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Comment by tonymet | Hacker News Reader

I remember this coming up at the end of the USSR when Finland said that they didn’t want it.

Word was also spread around that it was polluted with nuclear crud etc so wasn’t worth taking back. The explanation that all the Finns had left 100 years ago makes more sense (though the nuclear pollution argument is sadly at least plausible - USSR was not particularly careful in that regard)

And also realistically we couldn't afford it. Not with trade with USSR being gone and Finland being in recession. And really, we have enough forest already, nothing too valuable in there anyway.

Maybe if they had their own RS-28 Sarmat weapons

How Finnish is Karelia still?

In that it has pine trees and lakes, very. Otherwise, not at all.

Effectively all finns left Karelia after the war. Those few who did not got moved to some shithole in Siberia by Stalin.

edit: This is what Stalin did to most non slav peoples in Russia close to any major/important city or resource. (in this case Saint Petersburg)

I don't think Russia has really made any efforts in Karelia, so it might basically look the same as when Finland lost it 80 years ago.

There are few. I have friends who go there a couple times a year to bring clothing and supplies.

Got any other shitty ideas that have basically zero upsides but almost infinite downsides? A nation of five million people and zero nukes starting an armed conflict with the biggest nuclear power in the world? And for what, a patch of land that basically no one thinks about?

Russia is big only in land area. It's not that big by any other metric. Definitely not the biggest nuclear superpower. Their tech is outdated and not maintained well. Their command, logistics and planning are chaos. Their usable resources are already nearly depleted.

I wouldn’t bet literally everybody’s life on that. They’ve had 30 years of fat oil revenues to rebuild capability.

Seems like they corrupted it away. The market won't innovate as well if it's not technological merit but money under a table that decides which company gets a defense deal, and when a considerable portion of that money is embezzled. And you can't get as much military resources built with these obstacles. Maintenance becomes non-existent, or done only for show. Etc.

Russian military is also brainwashed with their pseudo-scientific geopolitical propaganda, your army simply can't work well if it thinks that bullshit is true, just look at the idiotic "tactics" they're using right now.

Anyone have estimates on how many people Russia could kill in the worst case situation of a full scale launch? Would it be the extinction of humanity due to the nuclear holocaust that follows?

Worst case? I think it would be hard to guarantee actual extinction. Probably some people would survive. But most wouldn’t, and civilization as we know it would most certainly be over.

The question is if the nukes will even be able to get into air, travel to their targets, and correctly perform their function there. I'm increasingly sure it wouldn't work, these people are full of shit.

Also, I think the technological gap is now simply too large. The recon capabilities of today + various types of UAV and new kinds of manned aerial vehicles, coupled with new generations of weapon systems, could very well mean we would pluck the nukes from the sky mid-way.

Citation needed...

As far as I know, no country today has a viable anti-ballistic missile defense system that works well enough to stop even a small percentage of the number of nukes that would be triggered by a MAD style endgame. What technology are you talking about?

This seems like an incredibly bold assumption to roll the dice on, you know, given you’re talking about almost all life on Earth.

I’ve also never heard of a defence system that can pluck that many missiles out of the air. The closest I’ve heard of is the Iron Dome - which would not be able to stop what you’re talking about at all. I would think the nation that has that capability would make it known for geopolitical reasons.

While I agree that anti-missile technology is extraordinarily unlikely to be as effective as hoped for upthread, if it did exist at that level of capability, the owner may still wish to keep it a secret. If it becomes known that your enemy possesses the capability to neutralize your primary weapon, you are likely to take counter-counter-measures, which could undo the advantage.

All their other missiles have worked.....

I'm seeing tons of reports of preventable malfunctions of all their equipment. Damn it, their tanks are running out of fuel mid-way to battle!

Their bombs are rusted!!! What kind of operation are they running FFS? https://twitter.com/ukrpravda_news/status/149767369139567001...

Seems like the most likely course of their nuclear attack is, they blow up themselves because the doors rusted shut.

Even if 30% of their missiles fail, 70% still gets through. That's about a thousand nukes.

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