The transition

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I am in no way condoning Trump's foreign interventions and assassinations. That is all part of the insider trading market manipulation for personal gain. The new youth accounts are just to bring more public funds into markets for insiders to steal.
 
Anyway, its a difficult situation and no one wants to back down.
Ukraine will be paying for this war for a hundred years and lose all its mineral rights for 50.
18% of civilian housing has been destroyed alone.
 
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LandoftheGiants said:
Oh dear oh dear... Why do you insist on spinning things away from the obvious reality. I was talking about the Japanese attacks on Americans, not what happened in China or anywhere else. I couldn't give a FF that they were nuked, but the fact remains that they were innocent civilians. Now Japan is you're allie and China the threat, try to keep up ok.

As for Australia "being irrelevant" You're delusional superiority is duly noted, and you're on the ignore list.
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Ignorant..
They attempted several times to attack the US... Including bombs tethered to hot air balloons... Very military specific targets I'm sure. The only thing that stopped them was logistics. And if you don't think they would have treated us, the enemy the same as the Chinese you're proving my previous statement.
 
LandoftheGiants said:
This thread has turned into a US flag waving party
I'll leave you all to it. Bye.
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Mr. Coffee said:
Probably the best way to get out of this war would be to withdraw to the 2014 borders and call it a day.

The reality is that Russia has zero good options when it comes to using nukes and using a nuclear weapon won't improve their situation.

First off, China has made it abundantly clear that Russia must not do that. Since the Rushka economy is largely propped up by China at this point they get a vote.

Second, most likely Russia would deliver such weapons with medium-range ballistic missiles like the Iskander. The Ukrainians have a very modest ability to shoot such missiles down. So Russia would have to launch multiple weapons to have a high chance of achieving anything at all. And because they would have to launch multiple weapons at once with relatively little clue about how many would actually reach their targets and detonate, that makes it impossible to go for any precisely calibrated political or diplomatic effects (see below).

Third, tactically you'd need a lot of weapons to achieve significant effects. In the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War the Pentagon estimated that they would need between 50 and 200 tactical nukes to "significantly degrade" Saddam's Army. In Ukraine in 2026 with modern realities you'd need many more than that.

Fourth, any use of nuclear weapons will degrade the effectiveness of Russia's nuclear deterrent. Partly for the simple reason that every weapon you use against Ukraine is one weapon that can't be used against anyone else in a future war. But the bigger reason is that it will give everyone else precise information about the reliability and effectiveness of Russia's arsenal -- which would be fine if it proved to be very reliable and effective.

I think the risk of very negative responses from Europe and China go up rapidly as more nuclear weapons are used. If only because the winds will blow the fallout right into Europe and that is likely to piss them off. Extremely. On the other side of it if they launch just one as a demonstration and it is either a dud or is shot down, they get 100 percent of the negative consequences and none of the "positive" consequences.

You might wonder why I think I know anything about this topic at all. Well, the fact of the matter is that no living human has any practical experience with using nuclear weapons in a war. What we all rely upon is book learning, mostly from the 1950s with only inconsistent and minor changes since then. I've read enough of the books to be pretty confident that I know as much as most politicians in the chain of command do, if only because most of them are too busy to read this garbage.
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So now it is Russia having "no good options" instead of no options. I see what you did there. "Good" is subjective. Good today could be disaster tomorrow.

Your points above have a lot of merit, especially where you say that if Russia chose a nuclear response and it failed, that would be a tactical disaster. That's true, but who says that they would use 1960's nuclear warheads? Russia was one of the first countries to use hypersonic weapons. How do you know that Russia does not have a hypersonic version of a nuclear, biologic, or an unknown hypersonic threat that nobody but Russia knows about? Because you don't. Hypersonics are generally impervious to missile defense systems like the Patriot and THAAD. You don't even need missiles, though, and you don't have to end it in a day. A constant trickle of Russian infiltrators deploying suicidal packages of mass destruction day after day would escalate this conflict to some kind of conclusion. Russia has the means to do all of this.

China has a say mainly because they buy their energy and weapons. However, China's economy is highly dependent on Russian energy. They will tread lightly, especially with the current state of Middle East energy transportation.
 
Hasn't this run its course? Nobody posting here is even qualified to Monday morning quarterback the Ukraine war. And, of course, the Ukraine war has nothing to do with the transition to electric vehicles. This just seems like an opportunity for people to vent their political frustrations, which nobody wants to read about.
 
Oil prices are relevant as are economics. We are also seeing another transition. (I started transitioning myself.) That is for small, inexpensive battery powered vehicles to take out large expensive ones. Ukraine used a small cheap drone to attack an Iranian ship bringing war supplies to Russia. That is an innovative transition.
 
RunForTheHills said:
Hasn't this run its course? Nobody posting here is even qualified to Monday morning quarterback the Ukraine war. And, of course, the Ukraine war has nothing to do with the transition to electric vehicles. This just seems like an opportunity for people to vent their political frustrations, which nobody wants to read about.
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This thread has been going on for three years. Topic drift is inevitable in that time frame. This thread hasn't even reached the Godwin Point yet.
 
stompandgo said:
Your points above have a lot of merit, especially where you say that if Russia chose a nuclear response and it failed, that would be a tactical disaster. That's true, but who says that they would use 1960's nuclear warheads? Russia was one of the first countries to use hypersonic weapons. How do you know that Russia does not have a hypersonic version of a nuclear, biologic, or an unknown hypersonic threat that nobody but Russia knows about? Because you don't. Hypersonics are generally impervious to missile defense systems like the Patriot and THAAD. You don't even need missiles, though, and you don't have to end it in a day. A constant trickle of Russian infiltrators deploying suicidal packages of mass destruction day after day would escalate this conflict to some kind of conclusion. Russia has the means to do all of this.
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A couple of thoughts here.
  1. Existing hypersonic missiles are basically ballistic missiles with some limited capacity for terminal maneuvers and possibly a guidance system that will allow for terminal guidance. Good examples are the Chinese DF-21D and the Russian Avanguard.
  2. All of these weapons are ruinously expensive. Each missile costs about as much as a modern fighter jet and is comparably difficult to manufacture.
  3. They have correspondingly large supply chain footprints as well.
  4. They are very hard to test in secret in an era of satellite intelligence.
What I'd get out of that is that it would be hard to secretly develop such a gadget in the modern era.

The other thing is that, with very limited exceptions, Russia has proven unable to develop and deploy new weapon systems since the Cold War ended 35 years ago. So to a large extent they are dependent on ancient and largely obsolete weapons.

Your point about suicide squads with backpack nukes (which could never be carried in any backpack I'd want to wear) is well taken. On the other hand, the kinds of special operations troops that you'd give that kind of dirty job to have been decimated by four years of the Special Military Operation so I'd wonder about their ability to actually pull that off more than once or twice.

What is interesting about hypersonic weapons is that I think they are much more useful as a deterrent and a threat than they will be in actual combat. Part of that is their enormous expense (other methods would probably be more cost-effective). The other is that I am skeptical (because of physics) that you can actually reliably hit a moving ship that doesn't want to be hit with such a weapon. Mainly because the ability of such a weapon to maneuver very much at such speeds is incredibly limited, and also how you actually find your target with terminal guidance in a very short time window (probably only five seconds or so) is challenging because your missile is surrounded by plasma (caused by the hypersonic speeds) which limits how you can guide to the target -- plasma is opaque to optical, infrared, most radar, and also GPS signals.
 
RunForTheHills said:
It came close. WWII and Germany was discussed just a few posts ago...
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Yeah. I'd also argue that the war in Ukraine and the war with Iran are both resource wars and our inability to get off of fossil fuels makes wars like those inevitable.
 
Mr. Coffee said:
Yeah. I'd also argue that the war in Ukraine and the war with Iran are both resource wars and our inability to get off of fossil fuels makes wars like those inevitable.
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They are resource wars. But as we have seen recently with Iran and Saudi Arabia, agreements to build civilian nuclear facilities are also very political. Not that I believe Iran wants to enrich uranium for civilian power reactors.
 
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