Doomsday weapons and weapons to end all wars

The saga of RAF Bomber Command and Neville Chamberlain is a timely warning on the risks of deterrence frightening the wrong person.
Chamberlain was so impressed by the ability as he believed it for air forces to inflict a knock out blow on an enemy that he became more frightened of the Luftwaffe than Hitler was of the RAF.
We see something similar today. Putin has NATO stunned into inaction by his nuclear forces. NATO's own impressive nuclear systems seem neither to scare Putin nor reassure NATO countries.
 
zen said:
Do they?

I suspect Russia is reassured command and control of NATO Nuclear Weapons is a thorough and professionally run matter.

But current events are taking place outside of NATO.
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Considering the performance of the Russian military, were I Putin I'd worry about the the thorough professionalism of my own nuclear troops.
 
The logic of nuclear deterrence relies on destroying the bulk of an opponents' cities.
In order to forestall this, the US and Soviet Union tried to allocate nuclear warheads to destroying the opponent's nuclear forces.
However, smaller nuclear powers like UK and France focus on removing the key cities of their opponent.
In Europe the use of even tactical nuclear weapons would lead to high civilian casualties.
Unfortunately we now have a situation similar to that in the 1930s where bombing cities frightened the democracies more than the dictatorships.
The rulers of the Soviet Union were not willing to sacrifice their people in a war so deterrence worked. Putin like Hitler has no such restraint.
 
Justo Miranda said:
There should be some means to detect the radiation produced by a nuclear device, in my opinion it should be a priority for the national security of all countries. Considering the volume of goods that enter the ports of the United States daily and that cross the Panama Canal, the system (if any) should be some kind of very fast and discreet scanner.
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Those exist. I don't know any details of their method of detection.

There are stories of SOCOM types swarming onto a cargo ship in the middle ocean at night, and then DOE NEST shows up. Nuclear Emergency Search Team. You see those guys show up all of a sudden, ask how far you need to leave town and travel upwind.


Rhinocrates said:
Yeah but do we want to piss off the creatures that could live in a gas giant? :)

John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes (aka Out of the Deeps). Essentially he recycled the plot of The Day of the Triffids, but this time it's invaders from Jupiter who decide to make Earth a waterworld.
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Anything living on Jupiter couldn't live here on earth, atmosphere is completely wrong.

Doesn't mean that they couldn't rock us back into the stone age or even Chixulub, but they're not landing here.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Those exist. I don't know any details of their method of detection.

There are stories of SOCOM types swarming onto a cargo ship in the middle ocean at night, and then DOE NEST shows up. Nuclear Emergency Search Team. You see those guys show up all of a sudden, ask how far you need to leave town and travel upwind.



Anything living on Jupiter couldn't live here on earth, atmosphere is completely wrong.

Doesn't mean that they couldn't rock us back into the stone age or even Chixulub, but they're not landing here.
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To be fair, the origin wasn't certain, only some characters thought that it was Jupiter. and when Wyndham wrote it people really didn't know what the deeper atmosphere of Jupiter was like. The aliens are never seen directly and it was only known that they were aquatic and adapted to high pressure - humans just see some examples of their technology above the surface.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Anything living on Jupiter couldn't live here on earth, atmosphere is completely wrong.
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Anything coming from *Europa* will look like it;s coming from Jupiter. With current understanding, anything that could live under the ice of Europa could potentially live in the deep oceans.
 
Putin is not Hitler, and it is not the 1930s. One could argue our neocon/neolib warhawks are a whole different breed from the men of the 1930s, imo.

The previous cold war was much safer imo as both sides knew the cost of nuclear armageddon. They had men who saw world war first hand and saw the horror of nukes on the japanese people.
 
Nuclear weapons have not lost their terror factor. Putin had been around for most of the Cold War. He is former KGB as well.

The desire for land and resources has not diminished, especially if they can be taken by force.

I also lived through most of the Cold War. It was not safer by any stretch of the imagination. In the 1980s, I saw a Russian targets list. My city was number 5. Surveillance was not as sophisticated during the 1960s, and the risk of false alarms was higher. The former head of Soviet Rocket Forces from the period appeared on TV. He related how his station received an alert. It showed the U.S. had launched all of their ICBMs. He had 15 minutes to decide on what to do. Soviet agents in the U.S. were contacted. They had observed no launches. The fastest aircraft were dispatched to a certain geographic area, and they also observed nothing. He stood down from the alert. Later, it was determined that the sun striking clouds at a certain angle and altitude caused spy satellites to send the warning.
 

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