baybal2

Russia has around 1000 warhead maximum possible first launch capacity in the most optimistic scenario.

If Russia saves submarine second strike, it will be 800.

If Russia will chose to hold off land-based second strike, it goes to 550.

If Russia chose to reserve some of its most powerful ICBMs as a reserve for the "dire friend" China, I would give it to be 300 warheads.

If the nuclear command & control centre is destroyed by a pre-emptive strike, there will be no coordinated first strike, but uncoordinated launches by individual units, highly conditional on officers resolve to fight an now unwinnable war.

By mid cold war, RAND calculated that it will take 20 years for the US to reach full reconstruction to pre-war level in an even of a Total Nuclear War

The plans for the war were drafted likely in 2021, and maps printed in Jan 2022.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t55fov/anonymous_c...

Reciting the Russian proverb — "if the enemy is mad at us, then we are doing everything right"

The ratio of military advantage Russia has over Ukraine is comparable to what NATO has over Russia — 8:1

The easiest direction to attack Moscow is from the south. Woods West of Moscow were intentionally left untouched for centuries to be a deathtrap for potential invasion.

There are very few real think tanks left.

A typical Western "military analyst" these days often comes with a law degree, MBA, or even a financial guy, sometimes with few years of service, or a stint in Westpoint, clinging for a claim of being "serious subject matter expert," and making money off that.

As I said few times over this week, a lot of them don't even know the difference in between a tank, and an APC, so bad it is really.

And Western politicians listen to them...

I myself rang the bell as well, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30453790

This is what happens when politicians go straight deny military professionals eminence over military strategy just to make a point.

Decades of the West spoonfeeding dictators, and other "our bastards" after the collapse of USSR came back to roost.

The War on Error has made the West completely oblivious to the number of very big elephants in the room while politicians were playing the War on Error as if it was some kind of CounterStrike game, and then wasted time on refugee crisis, Trump, Brexit, and various other piss contests.

Germany had to be brain drained 3 times, and then destroyed as a nation, and rebuilt to force it to become "normal."

I see rationality in what you say in principle, but the window of opportunity for applying that method was lost in nineties, after the West disengaged from trying to make Russia a normal country, and left it to become a rouge state.

The West stopped propping up democratic politicians in Russia shortly after they felt that "job's done," and, bizarrely to 16 years old me 15 years ago, started working for the anti-democratic camp. What's the point I asked myself? And this was the time when I discovered the "our bastard" theory, practised religiously by some Western politicians.

Similarly to how Putin turned into "our bastard" for the West 20 years ago, NSDAPers were once propped up into power on hopes of getting pliable "our bastards" for major powers in light of their own problems.

This is why I keep telling about the idea of "enforcing freedom."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy

Sometimes you have to force people to be free. There are people who will, bizarrely, fight for the right to be enslaved. Why? Because their brains are broken.

Some broken by years of humiliation, some because they were born that way, some because they thought "it's hip, suave, and I'll get into cool kids crowd." Such things were novel for the West, but now you see them more and more.

It's very much like a stance on whether you do forcefully treat people from alcoholism, or substance abuse. You see it being very destructive, down to such person becoming a danger to society once they run out of cash.

Similarly, you would not want such people to hit the bottom of brainrot, when they will be ready take Russian money, or turn their country into another Hitler Germany.

The seeds of current crisis were sown when the West thought "job's done" when USSR collapsed, and scat on Russia instead of keeping trying to make a proper country out of it.

I am a non-white citizen of Russia through a rather bizarre family history.

My parents changed my, and their names, and surname to Slavic sounding for reasons you can understand. Out of many, lower risk of being drafted (being non-white, and living in far-east increases likelihood of draft 10x,) ease of getting into a good school, or university for me, and simply lower chances of getting into random troubles with officials.

At the same time, knowing this, I am as much as discomforted by practice of meritless "diversity hire" just for the sake of putting people of colour to pass the diversity checkbox.

Pretending to play a role of "smart south Asian" while yes-manning, and knowing you being a decoration is as bad as discrimination, if not worse.

If you go to the code, you will see it being deliberately set by data coming through AJAX.

Whomever did this...

> I've heard reverence from all sides on the brilliance of Henry Kissinger, and am curious, what damage has he inflicted on Western politicians brains?

Have you seen his "brilliance" yourself? No, and these people didn't either.

Many people who credit him don't actually know a thing what his political theories are.

He was an extremely good networker though. He took credit for things he didn't do to raise his stature among US elites, which he then used to solicit other people giving him more credit. He liked to collect recommendations, and introductions.

His "Realpolitik" was mostly about how to strategically backstab allies for "geopolitial considerations" only he can see, or understand, but really they were just bullshit he made up to cover for failings of Nixon administration.

His political theories don't make sense on closer examination, but they were used to grow 3 generations of US state department officials, who were told of them as truth in its last instance.

In other words, this man is the reason why a lot of US state department officials have porridge for brains.

It's all up to you https://www.google.com/maps/place/Anlandestation+Nord+Stream...

> negotiated two of the bloodiest conflicts in post-WWII theater: Vietnam War & the Yom Kippur War.

1. The South folded in the first place because he persuaded Nixon to lose the war

2. Egyptians expected Nixon to be weak on Israel (and they likely knew Kissinger would play a role in that,) and force them to give up Sinai. They succeded.

The sheer amount of damage Henry Kissinger inflicted on the sane functioning of Western politicians brains is staggering.

He is not a sagacious "strategic thinker," but a real world Grima Wormtongue, and should be treated as such.

Absolutely, we had so far 3 generations of pacifist politicians in the West who spoon fed dictators, instead strangling them. And the result is on every TV channel now.

No matter what your defence posture is, how many weapons you have, how many megatons is your nuke, all your weapons are useless if you don't use them, and more so, if you don't want to use them.

To the major demographic on HN, you have to change. There is no succinct, suave, hispter startup solution to a Russian paratrooper landing on your lawn. There is none.

You, and HN have to get ALL political, just like the society itself.

Next time somebody tries to shut your mouth for speaking about politics, I would've said the most un-gentle response to that man's face be the most befitting action.

Planespotters reports

Explanation: the real reason is NATO radars providing complete situational awareness to Ukrainian side, and Russian side can't do anything about that without shooting at NATO radar planes flying in NATO airspace.

Prior to all of events in Ukraine, I actually been to the museum of strategic nuclear forces like 20 years ago. Guides there were actual ex-officers.

The launch sequence was very simple, but the procedure to "turning the missile on" was highly manual, despite some automation allegedly being there "but not usually working reliably."

Most of the gear in the silo was actually comms gear. There were no fancy computers in it, and missiles were programmed offline. The provision for "online" reprogramming was there, but the officer said "we never ever tried it, except on a simulator in the academy."

Officers were never told what targets were programmed into missiles, but he said that as targets were almost never updated in his near 14 years as a launch officer, he assumed these were cities, and not military targets.

His jobs as a launch officer was basically to do nothing, but sit and wait for a command using all comms gear in his disposal.

Once the missile is "switched on," and ready, the launch was done by 2 officers turning their keys without any extra ceremony.

The "codes" were employed, but only to check the authenticity of launch, or online targeting data.

Russia actually had much harder time to maintain its arsenal than Ukraine because most of USSR's nuclear industry was in Ukraine.

I find the whole corpus of Western military writing on USSR, and later as "generally unreliable."

Just too much of fiction writers working in these think tanks to pump grants, and research funding.

Even today, go and lookup a number of articles on something very trivial, say, "Russian general military doctrine," and your will get absolutely random, and bizarre assortment of opinions not agreeing on anything, despite that the official doctrine document in Russian is not secret at all, and is easily googleable on the internet.

A lot of them are just regurgitating each other's data without any original input, or validation. A broken telephone effect ensures.

> It's good to remember Ukraine never possessed operational control of them [0],

Ukraine had full control, and an operational arsenal for a few years. There was no such thing as a PAL on Soviet nuclear weapons.

Ukraine had a fully functioning nuclear force for these few years.

I will give no credibility to claims of Western think tanks who can't tell apart a tank from an apc.

> Both Western governments and private parties have been publicly showing extraordinary amounts of intelligence on Russia troop movements, disposition, and likely intentions, and I can only imagine that that Ukraine is getting much more than what is public.

TikTok is world's biggest intel dragnet. On Twitter, I see a vid of the column from TikTak, and 1-2 hours after, of its destruction.

No military in the world has anything as powerful.

> Your last paragraph is a new topic. It's true that Si can be as efficient as SiC and GaN, despite what the marketing usually says. But there are other benefits to new materials. They already support higher voltages with planar technology, and 3D will increase that further. Gate driving will get easier and more rugged.

There are 1000V+ silicon switches today which are not as fast, but have for, for example, very good RDSon. 1000V I think is an upper limit one would go for passenger car EV motors.

Russian first strike capability with land + sea based missiles is at most 1000 warheads. Clearly not enough.

> So Putin is so angry and feels threatend that he wants to overthrough Ukraine, and the answer is to make them a member of the EU? This screams like more aggressives answers from Putin. I personally expect a smaller nuclear warning shot over the ocean from Putin next week.

There is an option: attack first. If Russian nuclear C&C is taken down, I doubt any of officers in the bunker would dare to launch. Even if they will, these would be uncoordinated launches, and nowhere near the size of a coordinated attack.

Yes, I see your nickname. That's the case if we go into details.

I think he specifically means high-end, high-frequency power FETs, since all the rage today is about them.

I would add that there is no real need for super-high-end switches in EVs, and component size for them is not a huge premium. There is no shortage of smart inverter topologies which achieve very good size, and efficiency without using any kind of fancy GaN of SiC switches. They will not be as small as them on the lower end, but around 100kw there is virtually no difference.

> Citation needed. I believe Putin enjoys a very strong approval in Russia

His approval rating is as genuine as his 146% election victories https://bloknot.ru/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/rostovsakaya-1...