- briefcasefullof
- Sep 25, 2004
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[This Space for Rent]
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NosmoKing posted:
I wonder what the difference in the stall speeds are between the two planes? IIRC, big and slow bombers or planes patrolling the edge of airspace would sometimes drop speed WAY back as a means of loving with fighters charged with shadowing them. The fighter simply couldn't go that slow.
Reminds me of the age-old joke about a fighter tailing a bomber (a B-2 or something), and the fighter being a show-off. He keeps going on and on about how awesome his jet is and about how much the bomber sucks. Having had enough, the bomber pilot says, "I bet I can do something you can't do." "What?" A few minutes pass, and nothing about the bomber's flight seems to change. "What'd you do," the fighter asks. "We cut off 2 of our engines  ".
NosmoKing posted:
The last sequence in Atomic Cafe is terrifying. It goes a loooonnnnggg way to show that the simple ideas that are proposed in the film as "countermeasures" are pointless.
I read several books that discussed the civil defense program and talked about the Eisenhower "shitload-o-shelters" plan and city evacuation plans. They were quietly abandoned when it was shown that sheltering in place in a city was simply a good way to end up with orderly corpses for the ones that weren't reduced to constituent atoms. Evacuating a city in the time it takes for a nuclear attack is a pointless exercise. That idea was quietly dropped as well.
In the early 80's when everyone was worried that Reagan was going to bring about global thermonuclear war, I asked my dad what the hell was going on and why everyone was so scared and nervous about the president's plans. I was 10 or 12 or so. Dad said, "they're scared because if the right people make the wrong decisions, in roughly one hour, everyone everywhere will be dead or dying soon".
I don't think the youth of today get the idea that we lived in a time where it was no bullshit that in 60 minutes, every city you've ever read about in the US, Europe, East Asia, and the USSR could have been green glass and char. They may have decided to blow the poo poo out of a few parts of other continents, because, gently caress YOU, we can.
I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War, but in high school I read Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. It did a good job of putting things in perspective about the effects of nuclear war, I think.
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