Clicky-clicky.

The hits just keep on coming.


Great stuff... the "Bomb the Fuckers" checklist just keeps getting bigger and bigger.


Lilith

The world just becomes a better place each day, doesn't it?

As for 'agent destruction weapons'... great- and the other side effects? Will those by any chance kill many people nearby? Or maybe they won't kill them... straight away. Either a nice long lingering death due to cancer or a nice example of a post US intervention Vietnamese style birth.

S- Welcome to the new age of 'usable' nuclear weaponry.

I wonder when Germany and France will be on that target list. The American goverment is obviously insane.
To read this article turns my stomach. Usable atomic weapons sounds to me like another Hiroshima or Nagasaki .
No thanks.

Trinity

I'm really quite pissed off. I can see them bridging the gap between talking and long range planning, and full-on use quite quickly. I'm not amused at all. Much respect to the person who leaked this though.

Not quite. The "usable" bombs the article mentions are <1 kiloton bombs



The ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 13 and 20 kilotons respectively, 13 and 20 times bigger than what they propse those more "usable" bombs to be (a kiloton or less). Smaller bombs are obviously going to be "easier" to deploy than large ones. They won't wipe out an entire city, which would make them more "appealing" to use as you'd be more likely to actually use one that will not wipe out an entire city.


Lilith

So... they won't wipe out entire cities. Has anyone studied the effects of regular large releases of radiation (probably with a short half life though) on the environment? Not yet I think is the answer (not with any evidence to back up any conjectures anyway), but if you want to then you may get the chance soon!

So, current US gov:
Advocate war.
Make war (not love with or without protection, unless you are already married).
Develop fun new nukular weapons for blowing up small towns as opposed to large cities.
Throw money into Star Wars defence plans.
Consider the possibilities of developing robotic soldiers controlled remotely by the thoughts of the grunts (oh shit, US Army grunts controlling things by thought alone? Can they do that? (think, that is)) so as to avoid as great loss of (American) life in wars they initiate... ah... sorry... liberation missions or whatever.
Consider starting a foreign legion to go and kill foreigners so that only foreigners are killed in wars (and who cares if they're foreign, right?).

What did I miss?
I'm not too sure on the economic front (other than tax breaks during a war, which is... dumb) so would anyone care to deal with that side?

S- With low batteries for keyboard.

How about you open a new thread for that specifically. You manage to try and drag most threads into completely new topics... you have new thread angst or something?




Lilith

As a side-note, just talking mechanics and not the overall design of foreign policy, I think using tactical nuclear weapons is a terrible idea. There is no reason to use a tactical nuke instead of a fuel-air device (like the so-called "daisy cutters" we used in Afghanistan). Fuel-air bombs first send out a shock wave, powerful enough to level structures and kill personnel. Then the heat comes, torching everything in something like a 1km radius. Those flames in turn use up all the oxygen, suffocating everyone around.

They're devistatingly effective against tunnel networks, because the blast flows through one tunnel to the next.

In short, between this and good ol' fashioned high explosives, I don't think that using nukes would be a good idea--for PR reasons if nothing else.

The issue of "against whom" is another detail, that I might get to in another post.

SS

Nah, I'm just trying to drag them all around to something technical in nature, before converting them into GothGeek threads. I do it by some rather bizarre routes to avert suspicion.
You did say that GothGeeks will try to take over the rest of the board if they don't get their own section, so I'm proving you wrong. We will take over anyway!

S

PS- Or, to be more serious, I am pissed off at myself and at the current 'kill them quick' method of diplomacy. While I can understand some of the points being raised, I don't feel that war is the solution, and thus it gets to me a little. However, ignore this- because real men don't have feelings. *sardonic smile, because I like the word 'sardonic'*

Our government is aware that the American civilians are not
accustomed to seeing huge casualties of our own (yes, military too, I have former Punk friends who I am thankful to have representing the U.S.A. with alternate open-minded opininions to the status quo) unlike other countries who have been up to this point more vulnerable. As a society, we generally are not well acquainted with great hardship, and having to do without, and suck it up. I think we realize this... enough said.
As to nukes, and radiation: it has been suspected that during the "Cold War" there were small "briefcase nukes" cached around our country for "the opposing side". Many of these lay
unrecovered, waiting for someone to discover them, or deteriorate (leaking radiation). Our C.I.A. needs more operatives, the older "agents" having retired. Skills are being lost, retraining is needed. Who wants to join the C.I.A.?

1) I'm from the UK, so I don't know what relevance the first part of your response has.

2) Join a bunch of surveillance obsessed spooks? No thanks, I disagree on principal with surveillance- the innocent should not be spied upon just on the offchance.

S

1.) Americans not being accustomed to hardship has no relevance to anyone other than an American. We have many more freedoms and privileges than you have in the U.K.
2.) Surveillance, is something I am sure you are familliar with being from the U.K. I am not a supporter of surveillance, and I don't want to be tagged like a condor. I am simply stating my personal belief that if one wants to defend one's national security, covert methods of field work are an alternative, I support. Israel has been successful with the Mussad. Limited covert agents, quick strikes.

If 13 or 1 kiloton bomb it is still a an atom bomb and the radiation poisoning will be as severe as for the victims in Hirioshima. Maybe there are not so many victims.

A nice perversion from the government to tell that this atom bombs are not so bad because they kill not so many people. They should tell this to the families who will lose their relatives from radiation poisoning.The enviroment damage of radiation is another side effect. Radiation does not stop before political borders.

Trinity

Really?
Wow.
News to me.
Pray tell, what are they?


Lead to a perpetuation of hostilities. Why does peace between nations finally come? It comes because people stop fighting, not because people who try to keep fighting get killed.
Surveillance... yes, over here we have CCTV being placed in lots of places (though fortunately there do have to be warnings up). We were going to have ID cards. We aren't any more.
Over there... can you say chipping? Sorry, you might not know about that yet?

S

Since when are we talking about hitting population centers? I was under the impression that we were talking about hitting chemical/biological weapons storage, which are essentially never located in residential areas.

And I'm still against tactical nukes, but let's think about this solidly for a moment:

1) Option one. We do nothing. If that country happens to deploy said weapons, 100,000 or 1,000,000 civilians die (in another country).

2) Option two. We use a tactical nuclear device. The nuclear device destroys all the chem/bio agents in the bunker. 5,000 in a city downwind end up dying from radiation sickness.

3) Option three. We use conventional explosives against the same chem/bio weapons bunker. A cloud of VX or some other chem/bio agent then drifts downwind to that same city, killing 5,000. Fuel/air bombs and napalm will destroy anthrax, but not VX. It varies from agent to agent.

As long as you're going to destroy a chemical weapons bunker, I'm not sure how option two is so much less ethical than option three. Just food for thought...

SS