WWIII likely start date (and what to expect)

[SteveGrabowski]

I don't think Trump looks forward to engaging in warfare. He loves sound bites and stirring up turmoil but TACO, baby. The idea of being a wartime president scares him. That's my opinion.

My opinion is nothing scares him because he's an overconfident dipshit who thinks he's a great man destined to prevail.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

You underestimate megaton sized warheads.
Have you tried one of those blast range simulators?

I'm not talking about being burnt, I'm talking about being immediately vaporized. Like there's no charred body, no ashes. That's in a very small radius below where an airburst happens.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Earlier this week, I heard someone making plans for the fall of 2027. And I nearly told her "don't bother, we're probably going to have very different priorities by then."

It sounds a lot like the depression Richard Feynman lived with for the first ten years or so after working on the Manhattan Project. He said he'd be sitting in a restaurant in New York watching people enjoying cocktails and steaks and he'd just want to jump up and yell that this will all be gone because he knew the public didn't understand nuclear bombs the way he did. They're terrifying, an h-bomb is basically like creating a new star a few thousand feet above ground.

 

[Moonbeam]

My opinion is nothing scares him because he's an overconfident dipshit who thinks he's a great man destined to prevail.

Right. Bone Spurs knows no fear. In my opinion he is was frozen by age two with fear. He's like the Wizard of OZ.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

That's what they said about the machine gun before The Great War. That was going to be the end of war. Surely no one would ever throw people in a front of a gun that can mow ten people into swiss cheese in a few seconds. Oops. H-bombs are made to kill and that's exactly what they will be used for. We already came a hair from having them dropped in 61 and again in 83. They'll be used some day. Trump and Putin both seem itching to use them.

Eh... large-scale nuclear bombardment is much different from the machine gun. A true exchange would not only destroy/render uninhabitable large swathes of land, but it'll likely create enough radioactive dust in the atmosphere to a) inhibit crop growth worldwide and b) potentially cause radiation sickness/near term cancer in dramatic percentages of the animal life across the globe, humans included. It'd be an actual extinction event, globally. Machine guns don't do that.

 

[eelw]

To be frank, I highly doubt some of us would care if Moscow turned into a desolate nuclear wasteland

 

[AnitaPeterson]

As you fully buy into exactly your own worldview and personal philosophy about me.

What’s the big deal about me having perhaps an even profoundly deeper self understanding than you do? The truth is the truth regardless of how far either you or I am from it. Why the fear and need to reject what I say.

Sorry, mate.
You seem to operate under the wrong assumption. I don't fear you, nor consider you superior.
The truth is I find you incomprehensible. Worse, nearly every post you make has to be about yourself, somehow.
I get it, you're enlightened - unlike the rest of us - so please stop trying to convince us of it.
Injecting all this pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo in every discussion is a surefire way to kill it.

 

[eelw]

Sorry, mate.
You seem to operate under the wrong assumption. I don't fear you, nor consider you superior.
The truth is I find you incomprehensible. Worse, nearly every post you make has to be about yourself, somehow.
I get it, you're enlightened - unlike the rest of us - so please stop trying to convince us of it.
Injecting all this pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo in every discussion is a surefire way to kill it.

Lol we all ignore Moonie’s fortune cookie rants

 

[FelixDeCat]

Israel has attacked Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, and the Middle East isn't any closer to banding together against Israel

You are obviously not keeping up with current events. Israel has done more lately to unite the world against it especially the Middle Eastern nations. Few remain in its corner, notably the US. Decades of diplomacy to establish economic and political ties with major powers in the region (Isreal and nearby powers) are now being cast aside in a campaign of land acquisition under the banner of "freeing hostages".

The current conservative leadership's position is that Palestine does not exist and never has, therefore land belongs to whoever can take it.

I just hope the Middle East is not forced to create a united defense force. The Middle East version of NATO. The attack on Qatar has shown that no-one will come to your aid if Isreal decides to bomb you. The solution is to have your own (adequate) defenses or join a united group with shared funding to protect each other.

A final showdown of East vs West resulting in Armageddon was predicted over 40 years ago in this video:

It is easy to criticize the quaint ideas brought forth in the video from our modern perspective but I think an East vs West scenario is plausible and I think world leaders have been working for many years to prevent it from happening.

 

[Moonbeam]

Sorry, mate.
You seem to operate under the wrong assumption. I don't fear you, nor consider you superior.

My point is that you operate under the assumption you know what you feel and don’t feel. I know you have no idea how wrong you are. My intention is to help you Dee what you neither see nor want to see.

The truth is I find you incomprehensible. Worse, nearly every post you make has to be about yourself, somehow.
I get it, you're enlightened - unlike the rest of us - so please stop trying to convince us of it.
Injecting all this pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo in every discussion is a surefire way to kill it.

This is a story you tell yourself, how you rationalize away serious consideration and hope to stay asleep. I am aware that no matter what I say whatever I do say will be said to kill it. This is the incomprehensible nature of ego prison.

You worry about nuclear war. I know why. I know it is a waste of happy time. Except as you are a little child you will have forgotten the joy of being. I would rather you did not do that. If I cause you pain it is only an echo of a hurt that goes much deeper.

 

[Muse]

That's what they said about the machine gun before The Great War. That was going to be the end of war. Surely no one would ever throw people in a front of a gun that can mow ten people into swiss cheese in a few seconds. Oops. H-bombs are made to kill and that's exactly what they will be used for. We already came a hair from having them dropped in 61 and again in 83. They'll be used some day. Trump and Putin both seem itching to use them.

I don't think you understand the situation. At all. You're very smart, you are educated, I guess a mathematician? I was a physics major, I know what nuclear fusion is about. The people who designed them, maintain them and design the systems that deliver them and design the systems that determine their management understand that the use of modern high power thermonuclear weapons would destroy modern civilization and render the planet largely uninhabitable and might destroy the human race completely. They do not want that to happen. Trump and Putin's itches if deadly are to be ignored. Putin shakes his nuclear swords but has not used them. Trump? He's always talking shit but it's shit.

They'll be used some day.

Thermonuclear weapons have made all out warfare unthinkable. Their great achievement has been the avoidance of it for 80 years.

 

[Moonbeam]

I don't think you understand the situation. At all. You're very smart, you are educated, I guess a mathematician? I was a physics major, I know what nuclear fusion is about. The people who designed them, maintain them and design the systems that deliver them and design the systems that determine their management understand that the use of modern high power thermonuclear weapons would destroy modern civilization and render the planet largely uninhabitable and might destroy the human race completely. They do not want that to happen. Trump and Putin's itches if deadly are to be ignored. Putin shakes his nuclear swords but has not used them. Trump? He's always talking shit but it's shit.



Thermonuclear weapons have made all out warfare unthinkable. Their great achievement has been the avoidance of it for 80 years.

You must know, I suspect, the Persian tale of the scorpion and the turtle?????

From a snake expect snake behavior. A saying

The issue is that all hate is self hate and the fear of feeling it as it is our real inner truth, the thing we believe over all else and about which we will kill or die rather than know experientially by having those feelings surface.

The illness is universal but the severity varies so I see no way to predict with certainty how insanely the sickness of the one with his finger on the red button might become. What I believe is that you have a chance to evolve and that is step one.

 

[Moonbeam]

Lol we all ignore Moonie’s fortune cookie rants

It is comforting, no doubt, to flatter yourself with the assumption that everyone else is as big a coward as you. I tell you that you are deaf and you proudly announce you refuse to hear. What a surprise. I am quite impressed by the depth of your unconscious transparency.

 

[iRONic]

Lol we all ignore Moonie’s fortune cookie rants

I haven’t seen a screed from him in months!

 

[SteveGrabowski]

The people who designed them, maintain them and design the systems that deliver them and design the systems that determine their management understand that the use of modern high power thermonuclear weapons would destroy modern civilization and render the planet largely uninhabitable and might destroy the human race completely.

Meh I think that's very oversold. MAD nuclear war would take most of the world back centuries because high altitude detonations would fry the electric grids and nuclear winter would starve billions in the year or ten before it faded but no one is ground bursting everything to contaminate the planet with fallout when airbursts are way more destructive if you're trying to take out cities. Groundbursts are for things like hardened missile silos, which the US purposefully puts away from populated areas (e.g. the nuclear sponge).

You have way too much faith in our leader to think he wouldn't use nukes. I hate being right when you talk about these red lines Trump can't cross and then he does. And Putin's a real threat to use them because losing Ukraine could knock him out of power which means he's in front of a firing squad. Hugely destructive wars are started over the stupidest shit. E.g. the Great War because Kaiser Wilhelm admired the Royal Navy when he'd go stay with Queen Victoria as a kid and wanted one for Germany, starting an arms race that made the war inevitable. And man Trump is the same kind of silver spoon dipshit Wilhelm was.

 

[eelw]

But it’s not like the orange monkey has a big red button to launch all the nukes. Yes he has the code to initiate launch. But there still is a general at that launch site that will ignore the order. Well until this all general meeting and they get fired and replaced by butt kissers

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Eh... large-scale nuclear bombardment is much different from the machine gun. A true exchange would not only destroy/render uninhabitable large swathes of land, but it'll likely create enough radioactive dust in the atmosphere to a) inhibit crop growth worldwide and b) potentially cause radiation sickness/near term cancer in dramatic percentages of the animal life across the globe, humans included. It'd be an actual extinction event, globally. Machine guns don't do that.

Nuclear winter wouldn't be from radioactive dust. It would be from widespread soot from the cities being on fire, creating way dirtier smoke than say widespread forest fires would. The cities would be on fire because they'd be hit by airburst nukes, which cause minimal fallout. Airbursts are far more destructive if you're not hitting a hardened target, which is why they were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is constructive interference between the initial blast wave from the explosion down to the ground and the reflection of the wave at ground level that makes them far more powerful for wiping out urban areas than a groundburst where a lot of the energy gets wasted going into the ground.

If you're in the north central US, eg Colorado, Nebraska, Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, or Missouri radioactive dust will be a problem because of the missile silos in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado that would be hit with groundbursts thus kicking a ton of dust up into the mushroom cloud and giving the radioactive fission products like cesium, iodine, and such something to bind to and be carried by the wind. But fallout wouldn't be anything close to a nationwide problem. It would be for the areas of the north central US that got unlucky with wind direction on the day the missile silos got hit.

If you ever see a nuke go off over land and the mushroom cloud is white there isn't much worry of fallout. If it's dark you know it has a ton of dust and you're completely fucked if the wind is blowing from it and in your direction.

Sad about the fucking idiots in our government / military groundbursting nukes in Nevada and causing that town in Utah to have skyrocketing cancer rates. But that's just not how real nuclear war would be unless you're in the same area as the missile silos.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

Nuclear winter wouldn't be from radioactive dust. It would be from widespread soot from the cities being on fire, creating way dirtier smoke than say widespread forest fires would. The cities would be on fire because they'd be hit by airburst nukes, which cause minimal fallout. Airbursts are far more destructive if you're not hitting a hardened target, which is why they were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is constructive interference between the initial blast wave from the explosion down to the ground and the reflection of the wave at ground level that makes them far more powerful for wiping out urban areas than a groundburst where a lot of the energy gets wasted going into the ground.

If you're in the north central US, eg Colorado, Nebraska, Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, or Missouri radioactive dust will be a problem because of the missile silos in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado that would be hit with groundbursts thus kicking a ton of dust up into the mushroom cloud and giving the radioactive fission products like cesium, iodine, and such something to bind to and be carried by the wind. But fallout wouldn't be anything close to a nationwide problem. It would be for the areas of the north central US that got unlucky with wind direction on the day the missile silos got hit.

If you ever see a nuke go off over land and the mushroom cloud is white there isn't much worry of fallout. If it's dark you know it has a ton of dust and you're completely fucked if the wind is blowing from it and in your direction.

Sad about the fucking idiots in our government / military groundbursting nukes in Nevada and causing that town in Utah to have skyrocketing cancer rates. But that's just not how real nuclear war would be unless you're in the same area as the missile silos.

I'm pretty confident that in a real exchange (large-scale MIRV launches) there'd still be enough radioactive shit kicked into the air that it would have a dramatic effect on cancer development for most species (or at least ones we'd eat, and of course us). Anyhow what you said is true, the extreme content of smoke entering the upper atmosphere would as well cause wide-scale crop failure for at least a year. We're talking famine that kills actual billions of people.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I'm pretty confident that in a real exchange (large-scale MIRV launches) there'd still be enough radioactive shit kicked into the air that it would have a dramatic effect on cancer development for most species (or at least ones we'd eat, and of course us). Anyhow what you said is true, the extreme content of smoke entering the upper atmosphere would as well cause wide-scale crop failure for at least a year. We're talking famine that kills actual billions of people.

Yeah we could be talking anywhere from one to ten years of nuclear winter. Cancer rates would go through the roof not from the fallout, which I think would be pretty limited except in a few unlucky areas, but from the destruction of the ozone layer. So you'd go from freezing in the nuclear winter to insane sunburns, fast forming cataracts and a skin cancer epidemic with no way to treat it. Not to mention how well remaining plantlife would do transitioning from nuclear winter to through the roof UV levels in the span of months. Like I said, I'm going to the AFB to die instantly if I ever hear that 30 minute EAS warning. Though I live close enough to a target that I doubt I could get far enough away to survive anyways if I wasn't choosing to die fast. I'd have to move about 8 miles radially on a bike as cars would be worthless with the traffic jams that would be caused and even worse when the first strike is a high altitude EMP that renders them completely useless. Then I'd have to get in a ditch and hope to duck the second degree burns, as those could prove fatal with no medical services.

 

[hal2kilo]

Meh I think that's very oversold. MAD nuclear war would take most of the world back centuries because high altitude detonations would fry the electric grids and nuclear winter would starve billions in the year or ten before it faded but no one is ground bursting everything to contaminate the planet with fallout when airbursts are way more destructive if you're trying to take out cities. Groundbursts are for things like hardened missile silos, which the US purposefully puts away from populated areas (e.g. the nuclear sponge).

You have way too much faith in our leader to think he wouldn't use nukes. I hate being right when you talk about these red lines Trump can't cross and then he does. And Putin's a real threat to use them because losing Ukraine could knock him out of power which means he's in front of a firing squad. Hugely destructive wars are started over the stupidest shit. E.g. the Great War because Kaiser Wilhelm admired the Royal Navy when he'd go stay with Queen Victoria as a kid and wanted one for Germany, starting an arms race that made the war inevitable. And man Trump is the same kind of silver spoon dipshit Wilhelm was.

It would be at least as bad as the dark ages.

 

[FelixDeCat]

It would be at least as bad as the dark ages.

It will be Planet of The Apes.

 

[Kaido]

There are always wars and rumors of wars. Most are limited conflicts. Just live for today and you'll be okay.

Statistically-speaking:

* There are upwards of 60 ongoing armed conflicts in the world right now
* Up to 12 of those meet the definition of war

When I was a kid, there was just the evening news cycle & the newspaper. Now we have 24/7 global news coverage with 4K video straight from the Ukraine, Gaza, etc. As someone who has lived with anxiety his entire life, I don't think this kind of exposure is good for human beings. It's tough to want to be informed, but also not want to get sucked into the darkness that a percentage of the population brings to the table. People like Miss Rachel are a gem:

https://www.tiktok.com/video/7486656433103047979

https://www.tiktok.com/video/7509703418399984942

 

[rommelrommel]

I just don’t see a no holds barred war of serious conquest between great powers.

Russia isn’t a great power outside of the nukes, and for all his pathologies Putin does actually want Russia to continue existing. He’s not going to initiate nuclear war outside of a true existential threat. NATO could go all out and restore Ukrainian 1993 borders and he would probably de-escalate the war, certainly not nuke London.

China does pose a bit of potential conflict over Taiwan, but even if the USA chose to defend Taiwan with everything possible again I don’t see China launching nukes over it, and they cannot otherwise really menace the USA.

A major regional war with multiple actors is possible, but the scale of the world wars isn’t going to be replicated.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

the scale of the world wars isn’t going to be replicated.

The scale of fascists in power is being replicated like in the buildup to WWII so I think it's very possible

 

[Muse]

The scale of fascists in power is being replicated like in the buildup to WWII so I think it's very possible

The world is very different now. It was only at the end of WW II that nuclear weapons came into play and their were only 2 that were actual weapons. Hopefully they are the only ones that will ever be used. IIRC, 10 kilo ton, which is huge but tiny compared to the hydrogen bombs developed soon after WW II ended. Warfare in the 2nd 1/2 of the 20th century and beyond has been regional conflicts not global.