Declassified US nuclear targets – interactive map
futureoflife.org
futureoflife.org
Humans are crazy, seeing how we're speaking about a nuclear war now vs how people spoke about it in the 60s, it's like a mass psychosis, we don't care anymore, or maybe we're too dumb to think about the horrors of something before living through it.
Now bring in the downvotes because somehow what I said hurts your (allegiance to the flag since elementary school) sense of nat.. patriotism.
December 2020 there was to be a discussion on the matter in the UNSC but Germany and France refused it, which were actual guarantors of the peace plan.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.com/minsk-ceasefire-deal-full-text-agree...
[2] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/09/13/...
How did you divine this? Actually never mind: the OP is working off of either a quote from somewhere else (not the submission) or a mock-statement which is supposed to be said by people he/she disagrees with. What a confusing subthread.
The problem with the "anti-war" crowd right now, is many appear to be closet Putin supporters. Or at least they're so anti-American that they support Putin by default. It would help the anti-war people not in that camp to carefully disambiguate between wanting to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict -- a laudable goal -- and support for Putin's imperial aggression.
This is the eternal paradox of being anti-war: if you are advocating peace in a polarized situation you are essentially aiding and abetting the enemy. The anti-war movement really only has one window of opportunity: in a non- or low-polarized situation create strong trade ties, international agreements and intercultural understanding and hope that it can fetter the always active belligerents on all sides to a sufficient degree. When the polarization reaches a certain level (sufficient number of people killed or maimed on both sides and the killing frenzy rhetoric has taken hold) all we can do is go silent and watch as the world goes down in flames.
The most realistic hope is likely that there is a new window of opportunity to build on thereafter when the horrific memories of war are still live in memory.
But there is of course always a desperate, albeit likely unrealistic hope that people in charge will come to their senses before it is too late.
There is no such paradox. True patriots simply do not want their beloved countries to bloody their hands with the murder of foreign people. Not to mention with the total annihilation of the entire human race.
Of course those who are opposed to the war should protest. "People in charge" don't just come to their senses. Democratic societies especially have mechanisms in place to ensure that there's no need to wait for anyone to come to their senses. If elected leaders are abusing their power to murder and destroy, those elected leaders can be replaced, legally and democratically and without much fuss. That there is fuss is only the result of those people clinging to power and not wanting to let go. But the rest of us should fight to take power away from their hands. We should not let mad, bloodthirsty assholes keep power.
If you don't want your country to go to war, if you don't want your country to bomb foreign people, if you don't want your country to use its "nuclear deterrent" to start, or compound, a nuclear holocaust, then protest. Protest as if it was a very important thing, because it is a very damned important thing.
And btw, this applies to Russians also. You're forgetting, in your "paradox", that a Russian anti-war movement exists and that its people protest and don't give a dime about "paradoxes". And they're not even citizens of a democratic country that makes special space for such protests in its legislation. They're persecuted and beaten up and put into jail. But they protest because there is no other way.
I totally agree, people should protest. But they don't, exactly because of the age-old paradox mentioned, that you so emphatically deny. You underestimate the societal, psychological mechanisms in place, you underestimate the power of propaganda given to the military, even in democratic countries when "national security" is at stake, you underestimate the belief among large swathes of the population that "we can win this thing" and get rich doing it.
Of course I hope you are right, I'd love to be proven wrong. You are likely young and want to live a long and healthy life. I am old and with one foot in the grave anyway. But I do believe it gives me some clarity of vision, unobscured by wishful thinking.
But again, I hope you are right.
In the case of nuclear weapons on the other hand, it is about self-preservation because the blood-thirstiness and the willingness to take risks of the people who control nuclear weapons can doom us all to non-existence. Or, even worse, to a nightmare existence were we are worse than beasts in a world destroyed and incapable of sustaining life.
Even in Russia, all the people who protest the war are US supporters. It's incredible how much hate of one's own nation is the real cause underlying all those protests that are ostensibly for peace. It's as if people can't see the benefits of war for their own nation.
(yes, this comment is breaking the guideline against snark).
Not everything is a binary choice, and it gets tiresome to prefix every Internet comment with a whole paragraph of disclaimers.
The "anti-war" crowd questions the Western provocations and meddling since the orange revolutions by Nuland etc. It questions the erasure of history since at least 1995.
Mearsheimer, a West Point graduate, is certainly not a Putin supporter. Yet he is depicted as one by large parts of the Internet mob, who always have the correct flag selections in their Twitter "biographies".
People who repeat false Kremlin war justification propaganda are being tacitly pro-war. It's double speak to call this behavior anti-war. These are the people I was talking about.
Nuland discussing in a leaked call who should replace Yanukovych and mentioning the one person who was overwhelmingly favored by polls of Ukrainians just prior to Yanukovych's ousting, and would have won an election in a landslide, is not meddling. Her meeting with him, in view of public cameras, isn't meddling. Ukrainian politicans are allowed to meet officials from other countries.
- George Orwell
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/20274-pacifism-is-objective... this-is-elementary-common-sense-if
Stripped of that context and speaking generally, then I also disagree.
This word is often misused. Are you still worried about someone bringing it forth, now that you know what it means?
apocalypse (n.)
late 14c., "revelation, disclosure," from Church Latin apocalypsis "revelation," from Greek apokalyptein "uncover, disclose, reveal," from apo "off, away from" (see apo-) + kalyptein "to cover, conceal" (from PIE root *kel- (1) "to cover, conceal, save"). The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos' book "Apokalypsis" (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, "Apocalypse" c. 1230, and "Revelation" by Wyclif c. 1380).
https://www.etymonline.com/word/apocalypse#etymonline_v_1547...
If you want to be “smart” in your communication, being etymologically precise might not be what you want to do. If you use lower-h holocaust to describe nuclear <word for the end of the world as we know it> you are just inviting derailment of the conversation.
I would not say the word is being misused.
Armageddon (n.) "cataclysmic final conflict," 1811, figurative use of the place-name in Revelation xvi.16, the site of the great and final conflict, from Hebrew Har Megiddon "Mount of Megiddo," a city in central Palestine, site of important Israelite battles. (New Testament) the scene of the final battle between the kings of the Earth at the end of the world; Armageddon (n.) any catastrophically destructive battle;
the complete final destruction of the world, as described in the biblical book of Revelation. "the bell's ringing is supposed to usher in the Apocalypse"
2. an event involving destruction or damage on a catastrophic scale. "the apocalypse of World War II"
Meanings of words change over time.
Arguably, this is about the revealation that civil society is just a thin veneer painted to hide the depraved barbarity of the human condition.
I hope we never have to witness that again.
What I find inspiring is that billionaires like Musk are suddenly making moves to defuse the situation.
he is parroting russian propaganda word for word. (and russia is also quoting him)
What is your suggestion on how to handle the millions of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukranine? Ethnically cleanse them all?
> we put our guy at its head a couple years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Ukrainian_presidential_el... this is denying that ukraine has agency of its own. Nobody put a guy anywhere. He was elected.
> we will bring forth the apocalypse.
The only country that is threating 1st strike is Russia.
Note that I absolutely do not agree that anybody but Ukrainian people put Poroshenko there, just pointing out you're looking at the wrong elections to counter this narrative.
Whatever you think of Yanukovych and the people who followed him, the US getting so heavily involved in a country right on Russia's doorstep was a very risky move. There have been warnings from several prominent American foreign policy analysts about how this sort of action would prompt an extreme reaction from Russia. George Kennan, the father of the US' Cold War containment strategy, was extremely prescient, all the way back in 1998:
> "Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are - but this is just wrong. [...] This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end."[1]
If both Russia and the US continue to push maximalist positions, this conflict will just escalate and escalate, and nobody can say where it will end.
0. Recorded call from 2014 between high-level US State Department officials, in which they work out who should go in what position in the Ukrainian government: https://youtu.be/JoW75J5bnnE
1. George Kennan discussing NATO expansion in 1998: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/foreign-affairs-no...
2. He says "We will protect our land with all the forces and means at our disposal and will do everything to ensure the safe life of our people. This is the great liberation mission of our people." The key point here is "our land" - this includes the newly annexed oblasts "all the forces and means at our disposal" - this includes nuclear forces.
In other words he is saying that Russia can use nuclear forces to protect Donetsk / Luhansk / Crima from Ukraine.
now please send those 1000 bitcoins to UA: https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/#donate-army-crypto
Lavrov won't literally say "if the USA sends one more weapons shipment to Ukraine, we will drop a nuke on every Ukranian troop concentration we can find", because then they would look weak when it turns out they won't do it after all.
This is why all Russia's nuclear threats are veiled and implied. But make no mistake, they are there, and the message one can read between the lines is put there intentionally. It might be an empty threat or it isn't, but a threat it certainly is.
There are certainly concrete and non-ambiguous threats made behind the scenes, making explicit what actions each party is willing to commit to, but those don't end up in the media.
Such as “escorting” warplanes away from borders or being caught spying on sensitive military installations/procedures.
No nuke, so far.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-24/full-tran...
> I would now like to say something very important for those who may be tempted to interfere in these developments from the outside. No matter who tries to stand in our way or all the more so create threats for our country and our people, they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history. No matter how the events unfold, we are ready. All the necessary decisions in this regard have been taken. I hope that my words will be heard.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69390
> They have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.
> I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/69465
> The United States is the only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons twice, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. And they created a precedent.
This map is very the reason why Putin's threats are empty threats. The US, UK and France have nukes pointed at every single major Russian city, and as far as I am aware, Putin cannot stop them if he were to decide to go that route.
There is nothing in what he has done so far that seems to suggest he is either crazy, suicidal, or doesn't care about his mark on history.
In fact, let's give every country in the world nuclear weapons. Then no-one will dare to attack anyone else and peace will reign everywhere.
Not whatever he wants. Some token prize that's big enough that he can protect his own ass domestically, but small enough that a re-run is obviously a bad idea.
The big downside is future dictators realize that nuclear blackmail is a get out of jail free card, which increases future wars and nuclear proliferation.
Let me guess: You live in the US.
For most people in the world, the situation is that the US, and possibly some neighboring regional power, can invade whenever they want; and at best we can offer limited initial resistance and guerilla/terrorist attack once they've occupied.
But "with food comes appetite": The US government has normalized, among its citizens, the presumption of military intervention where and when it likes. That is deplorable. What's worse, though, is that it can stretch the same trick as far as nuclear war. That is, most US'ers seem to be willing to risk the destruction of all humanity because " 'We' can't let the dictator-of-the-day invade this country we don't care about and can probably not even place on a map!"
Calling out the US-centered infobubble perception is not a personal attack, just a reminder your perspective might not be a universal one.
Yes, that's how it works with nuclear weapons. It's deeply unfair: international bullies can threaten other countries into doing whatever they like, even complete subjugation, just because they are nuclear-armed. Overwhelming power supports overwhelming injustice.
Back when nuclear weapons first became available, many people, famous scientists among them, pointed out the problems with them. And guess what? This is where we are today.
We currently see NATO provide very stern back-channel warnings against nuclear weapon use to Russia. This is deterrence, which again decreases the chance of nuclear weapon use.
Similarly, providing military support to countries that are invaded decreases the risk of future invasions all over the world, since it makes the cost that much higher for someone who wants to achieve their goals by military force.
We can all agree that the Iraq war was a terrible mistake, and that the United States has made many such mistakes. But the current support for Ukraine's self defense is a completely different sort of situation, and has little to do with allegiance to any particular country.
It does also support the USA's geopolitical interests as a side effect, which is why the US is so strongly involved, but the deterrence effect is the main reason it's important. It serves the same goal you're aiming towards -- long-term peace and trade, and ensuring nuclear weapons are never used.
Why was it a mistake? It’s unclear what “mistake” means.
Tbh killing a million civilians for oil isn't a mistake, a mistake is like when you make spelling mistakes or trip and fall because you miscalculated, killing a million civilians for oil is just a warcrime, then the US might go on and on about Japan not apologizing for Nanjing for example, or just do business with Saudi Arabia who stone (aka THROW STONES ON WOMEN UNTIL THEY DIE) or decapitate people for adultery or some other trivial thing, or even Israel and the textbook Apartheid they subjugate the Palestinians to.
I'm saying this because I just got tired of the current narrative of the US playing the good guys and Putin being the bad guy, all politicians are bad guys, and seeing how the USSR disolved on the basis that NATO would not expand further, and it still did and now it has missiles stationed in Poland, and then the west backs a coup that resulted in Zelenskyy's predecessor then in Zelenskyy, I don't understand how that would be different as say Mexico or Canada having their government toppled by a Russian backed gov.
And spare me the "nukes" are deterrent talk, a nuclear war can escalate in 1 hour and kill >99% of humans on the planet, I love my country and other European countries, but if you made me chose between losing a chunk of it or 99% of people in the world dying? Come on...
Often what people mean is indeed that US had good intentions but just went about realizing them in a stupid manner. But politics is so ideological that you kind of have to ask what they mean by their shorthands.
However, Saddam Hussein was a genocidal dictator. He openly persecuted ethnic groups which were resistant to his rule. The mistake of the US was not in the toppling of Hussein, but in not having a credible plan to deal with the following sectarian crisis, where a majority ethnic group which had been suppressed suddenly has power over the minority ethnic group which had previously been in power. (The responsibility for which violence falls jointly on the people of Iraq.) To put it another way, either a genocide or a bloody civil war was inevitable with the death of Saddam Hussein or his successor, and all the US did was move the timeline forward 30 years.
I know neoconservatism went out of fashion after Iraq, but the US-dominated system thrives on making everyone freer and the world more open, and it's a good thing. Coup or no coup, expansion of the US sphere of influence is good, and expansion of the Russian influence is bad, it's that simple in my view as an Eastern European (as it is on the eyes of the vast majority of people liberated from the Soviet/Russian world).
>we will bring forth the apocalypse
Your comment is pushing Russian lies about the 2014 revolution in Ukraine and the only one bringing apocalypse closer is Russia.
As a European with many Polish and Ukrainian friends and coworkers I'm happy that libertarian isolationist Americans only have a say on Hacker News and r/Conspiracy. The world would be a worse place if American libertarians had a say in foreign policy.
You weren't there and don't know how it all went but you feel free to call it a coup lol.
I was there, my college friends were. And we all went because there of the shit that was going on.
But it is too simple for conspirators so let's add some ruski propaganda and through in some coups and western puppeteers.
Is there really a substantial semantical difference, or is it purely a rhetorical way of using nicer words?
Cheap tactics. People will downvote you because you're saying lies and non-sense.
1. It's Russia started the genocidal war and it's Russia uses nuclear blackmail.
2. Ukrainian president was elected in 2019, no one appointed him.
3. Without nuclear deterrence Russia would already use nuclear strikes, because their army is good only in fighting unarmed civilians.
4. There is indeed a mass psychosis - in Russia. But "we" are normal people, we do care, and we are not dumb to see the threats.
I too believe there is some sort of mass psychosis going on. It started before Covid, but seems to have been massively compounded by it. It has its roots in a struggle for power, both national and individual. I think that people feel that their personal power has been taken away and that they have been oppressed through inequality and subjugation to authoritarian political policies. This has had the dual effect of creating a sense of hopelessness for their futures and the idea that there isn’t a future to live for.
I think that for many individuals, the war against Russia is a proxy for their own struggles for personal power. They want to see authoritarianism lose because of their own struggle against it. If it doesn’t, what is there for them to live for? They’re willing to sacrifice all for it.
To state that this 1956 target list "probably doesn't look dramatically different [from today's]" is one of the most moronic things I've read in a long time.
Also, it is surprisingly uplifting - I always assumed nukes would hit the city centre - especially since we have the government officials stationed here. But it looks like the only two targets were airports.
Living in East Germany I hope it does!
https://www.mil-airfields.de/deutschland/flugplatz-altenburg...
If you want to stop the production of nuclear warheads, you cripple the factories that make high pressure, special alloy cooling pipes for example.
Which is to say, it seems big on the "panic and horror" and low on actual information. I have no idea how to follow whether their conclusions seem reasonable or not.
Any arrangement that makes the number grow is worse than the others.
At the level of states, you have anarchy. This is the key insight of realism. There is no authority that places guardrails on how each state treats each other. So each state needs to arm themselves.
At the level of people, you do not have anarchy. You have police which acts as the hegemon.
On society level it's indeed a bit more complicated matter. Every additional gun in the society is potentially one more gun in the hands of a bad person.
> Glad I live in the very south of Australia.
"The Silent Spring" has always been poetic license when it comes to nuclear weapons. We could cause a civilizational setback on an unimaginable, possibly unrecoverable scale for the human race...but we couldn't make ourselves extinct that way (for one thing: kind of a lot of people in Africa and South America, land of nobody's nuclear target). But the long term effects would be a slightly increased incidence of cancer and birth defects across the globe, but more people will die in the resultant famine from the collapse of global food production then will die due to direct or indirect effects of nuclear weapons.
Make no mistake: it would be the end of the comfortable 1st world lifestyle we know, possibly for good. But humans have existed on this planet for tens of thousands of years in circumstances far worse then now, and we have endured and continued reproducing regardless.
If I remember correctly, he said that Russia’s plans assumed hitting Poland and East Germany as well, to make it impossible for western forces to march through our grounds. (Of course most nukes were still directed at the western countries).
Though, it seems it's completely OK for people who live the current day like Trump.
I really hope the US could be bothered in the meantime to clean up their target list though ;)
East Germany was soviet
As many as you can maintain, really.
The real problem was that Russia’s military plans didn’t exclude nuking Poland if it came to it. At least that’s what Kuklinski - our general from the period said.
>Ukraine was a part of Russia then. Just as a Pole I am not surprised a bunch of nukes was targetting my home country - we were a vassal state to Russia back then, so that was to be expected.
Wow! --the Stockholm Syndrome really is strong in Eastern Europe these days.
I don't really understand why the German/Soviet agreement was considered the start of world war II and not the other annexations and aggressions Germany did before that. There was also the Japanese Invasion of China that happened 2 years before that treaty and yet that doesn't seem to have any meaningful impact on WWII.
...which included an (at the time) secret protocol which divided Poland into German and Soviet 'spheres of influence' [1], and the Soviet Union promptly invaded Poland two weeks after Germany did (on the 17th September 1939) annexing the Eastern territories of Poland.
In Europe at least, the start of WW2 is usually placed at the 1st of September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland (this was also taught in East German schools btw, so it's not a 'Western" point of view - the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pact was conveniently left out of course).
Germany and the Soviet Union also had pretty close economic ties right up until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Commerci...
>Germany and the Soviet Union also had pretty close economic ties right up until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941
Point being: no-one comes out of WWII with an unblemished record.
(but further back, Ukraine was part of Russia for a longish period up until 1917)