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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I’ll also just add that the Russian claims that Satan 2 is “invincible” are laughable at best, and their new doomsday weapons are all vaporware. A nuclear exchange would not go in their favor.
A nuclear exchange between Russia and the US would still be absolutely devastating for life on Earth, but that’s been the case for decades now.
In its heaviest configuration Satan 2 can carry 15 350kt warheads. I’d say at best it could probably destroy 5-10 midsize cities in a single go. You’d need a bomb 2500 times more powerful than the Tsar Bomba to destroy all of the US in one blast.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 31st 2019 at 11:26:42 AM
They should have sent a poet.
There is no viable defense against a full-scale attack by Russia. Our missile defenses are more for rogue states like North Korea than for WW3.
During a full-scale nuclear exchange we might try to shield a handful of critical sites with our defenses, but they’re not going to make any real difference in terms of casualties and damage to infrastructure.
Edited by archonspeaks on Feb 1st 2019 at 4:13:07 AM
They should have sent a poet.Yeah. If the nukes fly, deciding which side won the moral argument is an exercise that will only be of interest to future cockroach historians.
Edited by Fighteer on Feb 1st 2019 at 7:16:46 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Pretty much, and it's compounded by the fact that no one really wants to develop a counter to a full scale nuclear release, because it ironicly makes one more likely to happen.
As it stands the world is in a state of peaceful equilibrium, you tip the scales too much by removing weight from the other side and well...
So they just don't touch it, content to leave well enough alone.
Though it is worth mentioning rouge states like North Korea are different mater since your talking a completely different scale... a dozen vs tens of thousands.
Edited by Imca on Feb 1st 2019 at 4:30:06 AM
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I mean, I don’t think a full scale nuclear exchange would actually kill every human on Earth. There would definitely be people around after, and there would probably even be enough Americans and Russians left for the “winner” to be a subject of interest.
It most certainly would not be fun, though. It’d probably be the single largest loss of life in human history, and there would be suffering on a massive scale afterwards. The US and Russia would also probably both cease to exist as functional political entities.
Edited by archonspeaks on Feb 1st 2019 at 4:29:47 AM
They should have sent a poet.Senator Cory Booker announces presidential run.
Pretty sure even with some hypothetical weapon 2500 times as strong as the Tsar Bomba you couldn't do it.
The whole point of those tests was to see if weapons of that size were practical and they concluded that most of the energy in a blast that large is wasted and just directed upward into the sky.
Oh really when?Cory Booker has officially entered the presidential field
Booker made his announcement via an email and video to supporters, and he had interviews scheduled throughout the day.
“The history of our nation is defined by collective action; by interwoven destinies of slaves and abolitionists; of those born here and those who chose America as home; of those who took up arms to defend our country, and those who linked arms to challenge and change it,” Booker said in his video, which made repeated references to Trump and his actions as president.
“I believe that we can build a country where no one is forgotten, no one is left behind; where parents can put food on the table; where there are good paying jobs with good benefits in every neighborhood; where our criminal justice system keeps us safe, instead of shuffling more children into cages and coffins; where we see the faces of our leaders on television and feel pride, not shame,” he said.
Booker joined a race already occupied by three other senators — Kamala D. Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — as well as several other candidates.
His decision did not come as a surprise. Booker has been traveling to early-voting states for months, teasing his eventual entrance. On the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday last month, he visited South Carolina, the first of the early-voting states in which black voters dominate.
...
Booker, 49, has been looked at as a potential presidential contender for most of his political life. In 2002, when he made his first, unsuccessful bid for mayor of Newark, he was followed by reporters and documentary crews; a chronicle of the campaign, “Street Fight,” was nominated for an Academy Award. Four years later, Booker ran again and won by a landslide.
From City Hall, Booker became one of the country’s best-known mayors, leveraging his fame into attention and lucrative investments for Newark. Months after taking office, the book-on-tape start-up Audible moved its headquarters to Newark. Months after Booker won a second term, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg plowed $100 million into a fund to improve the city’s schools.
The mayor found plenty of critics, who argued that his effervescent Twitter presence and willingness to visit constituents at their homes masked persistent problems with public services. In 2012, Booker angered liberals by criticizing President Barack Obama’s attacks on Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, saying that painting Wall Street with “broad brushes” was unfair to “the good people who work there.”
...
After winning a full term in 2014, Booker began to make moves on the left. He broke with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) to back Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, and helped protect states that had legalized medical marijuana. In 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) quietly vetted Booker as a potential running mate. In 2017, Booker endorsed Sanders’s Medicare-for-all heath-care plan, as well as legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Despite that, Booker has been viewed skeptically by his party’s left, and been ridiculed by conservatives who say his image has been carefully manufactured.
...
In his announcement video, Booker talked of his upbringing in New Jersey, one that he noted distinguishes him from the rest of the Senate — as well as his competitors in the presidential race.
“When I was a baby, my parents tried to move us into a neighborhood with great public schools, but Realtors wouldn’t sell us a home because of the color of our skin,” he said. “A group of white lawyers, who had watched the courage of civil rights activists, were inspired to help black families in their own community, including mine. And they changed the course of my entire life. Because in America, courage is contagious.
“My Dad told me, ‘Boy, never forget where you came from, or how many people had to sacrifice to get you where you are.’ ”
I've been expecting this for awhile, and think it's likely that Booker will be strong candidate.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |Check out my post right above yours, I copied a lot of details from a WaPo article.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |![]()
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That’s sort of a purely theoretical figure. Based on the size of the blast from the Tsar Bomba a weapon 2500 times larger would create a blast that would blanket the whole continental US. A lot of that energy is lost into the atmosphere though.
During the Cold War the US conceptualized a weapon called the “backyard bomb”. This was the ideal weapon, a bomb so powerful that you could set it off in your backyard and it would kill everyone on Earth. The idea was that since the weapon would be impossible to deflect or even prevent from being detonated, it would be the perfect MAD weapon.
Edited by archonspeaks on Feb 1st 2019 at 5:12:07 AM
They should have sent a poet.A hypothetical "biosphere killer" weapon would work in one of two ways:
- Release so much energy in an instant that it literally ignites the atmosphere, initiating a global firestorm that scours all life from the surface. The science behind this is dubious.
- Throw up so much dust, dirt, etc. into the atmosphere that it initiates a runaway global cooling cycle, aka "nuclear winter", for enough time to kill off most higher life.
The energy required to do either of those things is way beyond any single munition we've ever built, as far as I know.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"They have set up a system which will allow trade with the Iran without the need to go through US banks:
It's not a complete solution because a lot of companies will still be reluctant to get hit by sanctions by the US, but at least the smaller and medium-sized companies now have a chance to use the opportunity to trade. Plus, the Iran was really running out of important medicines. It was high time to do something about it. This way, at the very least it will be possible to deliver the basics.
Ironically the UK actually helped to set up the payment system.
Trump actually ran for President the first time in his career when he ran against Pat Buchanan in the 1st Bush Presidential Election. There was a fear that Ross Perot was the reason why Bill Clinton won against George H.W. Bush and that if Buchanan ran on the same ticket as Bush then Al Gore would have won.
Trump was told to do this by Roger Stone in order to utterly derail Buchanan's plans and turn the entirety of his run into a circus (which he did). It resulted in .5% of the vote going to Pat versus 19% of Perot and destroyed the Reform Party.
Trump was also told, according to Stone and that's a bit like trusting the Riddler, that this was a good way of understanding how campaigning worked without risking any actual political capital.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 1st 2019 at 5:55:25 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.> Out of interest, do people run for President just for exposure/experience? Or any other motive other than actually trying to win the thing?
They do it because it's a huge gamble and they've got a hunch they could win,you don't generally run unless you've already got a lot of exposure already and a full bank account
have a listen and have a link to my discord server

I don't mean to be pedantic here, but that link on the Satan 2 also doesn't say anything about destroying all of North America in one blast. It says the Satan 2 can carry up to 8 megatons in warheads, which is still less than 20% the power of the Tsar Bomba, which would at most destroy a city.
Yes, there's reason to be concerned, but there's no call to be making wildly inaccurate doomsday predictions.
It's been fun.