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HoratioRash posted:Dowries were banned, forced marriages were banned, men were allowed to shave bears and women were prohibited from wearing burkas. I know it's an innocent typo but I love the mental picture of a bunch of Afghani men joyfully exercising their newfound right to shave bears.
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Sep 18, 2014 03:06
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Gabriel Pope posted:I know it's an innocent typo but I love the mental picture of a bunch of Afghani men joyfully exercising their newfound right to shave bears. Afghan men, Afghani is the currency!  Sorry, it's a thing that was really hammered home when I was there. What are some of the cultural differences and stereotypes across Russia itself? Like comparing people from Moscow to people living in Siberia? I guess Soviet-era and modern if there is any difference.
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Sep 18, 2014 19:16
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Dirt5o8 posted:What are some of the cultural differences and stereotypes across Russia itself? Like comparing people from Moscow to people living in Siberia? I guess Soviet-era and modern if there is any difference.
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Sep 18, 2014 23:33
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Ytlaya posted:Is there anything actually wrong with the bolded? I mean, we do nuclear powered submarines okay. I'm guessing there's some unique engineering challenges that make it not be a good idea. I Am Not An Engineer, but I dunno how you'd run a jet or rocket engine off of a nuclear reactor. I think you're stuck with using the nuclear reactor to generate electricity or steam and drive a propeller, in combination with the added weight from shielding those are pretty serious constraints on what you can do with a nuke-powered plane, safety aside.
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Sep 19, 2014 20:33
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Pellisworth posted:I Am Not An Engineer, but I dunno how you'd run a jet or rocket engine off of a nuclear reactor. I think you're stuck with using the nuclear reactor to generate electricity or steam and drive a propeller, in combination with the added weight from shielding those are pretty serious constraints on what you can do with a nuke-powered plane, safety aside. I think the idea was that it would be a ramjet and the reactor would be unshielded and air-cooled. They'd fly around at mach 5 at low altitude, drop the 50-bomb payload onesie-twosies on Russian cities, then cruise around spraying fallout everywhere until the plane fell apart.
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Sep 20, 2014 02:58
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Pellisworth posted:I Am Not An Engineer, but I dunno how you'd run a jet or rocket engine off of a nuclear reactor. I think you're stuck with using the nuclear reactor to generate electricity or steam and drive a propeller, in combination with the added weight from shielding those are pretty serious constraints on what you can do with a nuke-powered plane, safety aside. Jet turbine engines work by using heated fluids (air, in most cases), to drive a set of fancy fan blades. How the air gets heated is not important. If you're ever in Idaho, you can see the prototypes. Also: feedmegin posted:With the added caveat that America has actually nuked a country in real life, unlike the Soviet Union... You seem to be under the illusion that using two nuclear weapons on Japan was the worst thing we did to them during WWII. It wasn't. Please do some reading on the 20th Air Force's incendiary campaign against Japanese cities. As far as horrible ways to die goes, being vaporized by an atomic bomb is way better than a full-scale fire raid.
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Sep 20, 2014 03:06
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MRC48B posted:You seem to be under the illusion that using two nuclear weapons on Japan was the worst thing we did to them during WWII. Don't wanna turn this into nukechat but it was quite a bit worse than being vaporized, actually. Americans from their part obviously censored the aftermath as much as they could. Here's a recent documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8QY5gt1weE
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Sep 20, 2014 10:20
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blugu64 posted:Radioactive exhaust that irradiates the land below the flight path. Also NIMBY spoil sports. Under 15 posted:I think the idea was that it would be a ramjet and the reactor would be unshielded and air-cooled. They'd fly around at mach 5 at low altitude, drop the 50-bomb payload onesie-twosies on Russian cities, then cruise around spraying fallout everywhere until the plane fell apart. Project Pluto was a missile using an unshielded nuclear reactor to power a ramjet. It wouldn't be crewed and it wouldn't drop a bomb. There were also plans for nuclear-powered planes, on both sides, but none were ever produced. If you look up back issues of Scientific American, sometimes you can find 1-page job advertisements requesting scientists and engineers for projects like this. They wouldn't have suffered from the radioactive exhaust issue that you allude to, since it would be very difficult to vent nuclear exhaust without inadvertently poisoning the crew. The idea was that you'd put a small nuclear reactor on a bomber with propeller engines so that you could have better endurance, which serves as a better deterrent than bombers with gas-powered propellers. The issue of shielding the crew from the reactor was apparently never quite solved, and then ICBMs came along and obsoleted the whole idea. FilthyImp posted:I'd consider "flying an atomic bomb around" a pretty significant engineering challenge. Nuclear reactors are not nuclear bombs. But in any case, we never had an issue with flying around bombers that carried nuclear bombs QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 08:51
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MRC48B posted:You seem to be under the illusion that using two nuclear weapons on Japan was the worst thing we did to them during WWII. His point was that Soviets feared that the only country who had ever used atomic weapons might use atomic weapons again, which probably helped to make the threat feel even more real and imminent. I don't think that he was implying anything about the morality or devastation of such weapons
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Sep 22, 2014 08:53
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Rhymenoserous posted:Back to this: If a nuke sub goes bad you can scuttle it and all that open ocean water would do a decent job of keeping things from becoming a complete disaster. Meanwhile a military pilot in control of a nuclear aircraft pulls a "Hey guys watch this" and crashes in a residential area. Getting off topic for this thread, but the guy who was on his last pre-retirement flight is a hero. He had long said that the pilot was dangerous, and didn't need to be on this flight, but he in good conscience wouldn't risk anyone else's life.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:22
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Senor Tron posted:Getting off topic for this thread, but the guy who was on his last pre-retirement flight is a hero. He had long said that the pilot was dangerous, and didn't need to be on this flight, but he in good conscience wouldn't risk anyone else's life. So was the pilot messing around or was he just incompetent?
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Sep 23, 2014 03:22
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Dirt5o8 posted:So was the pilot messing around or was he just incompetent? There's significant overlap between A and B there when you're flying a 100-ton aircraft.
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Sep 23, 2014 07:04
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Dirt5o8 posted:So was the pilot messing around or was he just incompetent? I guess it depends on what your definition of incompetent is, but the pilot had a long history of breaking safety rules and doing really unsafe poo poo in the air. He had previously almost crashed a B-52 on his daughter's softball game by doing dumb maneuvers, but managed to save it at the last second. So to answer your question, I'd say he was messing around due to his own incompetence.
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Sep 23, 2014 12:31
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QuarkJets posted:But in any case, we never had an issue with flying around bombers that carried nuclear bombs Goodness knows what happened in Russia when military nuclear accidents occurred (I'd love to know and that would be relevant to the thread), but the US had their fair share, with 32 officially recognised Broken Arrow incidents (Not limited to aircraft incidents), including: 1950: A bomber with engine trouble jettisons a nuclear weapon that detonates and spreads enriched uranium over Canada, where it was secretly deployed. 1956: A B-47 bomber carrying material for 2 nuclear weapons disappears between Florida and Morocco, never to be seen again. 1958: An B-47 airman pulls the wrong lever and drops a nuke onto a kids playhouse. 1961: A B-52 breaks up in midair and drops an armed nuke or two near Goldsboro, NC. 1965: A plane with a nuke falls off of an aircraft carrier, plane pilot and payload all lost. 1966: A B-52 collides with a tanker, two of it's nukes explode and spreads radioactive material across part of Spain. 1968: A B-52 catches fire and it's four nukes explode, irradiating Greenland. Perhaps the 1961 incident involved an armed nuke, but the others apparently could not have resulted in a nuclear detonation. Of course if "A nuclear detonation accidentally occurring" is your definition of an issue, then no, we never had an issue with nukes getting scenic flights all over the place. This list of military nuclear accidents really drives home what McNamara mentioned in The Fog of War about the combination of nuclear weapons and human fallibility (though he spoke in reference to offensive use). Actually, that doco would be kind of relevant to the thread, at least the parts when he mentions talking to his commie counterparts after the facts, at least Castro and some Vietnamese dude. What are the chances of a Russian Documentary of similar scope being produced? The Sausages fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 13:40
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Dirt5o8 posted:What were people's reactions during some of the big confrontations? Like the Cuban Missile crisis? Fortuitously, Khrushchev's son, Sergei Khrushchev, emigrated to the US in the 90s and answers this exact question in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phpe0DsisbY. You might find more videos where he speaks online.
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Oct 1, 2014 00:53
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Senor Tron posted:Getting off topic for this thread, but the guy who was on his last pre-retirement flight is a hero. He had long said that the pilot was dangerous, and didn't need to be on this flight, but he in good conscience wouldn't risk anyone else's life. Not to say that anyone was not a hero, but I think that you may be conflating Col. Wolff (the officer on his last flight) with Lt. Col. McGeehan (the officer who knew Lt. Col. Holland was a menace and prevented anyone from flying with him unless McGeehan was co-pilot).
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Oct 2, 2014 00:51
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Cuntpunch posted:Here's another: This totally happened, for the record. http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-clear-lake/#22200101=0 Houston Chronicle posted:Yeltsin asked customers about what they were buying and how much it cost, later asking the store manager if one needed a special education to manage a store. In the Chronicle photos, you can see him marveling at the produce section, the fresh fish market, and the checkout counter. He looked especially excited about frozen pudding pops. MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Oct 3, 2014 |
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Oct 3, 2014 02:26
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To be fair I've lived in the US my whole life and sometimes I marvel at the ice cream section. Klondike Bars with mint chocolate chip ice cream? Genius.
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Oct 3, 2014 03:24
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He expended too much energy and got tired
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MothraAttack posted:This totally happened, for the record. this is really depressing. poor old communist man. 
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Oct 3, 2014 04:48
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The father of a former school friend of mine is a journalist, and she told me a story about how he was riding in the car with Yeltsin once, who was noticably drunk as usual, and had the car stop in order to take a dump in the woods by the road.
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Oct 3, 2014 07:52
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Hannibal Rex posted:The father of a former school friend of mine is a journalist, and she told me a story about how he was riding in the car with Yeltsin once, who was noticably drunk as usual, and had the car stop in order to take a dump in the woods by the road. I saw this a couple times in Europe by old people. Just pulling over on the side of the road and unloading real fast. One was actually stopped by a cop but it didn't seem to phase her too much.
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Oct 3, 2014 13:07
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QuarkJets posted:There were also plans for nuclear-powered planes, on both sides, but none were ever produced. If you look up back issues of Scientific American, sometimes you can find 1-page job advertisements requesting scientists and engineers for projects like this. They wouldn't have suffered from the radioactive exhaust issue that you allude to, since it would be very difficult to vent nuclear exhaust without inadvertently poisoning the crew. The idea was that you'd put a small nuclear reactor on a bomber with propeller engines so that you could have better endurance, which serves as a better deterrent than bombers with gas-powered propellers. The issue of shielding the crew from the reactor was apparently never quite solved, and then ICBMs came along and obsoleted the whole idea. Both the USAF and Soviet Air Forces worked with Convair and Tupolev to test putting reactors in aircraft though, ending up with the NB-36H and Tu95-LAL respectively. The reactors in both never powered anything and were just used to test the effectiveness of the shielding. Turns out it does work but you can't put any bombs in your nuclear bomber because it's too heavy now it's full of lead and other stuff.   
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Oct 3, 2014 13:55
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:Turns out it does work but you can't put any bombs in your nuclear bomber because it's too heavy now it's full of lead and other stuff. Could something like this work with today's nuclear/aerospace tech, or is it still too heavy to work? Also, how much shielding could you get rid of if you did this to an RPV? Combine it with Groverlasers and a nuclear powered drone could have a pretty long loiter time.
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Oct 3, 2014 14:24
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bitcoin bastard posted:Could something like this work with today's nuclear/aerospace tech, or is it still too heavy to work? Also, how much shielding could you get rid of if you did this to an RPV? Combine it with Groverlasers and a nuclear powered drone could have a pretty long loiter time. We'd probably put it in AWACS if we could.
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Oct 3, 2014 14:55
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bitcoin bastard posted:Could something like this work with today's nuclear/aerospace tech, or is it still too heavy to work? Also, how much shielding could you get rid of if you did this to an RPV? Combine it with Groverlasers and a nuclear powered drone could have a pretty long loiter time. It "worked" with 60s tech. We just didn't want to throw enough money at the problem to get a production aircraft.
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Oct 3, 2014 15:18
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One thing to keep in mind is that the USSR spent a lot of time playing catchup to the US arsenal, with the US arsenal being expanded far beyond necessity due to internal military politics, politicans appearing hawkish, and bad information about how many weapons the USSR had. At one military display the Soviets flew the same few bombers over the stands multiple times, tricking the American observers into thinking they had 400 nuclear capable bombers and not just like 14. So the Americans flip their poo poo about a 'bomber gap' and build 800 bombers. This creates an actual bomber gap that the Soviets then have to match, lest the Americans get actually good intelligence and realize that a suprise nuclear attack would be very one-sided. This pattern plays out quite a lot during the Cold War, and there's an argument that the Soviet economy simply couldn't keep up with American military spending. If I remember correctly, the American arsenal peaked in the late 1960's, and as our bombs got better we gradually got rid of the old ones. The Soviet arsenal didn't peak until the 1980s, as they tried to match Reagan's massive military expansion with a similarly large deployment of nuclear weapons just to prevent that lunatic from starting a war. I think of the Cold War as two beefy drunk guys on the street daring each other to throw the first punch but both being scared to get in a fight.
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Oct 3, 2014 21:21
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Popular Thug Drink posted:I think of the Cold War as two beefy drunk guys on the street daring each other to throw the first punch but both being scared to get in a fight. More like two beefy drunk guys holding whirring chainsaws at each others' necks and threatening to push but hoping to gently caress neither does because if they do they both die. Part of the reason the Cold War never got hot was because if one side picked a big fight neither side would win.
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Oct 4, 2014 02:10
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ToxicSlurpee posted:More like two beefy drunk guys holding whirring chainsaws at each others' necks and threatening to push but hoping to gently caress neither does because if they do they both die. Part of the reason the Cold War never got hot was because if one side picked a big fight neither side would win. Also they've got everybody else on the streets neck on the sawblade as well and if one goes they all go.
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Oct 4, 2014 04:38
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eigenstate posted:Fortuitously, Khrushchev's son, Sergei Khrushchev, emigrated to the US in the 90s and answers this exact question in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phpe0DsisbY. You might find more videos where he speaks online. Interesting, I wonder how many other senior Soviet officials have descendants that now live in the US? I know that Stalin's daughter defected to the US. Also makes me wonder what their Soviet predecessors would have thought of their defection/emigration, Khrushchev in particular.
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Oct 4, 2014 08:28
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Frostwerks posted:Also they've got everybody else on the streets neck on the sawblade as well and if one goes they all go. "The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five." Carl Sagan
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Oct 4, 2014 14:27
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bitcoin bastard posted:Could something like this work with today's nuclear/aerospace tech, or is it still too heavy to work? Also, how much shielding could you get rid of if you did this to an RPV? Combine it with Groverlasers and a nuclear powered drone could have a pretty long loiter time. Pointless with the new hypersonic missiles and drones in development. Loitering ability doesn't matter when you can have something like that anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes. Plus having a nuclear powered aircraft REALLY rubs people the wrong way; you think the NIMBYism is bad when they try to build a new power reactor somewhere? Imagine the uproar when politicians find out the military wants to fly reactors over people's houses.
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Oct 4, 2014 16:50
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wilfredmerriweathr posted:Pointless with the new hypersonic missiles and drones in development. Loitering ability doesn't matter when you can have something like that anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes. There are a lot more problems with a nuclear powered aircraft than just flying it. Simple version: What happens if it crashes? Cleanup sounds fun.
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Oct 4, 2014 17:32
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bitcoin bastard posted:Could something like this work with today's nuclear/aerospace tech, or is it still too heavy to work? Also, how much shielding could you get rid of if you did this to an RPV? Combine it with Groverlasers and a nuclear powered drone could have a pretty long loiter time. There's no point. The point in the 50s was to have nuclear bomb capability anywhere at any time by having planes in the air forever. We have ICBMs now, so that's irrelevant
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Oct 4, 2014 19:31
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Shooting Blanks posted:There are a lot more problems with a nuclear powered aircraft than just flying it. Simple version: What happens if it crashes? Cleanup sounds fun. Yeah that was my point. Flying something like that over anything other than open international waters is a recipe for large scale contamination when something goes wrong, hence my comment about it never being allowed. NIMBYs won't allow safe civilian power reactors anywhere near their homes, so a nuclear plane that is admittedly much much less safe would never get off the ground in the 21st century. This is the same issue with nuclear rockets BTW, which have been developed and may well propel us to other planets at some point - but they will have to be launched with conventional means and only activate the nuclear engine once clear of earth because blasting off atop a column of fallout is kinda looked down upon.
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Oct 4, 2014 19:38
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Those NIMBYs, they just couldn't make a rational decision *looks at upside down chart of military plane crashes in the 60s*
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Oct 5, 2014 00:24
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From the academic side of things there is a great book that deals with the foreign policy of the early Cold War from a Soviet perspective, "Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Krushchev" by Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov. It's a bit old now, but it was an informative read.
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Oct 5, 2014 03:05
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Best Friends posted:Those NIMBYs, they just couldn't make a rational decision *looks at upside down chart of military plane crashes in the 60s* Yeah, uh, if you heard a wooshing sound, it was probably the point flying over your head.
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Oct 5, 2014 07:16
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ToxicSlurpee posted:More like two beefy drunk guys holding whirring chainsaws at each others' necks and threatening to push but hoping to gently caress neither does because if they do they both die. Part of the reason the Cold War never got hot was because if one side picked a big fight neither side would win. Hey don't forget France and the UK holding butter knives saying 'come at me and I'll give you such a nasty cut on the wrist before you chop my head off!'
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Oct 6, 2014 20:32
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What was the reaction of Soviet elites (and also Soviet citizens) to the chilling of Sino-USSR relations and Nixon/Kissinger's overtures to China?
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Oct 6, 2014 21:27
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wilfredmerriweathr posted:This is the same issue with nuclear rockets BTW, which have been developed and may well propel us to other planets at some point - but they will have to be launched with conventional means and only activate the nuclear engine once clear of earth because blasting off atop a column of fallout is kinda looked down upon. It's worse, once the Nimby crowd understands that we want to send a nuclear rocket up even on conventional thrust expect videos of challenger to abound and people saying "Just launching them is too dangerous". Until we can mine the heavy metals in space and do the launch from there, it's going to be hell.
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Oct 8, 2014 16:35
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