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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • A modern nuke is FAR from the “bang 2 rocks together” designs that were first designed. For a start, most are fusion devices. Fairly exotic reactions are used to make a small amount of fusion material to go critical. This creates a shaped charge on a fusion core. The compression wave sets fusion happening, which releases 95% of the energy. Most of Russia’s arsenal is of this sort.

    The downsides of these is the use of exotic elements. They often have a short half life, e.g. tritium, with 12.5 years. This means they decay. Even worse, some of the byproducts will actually poison the reaction. E.g. Rather than producing a flood of neutrons, they absorb them.

    If any of this chain fails, then your fusion nuke becomes, at best, a low yield fission nuke. More likely, it becomes a dirty bomb. It’s still nasty, but not the city destroying terror weapon it would be intended as.



  • Adrenaline with completely fuck up your higher brain functions, unless you’ve trained to cope with it. Its default effects are fight, flight, freeze or fawn. She went into freeze. She likely didn’t want to make matters worse, and couldn’t think it through, due to the adrenaline spike.

    A rather dark survey I heard about years ago. Researchers couldn’t find anyone who has self rescued from a submerged car, who hadn’t planned for the eventuality. They had all worked out what to do if that happened to them. Many of the deaths had claw marks on the dashboard, and sometimes they hadn’t even gotten their seat belts off. In the moment, their monkey brain couldn’t even plan that far.














  • Nukes and ICBMs are extremely complex devices. They also require extremely specialist servi e work to remain functional. Even worse, the only people who can actually check that work are the ones doing it.

    Russia hasn’t detonated a nuke in decades. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of their arsenal are now duds. The money embezzled, while boxes were ticked. Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of their ICBMs just wouldn’t launch.

    Russia’s nuclear capabilities are likely a paper tiger, and Putin likely knows this. Until they try and use them, they are scary. If they try and they fail, they are in a VERY bad situation.

    Putin is many things, but he’s not stupid. It would take a LOT more pressure from nato for him to even consider using nukes.




  • The message wouldn’t be to Putin directly. It would be to those both in his power base, or capable of disrupting it.

    The goal would be to push Russians to the point they deal with Putin internally, and/or put putin in a position where he needs to end the war to stabilise his own position. It’s all about making the right people feel the effects.

    Oh, and as a European, I think the risk is acceptable. If Putin struck at a NATO country, the results would likely be swift and short. The only unknown would be Russian nukes, and even those are far more of an unknown than most people think.