if they had just pushed to the French border it might have changed a lot
yeah, I learned about it in this comment which has a link to an article about historical inaccuracies in that game
given what they did with the highway of death & oliver north in previous games, that article seems like real tame lib shit tbh
In the light of historical distance, it's tempting to dismiss the SADM as an aberration born of Cold War hysteria. But the United States still keeps tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, albeit in the form of the less adventurous B61 air-dropped bomb. More frighteningly, other countries are increasingly embracing them as instruments of national defense. Pakistan, for example, reportedly keeps nuclear weapons forward deployed, and authority for their use pre-delegated to troops in the field -- an effort to compensate for India's much larger army. And in a reversal of fortune, now that Russia finds itself in a position of conventional inferiority vis-à-vis NATO, Moscow has elevated the role of tactical nuclear weapons in its strategic doctrine.
In 2018 Trump had an SLBM warhead (W76) variant funded in the military budget, with a 5-7kt yield instead of 90kt (The US has many other low-yield nukes, but those have to be put on bombers which might get shut down by Russian air defenses or whatever, so this one was ordered). I feel like the world is going to sleepwalk into nuclear war - it'll start out somewhere with these "tactical" nuclear weapons and escalate into a full-blown nuclear exchange.
it’ll start out somewhere
My money is on the India/Pakistan border, as climate change depletes the water of the Indus river deeply (this has already begun). 85% of food produced in Pakistan comes from that water. And almost all the tributaries of the river go through India before they reach Pakistan. India is already in deep shit water-wise. So eventually they'll shit on the Indus Waters Treaty to avoid the death of large swathes of their population, and Pakistan will have to react to avoid the same on their side.
Yeah, I agree. Excellent point about the water & treaty. I read this terrifying research article modeling a nuclear exchange between them and the aftermath in 2025 a month ago but it didn't have water issues as a precipitating cause
was this your go-to resource wars/extinction impact in your debate rounds?
Schools in my country don't have the weird ass debate clubs you guys seem to have. Also, it's simply the most probable for me.
lol fair enough
it was my first introduction to marxist lit, so they aren't all bad
the libs were obsessed with extinction scenarios though, and your comment read like you had gone a little too far down that rabbit hole
When it comes to extinction scenarios the rabbit hole isn't very deep these days - reading publications on climate change is all it takes.
the backpack nuke was perhaps the most darkly comic manifestation of an age struggling to deal with the all-too-real prospect of Armageddon
That or either the insane nuke gun called "the Davy Crockett" (which inspired Fallout's Fat Man) or the insanity called project Pluto - a unmanned nuclear powered craft that could stay in the air for months, launching many nukes, after which it "could then spend weeks flying over populated areas at low altitudes, causing secondary damage from radiation" (though the efficiency of that second part is disputed).
Oh shit, I think I might have access to a set of interviews with the engineers behind Pluto.
Know someone who worked on the project (long dead), or at least one of the nuclear aircraft projects in the 60s
Edit: It was this one he was convinced that they had solved it, just needed more time to develop the shielding. Can you imagine having nuclear airplanes? Good and bad for sure. Would reduce carbon cost of flying to virtually zero, but also flying reactor...
Reactivity control rods were installed and it was found that the control rods did not determine the output power of the ARE; rather, the power demand did, which affected the outlet and inlet temperatures because of the negative temperature coefficient of reactivity. The ARE was operated at power for 221 hours up to a peak of 2.5 MWth.
Fuck man, MSR is so cool. A power generation device that automatically outputs based on demand.
