RANT: TOO CLEVER BY HALF

 

 

 

 

I WANT TO THANK the American Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), their captive politicians, the nation’s propagandizing and sabre-rattling media, and of course, their familiars and followers in the Collective West, for providing me with an eagle-eye view of eastern Europe and the European borderlands of Russia. Before the war started in 2022, if you’d asked me to draw a map of Ukraine as it sits in eastern Europe, I’d probably get the borders all wanky, extending them into Poland or Hungary (which would tee-off Poles and Hungarians, to be sure. Same goes for Slovakia, Romania and Moldova. If you asked where Transnistria was, all you’d get from me was a blank stare and a frown. But today, I’m well versed in Ukraine’s eastern provinces. I know the whys and wherefores around Crimea, where Ukraine’s cities are, where the battlelines are drawn, where rivers flow, the country’s ports, the terrain’s highs and lows, etc.

The same goes for western Russia, from its border with Ukraine, on to Moscow, then the Baltic Sea and Saint Petersburg, up to its Western neighbors, Finland and Sweden,* and that old NATO standby, Norway, and finally north towards the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean. And don’t get me started on the Middle East! I can find Gaza and the various nations of the ME on a map blindfolded! Along with names, dates and places (more or less).

TO ABUSE Samuel Johnson’s maxim: war helps wonderfully to concentrate the mind. And so, I can’t wait for one to break out between China and the U.S. over Taiwan, or in the East or South China Seas! It’ll be another geography lesson brought to you your local MIC oligarchy.

 

   JB: "Heh-heh. Gotcha! Cough, Cornpops!"

AND IT MIGHT BE OUR LAST lesson if things get out of hand in any of these theatres of conflict. In recent days, the increasingly unstable president of Ukraine (though his term in office expired last year and he rules by diktat, no longer the country’s legal president) mused that Ukraine should develop its own nuclear weapons program. Zelensky and “The Bomb”—what could go wrong? BTW, that’s a good way to ensure Kiev gets turned into an ashtray, if el presidente ever ventures down that road. As for the conflict in Ukraine, it continues at pace with both Washington and Moscow doing their share of nuclear sabre rattling. For example, earlier this year, Joe “Where’s my ice cream?!” Biden quietly changed America’s nuclear doctrine. Now, America will expand its nuclear targeting arrays to be able to conduct a “first strike” option against China, Russia and North Korea, all three at the same time. The change in U.S. nuclear launch protocols seems to be in response to China’s declared goals of increasing its nuclear stockpiles to keep its deterrence effect viable and to maintain its ability to strike back.

  

“The Chinese leadership undoubtedly considers its nuclear arsenal to be very vulnerable.” (NZZ) One reason Beijing may feel vulnerable is because of advances in nuclear warhead and delivery platform technologies that make a first strike more 'attractive', if I can put it that way, even winnable.   Incidentally, China is the only major nuclear power to have a “no first use” policy, that is, it will not use nuclear weapons first, in any nuclear exchange. Worryingly, the U.S. and Russia have changed their nuclear protocols, in recent months, to adopt more first-strike scenarios, even against an non-nuclear state if that state's aggression is deemed threatening enough to either Russia or the U.S.

[If the globe’s nuclear weapon states all declared a "no first use" protocol in their strategic defense policies, all of us would sleep better at night. Ed.]

 

    Ted  Postol

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) PROFESSOR TED POSTOL, someone regarded as one of the top experts on nuclear weapons and missile defense, tells us in this video how the United States proposes to revamp its missile targeting system to include China’s anticipated ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) expansion while still being able to target all the Russian missile silos and command and control sites, industrial centres, ports, transportation hubs, energy grid, etc. that it previously targeted. IN THE DIAGRAM below, on the left-hand side we have a hardened missile silo targeted by incoming ballistic missiles, with the “lethal volume” zone, in green, indicating where a 100 kt¹ warhead detonation would destroy the emplaced ICBM. [100 kt=100 “kilotons”, one-hundred-thousand tonnes of TNT. By comparison, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 had a 14 kt and a 25 kt explosive force respectively. Ed.] Note in the diagram: of the nine ballistic warheads launched at the target, only four successfully hit ground zero inside the “lethal volume”. IIUC, Ted’s chart depicts the probability of a successful missile strike, in this case four hits and five misses.

 

HERE, he is talking about the use of “heavy lift” ballistic missiles, and primarily those making up the land-based strategic nuclear arsenal of the United States, those 400 or so siloed missiles that are the first “leg” of America’s nuclear triad, located in the central states of Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana. They are a legacy system from the Cold War when ICBMs where stationed far inland to protect them from attack and to give Washington time to respond with an equally lethal counterstrike. Today, there are submarine-launched ballistic missiles and nuclear capable cruise missiles, tactical nukes, as well as mobile launch platforms and new hyper-sonic missile and anti-ballistic missile (ABM) developments that make siloed missiles increasingly redundant, if not any less deadly. Additionally, because of the speed of today's (and tomorrow's) hyper-sonic missiles, those siloed ICBM  missiles have the potential of launching first in any threat of attack, real or  'false-positive' (due to technical failure), because if they delay, they may lose the launch window and be destroyed by incoming missiles. (It's the old 'use them or lose them dilemma') Incidentally, the U.S. does not yet have a reliable hyper-sonic missile array like the Russians. My concern is there will be a new arms race when the Americans finally perfect hyper-sonic missile technology, especially since all previous nuclear arms treaties between the U.S. and Russia have been cancelled save for the "New Start" treaty,  which is set to expire in 2026 unless the two begin talks now to renew it. ("New Start" capped the number of nuclear warheads each side may possess.)

IT IS WORTH REPEATING that the U.S. announced in July of this year that it would deploy a ground-based Tomahawk missile array in Germany beginning in 2026, along with "a hypersonic missile that is still in development."(Arms Control) These missiles are capable of delivering nuclear payloads. So, the fucktards in Washington, instead of renewing "New Start", are looking past the treaty to 2026 when they can expand their nuclear arsenal and re-introduce intermediate-range missiles into Europe. This type of missile was effectively banned in Europe since 1987 when the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) treaty was signed between Regan and Gorbachev. It remained in effect until 2019 when chump Trump walked away from it.😟

 

IN TERMS OF TED’S DISCUSSION, the vagaries of targeting are such that only a certain number will predictably hit inside the target zone in a ground-blast strike. But, Professor Postol informs us that the United States is developing a very clever work-around to ‘fine tune’ targeting protocols for its ballistic missiles. (And recall, there may be several warheads per missile, each with their own pre-planned target.) The trick is to aim slightly long of the target and to have, instead of exclusively ground-detonations configured into the warheads’ various trajectories, adjust each warhead’s fuse (the “super fuse” as Ted calls it) to detonate at various elevations, but still within the “lethal volume”, as we see in the right-hand illustration. This means fewer warheads are needed per target (perhaps just one), allowing each missile to acquire more targets, and thus quickening a hell-scape on earth, where the only sounds are the breaking of bells and the thunder of hoof beats as the Four Horsemen ride forth to claim their new world. (Just sayin’.)

 

ARMAGEDDON ASIDE, Ted indicates that the development of a “super fuse” has been a hush-hush research project for several years. And I assume America’s advanced satellite observation and space-based monitoring technology enables them to calibrate such intricate “air burst” detonations as depicted in the diagram, especially given the incredible speed of incoming ICBMs. (Thousands of miles per hour.) 

 

👉I PICKED TED POSTOL'S OVERVIEW³ of “super fuses” to cite one example of how technological improvements to nuclear weapon designs, or to their delivery systems and protocols, no matter how clever they may be, if they are introduced at the wrong time and in the wrong manner, could result in the strategic deterrence system becoming unbalanced. This system was a series of treaties and protocols, along with a 'learning through experience' knowledge base since WWII, and was meant to keep a rough parity among the nuclear powers, with each power assured no other would attack them with nuclear weapons without the attacker suffering equally devastating consequences. During the Cold War, it was called the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine. It was there to remind politicians and other madmen that no one wins a nuclear war. That no one can launch a first strike without the clear understanding their own society will be destroyed by a counterstrike, and that, no matter how hard you hit your opponent, or how much destruction you unleash upon their society, or how many bombs and missiles you use, if their goose is cooked, then so is yours.

 

    "Must. Not. Sneeze."

BUT IT SEEMS the times they are a’ changing with the introduction of a variety of “tactical” and “strategic” nuclear bomb and missile warhead types⁴ that could become part of a nuclear power’s conventional war plan’s arsenal, and be brought more readily onto battlefields to shore up a losing side or break a dead lock. The cute name for these smaller, tactical, piddly (1 kiloton of TNT give or take) type of nuclear weapon is “baby nuke”, which we may yet see used on tomorrow's battlefields. 

👉Hyper-sonics may be a game changer in the deadliest game on the planet, especially if more countries acquire them to deliver conventional or nuclear payloads. Such missiles could evade ABM (anti-ballistic missile) defenses and be so swift as to destroy the target's ICBMs before they can retaliate. Such capability might make a successful first-launch attack a terrifying possibility. [Of course, there is the problem of nuclear-armed submarines, safe in the deep ocean, that could respond unless they find a clever work-around to dispose of them, too. So far: none yet. Ed.]

👉Finally, changes to nuclear doctrines by the Russians and Americans which lower the threshold to use nuclear weapons in a conflict zone could end in catastrophe. 💀

 

 

Cheers, Jake____________________________________

 

* Of course, Sweden doesn’t have a land border with Russia, but it may be required in the future to stare angrily across the Baltic Sea at Russian ships sailing by. 

 

1. Tonnage of TNT: One kt=1000 tons of TNT. One mt=1,000,000 tonnes of TNT. 

 

2. There are over 400 "Minute Man" nuclear missiles siloed in three central states of the U.S.

👌This is the land-based pillar of America's "nuclear tripod". Most carry a nuclear payload of around 1.5 mt(of TNT).

👌Fourteen Nuclear submarines, the “Sea leg” of the nuclear triad, also fire heavy lift (i.e., larger warheads) strategic missiles, along with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and torpedoes. Surface ships are also armed with cruise missiles that could carry nuclear payloads.

👌Nuclear bombers fire nuclear-armed cruise missiles and have “gravity bomb” capabilities, which used to mean the aircraft needed to be over the target to deliver its payload. Recently, the U.S. has begun to 'modernize' the one-hundred nuclear gravity bombs it has stationed in several European countries, equipping each with new “glide bomb” capabilities. (Couldn’t they just spruce them up with a new coat of paint? Why not?)

👉Land-Sea-Air: The nuclear “triad” of the strategic arsenal of the United States.

 

3. Ted Postol proposed supplying the Russians (and perhaps all nuclear weapons states) with the satellite imaging technology the U.S. uses to monitor missile launch-blasts globally. His rationale is: if the Russians could have the same system, which is superior to their ground-based "early warning" radars, then they would feel more secure with both powers using the same technology, each having the same capability to detect incoming ICBMs, so there could be no "surprises", thereby deescalating tensions between them.

SIMILARLY, I suggest, making the American's new "super fuse" technology open-sourced so that each (and every?) side would need fewer weapons to provide the same target coverage from their respective nuclear  arsenals. Of course, a nuclear weapons reduction treaty involving ALL nuclear weapons states, including Israel, would be the necessary precondition to receive the technology. 👍

 

  Seriously? Would you trust that handle?

My personal nuke reduction treaty would have each state left with a single 1 kt (of TNT) bomb, using a mule for a delivery system. The delivery of the nuke to the target might take weeks, months, years even, depending on the mule's sense of direction, or perhaps not arrive at all, which gives the opponents time to forget what it was they were fighting about and to return to their respective corners.

[Jake is onto something here, with one caveat: to avoid catching holy hell from the mule lobby, not to mention the S.P.C.A., I suggest an alternative to the mule delivery system: instead, use the first-born son of each state's ruler, strap a nuke on their back and send them on their way. They'd still have to hoof it by foot to get to their target, which gives the warring heads of state plenty of time to sit down with a bottle or two of Jack Daniels, get roaring pissed, realize they really, really love each other, and ink a peace deal on the tablecloth. Ed.]😂

 

4. With explosive power varying from a tiny 1 kt up to 2.3 mt (2.3 million tons of TNT.) The latter are known as "city killers." A popular payload size for nuclear-tipped cruise missiles is 150 kt. to 300 kt. Why use more fissile material than you need to accomplish the same death-dealing from the skies task, but with a smaller payload?

 

"A nuclear war cannot be won, and must never be fought." --President Ronald Regan, 1984.

    

NEWS UPDATE: THE "ORESHNIK" ("Hazel Tree") MISSILE

 

NEWS UPDATES: I caught a vid from Nima Alkhorshid’s “Dialogue Matters” YouTube podcast a couple of days ago that had Professor Ted Postol back to discuss the November 21^st launch of Russia’s new, hypersonic “Oreshnik” missile, used to target a manufacturing plant in Dnipro, East Ukraine. There are several questions concerning the missile’s speed and destructive capabilities that remain in the realm of speculation. In his update, Professor Postol notes the ballistic missile traveled at hypersonic speed* from its launch site at Kapustin Yar, in Russia’s Astrakhan region, to Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine. It traveled the approximately 800 km distance in around 15 minutes. It used an advanced Russian ICBM booster engine to reach an altitude of seventy-five kilometers and entered the upper atmosphere at Mach 10 speed.

 

    DIAGRAM 1

In Diagram #1 on the right-hand chart, we see the missile’s ballistic arc upwards and its rapid descent to towards Dnipro. IIUC, the chart indicates the missile reached its apogee (highest point) in about seven minutes. After which it continued its lateral journey to Dnipro while rapidly descending from the stratosphere. The arrow pointing to “minute 14” means that the missile was traveling at a speed of Mach 11.2 when it was roughly 200 km out from the target. The red arc represents the number of minutes the “Oreshnik” was in flight. (Don’t worry about the greyed arc.)

 

    DIAGRAM 2

In Diagram #2 on the left-hand chart, we see the speed of the Oreshnik’s munitions¹ as they hit the ground. Again, IIUC, the red ‘stars’ with greyed “velocity at impact” represent the spread pattern of the munitions and their speeds at impact. The grey arrows with speeds (from right to left) represent the missile’s trajectory just before impact (at Mach 11), to first impact (Mach 9.6) to final impact (Mach 8.7). So six strikes per warhead times the number of warheads (6) equals thirty-six strikes, coming in waves of six and impacting the ground in a line of about one kilometre in length.

👉A couple more points on this new missile: Professor Postol notes that photographs taken at the time of the attack do not suggest a major strike or damage to the military-industrial facility in Dnipro, and certainly nothing resembling the destruction that a tactical nuclear missile would have done (as some commentators speculated the Oreshnik's speed alone at impact would cause). There was some damage, yes, but not as much as first reported. The kinetic effects of the “Oreshnik” munitions hitting the ground (as they slowed down due to friction in the atmosphere) were less than predicted.

 

TED SUGGESTS that President Putin may have been given inaccurate information that inflated the “Oreshnik’s” capabilities when he made his announcements earlier about what the missile could do. [Some egg-on-face time, I would guess. Ed.]

👉HOWEVER, these missiles and their various payloads remain all but impossible for air defenses to shoot down.

👉The November 21 “Oreshnik” was called a “test” by Putin, and further refinements to the missile may be forthcoming.

 

👉NOTE: The pattern of munitions was such that they struck ground over distance of almost a kilometre. They weren’t grouped tightly together, in other words. But they could have been, as Professor Postol speculates. By adjusting small firing nozzles on each of the warheads as they ejected from the missile in high orbit, a tighter grouping of each warhead's munitions could be achieved. The resulting strikes would be much more consequential at the narrower point of impact. 

👉AND there is some suggestion that the missile did not contain any explosive munitions and struck using only the kinetic energy from their individual payloads. PERHAPS the strike was to make a point with the pinheads in Washington and in Western European capitals that the Russians have a hypersonic missile that could hit targets, with virtual impunity, anywhere in Europe and this demonstration of the "Oreshnik's" capabilities serves as a warning to back off because next time the missile will be loaded with explosives. Perhaps, we should heed the warning. Maybe?

 

The target on November 21 was a huge Ukrainian military-industrial plant, itself almost a kilometre in length. Some of the “Oreshnik’” munitions fell on neighbouring areas of the city. Damage to the factory is not known at this writing.

👉But we should think about the fact that the “Oreshnik” is nuclear-capable. It can carry a nuclear payload. Professor Postal made a ‘back-of-the-envelope’ guesstimate that Russia’s new missile could carry six 500-kiloton warheads [The Hiroshima atomic bomb had an explosive capacity of 12-15 kilotons.] Such kilo tonnage would:

 

“…set fires…over 150-200 square kilometres…with a fireball that’s hotter than the surface of the sun…causing firestorms and winds that are hurricane force…. It’s like being inside a gigantic fire with air temperatures well above the boiling point of water, and nobody lives through that. This is Hamburg or Dresden on a scale like we’ve never seen before.” (Daniel Davis Deep Dive)

 

WE WILL PROBABLY LEARN MORE about the “Oreshnik” in the days to come, chiefly because it will probably be used again by the Russians if (or when, most likely) Ukraine does their butt-fuck stupid launching of cruise missiles into Russian territory. This time the sub-munitions may carry high explosives and be configured to strike a target within a narrower zone of contact. BOOM-BOOM! 

So, there’s that.

 

Cheers, Jake.__________________________________________

 

* Ted says that there is no ‘dividing line’ that distinguishes a “super sonic” missile’s speed from that that of a “hypersonic” one. There is no technical barrier between the two. He gives hypersonic speed a ballpark estimate of Mach 3 (three times the speed of sound) and greater. Ted quips it means the missile is traveling “really fast”.😀

Related to that are the terms “strategic” and “tactical” when talking about nuclear warheads. A “strategic” missile is one that carries a heavier load and can travel thousands of miles with massive destructive capabilities. Warheads on these ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles) have an explosive force ranging from hundreds of kilotons to megatons.

 

“There is no exact definition of the "tactical" category in terms of range or yield of the nuclear weapon. The yield of tactical nuclear weapons is generally lower than that of strategic nuclear weapons, but larger ones are still very powerful, and some variable-yield warheads serve in both roles. Tactical nuclear weapons include gravity bombs, short-range missiles, artillery shells, land mines, [Imagine stepping on one of those! Ed.] depth charges, and torpedoes which are equipped with nuclear warheads.” (Wikipedia)

 

   Geeks At Foreplay

FOR EXAMPLE, tactical nuclear warheads can range from less than a kiloton “baby nukes” to tens or even hundreds of kilotons (though most are in the tens of kilotons). By comparison, the Hiroshima bomb had a yield of around 15 kilotons. “tactical” nukes are designed for “battlefield” use and for degrading an enemy’s ABM defenses, radars, communication links, etc., as well as well as on the battlefield against troop movements. “Strategic” missiles can range from hundreds of kilotons to two or more megatons, which are orders of magnitudes larger than the two bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. They are known as “city killers”, and though they may not be a “Death Star”, they get the job done, nevertheless. “Strategic” nuclear weapons generally travel greater distances and are designed to destroy an enemy’s society by attacking its cities, critical infrastructure, its command-and-control centres, and its populations.    

BTW: The largest nuclear detonation ever recorded was with the “Tsar Bomba”. In 1961, it was air-dropped by a Russian bomber at Mityushikha Bay Nuclear Testing Range in the Arctic Circle. It had a yield of 50 megatons. BOAKYAG!

 

1. Professor Postol speculates that the “Orshenik” contained six warheads. Each warhead, when released from the missile at high altitudes and speed, has individual thrusters to steer it into slightly different trajectories with respect to the other warheads, so that they come down in a pattern resembling the hazelnut tree’s hanging pods that were so distinctive in the night sky over Dnipro. In addition, those warheads each contained six “sub-munitions”, which are released from each warhead making for a total of 36 ground strikes. The 6 warheads release their six “sub-munitions” which then fall on their target in a patterned wave. This happened six times in a matter of minutes. What people saw in the sky were the “sub-munitions” as they streaked though the air to strike their targets, like “meteorites”, as President Putin characterized them in an interview shortly afterwards.

 

    "Tsar Bomba" Explosion 1961