November 06, 2013

Meanwhile, in the South China Sea

Cdr Salamander provides this helpful map of the maritime borders of the various nations in that part of the world.


Yikes!
more...

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November 02, 2013

Well...You Have a Nice Weekend too China

Yesterday, China interupted America's hand-wringing over the Obamacare debacle with a bit of a nonsequiter.

It seems that they just, out of the blue, felt the need to remind us that their small fleet of ballistic missile submarines can wreak all sorts of nuclear devastation on US cities.

This is not news...so why bring it up?

China state media also included this fallout map which doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.


Also: Why are they wasting a nuke on Rutland Vermont?

The Blaze suggests that this might be welcome news, indicating a loosening on secrecy and censorship, but this flies in the face of recent trends which have been even farther in the other direction.

We mentioned back in August that FAS had gotten wind of China doing  a lot of nuclear attack simulations and had been putting together their own.

Hot on the heels of this helpful reminder...Today we had China announce that they intend to "silence" the Dali Lama. This is part of a larger internal crackdown fully in keeping with the disturbingly Maoist tendencies of Xi Jinpang.

Nuking the people who owe you money and buy your stuff is a poor business model (as wise people have pointed out) but if it looks like said people (the US) is never going to pay you back and are going completely broke it becomes less so...especially if the perceived deadbeat is the only thing standing in the way of regional hegemony.

Furthermore, if one thinks Mao was a swell guy and his attitude towards human life is laudable, then the huge population of China and the individual low yields of most of the warheads in the US arsenal might make it appear that China could "take the hit" of a US retaliatory strike.

In the long run...which is how China looks at things... they might even be right.



This still seems unlikely. No one "wins" a nuclear exchange.

However, stupider decisions have been made. The decisions that led to World War One all seemed like good ideas at the time. It's also important to remember that other societies and values systems can produce decisionary calculus with regard to acceptable trade offs is likely far different from ours.

On an equally upbeat and somewhat related note: There is an interesting report here on dealing with a low yield nuclear blast (about 1/2 a Fat Man) in a nuclear terrorist attack.

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