that I buy that it was some paradigm shift that caught all the various general staffs completely flat footed. edit: quote:They had no idea the gas would kill the numbers it did early on because they couldn't put 2 and 2 together (one being the sheer concentration of soldiers on the front lines and the other being how seriously hosed you were in a trench as gas came pouring down on top of you). Also, where are you getting that notion? I've never read anything that indicated that anyone in command on either side had no idea that gas would be as terrible as it was. The Germans were trying with various levels of success to deploy it effectively on the eastern front on major concentrations of Russians before they tried it on the western. If anything it seems like they always expected it to be more effective and were dismayed when it failed to cause the catastrophic gaps in the line that they expected. You don't exactly stockpile a couple thousand tons of something relatively rare and wait to deploy it all at once in a major offensive if you think it's going to be ineffective or a mild irritant. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Apr 30, 2014 |
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Apr 30, 2014 18:24
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I may be getting it wrong, because it was 3.5 hours of listening, but I think Carlin's discussion of artillery is in regards to generals not really grasping what firing 40,000 rounds a day does to supply lines and how the sheer volume of artillery fire rendered standard infantry tactics useless.
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Apr 30, 2014 18:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:Wait, what? Can you go into any more detail on this? I'm middling at best with my military history, but it's not like WW1 was the first place modern artillery was employed by European armies. Things weren't quite what we'd call "modern" in the franco-prussian war (no hydrolic recoil mechanisms that I can think of) but we're solidly into breech-loaded howitzers and out of Napoleonic-era cannons. Prussian artillery in particular was pretty important at both Sedan and the siege of Paris. Moreover the main problem everyone had in 1915 was that they didn't have nearly enough heavy artillery and ammunition for trench warfare. The real issue was that you just couldn't push armies of that size 20km beyond a railhead before command and control and logistics systems broke down because everything's being moved by horse-and-cart and there are no radios to let you know where anyone is.
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Apr 30, 2014 18:32
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