I must be going crazy or something...

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Esquire M Busterbury

Moderator
I keep getting this strange feeling on the back of my neck...the little hairs keep raising every so often. I've got this crazy idea in my head that we may be approaching some kind of Nuclear WW3.

Now, I know this may sound strange but I could almost swear that we're going to start an aggressive military campaign against Iran & Syria by year's end. And God only knows where things could spiral from there.

Maybe I'm just paranoid. Maybe everything's fine, all under the control of very capable, very competent people who know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. Maybe I have nothing to worry about. Maybe all the bad news I keep hearing is just that. Bad news.

But maybe I should stock up on some bottled water & T.P. anyway.
 
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the most important thing for me is ammo, in sealed containers. but hey, thanks for reminding me that I can't wipe my butt with fmj's.....maybe every case of wolf should come with a roll of t.p....???
 
You forget, in any apocolyptic aftermath, guns and ammo can and will be traded for ANYTHING. The way I figure, quality arms will suddenly & drastically grow in value overnight. (Hypothetically god forbit etc etc...)
 
True, we are. OTOH the Middle East is in a condition right now that is more volatile then perhaps it has ever been. While there may have been points in the past where there was more active agression ongoing, never before has so much suppressed desire been backed by anywhere near so much capability. It appears to me things have to be defused soon or, yes, the fecal matter is going to impact the rotary device in a fashion we can't help but feel to some degree.

Since I don't see any likely means of defusing things I guess the big question is WHAT degree, exactly. Hmm....TP, beans, corned beef hash, another SOCOMII...
 
yeah...people have been saying the same thing for hundreds of years. every generation thinks it has it the worst, every generation thinks the youth of the next are too wild, every generation considers itself the pinnacle of character

World's not gonna end any time soon. We'll have a colony on the moon before there's a massive ground war that some people here seem a little too eager to entertain the thought of. Some of the "hypothetical" threads I see in other forums scare me mostly due to the people making them.
 
Well for the hundreds of years prior, mankind didn't have 'the button'. But by adding megaton yields and 'religious fanatics' (on both sides) to the equation, it certainly makes this century a little more interesting than most previous ones. And while I'm not trying to start another dreaded 'hypothetical' thread, there's simply something about what's been going on lately that's been giving me, for lack of a better scientific term, the HeebeJeebies.

Like I said, I'm probably just crazy...
 
Y'all figure you're gonna get nuked here? Avoid seaports. A big nuke is a large thing, and not especially easy to smuggle aound even in pieces. Intercontinental ballistic missle attacks are really unlikely, unless one of the nations that already has them (former USSR or Red China, maybe France or the UK, as far as I know) decides to push the button. Most of the other members of the nuke club don't have anything with serious legs; they're prepared to nuke neighboning nations, a trick like using hand grenades to eliminate mice in the basement.

So flaming thermonuclear death would have to come to the U.S. on a ship. Maybe an airplane but -- don't know if you noticed? -- we kind of have this thing about planes right now. Or from a bunch of busy little beavers dieing nicely of radiation sickness while they assemble a bomb in their basement, which would tend to get noticed.

There is such a thing as a "suitcase nuke," usually a plain fission bomb. A little heavy, especially if the person carrying it needs to lug it around for awhile. And a bomb like that would make a very big mess. The mess would be smaller than Hiroshima.

...Setting off any one of them would result in a very harsh response. Even a crazy man hesitates to bugger a sleeping tiger.

The way for a real supervillan to do it -- short of stealing a half-dozen missle silos -- would be to get a lot of nukes in the country and set them all off at the same time. Otherwise the risk/benefit ratio just doesn't work out. The problem with this scenario is that really big conspiracies don't work; they leak, or someone gets caught.

There are higher-probablity bad things to worry about. For example, the New Madrid fault, right there in the Midwest, is overdue for a big one and it's inevitable.

Crazed Islamists successfully doing bad things is not inevitable. Plus, they're a bunch of sad-sack amateurs. Look at 9/11, their big supervillan moment: they were able to hijack way fewer planes than planned and only 3 of the four they did get managed to achieve their objective. And that was against an unsuspecting opponent!
 
And those three out of four essentially changed this nation into something...less...than it was. Pretty solid return on their "investment".

As for nuking us, that isn't what I am thinking. I'm thinking the Middle East goes up in a big 'shroom, maybe part of Europe, perhaps Russia and China even throw a few things at each other to some limited degree. Bye-bye india and Pakistan? What happens to the US then? The repercussions are beyond complete review.

No more foreign oil for years, at least. Financial collapse. Potential disease and famine from fallout, lack of farming, societal collapse, etc. Police-state government? Increases in terrorism that expand the social and economic problems? What else can you think of? I guarantee if half of "over there" goes up in flames we are not going to sit comfortably over here eating ice cream and watching the fireworks.
 
I guarantee if half of "over there" goes up in flames we are not going to sit comfortably over here eating ice cream and watching the fireworks.
Click to expand...

I'm going to be eating ice cream - if I don't, it'll melt.
 
Well, even if all of "over there" goes up in happy little nuclear flames, I'm not too terribly worried, for these reasons:

#1: I'm saving right now to install a bi-fuel system in my pickup, to run either LPG or CNG in my truck. Should have that ready in 3-6 months.

#2: I have a bicycle in good shape and live within 10 miles of work.

#3: All I really see happening is a decrease in the amount of available gasoline and deisel in the US and global market. If I run a viable alt fuel like LPG or CNG (Did you know we produce about 90% of our current used CNG supplies? and the majority of the rest comes from elsewhere than the looney bin Middle East?), I will be minimally affected other than by consumer prices for other goods. I may have to cut cable and/or other luxury expenses, but that's it.

And if it does erupt into a war, at least it will kill all the crazies over there. Or at least most of them.

I'm tired of all this terrorist/radical islamist $#!t.
 
Well for the hundreds of years prior, mankind didn't have 'the button'. But by adding megaton yields and 'religious fanatics' (on both sides) to the equation, it certainly makes this century a little more interesting than most previous ones. And while I'm not trying to start another dreaded 'hypothetical' thread, there's simply something about what's been going on lately that's been giving me, for lack of a better scientific term, the HeebeJeebies.
Click to expand...
True. But I would wager that long after we're dead and buried there will be even more powerful weapons for people to destroy each other with. Violence is an inherent part of nature and we simply love to find more efficient ways of bringing it about.
 
Last night on the History channel, there was a presentation of World War III? Beyond Lebanon. It laid out some very good questions that have some very plausible answers. It will replay this afternoon, 4pm MST.

The idea that we may be in the first stages of WWIII is not as implausible as it first seems.

If Iran gets nukes, they will use them. Never discount the words of a fanatic.
 
azredhawk44, it's good that you have plans. Problem is, where are you going to go on your bike or alternative fuel truck? When gas hits $6 or $10 a gallon or some even more absurd price after a nuclear war in the Middle East how many businesses do you think will survive? How will rural communities manage? Retail businesses? Small business? Then what happens to the big business that survive by supplying those communities and small businesses?

YOU may have a plan. I may have a plan. Most people's plan is "It can't happen here". The fact is it can and it doesn't take a bomb to do it. Just the right kind of economic upheaval. Energy is that right kind. But time will tell...
 
Antipas, I don't discount the words of fanatics but...

Well, 2A's observation is right on the money but the thing is, a handful of jihadist headcases wasn't what "changed this nation into something less than it was," the Federal Government did that -- to the cheers of many. All the bad guys did was kill off fewer people than die on the freeways during a busy holiday weekend. Sure, yeah, they did it in a big, big way; but realistically, a jet 'jacked by jihadists is still the least of your worries and probably less so now than it was on the very day of the act. I take a greater risk every time I ride a motorcycle and I do that for fun.

You can either live in fear of wild talk, prepare to meet hardship and strife with resolution and confidence in your own abilities-- or become the paranoid Big Brother to the world, a threat as bad as what you seek to prempt because that's the only way to keep it from ever happening. When we pretend 9/11 was something fundamentally different to the OKC bombing, the Weatherman bombings, or the various blowings-up done by socialist-anarchists in the late 19th and early 20th century, we're decieving ourselves; we're indulging in "devil theory," the notion that all would be skittles, beer and singalongs if only it weren't for some readily-identifiable group and that all will be well once we have rubbed 'em out.

Nice notion. Comforting. Happens to be false. 'Bout the time Iraq is pacified and Iran has been bombed to glass, some other bunch'a flakes will show up; or some Duly Constituted Authority will itself have become as great a menace to ordinary folk as any fanatic group.

Focus too much on the obvious threat and some threat you never even thought of will whack you from behind. That's how it is. That's how it has always been.

As for sharp social readjustments should extreme badness come to pass, better set some stuff back, because "just above starvation" is the normal operating mode for the vast majority of the human race. It always has been. We've been fat and happy here in the States, in large part thanks to limited government and individual freedom but we're fat-headed if we believe it will last forever.

There's nukes in the world. They've already been used in war. It's nearly certain they will be again. You don't have to like it.
 
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