Much of the "realist" discourse is about accepting Putin's victory, cuz it's *guaranteed*. But how do we know it is?
I'll argue that analysts 1) overrate Russian army 2) underrate Ukrainian one 3) misunderstand Russian strategy & political goals🧵
Posted on 09/30/2022 9:48:20 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
Putin using a battlefield nuke or two makes him look as STRONK man in Ruzzia. So a plus domestically, as he gets condemned worldwide.
The average Roooski admires stronk dominant leader. And if he flips off the rest of the world, then so much the better.
He is a fellow at the Kennan Institute of the Wilson Center. Probably can do better than that because others there tend to be naive and soft on Russia and he doesn’t fit in.
Putin using a battlefield nuke or two makes him look as STRONK man in Ruzzia. So a plus domestically, as he gets condemned worldwide.
The average Roooski admires stronk dominant leader. And if he flips off the rest of the world, then so much the better.
Russia has declared that nuclear weapons will be used.
This changes the game.
In short, if Russia deploys tactical nuclear weapons you will see either a total surrender of Ukraine and western powers, or total war to destroy Russia.
I have my own guess, but I may be wrong.
What is clear is that Russia is not able to push through the NATO supplied Ukrainian army like they thought.
Problem is, what happens 5-10 years down the road, when Russia learns from their mistakes?
Hope the weather in St Petes is good.
Russia is on fatal terrian. A war that was supposed to be over in a few weeks (one that I thought would be over by then), is dragging into the winter. Putin is has been claiming the right to take back the Baltic States, Poland, and Finland.
Europe is slowly awakening to the fact that the Russians are what Patton said they were, Mongols. Eventually, another world war will start to solve the issue one way or another.
Russia is 2-1 in such conflicts so far, but she has a much smaller and weaker infrastructure than those last three conflicts.
Denis Pushilin loses his city and his office to the Ukrainians within 24 hours of signing it over to Russia for protection... Ouch. That’s gotta hurt.
https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1576287584514236419?t=1zTwzBo2YOYdlGmZPTc1xA&s=19
But, Russians are used fighting wars in the winter and have tanks and equipment that allow them to do so effectively.
Meanwhile, whatever Ukraine has left is Western and in not effective in wet fall conditions or in winter.
Just the opposite -- they are slowing awakening to the fact that sanction war with Russia is destroying the economies. Many also realize their ally (us) has screwed them over by blowing up the Nord stream pipelines.
Many Europe countries are looking a potential depression, not just recession. And, there care helluva a lot more about that and this war's role in it than about the Russians.
You ever heard of the survivors of Nagazaki? Hiroshima? Chernobyle?
I was one of them,.
Yes, radiation kills, but it is not the end of everything as Climate Change type doom sayers make it out to be.
Tokyo is much more striving than Detroit.
Better take a bomb than being a slave of communists. A cursorial education in nuclear survival would teach you that instead of gullibly swallowing the media scaremongering of nuclear winter and spectacular special effects in movies.
This is why Chernobyl was more toxic than a detonation. Above 1 Mt the nuclear dust gets dispersed high in the troposphere. Chernobyle was a nuclear burn pit with low level spread of nuclear dust all over.
This dust which spread out tended to accumulate in concentrated form in snow melt water bassins. I directly drank very high dose of concentrated radio-water in the Alps. I got two days of radiation poisoning sickness followed by gland growth a few weeks later.
The thyroid being particularly hit, an immune attack on the thyroid fueled thyroid which fueled more metabolism further stimulating auto immune reaction. The result was that my body ate itself including the gland growth which them shrank.
Suffice to say I must still have strontium in my bone and still risk bone cancer eventually, not sure. It has been 30-40 years since then and I risked death without any treatment after significant exposure. I however survived a direct internal radioactive hit they no one would suffer if taking cursorial fallout contamination and ingestion after a nuclear exchange. Bombs do not pollute as much, let alone high megaton types. And the Nuclear Winter is a myth. These big bombs do not have the fall out drop back down on us, it spreads high stuck between the troposphere and higher layers much like Cyrus clouds.
The initial blast within a certain radius avoided, it is totally survivable. The only danger is the chaos resulting from lack of electricity and law enforcement. This is what kills a majority of the people, the disorganization, not the kinetic effects.
Australian study even noted that smoking is far more noxious and radioactive than a nuclear fallout, so much that in Australia cancer would be reduced due to lack of available tobacco.
*. I however survived a direct internal radioactive hit that no one would suffer if taking cursorial fallout contamination and ingestion precautions (dust mask and rain coat to wash after going outside) after a nuclear exchange. Bombs do not pollute as much, let alone high megaton types.
But, you still seem to be making excuses for only an in theater tactical nuclear weapon.
That would never be the end of a nuclear standoff. Once the cat is out of the bag again, all H3ll would break lose. One tactical nuke would bring on a total nuclear war with all strategic weapons launched to every target and your novel experience would seem like a common thyroid irradiation like my wife had done at the hospital.
You clearly don't understand what Nuclear Winter actually is. The nuclear dust from a few thousand nuclear blasts dispersing into the upper atmosphere preventing sunlight from reaching the ground is what causes a Nuclear Winter. That's not a myth. The death to plants from lack of sunlight and freezing cold for weeks on end will cause a tremendous amount of deaths from starvation, greatly surpassing the deaths from radiation.
I also wonder how the charged particles from the nuclear blasts will react with the ionosphere.
Nuclear winter is balderdash. Works by serious people on nuclear weapons such as Edward Teller explain it well. This was direct Soviet propaganda to push the green parties in Germany and Europe.
One volcano in 1816 caused the infamous "Year without a Summer!"
On April 5, 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano, started to rumble with activity. Over the following four months the volcano exploded - the largest volcanic explosion in recorded history. Many people close to the volcano lost their lives in the event. Mount Tambora ejected so much ash and aerosols into the atmosphere that the sky darkened and the Sun was blocked from view. The large particles spewed by the volcano fell to the ground nearby, covering towns with enough ash to collapse homes. There are reports that several feet of ash was floating on the ocean surface in the region. Ships had to plow through it to get from place to place.Spread your lies somewhere else. Edward Teller indeed.But the smaller particles spewed by the volcano were light enough to spread through the atmosphere over the following months and had a worldwide effect on climate. They made their way into the stratosphere, where they could distribute around the world more easily. Earth’s average global temperature dropped three degrees Celsius. The effect was temporary. Eventually, even the smallest particles of ash and aerosols released by the volcano fell out of the atmosphere, letting in the sunshine.
The Year Without a Summer had many impacts in Europe and North America. Crops were killed - either by frost or a lack of sunshine. This caused food to be scarce, and caused farmers who were able to grow crops to fear that they would be robbed. The lack of successful crops that summer made the food which was grown more valuable, and the price of food climbed. Because the price of oats increased, it was more expensive for people to feed their horses. Horses were the main method of transportation, so with expensive oats, the cost of travel increased. This may have been one of the factors that inspired a German man named Karl Drais to invent a way to get around without a horse: the bicycle.
Mount Tambora and the Year Without a Summer
Year Without a Summer (from wikipedia)
200 years ago, we endured a 'year without a summer' (from USATODAY)
Hint: if one volcano can do that, think what hundreds or thousands of 20 megaton nuclear bomb detonations would do.
The gloomy summer weather also inspired writers. During that summer-less summer, Mary Shelley, her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and poet Lord Byron were on vacation at Lake Geneva. While trapped indoors for days by constant rain and gloomy skies, the writers described the bleak, dark environment of the time in their own ways. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a horror novel set in an often stormy environment. Lord Byron wrote the poem Darkness, which begins, “I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’d.”
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