I consider Trump more like the logical effect of a pokemon that attacks itself in its confusion. Except instead of being confused by a physic attack people like you were just stupid enough to think it was a good idea to deliberately attack yourself instead of swapping it out for Hillarymon.
The electoral equivalent of cleaning a loaded firearm that you keep pointed at your face the entire time and try and tell me just because you shot your ear off instead of hitting your face it was a good idea.
“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”
"Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others."
Ambrose Bierce
The Bird of Hermes Is My Name, Eating My Wings To Make Me Tame.
One of the scariest things about the 21th century is that we've likely got a new cold war coming, but one where the collective experience of the last time industrialised great powers went to war directly with each others is passing from living memory.
Nukes should absolutely not be on the table as suggested by the OP here.
Well, when Russia detects a few thousand US ICBM launches, they have about 10 minutes in real time to figure out if all those missiles are heading to China or if some of them are headed to Russia. If they guess wrong, they lose their entire nuclear capability before they ever have a chance to use it. It is in Russia's best interests to make sure neither the US nor China survive such a scenario.
Anyway, no matter how it plays out it gets staggeringly bad. Even if Russia doesn't launch, and Europe stays out of it as well, and India doesn't take the opportunity to nuke Pakistan and vis versa...
Assuming everything stayed strictly between the US and China (And Japan and South Korea, China will definitely nuke to target the US Forces there), then the survivors have to deal with a world where the #2, #3 and #12 economies just ceased to exist, the #1 economy is horrifically mauled, or also gone, depending how many nukes China got through. Then there are massive bands of irradiated smoke and dust spreading over the northern hemisphere, with cities and forests burning uncontrollably for months. This will cause crops to fail all over the world, on top of losing the agriculture production of the US and China, thus leading to massive famines.
But most of the population of the US, China, Japan, and the Koreas won't actually be dead. Probably only about a third of them died, and while that is still the better part of a billion people gone, that still leaves about 2 billion left. 2 billion people that are going to flee their homes since there is no infrastructure, and everything including the air itself is poison. 2 billion refugees covered in boils with loose teeth and varying degrees of radiation poisoning. Of course they will starve, as will most of the rest of the globe, as global temperatures plunge as the dust reaches the upper atmosphere.
There is a reason nobody seriously considers the use of strategic nuclear weapons. The consequences are more horrific then anything any government actually has done, include Nazis and soviets. The sheer scale of suffering caused is insane.
First of all ICBM are most likely reserved for Russia so any kind of nuclear bombing will be done from submarines positioned in South China Sea and any major nuclear power would be informed that the attack isn't targeted at them just to prevent a grave misunderstanding. However, I don't see a nuclear war as a possible scenario as long as both counties are governed by sane people. The worst that could happen is as tension rises and the war becomes imminent China seizes south Korea to prevent land invasion, which leads to naval blockade, by then China will have a coastal defense strong enough to prevent enemy landing, then the war ends with a stalemate.
Last edited by Yadryonych; 2019-12-31 at 12:33 AM.
The only way to win is to not play the game.
Human history has a repeating theme where there are taboos in war that some strong leader eventually breaks.
1. In the Roman Republic, the military of appointed Roman provinces was to never ever cross the Rubicon river as that would be entering Italy proper. It was taboo. Julius Caesar broke it and sparked the Roman Civil War (which he won) .
2. During the American Revolution in 1776, it was considered taboo / unmanly to flee from a battle. General George Washington not only broke that taboo multiple times, but he lost more battles than he won, but was never captured or forced to surrender, and instead fought the first modern guerrilla war campaign to defeat the British.
3. During the French Revolution in 1795, a Royalist insurrection threatened to dislodge the revolutionary Directory as the government of France. It would likely have done so, but a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte changed history. Of all the generals, he was the only one willing to fire on civilians, breaking a HUGE taboo of war. This was Napoleon's "whiff of grapeshot" battle, or "let's give the civilians a whiff of grapeshot" as he swiveled all the cannons around on civilians to slaughter them all and end the insurrection. In return for this, Napoleon became a rock star with fame, fortune, control of the Army of Italy and it set him on the path to become Emperor.
Currently there is a HUGE war taboo on using nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, I think the odds are great that, eventually, some strong leader is going to break that taboo as well and just lay waste to large areas of the planet until the Earth's environment is permanently crippled.
TO FIX WOW:1. smaller server sizes & server-only LFG awarding satchels, so elite players help others. 2. "helper builds" with loom powers - talent trees so elite players cast buffs on low level players XP gain, HP/mana, regen, damage, etc. 3. "helper ilvl" scoring how much you help others. 4. observer games like in SC to watch/chat (like twitch but with MORE DETAILS & inside the wow UI) 5. guild leagues to compete with rival guilds for progression (with observer mode).6. jackpot world mobs.
No one who understands nuclear weapons wants to use them. There is a reason Mutual Assured Destruction is named that, they are not viable to use against a target that can respond in kind! China has ~260 strategic warheads, which may or may not be enough to effectively destroy the US (depends on your definition).
Current US ICBMs (about 500 are left) are armed with a single warhead of 300kt to perhaps 475kt.
Current US SLBMs (288) are armed with up to 8 warheads of 90kt to 475kt (maximum of 1,152 warheads total, for an average of 4 warheads per missile).
The B-52s can be armed with up to 528 ALCMs with a variable warhead yield of 5-150kt.
The only weapons of greater than 1Mt are the B83 gravity bombs, only really deliverable by the B-2.
The only other nuclear weapons in the US are the various strategic and tactical B61 gravity bombs, with various yields of 0.3kt to 400kt.
So, the US has already moved away from large yield warheads. One of the main reasons is nuclear weapons do not scale as well as you would think, and modern missiles are far more accurate than older ones. A single 1Mt warhead has less about 1/3 the destructive potential of 10 100kt warheads, while a single 5Mt warhead is only 15% as destructive as 50 100kt warheads.
Nuclear warheads will only become obsolete if we invent something even more destructive, which I hope we do not, or we figure out how to actually rid the world of all of them, which isnt going to happen.
You know, I'm really trying to think of what you mean other than "I support Trump because he's roughing us up out of our complacency as a preparation for the bigger threat after him", but for the life of me, I'm drawing a blank.
Surely, that isn't what you are saying is it? Because that's so absolutely, out of this world self deluded, I just don't know what to say. It's also perhaps the worst Trumphadi excuse I've heard.
Honestly, it won't kill you to say "I fucked up back in supporting Donald Trump and prioritizing near term greivences against my fellow Americans over our long term national interests and I'd take it back if I could". You might gain some respect.
- - - Updated - - -
(I think you know all of this, but I'm directing it to you to educate others).
I think an essential thing to add (for people less in the know) to this is that the destructive potential of the ever larger Cold War-era nuclear weapons were connected to their inaccuracy. When you're throwing a warhead halfway across the planet and it has (due to technological limitations), a circular error probable of 2 kilometers, you need to make your warhead really big in order to miss by up-to 2 meters and still destroy what you're meaning to destroy.
Modern US weapons are very accurate against fixed targets - around 2-5 meters with the Trident II D5 LEP upgrades over the last decade. But they'd be used only against absolutely-can't-fail targets, like mobile launchers and hardened ICBM bunkers.
Many of the tactical weapons of the Cold War, such as air launched cruise missiles with nuclear warheads similarly existed because of accuracy failures. But modern conventional weapons with electro-optical guidance systems would be more effective at destroying their intended targets (usually air defenses).
Modern multi-modal guidance on conventional weapons makes many types of Cold War era nuclear weapons functionally obsolete, leaving the purpose of a nuclear warhead limit to destroying large and hardened infrastructure. It would take a lot of bombs or cruise missiles to destroy a large air field... a nuclear weapon can do it in one. And as you said, a lot of small nuclear weapons (especially very accurate ones) are a hell of a lot more destructive than one big one.
One reason Obama funded prompt global strike was to replace even nuclear weapons in this field too. Because a hypersonic cruise missile launched from the united states striking a target at 25 times the speed of sound may be powerful enough to destroy such a target in one shot too.
So it's very possible that as destructive as nuclear weapons are, their functional utility beyond being end-of-the-world weapons existed in a historically narrow window of time, and they became obsolete due to superior technology for more than scorched earth warfare.
Tactical nuclear weapons still have a few "practical" uses, such as the destruction of massed armored formations with limited numbers of delivery systems against a target that cannot respond in kind. They are also very effective anti-sub weapons, but the US no longer uses them for that. There is a school of thought that naval warfare is the only viable use of tactical nukes that doesn't lead to a strategic exchange between nuclear powers, but I disagree.
As a viable offensive weapon, nukes become obsolete once MAD levels are reached between opposing sides or the political will to use them is removed. However, as a defensive weapon, they are still very effective, in a "we have nothing else to lose" sense.