New CBS TV Series Making Nuclear War Thinkable And Great Fun For Everyone

Fred J. McCall wrote:
"Allen W. McDonnell" wrote:

:If all three of them are dead or incapacitated together then it goes down
:through cabinet posts to Secretary of State Rice, the #4 person and formerly
:the woman closest (after Maddy Albright) to being President.

Which raises the (legally) interesting question of whether or not
Albright could have become President, given:

"No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United
States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be
eligible to the office of President..."

Looks like Maddy Albright was infinitely far from being President,
since it would take an amendment to the Constitution for her to be
eligible to hold the office. She was born in Czechoslovakia, you
see...

Though Anuld is undoubtedly working on that.



--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson

Fred J. McCall wrote:
"Eric Chomko" wrote:

:
:Rand Simberg wrote:
: On 16 Nov 2006 08:19:02 -0800, in a place far, far away, "Eric Chomko"
: made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
: a way as to indicate that:
:
: I could give two ****s about being right
:
: That's pretty obvious, since you almost never are.
:
:But I produce great results.

BWAAAAAHAAAAAHAAAAAHaaaaahaaaaaahaaaaa!!!

That's not not what my employer thinks. He, not some lunatic on the
internet, is what matters after all.


:You? I don't think so...

There you go tacking unnecessary words on the end of sentences. Your
thought was complete and correct once you had said "I don't think".

Poor Freddy, never learned how to be civil. Now take your meds like a
good boy...

Eric


--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn

Jordan wrote:
Eric Chomko wrote:
Jordan wrote:
wrote:
What, exactly, does the issue of whether or not nuclear war is
"survivable" (there really isn't any issue, since it obviously is, if
said nuclear war is small enough) have to do with getting people to
"vote for Bush?"

Hold the phone! Did you say "if said nuclear war is small enough"?

Yes. Relative to the size and capabilities of the combatants.

What if it isn't?

Then it may not be "survivable." That's implicit in my statement, and
intentionally so. I was never arguing that some forms of warfare,
including nuclear warfare, are unsurvivable; merely that not all
nuclear wars are "unsurvivable."

Fine, makes sense assuming some sort of limitation to the nuclear
exchanges.


And where is the dividing line between survivable and not survivable?

At our current level of dispersion and technology, a war which rendered
the Earth's surface uninhabitable for a mere century would probably
kill _everyone_, which is the the definition of maximum
"unsurvivability." Not that we've ever deployed enough nuclear weapons
to accomplish that.

Correct, but if the world's arsenal went up, then what? Somehow I
don't think I want to test that to see what happens, and I don't think
you do either.

The point is that yes, one bomb or four isn't not going to wipe out the
human race, but enough could do it. Why screw around? And surely
someone is making a better bomb in the manner in which someone is
making a better mouse trap.

Surely we don't know, but I'm curious what you think.

Levels of damage far beneath the uninhabitable-for-a-century mark would
render the war _unwinnable_, because both combatants would have been
devastated the point of no longer being functional states. A
full-scale war between America and the Soviet Union in the 1970's or
1980's would have almost certainly been unwinnable by either side.

Sounds like the MAD scenario.

The war shown in _Jericho_ is apparently (I'm not following the series
so I am not sure what is really going on) a much smaller affair. There
are many small-to-medium sized nuclear war scenarioes which would be
"winnable," depending upon what was at stake (obviously, a war launched
for slight cause which led to the destruction of even one or two of our
side's city's would be at best a Pyrrhic victory, while a war launched
for national survival might be "won" even if we lost half our
population in the process).

The problem with limited nuclear war is similar to limited conventional
war; that when you hit the limits the best you can hope for is
stalemate and that helps the enemy inherently.

And what does "voting for Bush" have to do with anything? Has it
escaped your cosmically brilliant intellect that Dubya _can't_ ever run
again for President?

But he still has two more years to build his legacy.

Yes, but this has nothing to do with "voting for Bush." Bush is
President until January 2009 with no "voting" required; in the American
system the only way to get the equivalent of a "vote of no confidence"
and the fall of a sitting executive is either a Presidential election
or an impeachment which proceeds to either resignation or conviction.

Yes, yes, I know that but you are taking this too literally. Surely
Bush doesn't want to end up like Herbert Hoover, literally feeling like
a huge failure. Poor Hoover basically begged Truman to give him a job
and after being out of office as president for 30 years was able to
repair his image. W might not be so lucky.

If you're not American, I can understand why you don't automatically
get this; it's one of the ways in which our republican democracy
differs from a parliamentary democracy. If you _are_ an American, I
can only say that you should have paid more attention in Civics
classes.

I know about the election process and presidential term limits, I was
speaking about Bush's legacy. No doubt Bush will jump back into (as if
he ever left) business based upon his having been president. But
history may not be so kind to the younger Bush (though his dad may
benefit as a comparison). That and that only was my point.

His first six years are what they are. This election IS referendum for
Bush, though he was not running. Now he has two years to actually do
something for the country instead of take from it for someone else.
(Yes, I believe he stated the war in Iraq to benefit his business
friends in Texas).


I am still _utterly_ confused as to what you think the TV series
_Jericho_ has to do with any of this, though.

Not my question. Another poster.

So if he's going
to do anything worthwhile then he'd better start now.

He's already toppled the Taliban

What??? Have you been reading the latest CIA intel reports?!? They are
back and as strong as ever. Geez, wake up!

and Ba'athist regimes in Afghanistan

What Ba'athist regimes in Afghanistan? They are from Iraq. They are now
no doubt part of the insurgency.

and Iraq, and his war policies have killed many tens of thousands of
terrrorists,

Oh, so we have a 1 to 3 or more better body count that the enemy? Oh
boy...

the death of each one being a net plus for the human race.

No argment there, but since they seem to think losing 10 to our one is
okay, I wonder what body count really means in a positive way.

So I would argue that he _has_ done something "worthwhile."

Not really as the war is no real gain for the US. Don't be one of the
dupes that thinks Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. That is Cheney and
like-minded people's propaganda.

Though I wish he'd done more. There's still Iran and North Korea to
take care of.

We can't do it alone and the fact that Bush appears to have alienated
much of the free world I fault him for not garnering allied support.
Also, playing cops of the world might seem like the US's lot in life,
there is still much to do on the domestic front (i.e. disaster relief
in places like NC and NO).

Eric


- Jordan

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 16 Nov 2006 13:53:06 -0800, in a place far, far away, "Jordan"
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
a way as to indicate that:

Eric Chomko wrote:

Hold the phone! Did you say "if said nuclear war is small enough"?

Yes. Relative to the size and capabilities of the combatants.

What if it isn't?

Then it may not be "survivable." That's implicit in my statement, and
intentionally so. I was never arguing that some forms of warfare,
including nuclear warfare, are unsurvivable; merely that not all
nuclear wars are "unsurvivable."

Logic isn't Eric's strong suit.

Why don't you run along and let the adults debate.


Yes, but this has nothing to do with "voting for Bush." Bush is
President until January 2009 with no "voting" required; in the American
system the only way to get the equivalent of a "vote of no confidence"
and the fall of a sitting executive is either a Presidential election
or an impeachment which proceeds to either resignation or conviction.

If you're not American, I can understand why you don't automatically
get this; it's one of the ways in which our republican democracy
differs from a parliamentary democracy. If you _are_ an American, I
can only say that you should have paid more attention in Civics
classes.

Eric is an American, albeit one of the stupidist ones you'll ever
meet.

Yet I have the same educational background as you based upon number of
degrees and levels and actually lived in a foreign country for 8 years.
I'd say that I am more educated and worldly than you despite what your
opinion is about me.

Eric

Eric Chomko wrote:
Jordan wrote:
Then it may not be "survivable." That's implicit in my statement, and
intentionally so. I was never arguing that some forms of warfare,
including nuclear warfare, are unsurvivable; merely that not all
nuclear wars are "unsurvivable."

Fine, makes sense assuming some sort of limitation to the nuclear
exchanges.

Well, one "limitation" is the size of the arsenals involved, and
another the available delivery systems, and yet another, the available
defensive systems. Pakistan might _want_, in a nuclear war, to kill
every single person within the borders of India, but Pakistan does not
have the weapons or the delivery systems to do so, and it is doubtful
that the Indians would sit passively and let the Pakistanis do this
without making attempts to intercept the strikes.

And where is the dividing line between survivable and not survivable?

At our current level of dispersion and technology, a war which rendered
the Earth's surface uninhabitable for a mere century would probably
kill _everyone_, which is the the definition of maximum
"unsurvivability." Not that we've ever deployed enough nuclear weapons
to accomplish that.

Correct, but if the world's arsenal went up, then what?

Lots of death and destruction, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere,
where billion (probably around 1-2 billion) (*), would be killed in the
initial exchange. Severe environmental effects including a nuclear
winter of some kind which would kill another 2-3 billion. Probably
only a few hundred million out of 6 billion would survive, coming to a
90-95 percent death rate.

But the human race would still survive. We don't have enough or the
right kind of weapons deployed to damage the environment enough to
produce a species-extinction event, probably because we have never
pursued this as an actual goal. Right now, _every_ nuclear war we
could fight would be _species_-survivable.

Note that in the scenario I outlined, the major combatant nations
would, however, be extinct as states -- even though some of their
populations would figure in that "few hundred million." (Most of the
survivors would, however, be in non-combatant nations, since such would
be far less likely to be specifically targetted).

Somehow I
don't think I want to test that to see what happens, and I don't think
you do either.

Of course I don't. I'd rather not see _any_ nuclear wars. Or any wars
in general. However some wars, and possibly some nuclear wars, are
either unavoidable, or necessary to avoid worse future wars. In
particular, you are not going to see a completely peaceful coalescence
of any World Government; there _will_ be "Unification Wars" if only
because even the most benign possible world government will dangerously
threaten certain malign interests merely be coming into being.

The point is that yes, one bomb or four isn't not going to wipe out the
human race, but enough could do it. Why screw around?

I did not advocate "screwing around" (whatever that means). I merely
pointed out the reality, supported both by history and physics, that
some nuclear wars are survivable and some of the survivable ones are
winnable (for various values of "survive" and "win"). I pointed this
out because some have here argued the _Jericho_ is being silly by
implying that there is any future for anyone after _any_ nuclear war.

And surely
someone is making a better bomb in the manner in which someone is
making a better mouse trap.

Oh, we'll someday have explosive devices that dwarf any nuclear weapon
yet constructed.

Levels of damage far beneath the uninhabitable-for-a-century mark would
render the war _unwinnable_, because both combatants would have been
devastated the point of no longer being functional states. A
full-scale war between America and the Soviet Union in the 1970's or
1980's would have almost certainly been unwinnable by either side.

Sounds like the MAD scenario.

That is, in fact, the specific scenario whose study prompted the
general concept.

The war shown in _Jericho_ is apparently (I'm not following the series
so I am not sure what is really going on) a much smaller affair. There
are many small-to-medium sized nuclear war scenarios which would be
"winnable," depending upon what was at stake (obviously, a war launched
for slight cause which led to the destruction of even one or two of our
side's city's would be at best a Pyrrhic victory, while a war launched
for national survival might be "won" even if we lost half our
population in the process).

The problem with limited nuclear war is similar to limited conventional
war; that when you hit the limits the best you can hope for is
stalemate and that helps the enemy inherently.

You're assuming that the "limitations" are self-imposed. They may
instead arise out of the correlation of forces.

much snippage

... and his war policies have killed many tens of thousands of
terrrorists,

Oh, so we have a 1 to 3 or more better body count that the enemy? Oh
boy...

Actually, we are killing 10-20 or more Terrorists for each of our own
people lost.

the death of each one being a net plus for the human race.

No argment there, but since they seem to think losing 10 to our one is
okay, I wonder what body count really means in a positive way.

Their numbers are not unlimited.

So I would argue that he _has_ done something "worthwhile."

Not really as the war is no real gain for the US. Don't be one of the
dupes that thinks Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. That is Cheney and
like-minded people's propaganda.

I don't think Iraq had _much_ to do with 9/11. I think that taking
down Saddam's Ba'athist regime (by the way, "Ba'athist" refers to the
prewar IRAQI not the Afghan regime) was a good deed in and of itself.
Bush's problem has been in the follow-through into Iran. So far.

Though I wish he'd done more. There's still Iran and North Korea to
take care of.

We can't do it alone and the fact that Bush appears to have alienated
much of the free world I fault him for not garnering allied support.

We can do it alone; it's just harder. And while I would fault him for
"not garnering allied support" I would also fault our allies for
failing to support us in a war which is even more in their interest
than in our own.

If we do retreat back into isolationism, Europe will be one of the
primary places to suffer the effects, because we will _not_ continue to
defend the Europeans in such a situation.

- Jordan

(*) You specified "the world's," so I'm basically assuming the worst
possible scenario -- a multilateral exchange a la _On the Beach_ in
which everyone who has nuclear weapons tries to kill as many of their
enemies as possible.

Jordan wrote:
norrin wrote:
wrote:

The story outlined is not realistic. It's set in a small town in
Kansas. Nowadays, kids living in small towns are in such
a hurry to leave the parents have to nail their shoes to the
porch. In the event of war, all the able bodied people would
be leaving in droves. A few years later, ghost town.

Has it actually been established that _Jericho_ takes place after "a
few years" of a major war?

Unlike _Lost_, _Jericho_ does not take place on an island.
Like _Lost_, the realism of the setting is not of major
importance. There's no need to build a raft, anybody can
walk away and most of them can drive.


Holy ****! (Update): Here's executive producer Jon Turteltaub on Sci Fi
Wi
Jon Turteltaub, the executive producer of CBS' upcoming
post-apocalyptic drama series Jericho, told SCI FI Wire that he did
research about what might happen after a nuclear attack and was
surprised by the answers he found. "This is going to sound odd, but a
nuclear bomb is not as bad as everybody thinks," Turteltaub in an
interview. "Without question on the scale of things in the world, it's
on the bad scale of things that can happen. Puppies are on the really
good side of things [laughs]. But sometimes we have this image that one
nuclear bomb would take out all of New York City and Brooklyn and
Queens and parts of New Jersey."

Fallout. Long Island. Uninhabitable.

One normal-sized nuclear bomb would _not_ take out all New York City,
nor would it render Long Island "uninhabitable," if that's what you
were trying to imply with your cryptic one-word sentences. Turteltaub
has actually done his research; you haven't.

The meltdown at Chernobyl made parts of the Ukraine
unsafe for human habitation. The fallout created by
a normal-sized nuclear bomb would have to be more.

Long Island does not feed itself, it relies on deliveries
of food, electricity from the grid, and pipes to bring in
water and take out sewage. The roads would be blocked,
the grid would go down, and the water would be unsafe.

That wouldn't be the case with the initial blast, Turteltaub (National
Treasure) added. "Part of the question is how much of the area is
uninhabitable versus how much in our perception and our fears is
uninhabitable," he said. "Coping with our own panic may be a greater
enemy than the reality of these things."

Even a convential attack on a city can trigger a stock market crash.
The financial losses caused by a single nuke would be the biggest
ever seen, assuming the market ever opened again. The loss of
infrastructure is also fatal.

"A stock market crash," unless deflating a bubble, is unlikely to be a
long-lasting event. Of course the market would open again. People
would still own stocks, and want to trade them. I'm not sure what
"infrastructure" you imagine would be lost to a single atomic bomb that
would be "fatal," or what you imagine it would be "fatal" to.


If they can have a Bishop of Rome in Avignon, they can have
a NYSE wherever they want, unless they want it too close to
a crater.

norrin wrote:

The meltdown at Chernobyl made parts of the Ukraine
unsafe for human habitation. The fallout created by
a normal-sized nuclear bomb would have to be more.


Um, no, it would not have to be more. And would in fact be FAR less.


--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/seawasp/

"Eric Chomko" wrote:

:
:Fred J. McCall wrote:
: "Eric Chomko" wrote:
:
: :
: :Rand Simberg wrote:
: : On 16 Nov 2006 08:19:02 -0800, in a place far, far away, "Eric Chomko"
: : made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
: : a way as to indicate that:
: :
: : I could give two ****s about being right
: :
: : That's pretty obvious, since you almost never are.
: :
: :But I produce great results.
:
: BWAAAAAHAAAAAHAAAAAHaaaaahaaaaaahaaaaa!!!
:
:That's not not what my employer thinks.

Oh? What makes you think so?

:He, not some lunatic on the
:internet, is what matters after all.

Is this where I should start bleating about 'expanding your world' and
all that?

snicker

: :You? I don't think so...
:
: There you go tacking unnecessary words on the end of sentences. Your
: thought was complete and correct once you had said "I don't think".
:
:Poor Freddy, never learned how to be civil. Now take your meds like a
:good boy...

Poor El Chimpo. Stupid Usenet Tricks 101 is the *best* he ever does.

Unfortunately, they don't make meds for fixing what's wrong with Eric.
That amount of stupid runs clear through to the center.

--
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the
truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"Eric Chomko" wrote:

:
:Jordan wrote:
: Eric Chomko wrote:
: Jordan wrote:
: wrote:
: What, exactly, does the issue of whether or not nuclear war is
: "survivable" (there really isn't any issue, since it obviously is, if
: said nuclear war is small enough) have to do with getting people to
: "vote for Bush?"
:
: Hold the phone! Did you say "if said nuclear war is small enough"?
:
: Yes. Relative to the size and capabilities of the combatants.
:
: What if it isn't?
:
: Then it may not be "survivable." That's implicit in my statement, and
: intentionally so. I was never arguing that some forms of warfare,
: including nuclear warfare, are unsurvivable; merely that not all
: nuclear wars are "unsurvivable."
:
:Fine, makes sense assuming some sort of limitation to the nuclear
:exchanges.

You mean a limit like "We've run out of weapons"?

: And where is the dividing line between survivable and not survivable?
:
: At our current level of dispersion and technology, a war which rendered
: the Earth's surface uninhabitable for a mere century would probably
: kill _everyone_, which is the the definition of maximum
: "unsurvivability." Not that we've ever deployed enough nuclear weapons
: to accomplish that.
:
:Correct, but if the world's arsenal went up, then what? Somehow I
:don't think I want to test that to see what happens, and I don't think
:you do either.

And you don't need to 'test'. The results of a full-scale exchange
are actually fairly well known.

:The point is that yes, one bomb or four isn't not going to wipe out the
:human race, but enough could do it.

For some value of 'enough' that is more than the total on the planet.

--
"Rule Number One for Slayers - Don't die."
-- Buffy, the Vampire Slayer

"norrin" wrote:

:The meltdown at Chernobyl made parts of the Ukraine
:unsafe for human habitation.

For a very conservative definition of 'unsafe'.

:The fallout created by
:a normal-sized nuclear bomb would have to be more.

It would? Why is that?

Hint: Reactors contain a lot more material than bombs and a lot more
dangerous stuff as well. Weapon fallout is pretty benign stuff
compared to the trash that's in a reactor that's been running for a
while.

:Long Island does not feed itself, it relies on deliveries
f food, electricity from the grid, and pipes to bring in
:water and take out sewage. The roads would be blocked,
:the grid would go down, and the water would be unsafe.

From one bomb? What the **** are you smoking?

--
"Rule Number One for Slayers - Don't die."
-- Buffy, the Vampire Slayer