also, this is an incredible statement, they're basically moaning that China would be able to respond effectively to a nuclear first strike by the burger empire
Asian defence officials said a joint early warning system would also allow China to launch nuclear weapons upon receiving warning of an impending nuclear strike. That would mark a shift from its strategy of using nuclear weapons only in retaliation against a strike that has already occurred — a change that nuclear experts believe Beijing has long contemplated.
https://archive.ph/KgDfJ
If that new age is ushered in, frankly China and Russia ought to make sure Washington DC and every major military base in the continental US is a irradiated no-man's land, even if all the nukes are shot down. Such a rogue state can't be allowed to exist with the nuclear capabilities it presently does- it's already bad enough as-is, but when and if they try a nuclear first strike, IMO no country is safe (not just China and Russia)- and assuming there's anything left of the ashes, the US will probably even need to be under a international occupation and partition in a manner akin to Nazi Germany's postwar treatment on steroids to properly de-Americanize (in a similar fashion to de-Nazification- rooting out all adherents of neoconservatism, Manifest Destiny and the Monroe doctrine, all alphabet agencies and those who make up the "blob," etc) the region.
They really wouldn't have to set anything up after destroying our government and some key military bases. It would take decades to create any sort of industry to even begin remaking the military. Not to mention, the US power grid is so bad the feds did a study on it. They concluded that all it would take is 13 key substations being destroyed and the entire power grid of the US is down for at least 18 months. In that 18 months they estimated 80% of the population would die. There would t be anyone left to even attempt to retaliate.
If you have a link to this study, could you share it?
That sounds like an interesting read.
It was on here a long while back. I'll have to do some deep digging but I'll see what I can find
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304020104579433670284061220
https://spectrum.ieee.org/attack-on-nine-substations-could-take-down-us-grid
Here's a couple. Apparently it's 9 locations not 13.
Thank you for sharing this and for taking the time to look for this!! It is indeed an interesting read!
Agreed, I'd prefer if there are no nukes involved. But unless massive change happens in the west to oust the neocons running the show in almost all western countries and institutions, I think this might be where we're headed- and that nukes may not even be the worst of the problems the world will have to face if the neocons aren't thoroughly stomped out quickly enough, even.
We want justice not revenge. There are many innocent people in Washington DC. But I do agree that the US and Americanism need to go away.
I don't see it as revenge, to strike back in equal capacity against the heart of the empire and almost all modern evils of the past century (and certainly the embodiment of the past half millennium of genocidal imperialism). Especially not in the hypothetical context of the US striking out with nukes first.
I see it as a matter of decapitating the empire before it does something worse. Because of things come to that point of a preemptive nuclear strike - even if China, Russia, or whatever other target is able to intercept it- anything at that point is on the table, and I genuinely don't see peace with the AmeriKKKan regime as an option in that scenario- that would basically be the statement of intent, to rule over the ashes (and to truly burn the world to ashes in the process).
What would be next? More nukes? Backing terrorist activities (well more than usual, and that would be saying something)? Bringing out the biowarfare and chemical weapons once again to unleash plagues and famine on the world, considering what we know of the US empire's repeatedly proven depravity? Trying to bring others down with it who may be less able to defend themselves from nukes like China and Russia might- for instance Iran, Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, perhaps even India (I certainly imagine they'd attempt to strike India and Iran, anyways) pretty much any countries they can think of as a spiteful last genocidal gasp of empire? Trying to exterminate as many indigenous peoples and leftist organization at an accelerated, industrial pace within the imperial core itself to preserve the settler-state's foundations, setting the country aflame in scorched-earth tactics, and further intensifying their werewolf-adjacent (the Nazi insurgency plans) preparations? In such a scenario I'd expect all that would be on the table and more.
If the west crosses that line- the line of unprovoked, direct nuclear war- I wouldn't call it revenge, to strike DC off the face of the map- frankly I'd argue it would likely be a necessity and a prime objective of the rest of humanity, if they have any sense. The sheer amount of horror the US has unleashed in its two centuries of existence, and the guarantee of even greater horrors to come if action is not taken swiftly and decisively in such a scenario, is undeniable. Revenge doesn't even factor into the equation here, I genuinely believe (and have good reason to believe- as surely much of the world also does) that the empire is that unhinged, and that capable and more than willing- and eager, even (and only restrained through the fear of retaliation) to destroy the rest of humanity, or perhaps even the entire species or biosphere altogether if they can't maintain hegemony.
In that context, with my thought process explained- can you disagree? And would it be based on reason, or some moral imperative and idealism?
Except, none of the people who call the shots would be anywhere near DC before they launch their unprovoked strike. The only people left in DC would be citizens and probably House\Senate members. That is if they don't go on recess before it happens by "coincidence". So unless this is some kind of "shock and aw" style attack, it wont have tactical value.
Perhaps then it shouldn't be nuked- though I think there's merit to the notion of taking out the core of the criminal bureaucracy that has overseen the most warlike, genocidal state in existence all the same- but it should certainly be occupied. And my personal take on it is that if I myself had anything to say about it, DC would be cleansed from existence, and its civilian population relocated to the outskirts and built new homes there. As the seat of modern evil in the 21st century, as the greatest monument to (many) genocide(s) humanity has ever seen, I think that there has to be something substantial done about it, either way- not merely a renaming of the city if and when it were taken, but a permanent military occupation, perhaps with the end goal of making it, if it were to remain, a living museum of the most warlike, monstrous state in existence.
I feel that it's deathly important that humanity takes such a stance, to disavow not only the settler-state and all its horrors- but to disavow the American empire in particular, which I'd argue is the inspiration of all modern genocides and the culmination of all the capitalist and imperialist (as the highest form of capitalism, granted) crimes in history.
Now, as for if whoever the US targets with a preemptive nuclear strike can't intercept all the missiles- that's another story. If you ask me, if MAD is invoked successfully, by all means survival- as well as maintaining MAD- becomes a matter of equal retaliation or worse. To do anything else would be a betrayal to the victims of such a preemptive strike, to the blood, sweat, and tears that went into creating such weapons to deter and retaliate against American aggression, and to the very notion of human dignity and equality across all nations, races, etc. as I see it. Because there certainly would be more incoming, and the precedent of the west getting away with invoking MAD and not receiving it in turn is frankly worse if you ask me than any other possible outcome.
tbh this is already the case when it comes to the air/sea war. Recent wargames show that in the moment of an attack, the US fleet and airforce in the pacific get missile'd to hell before even being able to operate effectively
From what I've read about the state of US nuclear arsenal it's a question of how many of them will even launch to be honest. As I recall, last few tests were a failure.
iirc John Oliver talked about a particular missile silo which is so old the computers still use punched cards, and there is no soldier who is actually trained on those systems. The door of that same silo is also always open, because it broke and they don't know how to fix it
apparently that missile silo went out of commission in the 80s bc of the issue of modernization. now it's just a museum. it's the titan missile silo in green valley, arizona. i'm guessing oliver refered to that one
FT answered my question:
They have also switched from using Russian as the language of co-ordination to real-time communication through interpreters on ships on both sides.
It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves if/when a new military bloc develops/expands.
With the way machine learning is advancing, I wonder if real time translation built into equipment will be possible soon.
Interesting thought. Probably possible, I think the main question there would be reliability for sensitive matters as well as security. Reliability meaning, if the AI is even a little off, it could cause a miscommunication with terrible consequences, and the best AI is probably still far off from comparing to an expert human interpreter (the best I know of that's fast and public is DeepL - similar to GoogleTranslate but arguably somewhat better - and then there are LLMs (Large Language Models) who can sort of do translation, but it's more of a gimmick than something they are designed for). There may be better though that's specifically in the sphere of Russian and Chinese language translation (I have no familiarity with AI translation tools originating from there). And security meaning, you'd need to be able to process what's said locally in such a way that it's not being sent off somewhere where it can be intercepted. For it to be local processing, it would require more local compute, which is going to be more expensive; might not be noteworthy difference between local and cloud compute if it's something like DeepL, but if it's a design more like an LLM, those can be greedy on GPU power.
So overall, I could see it being used as an assistive tool along with human translators to speed up the translation of especially long communications (if long communications is a thing in that context), but I doubt it's going to be replacing them meaningfully without worsening the communication process.
I agree with the risk that there could be mistranslation, so that has to be balanced with the need for speed of communication. If you're in battle conditions, waiting for the translator to hear the message and then translate could lose valuable time. I'd also argue this could be a narrower use case where the militaries could decide on a set of common phrases to be used in such situations, which would be a much easier problem to tackle. So, yeah there are definitely pros and cons, but if translation can be made reliable then I can see a lot of benefits at least in some contexts.
Did the burgerbrains really think that they can just get away with nuking someone else and their allies were just not going to react?
China don't have this many warheads (though they are expanding the arsenal pretty quickly), so i bet diamonds against nuts that some brainworms in Washington are entertaining the idea of quick first strike and hoping the response would be survivable.
Oh yeah, I recall rand published a study discussing how they could nuke China and US could make it through.
here it is https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1100/RR1140/RAND_RR1140.pdf
Knowing the US, they probably assume as long as they can protect all the CEOs and politicians in bunkers that they will have no problem weathering the fallout and rebuilding. Those are the most important "workers", right?
They will be very confused when actual workers don't magically appear on command.
Man, they are really hungry for a hot war with China… that sucks lol
if they manage to start a war with China it's gonna be a disaster orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine
