^ That is kinda sorta obvious actually. In all seriousness, if WWIII happens, the death toll would be within the neighborhood of billions owing to liberal use of atomic weapons and nerve gases. In a week.
Anyone who knows what anime I am referring to here gets a cookie.
Support Taleworlds!When did WWII start?
Going by the definition of a world war (a war involving and spanning a large portion of the world) it was when the US joined the war (which is what most historical things say).
Realistically, it started when the world economy went to hell, ensuring Hitler's rise to power.
If you REALLY want to get specific, it started when humans came to be, which started a long line of events that lead to WWII.
I maintain it's a stretch to say that the harsh terms made upon Germany were to blame for World War II, more so that they started it. Hitler and his party just took advantage of the treaty of Versailles in propaganda and putting forward fascist ideology. That and the massive upheaval in Germany. The Kaiser resigned, leaving a massive gulf in the political system — Germans were not familiar with the new type of presidential democracy. It was a dangerous experiment.
The circumstances allowing for Nazi popularity were related to World War I but it's important to get the causation right.
edited 28th Jan '11 8:25:44 PM by Shichibukai
Requiem ~ September 2010 - October 2011 [Banned 4 Life]UC Gundam as you pointed out later. Ya shouldn't have revealed it so quickly as I wanted to be first. oh well, SIEG ZEON!
But, if feels so good. Also your av is funny given that post =P
Japan occupied Vichy France's colony and would have moved against British and Dutch possessions in South East Asia and moved to invade Australia eventually, and Australia would be cut off from any assistance from Britain or the USA.
Also, the Japanese fomenting Indian nationalism to get th subcontinent to break off or rebel......
EDIT: M Ajor Tom, how the HECK did you NOT get the UC Gundam reference dude -______-
edited 28th Jan '11 9:18:41 PM by BalloonFleet
WHASSUP....... ....with lolis!Um because there are other anime that may have possibly used similar themes :P
Traditional scholars state World War II starts with the Invasion of Poland and that everything prior to that was the primer that prepared the whole mess to blow.
edited 28th Jan '11 9:25:33 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?Then again, WWII mostly had to do with the Europeans. Had Japan not ticked the US off, the entire expedition of Japan into China and Southern Asia could have registered into the history book as "That ignoble opportunistic looter country who plundered the rest of the world while Europeans are too busy beating each others' brains out" rather than a part of the Second World War proper. After all, if the rest of the Allies did not quite declare open war on Japan after the Rape of Nanjing, it is highly unlikely they would have participated in the Far Eastern theater. Except for England, of course, who had their stake in the Pacific, and maybe, maybe France.
That Japan joined the Axis was, IMO, a huge mistake. Japan would not profit from any war in Europe in the first place. After all, any gains it might have had from this war would have been offsetted by the fact that, you know, there is like several thousand kilometer of pure, undiluted tundra called Siberia separating it from Europe proper.
(Be free to call Did Not Do The Research if you please - my understanding of WWII may not be as profound as I would have liked, since I am very much a Medieval person.)
edited 28th Jan '11 11:55:16 PM by ArgeusthePaladin
Support Taleworlds!Thing is not all Scholars of world war II are white or European. The fact of the matter is the ball really got rolling in Europe to begin with. Hitler is the nutjob who pushed for the rapid expansion of Germany as a world power again and even got involved in other nations wars to gain allies and train their forces for the war to come.
Who watches the watchmen?![]()
Japan was kind of desperate despite its successes in China. Its main oil supply had been cut off, but it still desired an empire. It did have something to gain from this sort of cooperation, military and technological and strategic.
edited 29th Jan '11 4:44:30 AM by Shichibukai
Requiem ~ September 2010 - October 2011 [Banned 4 Life]And for that it took the risk of trying to fight all the superpowers of the world save for Germany, at the same time. Things then unraveled exactly as we knew it.
I can't help but think that move is somewhat stupid.
Support Taleworlds!World War III will never happen, and theoractically if it did no one would use nuclear weapons. It's simply unrealistic to expect countries to, considering the US and Russia have much more then anyone else.
edited 29th Jan '11 2:07:12 PM by Erock
If you don't like a single Frank Ocean song, you have no soul.^ Then you have the fact the nuclear powers have been in war since acquiring the bomb some of them decent sized and yet they never nuked anyone.
It's pretty much a Discredited Trope to think World War III will be some kind of nuke-fest that's over in 40 minutes.
Yeah, it would take a while to fling stuff around. Not all the missiles are ready to fly at a moments notice.
Fight smart, not fair.Actually the vast majority of the missiles are kept in a ready state. They have fuel and control consoles connected. The bombers are another story. Any sub with missiles just has to go through their sequence to fire them.
There is a chance if there is a severe enough war that at least tactical level weapons may be used. If nukes are used they will likely not be in a we vape the world scenario but in a more tactical manner.
edited 29th Jan '11 2:53:50 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?@Argeus: The Japanese had good reasons to be optimistic. Germany was keeping the massive British navy in the Atlantic. France had been taken out of the equation. At the start, the Japanese did not have to fight the Soviets, in fact the neutrality pact may have freed up the Japanese to attack America. They thought that they could fight and win by crippling Pearl Harbour. The British were largely defeated in the fall of Singapore.
Like Germany, Japan had several initial successes - when it attacked Hawaii and British Indochina, it was in a position of opportunity to do so.
edited 29th Jan '11 2:58:34 PM by Shichibukai
Requiem ~ September 2010 - October 2011 [Banned 4 Life]I mean, attacking America. There seriously was no reason to attack Pearl harbor and provoke the States into war with them yet. Optimism being one thing, there is one principle in war that people often forget when victories get to their head - you don't want to fight a war of two or more opposite fronts at a time unless it is completely inevitable.
Support Taleworlds!
Again it was either declare war on the USA or let their [Japanese] empire collapse from a lack of oil. And that hurts the CITIZENRY of japan too.
I meant that when they began exchanges with ICBMS that they don't launch every nuke at the enemy cities AND military forces (total annihilation), they originally just try to take out the other sides' nuclear weapon silos and bases etc - and hope the other side acts the same keeping both from wiping each other cities' off. However, that might be more dead from a mid-long term scenario.
Well that works if the war starts as a 'conventional' war - e.g. during the Cold War the NATO and WARPAC ended up fighting over the Fulda Gap and North German Plain, and then NATO takes out the nukes as the Soviets approach the French border (didnt NATO say 'use tactical nukes if the Soviets got that close to the border?)
edited 29th Jan '11 5:15:22 PM by BalloonFleet
WHASSUP....... ....with lolis!Actually, a strike on the USA's missile silos would do more long term damage to the country than anti population strikes. Because of all the irradiated cropland thrown into the air.
Fight smart, not fair.
that's what I said. I'll cite the exact thing though
We haven't mentioned fall-out. The dreaded stuff that destroys humanity.Well, there's a reason for that; the device has only just been initiated, there isn't any fall-out yet. Fall out is caused (mostly) by debris from the ground being sucked into the fireball, irradiated and spewed out of the top. This radioactive plume coalesces in the atmosphere and falls back to earth. It's a mix of isotopes of varying half lives. The most vicious of these isotopes have short half lives and are gone in a few hours (usually before the fallout makes it back to the ground). The milder ones can hang around for millennia but their effects are tolerable (speaking relatively again). The really dangerous ones are those that have a half life of between 5 and 6 years - these are long-lived enough to be seriously contaminating and hot enough to be dangerous. The worst is cobalt). Now the blast and heat throw debris outwards, where does the debris sucked into the fireball come from? Answer is the crater scoured in the ground by the energy from the device that went into said ground. But hang on, we've just discovered the best way to knock a city down is to use an airburst that doesn't crater the ground. Doesn't that mean no fallout? That's right, airbursts are relatively clean from a fallout point of view. They do generate some fallout from atmospheric dust and water vapor and a bit more (some very nasty) comes from the debris of the device but not as much as legend holds. This is especially the case since modern devices are very clean indeed and the debris from their initiation is far less than from the older designs.
All this means that dropping a nuclear device on a city doesn't necessarily destroy it. In fact, an acquaintance of mine, Peter Laurie, used to start off his lecture on such things by suggesting that 1 megaton device dropped on London would do only trivial damage to the city. After the lynch mob had been brought under control, he'd put a pie cutter on a demographic map of London and prove the point. We touched on how limited the damage caused by a one megaton device initiated over the City of London would be in Part Two. To be fair,that includes people and property slightly damaged but repairable. The catch is that London wouldn't have been hit by one but by several (in fact four 350 kiloton and two 1 megaton weapons in one particular attack plan). This would still leave a substantial proportion of the population and a larger proportion of their assets intact.
The implication of all this is that despite being subject to concentrated attack, the A-country isn't totally destroyed (although its society is) and remains a storehouse of people and goods. As an institution a big city is not viable for a variety of reasons but that is a long way from saying its simply flat, black and glowing in the dark. Its quite possible (depending on the attack patterns) that the big cities may be relatively unscathed.
So what's been going on in the B-country. One attack pattern is to hit the nuclear weapons stationed out there. These are mostly silo-based missiles. The only way to destroy those is to explode a device directly on top of the silo and scour out of the ground. In other words, a ground burst. And they create huge amounts of fallout. This means that a counter-force strike is inherently much more dangerous to the survival of the population than a counter city strike. Weird isn't it? A counter-value strike attacking the population in their home cities gives them a reasonable chance of survival while a counter-force strike restricting the target plan to military targets and rejecting a deliberate attack on the cities radically decreases that chance of survival. It's a point we've seen happening over and over again - when dealing with nuclear weapons we often end up going places we never thought we would. Thats because the logic behind nuclear weapons use and the effects of that logic is often counter-intuitive. It also demands careful though and examination of reality, not preconceptions or postures. The B-country also gets hit by counter-city strikes but the dispersed nature of the population reduces their direct effects.
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_103.html
(there's 2 other parts, replace th '3' in 103 with '102' and '101' errr darn it ill link them)
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_102.html
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_101.html

World War II was the most devastating war the world has ever seen I hope we never see one like it again.
edited 28th Jan '11 7:24:57 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?