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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • A modern nuke is FAR from the “bang 2 rocks together” designs that were first designed. For a start, most are fusion devices. Fairly exotic reactions are used to make a small amount of fusion material to go critical. This creates a shaped charge on a fusion core. The compression wave sets fusion happening, which releases 95% of the energy. Most of Russia’s arsenal is of this sort.

    The downsides of these is the use of exotic elements. They often have a short half life, e.g. tritium, with 12.5 years. This means they decay. Even worse, some of the byproducts will actually poison the reaction. E.g. Rather than producing a flood of neutrons, they absorb them.

    If any of this chain fails, then your fusion nuke becomes, at best, a low yield fission nuke. More likely, it becomes a dirty bomb. It’s still nasty, but not the city destroying terror weapon it would be intended as.



  • It’s a combination of both, I believe.

    The initial conditions had a definite rotational bias. This is preserved in the current orbital plane and direction.

    On top of that, anything massively off that plane is liable to hit or interact with the material in the plane, given enough time. It will be flung around, eventually either out of the system or into the plane.

    Stuff orbiting relatively close to the plane will have a biased pull towards the “average” plane. This will slowly flatten the orbits out.

    All these processes take a lot of time. The solar system, in general, has had enough time to settle. The ort cloud and other outer bodies are still quite chaotic. We see a lot more off plane than within the traditional solar system. They experience the latter effects far less, and so take longer to equalise. They still have a bias towards the initial spin however.





  • It did though. Hitler could have gone after Britain and france earlier. However, he thought Britain was staying out of things, and so played more safe and slow. This brought Britain the time it needed. Hitler honestly didn’t expect Britain to declare war on him, and that slowed his assault on that front. If WW2 had gone serious even 6 months earlier, Britain would have been in serious trouble. The RAF would have collapsed under the luftwaffa, and WW2 would have been very different. Appeasement traded lives for time.

    Don’t get me wrong, it was a dick move, and threw others under the tanks tracks to save Britain. It’s also worth noting that this is not what Trump is trying to do. He’s just being a boot licker to the most powerful person who will talk to him. Appeasement at least had a positive goal.



  • To his credit, Chamberlain wasn’t as bad as he’s made out. When he implemented his policy of appeasement, Britain was not actually capable of meaningfully resisting nazi Germany. He basically brought time to bring Britain back to a war footing. When it became obvious to the public that war was coming, he fell on his sword. This cleared the way for Churchill to take charge, without significant infighting. He also inherited Britain on a far better war footing, and even then it was a close thing.

    Basically, Chamberlain knew his plan wouldn’t work long term. He took one “for king and country”, likely knowing how it would be perceived. I can at least respect him for that.







  • Nukes and ICBMs are extremely complex devices. They also require extremely specialist servi e work to remain functional. Even worse, the only people who can actually check that work are the ones doing it.

    Russia hasn’t detonated a nuke in decades. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of their arsenal are now duds. The money embezzled, while boxes were ticked. Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of their ICBMs just wouldn’t launch.

    Russia’s nuclear capabilities are likely a paper tiger, and Putin likely knows this. Until they try and use them, they are scary. If they try and they fail, they are in a VERY bad situation.

    Putin is many things, but he’s not stupid. It would take a LOT more pressure from nato for him to even consider using nukes.




  • The message wouldn’t be to Putin directly. It would be to those both in his power base, or capable of disrupting it.

    The goal would be to push Russians to the point they deal with Putin internally, and/or put putin in a position where he needs to end the war to stabilise his own position. It’s all about making the right people feel the effects.

    Oh, and as a European, I think the risk is acceptable. If Putin struck at a NATO country, the results would likely be swift and short. The only unknown would be Russian nukes, and even those are far more of an unknown than most people think.