Category Archives: politics

Within nuclear war

Posted on by
Reply

I think it’s necessary to inform people about some basic facts about nuclear war, from the position of a person “on the ground”, because we are no longer dealing with distant and general possibilities.

First of all, people assume they will know what’s going on. They assume they will be able to see nuclear explosions and mushroom clouds, and that they will be able to watch the news and know what’s going on. I find that exceedingly unlikely, and I’m afraid the most uncomfortable part of the nuclear war would be never knowing what actually happened, and having your horizon of information reduced from being able to connect to the Internet and gather information, or turning on the TV and watching the news, to not knowing anything beyond the reach of your immediate senses.

Let me explain why I think so.

First of all, a nuclear exchange is a limited thing even in the most extreme of versions. Nobody will try to nuke empty terrain or seas or mountains just for shits and giggles. Even in the extreme retaliation scenario, nukes will be aimed at the major cities. For a typical nuclear weapon, the visibility range of a nuclear mushroom, in the best-case visibility scenario, is around 400 kilometers. This means no mountains in between, clear skies, and a high vantage point. For most people, the vantage point is limited by terrain – tall buildings, trees, mountains and hills and so on. For instance, my vantage point is limited to several hundreds of meters on most sides, and then it’s trees and houses, and a hill to the North and East; to the South, I have a very narrow stripe through which I can see toward the center of Zagreb, but that’s basically 5° field of vision where I can see tens of kilometers in the distance. If a thermonuclear weapon doesn’t strike Zagreb, I don’t think there’s any chance I could see it. If it hits within a few hundred kilometers, a low rumbling sound could probably reach me, but I wouldn’t be able to tell what caused it – sonic boom, conventional explosion nearby or a nuclear explosion far away, because I have no experience with nuclear explosions. If a nuke went off in Split, I wouldn’t be able to tell, and that’s slightly over 200km away, air distance, but with a mountain range in between. The dust in the air in the aftermath would make the sky look very colorful in the sunsets, comparable to the aftermath of Mt. Pinatubo eruption, but it would take days to be able to tell with certainty that it isn’t just normal atmospheric conditions. Remember, you can’t rely on the Internet, or TV, or even radio – those things would go out in the very early stages of war, and even if you could pick up something on the radio, you need to understand that people broadcasting aren’t necessarily well informed either. They might be as ignorant as yourself, only with access to a radio station.

So, statistically you are either on the X, and thus really fucked, or you are far enough away to be completely in the dark as to what is going on. If you didn’t follow the news closely up to the very moment of the nuclear exchange, you will likely miss the fact that they actually did it.

Considering how the nuclear powers will concentrate primarily on each other in their exchange of strikes, a large part of the world would be both untargetted, and far enough from the targetted zones not to be able to tell what actually took place. There will be information blackout, there will be inability to reach any information from certain parts of the world, and those places will remain “dark” for the foreseeable future – no information will be coming from those areas, and nobody will be able to go in and personally verify and report back. There will be no journalists reporting over the satellite, there will be no Internet connection to the impacted areas. All the people who will actually be able to communicate via modern means will be those who are well outside the impacted areas, so far in fact that they will be completely in the dark as to what is going on. The world will be split into areas of death, and areas of ignorance.

There will be an increase in radiation, but most people don’t have a radiation detector so they wouldn’t be able to tell, or do anything about it. In any case, other than hunkering down during the first few weeks of the aftermath to avoid the worst of the radiation, there really isn’t much you could do. Later, avoiding things that have more radiation than others would be preferable, but I’m not sure that it would matter much for most people; the radiation would not be either the biggest danger or the biggest cause of death. You see, the reason why we have 8 billion people living on this planet, and why we had under a billion for most of history, are the modern agritechnical measures – the Haber-Bosch method of making fertilizer, diesel fuel that powers the agricultural machinery, great silos for storing wheat, and so on. No oil refineries, no diesel fuel. No gas, no fertilizer. No electricity, no refrigeration. No long-range transportation, no way of feeding people across large areas. If enough of that collapses, the world suddenly can no longer feed billions of people. Sanitary conditions will degrade. Medicine will degrade and people will die from all the things that killed them in the 19th century. Most people are trained to do things that will not matter in this new world, and are very poorly suited and trained to do things that will matter, which will be a strong evolutionary pressure. By this point, I hope to be long gone.

Nuclear war posture

Posted on by
6

My interpretation of increased NATO troupe positioning at the Russian borders is that they intend to have boots and tanks on the ground immediately after a nuclear exchange, to prevent Russian post-war influx of influence in Europe; they basically want to have us militarily occupied in ways that would prevent the Russians to spread their spiritual and political influence here. Those troupes make no sense for “deterring Russia”, but they do make sense for keeping Europe enslaved by military boots on the ground.

The Russians are taking it seriously and they responded with their own counter-posture, by securing their southern border, and cleaning up Ukraine which was intended as a point of primary military penetration into Russia, from the South instead of the West, where Russia is expecting it and has impenetrable defences. They have the army on the ground in Belarus and Ukraine now, while Kazakhstan was neutralized as a threat.

NATO will get another warning to remove elements of nuclear warfare to pre-1997 positions, or, even better, to remove them from Europe altogether, at which America/NATO will laugh and increase the belligerent posture.

What happens next is that Russia inflicts a major military defeat upon America, but in such a way that it gives them a way out of total escalation. America has already propagandised its sphere of influence to the point where de-escalation would be seen as surrender, “appeasement” and treason, and is basically impossible; they closed the door for any kind of a diplomatic compromise some time ago, which means that now “diplomacy” will be conducted through “other means”.

There are many ways this could go, but most paths include a limited nuclear exchange – hundreds of warheads, aimed to de-fang, or, in nuclear doctrine speak, “counterforce”. It all eventually ends very badly. Basically, the expected stages of nuclear war are 1) non-nuclear limited counterforce, 2) nuclear total counterforce, and 3) total destruction of the enemy.

Non-nuclear limited counterforce is what recently happened in Yavoriv; the Russians flattened a Ukrop/NATO mercenary camp with cruise missiles. This was under a NATO radar umbrella and yet there were no warnings, just death from the sky. The same would have happened to the Aegis Ashore installations in Romania and Poland, and similar elements of nuclear gameplay that Americans have installed across Eastern Europe. I think Americans would respond to this by an attempt of a decapitation strike against Putin and the Russian leadership, but that’s the absolutely worst course of action since Putin is the only one who’s actually trying to contain this and play a limited game against America. Also, I would expect that the successor of the Perimeter system of automatic nuclear retaliation in case of a decapitation strike has been activated, and that’s the absolute worst case scenario for America.

Nuclear total counterforce is the kind of a nuclear war everybody wants to have. Limited, pin-point strikes against military targets, aimed to destroy the enemy’s ability to fight – sink the nuclear submarines, destroy ICBM silos and airforce bases, destroy the major military infrastructure nodes, take down the military satellites. This naturally escalates, and the number of targets increases with each iteration, until one side either surrenders (which is possible, but extremely unlikely), is completely crippled and unable to proceed (a more likely outcome), or is cornered to the point where it goes into phase 3:

total destruction of the enemy, by retaliating with full force against the cities of the enemy, causing their complete destruction, and in the process triggering the retaliatory strike against its own cities. This is the kind of a nuclear war everybody always talks about and fears. The likelihood of this outcome is intentionally exaggerated in order to present any kind of a nuclear war as so destructive, it must never be attempted, because any kind of a limited nuclear exchange will necessarily lead to a total mutual annihilation. I don’t necessarily disagree, because most of my wargaming simulations actually end with one side triggering phase 3 in total desperation, after attempts of waging limited nuclear war actually pissed the enemy off more instead of killing his will to fight.

Most of my wargaming simulations look like this: America uses hybrid measures against Russia; sanctions, colour revolutions, media pressure, modifying neighbouring countries into hornets’ nests of hatred for Russia which then start civil wars against their own Russian minority, forcing Russia to intervene and get caught in an Afghanistan-like scenario aiming to kill its economy and basically collapse its society, as it did in the 1990s. Russia understands the plan and makes preparations to strengthen its economy (completely internalizing the food supply and energy, for instance), discredit the internal enemies and traitors, and prepare its military for both conventional and nuclear warfare.

The next phase is Russia issuing an ultimatum to the West – back off or else. The West laughs it off because it lives under a false assumption that Russia is weak and can’t really do anything, and this is augmented by Russia’s prior conciliatory stance, which was misinterpreted as weakness. Russia then does a phase 1 of war – protect their borders, make sure that any kind of an incursion into its own territory is not possible, make sure that conventional warfare is waged in the neighbouring countries, thus giving themselves the ability to trade space for time in case the war goes hot. Eliminate all kinds of proxies NATO has established on its borders. Repeat ultimatum after a limited military action in the former-Soviet territory. After the ultimatum is laughed off again, destroy American military installations in all hostile post-Soviet area including the Warsaw pact countries. At this point America responds by a conventional strikes at the Russian leadership, trying to decapitate Russia with a pinpoint strike. If this fails, Russia responds with nuclear counterforce war against America and NATO, which means that a dozen nuclear strikes pepper Europe, and several hundred pepper America. At this point, the American military would probably try to de-escalate things, but their civilian government is made of complete lunatics who only know how to escalate. If decapitation strike against Russia succeeds, it triggers a phase 3 total nuclear annihilation instantly, and that’s the worst case scenario. Basically, whatever Americans want to do, they need to keep Putin, Shoigu and Gerasimov alive or everybody dies, because a decapitation strike is one of those fatal miscalculations that actually does the opposite of what the planners intended.