Nuclear paranoia - C/D?

I think the rub was: how long, in the current strange and violent world, till a nuclear catastrophe happens? Are we all just crossing our fingers?

Early last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret "Interim Global Strike Alert Order" directing the military to assume and maintain readiness to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea.

Two months later, Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, told a reporter that his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had changed its way of operating so that it could be ready to carry out such missions. "We're now at the point where we are essentially on alert," Carlson said in an interview with the Shreveport (La.) Times. "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes." Carlson said his forces were the U.S. Strategic Command's "focal point for global strike" and could execute an attack "in half a day or less."

In the secret world of military planning, global strike has become the term of art to describe a specific preemptive attack. When military officials refer to global strike, they stress its conventional elements. Surprisingly, however, global strike also includes a nuclear option, which runs counter to traditional U.S. notions about the defensive role of nuclear weapons.

Oh the ironing.

But seriously, the nuclear first strike option is always already there if you have them. The words are there for extra diplomatic pressure.

I'm still convinced that many of us will witness an American city being obliterated by a nuclear bomb.

as a kid, we thot we were cool coz we lived in the Beltway and would be immediately annihilated and would not have to live with the mutants

I guess this is the most appropriate thread to post this in. I've always been faintly aware of survivalist groups/literature/etc for years, but never actively read up on anything, mainly because I'm not paranoid. But I'm sitting here in my cubicle, insanely bored at work, reading a news article on North Korea, when I had the sudden inclination to find out what sorts of "Nuclear Winter Survivalist" materials I can find online.

Mainly I wanted to see, if there was a nuclear war between two or more superpowers, what the average person would have to do to survive such an ordeal if he/she was living in a fallout area and survived the initial blast, and what that would all entail. Or basically, how quickly I'd die after the initial attack, lol.

Found this free online book: http://www.oism.org/nwss/

I found this book amusing in a lot of ways. From the pictures within this book of people sitting in man-made dirt holes waiting out the end of civilization with eerily calm, zen-like expressions on their faces, to the fact that I probably couldn't even construct the simplest of tools based on these instructions.

Further Googling led me to this article: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-09/can-you-save-house-end-world.

Luxury shelters! Ha ha. At least the 1%ers will live on.

haha this new eric schlosser book sounds FUN - anyone read it yet?

Hell yes - bought it this morning and haven't been able to stop reading it.

don't read this

http://thebulletin.org/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-undermining-strategic-stability-burst-height-compensating-super10578

saving this one to savour later with my evening tea and crumpets

you'll regret it

There's nothing paranoid about fearing the destructive capability of missile-delivered hydrogen bombs.

If some military planner, as an exercise, wished to devise a plan to maximize human deaths across the planet, using only the bombs in the US arsenal, I'm pretty sure it could account for more than 95% of all living humans within the first hour and sweep up a majority of the remaining 4% or 5% in the next six months, from radiation sickness, starvation, and general despair.

getting vaporized instantly would be ideal imo. that 30 minutes of warning time would be hell though

The War Game (1965) was terrifying. Essential viewing if you wanna see what hell on earth is like

I think latham green's revive was more poignant

Nuclear Weapons Top Trumps

the thing that's making me take that with a grain of salt, besides the usual FAS biases regarding the existence of the Pentagon in general, is this line:

Because the innovations in the super-fuze appear, to the non-technical eye, to be minor, policymakers outside of the US government (and probably inside the government as well) have completely missed its revolutionary impact on military capabilities and its important implications for global security.

I believe the more concise version of that sentiment is usually phrased WAKE UP SHEEPLE

don't read this

http://thebulletin.org/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-undermining-strategic-stability-burst-height-compensating-super10578

why didn't anyone warn me not to read that

nightmare

that 'day after' film 'worked' on reagan iirc

have we talked about this?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/hackers-target-u-s-nuclear-facilities-russia-is-suspect.html

because that's not good

xpost I don't think anything would work on the current douche in chief.

I already made the firm decision to not have kids, now I'm just preparing myself for the likelihood that I won't die of old age. Time to burn through that retirement fund!

You know I do think human civilization could survive nuclear war, it worked in The Star Trek anyway

that 30 minutes of warning time would be hell though

think of the doomsday sex

http://i.imgur.com/5iMPEQc.jpg

Masturbation is surely protect against fallout?

see how well it worked for that guy

strangely underreported

"Beginning Sept. 20, any of the U.N.'s 192-member General Assembly may sign onto the treaty; it will go into force 90 days after it has been ratified by the 50th country. If it does, it will be the first legally binding global agreement that would ban nuclear weapons since their invention, and a significant milestone in the 70-year effort to rid the world of the threat of nuclear war."

At last we will be an official rogue state.

https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-07-07/united-nations-votes-to-adopt-legally-binding-nuclear-ban-treaty

https://news.vice.com/story/no-countries-with-nukes-adopted-the-u-n-s-historic-nuke-ban

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/treaty-banning-nukes-approved-by-nations-that-dont-have-any.html

http://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/Figure-2-Postol-final-correction-done_1.jpg?itok=ygUCg-As

https://i.stack.imgur.com/8cjoL.jpg

lol koogs

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/politics/nuclear-war-risk-1958-us-china.html

WASHINGTON — When Communist Chinese forces began shelling islands controlled by Taiwan in 1958, the United States rushed to back up its ally with military force — including drawing up plans to carry out nuclear strikes on mainland China, according to an apparently still-classified document that sheds new light on how dangerous that crisis was.

American military leaders pushed for a first-use nuclear strike on China, accepting the risk that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind on behalf of its ally and millions of people would die, dozens of pages from a classified 1966 study of the confrontation show. The government censored those pages when it declassified the study for public release.

The document was disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked a classified history of the Vietnam War, known as the Pentagon Papers, 50 years ago. Mr. Ellsberg said he had copied the top secret study about the Taiwan Strait crisis at the same time but did not disclose it then. He is now highlighting it amid new tensions between the United States and China over Taiwan.

...

Among other details, the pages that the government censored in the official release of the study describe the attitude of Gen. Laurence S. Kutner, the top Air Force commander for the Pacific. He wanted authorization for a first-use nuclear attack on mainland China at the start of any armed conflict. To that end, he praised a plan that would start by dropping atomic bombs on Chinese airfields but not other targets, arguing that its relative restraint would make it harder for skeptics of nuclear warfare in the American government to block the plan.

“There would be merit in a proposal from the military to limit the war geographically” to the air bases, “if that proposal would forestall some misguided humanitarian’s intention to limit a war to obsolete iron bombs and hot lead,” General Kutner said at one meeting.

At the same time, officials considered it very likely that the Soviet Union would respond to an atomic attack on China with retaliatory nuclear strikes. (In retrospect, it is not clear whether this premise was accurate. Historians say American leaders, who saw Communism as a monolithic global conspiracy, did not appreciate or understand an emerging Sino-Soviet split.)

But American military officials preferred that risk to the possibility of losing the islands. The study paraphrased Gen. Nathan F. Twining, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as saying that if atomic bombings of air bases did not force China to break off the conflict, there would be “no alternative but to conduct nuclear strikes deep into China as far north as Shanghai.”

He suggested that such strikes would “almost certainly involve nuclear retaliation against Taiwan and possibly against Okinawa,” the Japanese island where American military forces were based, “but he stressed that if national policy is to defend the offshore islands then the consequences had to be accepted.”

The study also paraphrased the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, as observing to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “nobody would mind very much the loss of the offshore islands but that loss would mean further Communist aggression. Nothing seems worth a world war until you looked at the effect of not standing up to each challenge posed.”

Ultimately, President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed back against the generals and decided to rely on conventional weapons at first. But nobody wanted to enter another protracted conventional conflict like the Korean War, so there was “unanimous belief that this would have to be quickly followed by nuclear strikes unless the Chinese Communists called off this operation.”