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JamesHackerMP

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Posts posted by JamesHackerMP

  1. My personal belief--without being expert on nuclear physics or international relations--is that if nuclear war starts it will be an accident or a terrorist attack mistaken for a first strike. Numerous movies/books have been filmed/written about such an event.

    There was a rather disturbing incident in 1995 where the launch of a Norwegian rocket was misinterpreted by Russian computers to be an American missile launch. Fortunately Yeltsin wasn't too drunk so he executed some caution and patience, thus saving the world from disaster.

    I don't foresee the general public in the U.S. allowing the government to deploy and pay for such weapons (neutron bombs) at this point.

  2. 1 minute ago, Dougie93 said:

    That was the rubric of the Anti-Nuclear Movement which Jimmy Carter caved into.

    It makes no sense tho.  The N-bomb will still impose unacceptable causalities, so mutual vulnerability is not destabilized by neutrons.

    The fact that it is more viable an option, makes it a more credible deterrent, in that the other side is far more inclined to believe that you will use it, so they are even more deterred not less.

    Do any countries have it in their arsenals?

  3. 6 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

    Correct.

    Almost all the radioactive fallout comes from the uranium casing around the two-stage physics package of the H-Bomb

    The explosion sucks all the debris up into the mushroom cloud where it is seeded by the burning uranium, this then rains back down as fallout.

    Take the uranium casing out, and the full blast of the fusion, in the form of neutrons, bombards the target for just a split second, like a lethal camera flash.

    Detonate it above the target rather than at the surface, you get no mushroom cloud, and no fallout, just the flash, which kills the people, but leaves everything else intact with no radiation.

    That's actually kind of scarier. Without a fireball and actual fallout, some countries might be more disposed, or less hesitant, to actually use the thing. Which I think might answer the OP's question about whether nuclear war is inevitable.

    Do the people in the target zone just drop dead of neutron radiation poisoning? Or are they burned/scarred?

  4. 9 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

    The Soviets didn't call it Tsar Bomba

    The Soviet code word for the RDS-220 was "Vanya" which means "Ivan"

    The Americans called it "Tsar Bomba"

    Obviously the Soviets were not ones to invoke the monarchy which that had overthrown in a hail of bullets.

    Right, I read that. 58.6 MT, friggin huge.

    I still like Mighty Mouse better.

    Not to quibble (or get irrelevant) but the monarchy was overthrown by riots over bread prices. The Provisional Government was overthrown in a hail of bullets.

  5. 16 hours ago, Dougie93 said:

    Well, in context, if I translate "Operation Jerboa" into Americanese, it's not "Operation Gerbil", it's more like "Operation Mighty Mouse."

    sounds better than "Tsar Bomba".

    Incidentally, In the Netflix show "A Very Secret Service" (or Au Service de la France), they have to drive through the Algerian desert to Reganne with the 'Green Jerboa' strapped to the roof of the car, to keep it from falling into the hands of the coup conspirators. :lol:

  6. 11 hours ago, Iznogoud said:

    The USSR was completely outgunned in the arms race.  At one time it was spending over 20% of its GDP in an attempt to keep up with the US while the US never went higher than 6%.  The nuclear arms race itself never did make much sense - it was purely a contest of terror.  With tens of thousands of weapons on each side the overkill factor was ridiculous.  By comparison Britain and France stopped at just a few hundred, believing that was a sufficient deterrent. 

    You're right about that. Maybe that was part of what Eisenhower warned about (the "military-industrial complex and its threat to democracy"). Some defense contractors got rich off of building all those ICBMs and nuclear warheads.

  7. I haven't read Sahara, yet. I have read a bunch of the "original" ones (the ones up to Trojan-whatever, where Cussler is writing by himself and the main character is still Dirk Pitt). If I remember correctly:

    Inca gold, Treasure, Deep Six, Cyclops, Raise the Titanic, Night Probe, Atlantis Found, Valhalla Rising, Flood Tide. Might have read Iceberg....or not. It was in high school I read most of them (I'm 40, now). I bought used copies of Treasure and Cyclops to re-read since it's been so long. But there are so many books I have only read partway through. Sahara was indeed a good movie. 

    I started a good one to read while I'm reading Shogun: The Lost World of Byzantium. Always loved the Byzantines for some weird reason. (I never finished Lord Norwich's series on the same, alas.)

  8. 19 minutes ago, Goddess said:

    Yes, I've read quite a few of them.

    I'm waiting for the one where they introduce Dirk's older brother - Arm. 

    **ba dumm tsssss**

    The sad this is, it took me a few seconds to get that. I seriously had to think it through.

    did you read the one where the U.S. "bought" Canada, somehow? That was actually a good one, despite being implausible. 

    I was re-reading a couple lately. Think I originally read them in late middle school/early high school days.

  9. 2 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

    Anytime you want to stop crying, whining and panicking, we can commence to arguing about something, in the meantime you're just blabbering hysterically about "abuse of powers" which prima facie are not the case by even cursory glance at the constitution. 

    If you do not wish to be an embarrassment to the American republic, perhaps you should do some more research before you publish to the internet prattling nonsense in the name of Americans. /shrugs

    OK....this has degenerated into a personality conflict. I refuse to get involved. There's plenty of other people here I can debate with. The rest of us have been acting like adults.

  10. 4 minutes ago, Dougie93 said:

    The intent of the act was to give him freedom of action, it's not an abuse just because you are a cry whining panic monkey, that the President then use the freedom of action mandated to him by act of congress.

    I don't think that was necessary. If you cannot argue like an adult, find another message board.

    In the mean time, I'm so terribly sorry I had the gall to disagree with you. I hope you weren't offended.

  11. Just now, Iznogoud said:

    I think that rather than attempting to get NATO allies to increase their spending to US levels I would be more in favour of gradually decreasing it to the NATO average.  A great deal of US spending goes into maintaining a global presence; something that none of its rivals even attempt and its military R&D alone is almost greater than the entire military budget of nations like Russia and China.

    That's likely because we're the remaining global superpower. When they were a superpower the Soviets did the same thing, spending to maintain their global presence to check the United States.

  12. 1 minute ago, Dougie93 said:

    The Congress can take the authority away, by holding another joint session and withdrawing the authority to take military action by any other means than formal declaration of Congress.

    Congress gave the President the power, they can take it away any time, hence the checks and balances are entirely in place.

    That's what I was trying to tell you.

    The president acting contrary to the intent of the act would be abuse of power.

  13. Just now, Iznogoud said:

    It proves one of my my many points exactly, which thanks to overspending on defence and a lack of planning, the US is literally falling apart in many areas.  Eventually something will have to be done about its decaying infrastructure, but having delayed so long in so many areas it is going to be much more expensive.

    Defense spending is 12% of the federal budget, and 4% of GDP, give or take. However, I agree with you about the infrastructure decay.

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