United States - Preparing for a Crisis War

[Reality Check]

Such explosions are known, predictable, near immediate responses to the actions you must knowingly decide to take...

The main differences I see that inform your opinion versus the other posters who believe nuclear weapons will be used in an all out manner are:
You believe the decision making process will be logical, based on accurate information, and not accident prone.
The other posters believe the decision making process will be illogical, panic driven, based on inaccurate information, and accident prone.
As I see it, that's a Generational Dynamics question mostly, which is why I originally said I don't have much to add to this discussion except for how it relates to the process of financial destruction, which in crisis periods is also a process driven by these same attributes. As you and I have pointed out, though, the fact that it is driven by these same attributes does not make it exactly the same due to the time factor. But when a decision making process is driven by the crisis era process, the time factor may not be the key factor.

One last comment. Back in 2005, John was saying there would be a crisis war and nuclear weapons would be used (same thing he is saying now). I told him I didn't think there would be a nuclear war and gave my reasons (they had to do with historical cycles). I've changed my mind since then. The reason I have is because I've been watching the total ass clowns in the US leadership "respond" to the financial crisis. Back in 2005, I could not have written a more horrific fictional financial horror story than what I see going on right in front of us.

I believe the agreements, and disagreements, come down to this:

Everyone agrees there is at least a 50% chance nuclear weapons will be used.

But I simply disagree that it is likely they will be used in such a way that virtually guarantees the immediate extinction of the people, and their families, who have to knowingly decide to use them in that way. Strategic nuclear weapons, when used as strategic weapons are unique. They immediately destroy the elites, and the military, who elect to use them that way. ( This is only true if the enemy is a major strategic nuclear power as well. ) And, believe me, the military makes darn sure the elites know this.

Generational dynamics is about kicking the can down the road and avoiding making the tough decisions. Deciding to take an action that will ( or even if you believe it only might ) immediately destroy yourself and your family is not kicking the can down the road.

[John]

> I believe the agreements, and disagreements, come down to this:

> Everyone agrees there is at least a 50% chance nuclear weapons
> will be used.

> But I simply disagree that it is likely they will be used in such
> a way that virtually guarantees the immediate extinction of the
> people, and their families, who have to knowingly decide to use
> them in that way. Strategic nuclear weapons, when used as
> strategic weapons are unique. They immediately destroy the
> elites, and the military, who elect to use them that way. ( This
> is only true if the enemy is a major strategic nuclear power as
> well. ) And, believe me, the military makes darn sure the elites
> know this.

> Generational dynamics is about kicking the can down the road and
> avoiding making the tough decisions. Deciding to take an action
> that will ( or even if you believe it only might ) immediately
> destroy yourself and your family is not kicking the can down the
> road.

Higgie is absolutely correct on this. GD is certainly not about
kicking the can down the road at all times. There is a lot of
can-kicking during the Unraveling period and the post-Unraveling
period (the period that precedes the Regeneracy).

Once the regeneracy occurs, can-kicking ends, and the crisis momentum
increases. One red line after another is crossed with each action by
one side bringing an even greater action by the other side. It's not
a matter of thinking about "destroying yourself." It's about each
side being convinced that it will be destroyed by the other side
because the other side will stop at nothing, and so both sides stop at
nothing. This continues until one side or the other is forced to
surrender, and the crisis climax occurs. After it's all over, the
recriminations begin, and we hear things like, "There was no need to
drop the bomb on Japan, because Japan was going to surrender anyway."
People say things like that after it's all over, but in the midst of
the crisis, nothing is barred.

The fact that every nuclear weapon in the world will be used does not
mean the "immediate extinction" of the people. Each nuclear weapon
kills people only in the range of 5-10 miles from the point of impact.
(Some people have disagreed with this, but even if it's 20 miles, that
won't change the point.) I've estimated that the world war will kill
some 3 billion people, leaving 4 billion people to carry on.

[Reality Check]

The fact that every nuclear weapon in the world will be used does not
mean the "immediate extinction" of the people. Each nuclear weapon
kills people only in the range of 5-10 miles from the point of impact.
(Some people have disagreed with this, but even if it's 20 miles, that
won't change the point.) I've estimated that the world war will kill
some 3 billion people, leaving 4 billion people to carry on.

I did not say, and I do not believe, anything along the lines of nuclear weapons will kill all the people.

My point is, and remains, the use of strategic nuclear weapons, as strategic weapons, targets the elites first, and everyone else later.

It is one thing for the elites to send other peoples sons and daughters off to risk death in a conventional war.

It is very different to initiate a process that within minutes will result in the things you value most: instruments of power, instruments of wealth production, instruments of distribution and communication, and your families ability to live, being destroyed. In non-strategic war it is the sons and daughters of the farmers and the hillbillies who are sent off to die. In strategic war with thermal nuclear weapons it is the centers of transportation, communications, economic power, political power and, almost as an after thought, large military bases that are targeted and destroyed first.

The communist Chinese elites fear losing control over their own people more than anything else. Centralized power is what maintains that. Centralized power is the first thing to go in a strategic war with thermal nuclear weapons. Remove the Chinese communist elites control over transportation, communications, economics and security and what do they have left ?

Elites live near population centers. People near populations centers are dependent on transportation hubs to deliver food, water, medical supplies etc.

Destroy the transportation hubs and all the rolling stock and tons of shipping ( rail cars, trucks, river barges, ocean going transport ships ) located there at the time of the attack and the ability to deliver food and other goods within a country is destroyed.

The blast radius of a thermal nuclear weapon has very little to do with how many people are killed. It is the selective destruction of the centralized infrastructure of a country that is required to keep a none agrarian society alive that determines how many live or die.

My point is, and remains, the very small number of people, the nuclear weapons elite, know very well what will happen in a strategic nuclear war.

And I do not agree they will go there out of fear, miscalculation or accident. Fear is a very powerful motivator, and in this very special case, it will work to accomplish just the opposite result of the one you suggest.

[Reality Check]

Two interesting studies were done during the 1980s when the United States Department of Defense was being revitalized.

One of these studies was an automated simulation of the United States mobilization that occurred during World War II.

The other was a federally mandated update to the Civil Defense plans of each metropolitan area.

Many local areas used a new and modern Civil Defense planning strategy to save time and money. The Civil Defense plans of the 1950s and 1960s were built around the shelter in place concept. The "new and modern" planning method called for populations to be relocated from "risky metropolitan" areas to "safe metropolitan areas". This re-location strategy avoided the need to update existing shelters and build more shelters to accommodate increased populations. The results of these local plans, when aggregated at the national level, were very interesting.

One simple example illustrates the most interesting key points. In the state of Washington there are two small cities that are near the east-west center of the state. One is located in the southern part of the state. The other in the northern part of the state.

The small southern city, Yakima, had previously been informed it was a key communications hub and a key railroad hub of the United States and was therefore a strategic target. Yakima planned to re-locate it's population to a small sleepy city in the northern part of the state known mostly as an agricultural center.

The small northern city, Wenatchee, had previously been informed it was a key communication hub and a key railroad hub of the United States and was therefore a strategic target. Wenatchee planned to re-locate it's population to a small sleepy city in the southern part of the state known mostly as an agricultural center. Of course the people of Yakima were planning to move to Wenatchee and the people of Wenatchee were planning to move to Yakima.

Virtually every rail road and almost every highway in the state of Washington passes through the eastern Washington cities of Yakima, Wenatchee, Spokane, or the inland ports of Pasco, WA or Lewiston, Idaho. Virtually all distribution centers in the eastern part of the state are collocated within one of those transportation hubs. Without the transportation infrastructure of those cities the eastern two thirds of the state that is rural farmland can not deliver food to the one fifth of the state that is urban, high density population centers and sea ports, on the west side of a major mountain range. All the towns and cities of eastern Washington state are also dependent on the distribution centers located in those five eastern Washington transportation hubs. Geography, history and economics dictate the location of these key infrastructures. The huge concentration of population on the west side of the state which was not killed when a strategic nuclear strike destroyed the sea ports, the centralized water and power infrastructure, and other key strategic targets on the west side, would starve to death while entertaining themselves fighting over the ever diminishing, limited food supply not destroyed when the west-side distribution centers were destroyed along with the sea ports and other west-side transportation hubs.

The other study was an automated attempt to duplicate the mobilization of the United States that occurred during World War II.

During the 1970s various U.S. military commands developed automated systems to plan, schedule, implement, and monitor, in real time, the movement of material, supplies and personnel needed as part of military exercises to test the ability of the United States to reinforce the defense of some part of Europe or some part of Asia. These automated systems were not fully integrated with each other, so, for instance the Airlift automated system did not know what parts of the United States civilian transportation system the Sea-Lift automated system was planning on using, and the Army Logistics automated system was equally blind. Individual exercises were also very limited in scope and duration compared to a full blown mobilization.

The World War II simulation tied these automated systems together and attempted to duplicate what actually happened during World War II.

Multiple attempts at doing this failed. The automated systems, when tied together, reported that the civilian transportation systems created plans that simply did not work in the real world. The same problem existed if the civilian transportation system that existed in the 1980s was used for the simulation.

The old men who, as young men, had actually accomplished the mobilization in the 1940s were then located and brought in as consultants. These veterans were very impressed with the automated systems and suggested it would have been much easier if they had them available in the 1940s. It was then pointed out to them that the automated systems did not work. They strongly disagreed. They said the systems were reporting exactly what they found to be true in the early 1940s.

The problem was that thousands of transportation managers in the 1940s, and all of the automated systems in the 1980s were using the rail capacities of the individual rail lines used in the civilian sector for planing. In fact multiple rail lines use the same transportation loading and unloading infrastructure at key choke points at ports and inland rail hubs where all the rail lines pass through the same transportation hubs. The entire U.S. transportation system must be managed, balanced, and fine tuned as a single transportation system based on the limitations of these shared infrastructure choke points.

The United States strategic war plans are based on the lessons learned during World War II conventional strategic bombing campaigns. The United States knows how to utterly destroy an industrial society by utterly destroying hundreds of key infrastructure sites that the entire non-agrarian portion of the society is dependent on for their very existence. Thousands of strategic thermonuclear weapons deliverable by ballistic missile, or cruise missile, simply allows the United States to do this in hours, not the months or years that would have been required in World War II.

To spell it out the vast majority of the population in an industrial society resides very near the urban population centers. If the transportation system that delivers food to these people is utterly destroyed, then they die. It has nothing to do with blast radius or which direction the wind blows from the blast craters.

These United States strategic war plans have existed for over 40 years. The Chinese have stolen both the U.S. strategic thermal nuclear weapons designs and the U.S. strategic war plans. The Chinese leaders know very well what would happen to their industrial society, their political power, and their families if they initiated a Strategic Nuclear War with the United States.

The United States leaders also know what would happen if hundreds of Chinese strategic thermal nuclear weapons, properly targeted, were detonated in the United States.

Fear is as good a motivator as greed.

[Higgenbotham]

Russia is believed to have a network of closed cities that were built based on the idea that a nuclear war is winnable, or survivable, I'm not really sure which is more accurate. I'm not sure if that is current thinking or not and have read many conflicting ideas over time, but my best guess is that it is not. One of the proponents of the idea that a nuclear war was never abandoned at all by the Russians is JR Nyquist, and he quotes various defectors to support that claim. My tendency has been to take what Gorbachev said in "Turning Point at Chernobyl" at face value as current thinking but to also bear in mind that current thinking can change quickly in crisis situations. From what I can gather, the information about closed cities has gone from being almost secret shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to being more out in the open now. Apparently, only part of the former Krasnoyarsk 26 is "subterranean". At one time, I was under the impression that the entire city was underground and housed its entire population of about 100,000 underground for the purpose of surviving a nuclear war. It seems like the belief was that, as housed, the scientists and other personnel would have still been able to carry on in that event.

Moscow's Secret Plans
By James Carney/Moscow Monday, Aug. 10, 1992

Unlike in the U.S., preparations for nuclear conflict during the cold war remain tightly held secrets in Russia, a reflection of the military's continued suspicion of the West. But some information can be pieced together. According to several sources, including former KGB officers, the Kremlin and other key buildings in Moscow are still linked by underground rail tunnels to an area about six miles outside the city center called Ramenki, site of a vast subterranean bunker designed for the country's leaders and their families. (Responsibility for protection of top Kremlin officials rested with the KGB's Ninth Directorate, which delegated tasks...

To read the entire article, you must be a TIME subscriber.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... z22MILuy2o

The subterranean complex at the other end of a three-mile-long tunnel is a cavernous, multi-story honeycomb of nuclear reactors, plutonium laboratories, cafeterias and workshops -- some 3,500 rooms in all.

It is the mountain that persuaded Stalin and Lavrenti P. Beria, his secret police chief, to build the complex in this remote stretch of Siberia. The peak, they calculated, would shelter the complex against an American nuclear strike, enabling the Soviet Union to produce bomb-grade plutonium after a nuclear war. The nearby Yenisei River, one of Siberia's mightiest, would cool the plutonium-generating reactors.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/18/world ... all&src=pm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheleznogo ... yarsk_Krai

[Higgenbotham]

Bunker busting around town
at 25/03/2010 21:58
Vladimir Kozlov

Ramenki bunker

Rumour has it that Moscow's biggest underground bunker is located some 10 km from the city centre, in the Ramenki neighbourhood, not far from the main building of the Moscow State University.

In the early 1990s, a Soviet newspaper quoted an anonymous KGB officer who claimed to have taken part in the construction of the Ramenki bunker, describing it as a fully functional underground city with an area of about 2 sq. km. Allegedly, the construction of the bunker began in the late 1960s and was completed in the mid-1970s.

The underground city was said to accommodate up to 15,000 people at the depth of between 180 and 200 metres and was connected by underground metro tunnels to the Kremlin and other key buildings.

The bunker reportedly had food supplies for 30 years and entertainment facilities, including movie theatres.

The Ramenki bunker caused some international resonance when a story on it appeared in Time magazine in 1992. Russian officials, however, never admitted the existence of the bunker, nor have they provided any comments.

So, it remains unclear whether the bunker actually existed and if so, what is happening there at present.

One argument in favour of the idea that the bunker actually exists was information made public about a fire in some underground structures near Prospekt Vernadskogo in December 2002 - no further details were available, however.

http://themoscownews.com/aroundmoscow/2 ... 25109.html

[Higgenbotham]

The creation of closed subterranean cities wasn't inconsistent with other Soviet systems, as described by Solzhenitsyn:

And the Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the
pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though
scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psycho-
logical sense, fused into a continent — an almost invisible, almost
imperceptible country inhabited by the zek people.

And this Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other
country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork,
cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets. Yet there were
many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many
others who had heard something vague. And only those who had
been there knew the whole truth.