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A God Damned Separate Thread For Your Argument About Global Thermonuclear War
zagdrob
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
War. War never changes.
Right now, there is somewhere around 15-20,000 nuclear weapons throughout the world. The vast majority of these weapons are owned by the two big players - the United States and Russia.
In case you haven't been watching the news, Russia decided to restart their imperialistic ambitions and start invading Ukraine piecemeal. This is causing some consternation in the west, especially within NATO as a number of NATO members border the Ukraine or have features that Russia finds attractive.
Arguably, these actions are causing a situation that's as close to World War 3 as we've been since...well, the Cold War at least.
This thread is for your discussion / arguments about war between Russia and NATO, outside of the context of the current crisis in the Ukraine. What do we have to be afraid of, how would this war progress, how likely is this war to break out, how irrational is Russia, etc.
Edit - Updated for people coming from the 2022 Ukraine Invasion thread. We have a lot of tangents and questions about nuclear war, MAD, ABM systems, modern doctrine, etc and this seems like a better place for higher level discussion than the Ukraine thread which moves incredibly fast.
And for the record, as of 3/4/2022 the Doomsday clock is at 100 seconds to midnight.
Edit 6/4/2023, we are now 90 seconds to midnight. Fuckin Putin.
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That really boils down to two things, in my estimation: how much does Russia misinterpret it's falling from superpower status to be a question of external loss of influence and control over it's neighbors and spheres of influence, as opposed to internal decline and issues surrounding their oligarchic economic and political scene, and how much is Russia willing to go down the hole Putin has begun to dug for himself in Crimea, just to maintain that facsimile facade of global power.
Russia has rational reasons to do what it's doing based on it's history of foreign invasion, occupation, the legacy of the Soviet period, etc., but they are only rational in the context of a continuation of the Cold War, insofar as this situation resembles the Cold War. And this is definitely not the Cold War. This is the West doing their best to build ties in Ukraine and deal with/punish Russia for a situation in Ukraine that Putin decided to escalate and exploit for minor territorial and strategic gain at the expense of his ties with the rest of the world. Nobody can say for sure what's going on in his head right now.
War is very unlikely. Nobody wants it, needs it, or really has the backbone or economic stability for it. Europe is still pretty deep in that whole debt crisis thing after all. It's not impossible, and I generally follow AMFE's assertions in the Ukraine thread that WW3 between NATO and Russia would almost certainly end in nuclear exchange and all that entails, but I don't see a war happening. The world isn't the way it was thirty years ago. We don't blow each other up as much as we used to, and we certainly don't do it if it means there will be nothing left to fight for or return to. We use globalization, information, economic sanction, lots of fancy words and saber rattling, etc.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
yeah that's the thing
if say, NATO stormed Crimea with an army I think it's unlikely Russia would jump to tactical nukes even if they lost the conventional war
but I mean, not impossible, and that's scary
Firing the ze missile isn't likely just to get NATO to fire their own missiles. It's very likely to prompt countries like China, India, other neutral countries that could launch a military strike of some sort and any Russian allies that decide they don't want to fight NATO; especially, since Russia decided to stick its dick into that hornets nest. To call up Russia and be like "hey fuckers, we saw that you decided to endanger the fate of humanity, so we decided that you fuckers will get to cease to fucking exist!" If everyone is acting rational, the rational action here is to dog pile and dumb fuck nation that launches the ze missile, so that everyone in the future fucking understands, that you do not launch ze fucking missiles because the world will end you. This is something rational countries would want because no one wins the thermonuclear exchange, survive maybe, but no one wins it regardless of their alliances.
So I'm more inclined to agree with Buttcleft's post in the last thread. The non-state actors are the scary ones; especially, if they are the types to blow themselves up with the nuclear device anyways (likely being a dirty bomb). They don't have a state to lose and some of those fuckers are pretty fucking insane.
worst case scenario the USAF blows up things inside Russia's border, seriously occupying Russia would require a draft and a force of millions to even have a chance, I think it's even less likely than WW3
Currently the Doomsday Clock is a minute 40 to midnight, so things have clearly deteriorated since 2014.
Ask or discuss away without worrying about derailing the Ukraine War thread. There is quite a bit of knowledge floating around and a lot of misconceptions.
One thing that's important to understand is that while firing at a nuclear power plant is not good a nuclear power plant can not explode like a giant nuclear bomb. That's one small good thing. Modern nuclear power plants can't really even melt down like Chernobyl (almost certainly...) even if everything goes wrong.
From the Ukraine thread...
Scuds are theater ballistic missiles and travel much slower and are detectible much earlier than ICBMs which carry the big warheads. Also Scuds don't carry multiple warheads that can maneuver independently (MIRVs).
Modern Patriot PAC-3 missiles are far more effective against...well, everything, than they were in the first Gulf War, but while they might have some capability in perfect conditions to intercept and destroy ICBMs they almost certainly wouldn't stop a full launch.
Subs are one of the key parts of the triad and MAD. Arguably the most important part since the bomber leg is almost redundant / irrelevant with modern ICBMs.
Subs give you for all intents and purposes guaranteed second strike capability even if you're not able to get your land based bombers or silo-based missiles off. A single Ohio Class carries about 288 warheads and is basically invisible and there are no defenses that can really stop the Tridents once they launch.
Officially, yes. Not that any country is likely to advertise that they have effective stealth submarine tracking. But radar doesn't work, active sonar gives away the hunter's location from father away than it finds the target's, and basically everything about them is built to defeat passive sonar. There's also only 38 of them in the world (with nukes at least, the US also has four with conventional cruise missiles) and oceans are fucking big.
I’m old enough to remember when “The Day After” aired.
I thought we left all this behind, but like every other problem humanity has created for itself, we just let it fester. Here I was upset about my girls having to deal with a world of Christofascists and Climate Change, and now this.
Yeah I am having some late-80s flashbacks right now that I do not like. Used to live close to Barksdale AFB, which is generally recognized as a 1st strike candidate.
I have a chunk of the Berlin Wall. It's supposed to be a piece of history, not an augury stone.
If Russia does that, and we don't act, it will be the beginning of the end anyway. We can't allow anyone to unseal the use of nukes under any circumstance without a response that demonstrates why Pakistan shouldn't nuke Mumbai and China shouldn't nuke Taipei. The freedom to do even limited first-strike nuclear attacks without overwhelming reprisal is the road to the real end of history.
So, yeah, if the dictators in charge of countries with nuclear capabilities figures out they can use them against countries without, and not get obliterated as a result, it's open season.
Not only will a lack of overwhelming reprisal for a limited nuclear strike in Ukraine mean that nations will begin nuking non-nuclear enemies, but it will kick off global proliferation. Brazil, Egypt, Iran, Saudi, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and a half-dozen other nations would rush to demonstrate nuclear capability and immediately threaten to destroy the capital city of anyone who crosses them. It'd be a slower fuse than instant MAD but it won't be possible to stop. Within 20 years the whole world will be nuclear and not long after, we'll have an exchange that ends basically everything.
edit: I guess we could shoot for hyperviolent Nuclear-Allies hegemony and just fully obliterate anyone who tries to get a bomb - no more farting around with sanctions, just total fucking war. At least some of us would survive that, assuming we could agree to not turn on one another. Sort of a reverse NPT... no trying to get a bomb or we all join together to level your society & scatter you to the winds.
All roads that start at "someone detonates a nuke, and then we do nothing" end in nightmares.
We barely avoided annihilating humanity, and that's not an exaggeration. There's no such thing as a little bit of nuclear war. We really could depopulate the planet in a matter of weeks, if not days, and what remains wouldn't reach a technological capability to even understand what was left for generations.
Same feelings here. I grew up in the 80s, and my entire extended family was convinced that a nuclear apocalypse was inevitable and imminent. But then I got to see the Soviet Union break down, the unification of Germany etc. and for many years I thought humanity had survived its greatest challenge, and the future looked bright. But time is a flat circle, and here we are again.
I guess there is some grim comfort in the feeling of "been here, done this."
But hopefully not for very long.
There are experts who are saying that it has already started, and future historians (if there will be any) will mostly debate the starting point. Was it the invasion of Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, or did it start even before that?
Fortunately they're also saying that WW3 might be mostly fought with money instead of weapons, so it might not be as bad as it sounds.
i think what's happening right now presents a stronger argument for disarmament than i can previously recall
what are our weapons even doing other than ratcheting up tension? great powers are still fighting and the mutually assured destruction doesn't have to be nuclear hellfire if everybody just decides they don't want to interact with you
anybody that uses them will be a pariah, disarm and go all in on defense tech that's nearly there, we're maybe the only country with the budget to do it and we could lead the way
Given how shoddy their military is, they wouldn't be able to defend their territory with it without that larger threat.
But at the same time, if Russia didn’t have nukes, would they be throwing their weight around?
I suppose both are true, but one is easier to accomplish than the other.
idk how you can still think that mad is working with attacks on nuclear facilities and the things putin is saying
aggression on our part continues to escalate tensions and arm the borders, and all of those weapons have to go somewhere when these governments collapse, which is a real uncertain proposition
if it's down to nukes and putin won't respect the conventional military and the diplomacy of the united states after this showing, entire world's fucked anyway
might as well see if trying something new can create a new paradigm, in our position
I honestly have no idea what you are talking about in any part of this.
And at the moment MAD is why Ukraine is getting invaded and Poland or Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania aren't. What continues to escalate tensions when it comes to Putin is his desire to control other countries around him. MAD just dictates which targets he can go after and why he can get away with it. Unliteral disarmament would just lead to more of this shit, not less.