Russia - threadbanned users in OP

@Bass Reeves

In fairness, there are days you put on the TV or see what's trending on Tik Tok and think to yourself, "A nuclear war wouldn't be the worst."

Really you could have just spared us and yourselves the bother. The memes are neither clever nor funny.

I saw a very good post on Quora earlier from a guy we'll versed in nuclear weapons and it puts alot of the nuclear bunkum in question. I'm posting it below. His words not mine

"As someone who has studied nuclear war for close to thirty years now, I am going to give you an answer that will blow your mind. Even if the entire Russian nuclear arsenal were used against Ukraine, it wouldn't substantially change the course of the war. How could I possibly say that? Because, the power of nuclear weapons has been used as a boogeyman for so long that the actual power of a nuclear detonation has almost no relation to their actual destructive power. No nuclear power can afford to actually use one in combat because it would expose the mythical nature of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are hyped to the point that no one contradicts it when a media outlet publishes a statement indicating that even a single nuclear device will destroy the world. This is a blatantly, stupidly, obviously untrue, but never corrected. After all, two were used in WWII. BUT that is just the tip of the iceburg. I thought there had been a couple of hundred nuclear test that prove this point. I was off by over an order of magnitude. There have been nearly THREE THOUSAND NUCLEAR DETONATIONS ALREADY, that are either known or suspected and this has not effected the survivability of life on Earth even slightly.

Well then, how dangerous are nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons, if they weren't their own catagory, would be classified as incendiary weapons. They set stuff on fire. They set a lot of stuff on fire. In fact they can set things on fire as far as two miles away from the actual detonation. Besides this, nuclear detonation are very bright, capable of blinding people 20–30 miles away. This is only constrained by the curvature of the earth. They also create hurricane force winds as the air around the detonation expands and contracts. If you are outside and unshielded and within a mile of a nuclear detonation, you are going to die.

The problem here is that Ukraine is really big. I mean the size of Texas big. Cities there tend to be spread out in modern times and their larger ones cover over a hundred square miles. The average nuclear detonation are only burn 2–3 square miles of territory. A city the size of Kiev would take on the order of 200 warheads to cover the whole thing.

Which brings us to our next point. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable to incendiaries. Modern city centers and industrial areas are made of concrete and steel. Most of the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was done because almost all the buildings were made of wood and paper. The initial blast set the city centers on fire which spread and ended up burning down most of the city. Modern cities are just not that vulnerable. In Ukraine, despite millions of rounds of being poured into their cities, not one of them caught fire and burned to the ground like the Great Chicago or Great London Fires in the 19th century or the fire storms of WWII. In the Japanese nuclear detonations, the brick buildings were still standing, despite being much less sturdy than modern buildings. This leads to the most surprising revelation about nuclear detonations: If you are not outside, you stand a good chance of surviving even within the blast zone. Nuclear blasts are mainly line of sight killers. The vast majority of “radiation” created by an nuclear detonation is infrared radiation, or heat the same as a gas stove or fireplace makes. Unless the building you are in is collapsed by the wind or you fail to leave if it catches on fire or you happen to be in front of a window with a direct line of sight to the detonation, you are probably going to be fine.

Thus we get to the real reason why Putin will not use nuclear weapons: they're just not all that effective compared to the boogeyman that is in our collective imaginations. Were a nuclear missile to detonate over central Kiev, no one would believe that it was an actual nuclear blast because the city is still there and all the major buildings are still standing.

Secondly, he doesn't have very many of them. The numbers given for the Russian nuclear arsenal are an outright farce. You get that number by taking of bombs that the USSR claimed to have built, and subtract the number used in their testing program. This leaves you with about 9,000 warheads. First of all, Russia doesn't have nearly enough delivery systems to put those warheads on. The second problem here is that nuclear warheads have a very short shelf life. Nuclear warheads require a detonator made of conventional expolsives. These detonators are some of the most precision pieces of engineering in the history of mankind. A series of explosives has to go off in such a way that the core is hit by the same amount of pressure from all directions simultaneously. If any of those explosives are even slightly off, the nuclear warhead will not go off. You now have an extremely precise machine sitting around a core of material emiting hard radiation. Hard radiation is not friendly to machines. Nuclear warheads need to be rebuilt a least every five years and maintained a lot more often than that. Even with that, a twenty year old warhead is a piece of junk. It's been more than twenty years since the Putin kleptocracy came to power. I'm sure that Russia has a number of Potemkin warheads that are kept in top shape for inspectors, but given the current Russian system, the Russian nuclear arsenal most likely resembles the Russian tank reserves: the bare minimum kept in service while the rest is a scrap pile.

Currently, the spector of the vast Russian nuclear arsenal is the last card he has in his hand. If he were to actually use it, it would expose that he never had anything but a junk hand and bluffing to back it up."

Never forget that Russia is a massive, absolutely massive country with a hugely powerful economy and unlimited natural resources. When winter sets in, Europeans will prostrate themselves to Putin to turn back on the gas and Biden will do a deal and the Zelensky will be hung out to dry. Ukraine will have to formally sign over Crimea and most of the Donbas. This is the way the world works and it's only a matter of time. Putin will mobilise and a million more troops will pour across the border and it will be done. And don't forget our Islanders and the T-13 Armadas and all those hypersonic missiles that we can use to level Kiev. The West will be terrified we'll use our nukes and they'll blink.

I really don't think that prostration will happen while Putin is in charge, so he'll either have to be sacked or become temporarily disorientated on a late night walk and fall out of a 12th storey window.

Russian state TV and Sergei Lavrov have both sounded off at different times, saying that Russia is essentially at war with NATO because of the support that NATO member countries are providing to Ukraine in this conflict. I don't know if Putin has said the same in public, but because that idea is out there among the Russian public, if he turns back now, his critics on the hawk side will say that he basically surrendered to NATO, and he's already getting mounting criticism from the other side of things for continuing with the war.

If he's going to get criticised either way - if the knives are coming out for him whatever why he goes - he may as well figure that he should just do what he thinks is the right thing, and Putin hates NATO expansion, curses the fall of the USSR and the collapse of its sphere of influence, and wants to take the West down. This invasion of Ukraine appears to be a major culmination of his mission to reverse the world order as he sees it, so I believe he will die trying to make this invasion a success. He's in too deep to go back. Somebody in Moscow please grab an ice pick and make themselves famous.

For the first time ever I will echo a few posters I seldom agree with and say there clearly are some Russian bots or just plain idiots active on this thread. Your post is so obviously wrong that I won't even waste words refuting it. Just watch the news - yes, even your Russian news - to see what the current reality is

Ultimately NATO subjugated and did not hold that country either and spent a lot more resources before timing out. You can't draw too much from that other than the Russian economy in parallel was failing (inherent contradictions of central planned economy) and they needed to reform, plus the mothers of the soldiers being injured and killed were not happy and started writing letters to everyone in the party they could (every letter has to be responded to or the party apparatchik loses promotion in their end of year performance review.).

An important defeat I left out was the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese war, where Japan sunk the Russian navy, that partly spurred the 1905 revolution.

Russian soldiers are not happy with defeat, the nationalists will want to avenge that and organise the economy accordingly, there is no significant political opposition within the Russian federation, though they may sense an opportunity, they always have to compromise with the system.

• Most of that landmass is sparsely populated tundra that the Russians managed to grab because very few people live there. Their population is dwarfed by Western Europe, with most living within the Western population centers
• The Russian economy was tied into the international supply chain and was driven heavily by the sale of fuel. Both have effectively been denied to them and their actions are driving an earlier adoption of renewable alternatives, so you have the Russians effectively shooting themselves in the foot in the long term. What's more, those resources are worthless unless you can maintain the equipment to extract them, which will get increasingly more difficult for them as time goes on.
• Supporting Ukraine is likely boosting Biden ahead of the mid-terms and may be helping undo the damage of the Kabul withdrawal. Politically, he will be investing in keeping this going to hopefully an eventual win.
• Mobilizing a million more poorly trained & armed conscripts and then pouring them into Ukraine would make Pickett's Charge look like a silly playground run-about. Numbers won't help them unless they have a solution for the quality of their armed forces.
• The T-13 Armata...of which I believe there are / were 12 working examples, of which at least one needed tractor assistance to complete a parade? The tank that now can't be produced in numbers because it needs parts from countries that santion Russian? That T-13 Armata?

The Russians have limited resources, people, money and above all time. They'll run out of one or several of these and will be physically unable to wage any kind of warfare for much longer. That is how the world works.

,🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Another Comedian the gas pipe will be turned on within weeks

Sometimes, rather than argue directly against a point you disagree with (aka 'banging your head against a wall'), it can be more effective to take those points and present them as your own in an exaggerated form, in order to highlight the ridiculousness of the counter proposition. There's probably a formal English term for it, but I didn't pay that much attention in class 🙂

Not going to happen.

If Russia wants revenge, they'd be fools to seek it militarily. It's not as if Russia were to retreat from Ukraine that the Ukrainians would high five each other and then sit on their hands until Russia tried to invade again - Ukraine would obviously use that time to complete the modernisation of its military with help from NATO, to build defences against invasion, or possibly even just join NATO altogether. The time to invade Ukraine would have been 2014, when it had little on the military capability it currently enjoys.