re: #294 albusteve

not sure, but it sounds bad

It is bad. If we get hit, it’ll be up to the civilians of the disaster area to cobble together a response. We’ll have to slap together our own fallout shelters by piling books on a table and stacking furniture around the sides. We’ll have to mount our own rescue operations. Some will have to stand outside in fluffy fallout ash fighting fires until they’ve picked up so many REM’s they have no chance.

If you have water (the toilet tank is quite drinkable) you can hold out for weeks with virtually no food. You can use a chamber pot and dump the waste outside; quick trips into the hot zone are fairly safe.

Help will come, eventually, but going by the form we’ve shown with this oil spill, it won’t come fast and it won’t come organized.

Our enemies won’t stay their hand; if they can do it, they will. They can’t incinerate the U.S. They would if they could, but they can’t. What they can perhaps do is hit two or three cities with Hiroshima style bombs, and kill a hundred thousand of us. That will leave some three hundred million. From the perspective of the great wars of history, it would be a mere pinprick.

Our enemies aren’t thinking straight, or they’d see that this pinprick would be the start of a chain of events that could go almost anywhere, but down all roads lies their ruin and our victory.

We should have some contingency plans for this escalation of the war. It probably wouldn’t be necessary to retaliate with nukes against cities. That’s harsh and the civilians of Iran, in particular, are more victims than agents of the Iranian regime. But if we haven’t thought it through, reflex retaliation in kind might be the default response. Better, I’d think, would be a semi-conventional war, with tactical nukes to quickly settle any organized fight that was taking too long or going the wrong way.