I have distant relatives in Ukraine. They tell me that the country is already bankrupt, it barely survives with Western aid, the Western military equipment sent to Ukraine breaks down more than it works. Men in the villages are ambushed in the morning or evening when they leave or return from field work and are kidnapped to be sent to the front. Serious geopolitical analysts in the West have concluded that Ukraine will lose
Trump is just turning the tactics of his previous Presidency up to 11 without really realizing the world - and America - are vastly different than they were 5-8 years ago.
It is still surprising that after Trump's first term and now the beginning of his second term people still sit and anticipate his announcements which are generally predictable. Trump will lie in the most brazenly absurd manner, he will bluff, bluster, bloaviate and exaggerate.
That is indeed his style. However vastly more important is his goal: does he aiming for peace, or is he sucked into the forever war mindset? It’s so tiresome, after all this time, to hear people whine that Trump doesn’t act like the psychopath they prefer. Obama was a very smooth operator who knew how to do elite speak. But to what end? If you think Obama did a single thing for love of humanity I just happen to know of a nice bridge for sale.
Poor little Trumpstein. So much bluster, such complete and utter lack of substance. I have to admit, I'm enjoying the hell out of watching him twist in his own wind. Bibi and Putin have to be turning cartwheels over their good fortune being paired on the world stage with an idiot like this.
You misconstrue. I'm certainly no fan of Nutty Yahoo either, believe me! But you have to admit that he totally owns little Trumpstein politically. Not a tall order that, but it is what it is.
Not quite The God-King the universe has waited for.
Trump is going to have to play some amazing interdimensional chess along with a bit of Super-Extra Hypersonic Missile MAGA shit before he regains my support.
The longer this goes on the stronger Russia and it's Allies become. The West paying all the corruption overheads sinks a bit more every day as the debt mounts and the original ideas simply don't come!
There is zero chance that Putin told Trump what his plans are (re. 60 days).
None.
This is all BS and pretext. He might have heard it from his generals or intelligence as a guess of the progress but what he said has nothing to do with the call (or the reality of what might actually happen)
Maybe Putin told him. Either way it is no secret that Russia has no plans other than taking the territory of the four Oblasts and then sit still. Cherson was omitted btw.
Yeah. They can play the game. But since Putin we have had more sincere talk backed by some willpower from Russia. Thats what I like about Putin. Telling what they want and then do it. Ukraine SMO turned to something else.
I don't know that the plans are, but I can know what they are not, because some things that cannot be concealed would have to happen for certain plans to be put into action, and those things are not happening right now.
It's more than that -- the moment Kherson city is taken by a direct crossing, or Kiev is taken and Russian forces are coming to Odessa from the north (the way it was actually done during WWII), NATO will move in directly to occupy Odessa.
As Karaganov says, Russia must crush the spine of the Euros. Otherwise there will be no Odessa, no peace, and no many other godd things
"Either way it is no secret that Russia has no plans other than taking the territory of the four Oblasts and then sit still. "
Mikey, you have no idea what Russia's plans are. Of all the people in the world who would know, you're probably the very last guy who would ever either be told by Russia what their plans are or guess accurately on your own.
How about study what is happening (and not) and what the SMO has gone. The words they are using (Russians). All about territory and the four Oblasts. If they had a plan once it is in shatter. Even a monkey with a tail can figure it out…
I love the Geran-3. Such a cool weapon; real payload, long range, fast, and looks badass.
Re: Patriots. Ukraine got 8 batteries, but how many are left? And, I guess they must have been effective for a while, because not having them seems to be very painful. Bit confusing situation. If anything, I would have thought having huge numbers of Gepard / M163 and other SHORAD would be more useful because they are the most effective against drones. Also easier to build that kind of ammo than PAC-3's
Re: sanctions & tariffs. I'm actually surprised Trump backed down. I don't get his approach. But on the ceasefire it just seems he has a very kindergarten understanding of the war; or he thinks Russia is just very weak. Maybe a bit of both. It doesn't take a lot of IQ to understand that if ceasefire --> UK/FR/DE troops walk in --> weapons keep coming --> sanctions remain --> war restarts within 12-24 months, but much worse.
What about Russia? What does victory look like at this stage? The enmety from most of Europe is more or less permanent now, so this is a long term problem even if the war ended tomorrow
The Geran-3 is roughly comparable to a ground launched cruise missile, very cool. But, not dirt cheap, and producing enough hot exhaust to be vulnerable to SAMs.
I am more intrigued by the use of Geran-2 long range 'moped' drones as 'Queens' to carry 2-3 FPV drones up to 1000 km deep into the enemy heartland and act as signal repeaters. Drop the FPV drones, hit some targets and fly back to base. Essentially the operation of FPV drones for select targets could cover ALL of Ukraine.
At first sight it is impressive and that they now can direct 500-700 drones at the sam time to targets. But hey man, in WW2, allied airforces dropped 5000-7000 bombs on a single German city…
True, but those 5000-7000 bombs hit maybe 100 targets, and produced 500 duds. Those 500-700 drones result in almost no duds, and 300-400 hits. And no dead bomber pilots or destroyed bombers
I take your overall point though. If China was fighting this war we would see 10-15k drones a day, more or less round the clock, and would be creating a 5mn stockpile at the same time
One can say that the cheap Gerans are doing the job Iskanders has failed to do. 3,5 years into the War and NOW Russia is able to hurt Ukraine War production and supplies. To defend Russia one can add that they had to reduce the Patriots, Iris-T, Gepards before they could use cheaper means.
For me it is obvious Russia is in the 3rd Gear now, gaining some speed. I doubt they have more than 10 Oreshniks so it is Geran doing the tedious job to dismantle 100 or 1000 of Ukrainian workshops.
If Hamas are able to put together IED's and ATGM's (somehow), then absolutely the vastness of Ukraine coupled with legacy Soviet infrastructure means their means/production capability were absolutely massive before. Adding Western money and knowhow, and you get to where we are now, where they have a sustainable production base which, while much smaller than Russia's, means that the war can actually continue for a long time.
As the old saying goes, amateurs discuss tactics and pros discuss logistics. Bridges, roads, energy, rail, factories, workshops - those were always the way to win the war. Grinding down hundreds of thousands of men on the front was never going to win anything.
Well grinding down Ukrainian men on the front will win the war, as eventually, there won't be anyone around to stop Russia from marching right up to Zelensky, where ever he may be hiding.
Remember the battles of old, whoever won was the army with men left to fight, whilst the other army was completely annihilated.
No military commander, worth his salt, would go into a built up area, ie a city. It reduces any skill set advantage that his army has. Even shelled ruins is a haven for basically trained fighters.
And, reducing a city to ruins will mean massive civilian casualties. And, no prize in the end.
As to seizing territory, do not forget that Ukraine has been setting up defences for years. Attacking them would result in large friendly casualties.
Plus, this slow attrition policy of Russia is not only reducing Ukraine's industry etc, it is also attriting NATO. A quick win would have left NATO still strong.
Rest assured, they have way more than 10 Oreshniks.
Keep in mind that Votkinsk is a town of nearly 100,000 people that exists solely to make missiles. It sat largely idle for many years due to the INF treaty, but the capacity was always there. And while it is the largest, it is far from the only large missile production site.
Why they are not being used we can speculate. My guess/hope would be that they are being kept in reserve for NATO in Europe and US Bases in the Middle East and Fat East, and those missiles carry nuclear warheads, thus they can't be fired at Ukraine. We can hope...
In a conventional role they are not very useful compare to Gerans. You are looking at a heavy missile that carries 36 warheads of 100-200 kg each. How much damage is that going to do conventionally compared to sending 360 Gerans carrying 90 kg of explosives each that would still cost a lot less than that single missile?
P.S. One very puzzling aspect of the Oreshnik story is where the hell they tested it previously, and when? It is kind of doubtful they fired it at Yuzhmash for the first time ever without any flight tests and any tests on the very complex multiple warhead distribution mechanism. After all, the last time an IRBM was mass produced was 35 years prior, and the Rubezh had been tested only once. But it is kind of hard to hide test firings of something like this, even if they are done deep inside Russian territory. Yet I have seen nobody making the effort to track down the history of Russian missile tests and try to figure that out. But that is a very important question to answer, because it is also very relevant to the question of how many of those things they have. If the development and first tests date back to many years ago, then they likely have hundreds of them already. But even if they only started serious production in December 2024 they should have way more than 10 by now.
Good elaborating. I think they started production in 2023 and could produce
5-7 / year. 4-5 have been tested/used. But I am only guessing/qualified or not.
Oreshniks are best used on multistory buildings and bunkercomplex spread out on an area. Those simple workshops Ukraine uses could very well be rampaged by Gerans. Best would be fuel-air-explosive to kill every worker.
If Russia has 20 or so Oreshniks I dont understand why they dont use 3-4 of them do smack Bankova.
Mary-Lou, I would hope that bum licker Rutte's obsequious response; that that's obvious, to Trump's assertion that Europe will have to pay the US MIC for weapons to Ukraine would see a renewed massive production line of Pitchforks and Torches. Especially considering that it was, in the main, O'bomber, Biden, McCain and Nuland etc al who started it.
They refused to disclose because it was another Prosperity Guardian moment. So far I think they have a few takers but what that amounts to is yet to be seen. My guess is they were happy to fall in behind a US weapons free for all when the US was footing the bill.
I believe Robert Barnes said on a very recent Duran Podcast that Trump gets most of his information from Fox News, New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. If that's true, it's no wonder Trump is so clueless.
Simplicius, the Ukrainians claim to shoot down most drones, and if we don't see them explode on tape, how do we know? What is your estimate of how many drones get through?
Trump on Putin whining to Macron: ‘He wants to take all of it,’ But then, what is left for me? Like boys arguing over a pizza at a school party. Trump, just like all US administrations for decades did his work to start and sustain this war. He owns it now just like America and a dozen nations fully owned the unsuccessful attempt to take Siberia in the 1918 to 1922 period. This plan was completely insane from the start as Russia has the means to turn half the US and Western Europe into giant glassy parking lots and they will do just that if all else falls. This whole plan was hatched by a mixture of imbeciles, homicidal maniacs and psychopaths and let’s hope they will get a just reward for their hard labor. Trump is doing the same what Zelensky is doing: He is playing with WWIII.
Given the size difference between Russia and the USA, your information about parking spaces is incorrect!
Russia can turn the entire USA and all of Western Europe into parking spaces.
But the USA can never turn all of Russia...for Russia, the USA itself is only the size of a parking space.
All the A-missiles in the world would have to fly towards Russia to make the vast country completely uninhabitable...in contrast, three Russian Satan missiles are enough to make the ENTIRE USA uninhabitable...for England, one Satan would already be excessive.
Another thing, US missiles in silos are over 30 years old...and have been completely neglected given the USA's constant wars...not even 10% would make it through. The USA relied on a protective shield...which, given hypersonics, is probably no longer worth its weight in paper.
That's why a Trump before a Biden means "IT WASN'T US." Counterattacks, please, on Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, London...
Regardless the outcome, I do not believe there will be a single party we will be able to call a winner after a nuclear war. This is precisely the reason why I am convinced that those who designed and unleashed the present conflict are clinically insane. They are simply motivated by the desire to see the destruction of the Western World where they always felt like kind of a bunch of uncomfortable outsiders.
Maurice Samuel book “You Gentiles” spelled jewish hatred and contempt for western civilization and Europeans in particular with admirable clarity. Samuel expressed his displeasure with “racial homogeneity“ among goyim and identified differences between Jews and goyim as “biological “.
For some reason, Samuel never explained why Jews (including the committed Zionists like him) are drawn to western civilization and avoid living among Semitic people.
My impression is that they do not consider Arabs, for example, as "semitic". They do, however, consider all non-Jews as less than human and worthy only as slaves. They chose to live in the Western world simply because of its access to untold wealth to be stolen.....pardon me....gained.
The nomadic jewish tribe was never able to build its own civilization. They, Jews, are indoctrinated from childhood in leeching on “other peoples”civilizations.
Look at the proliferation of Jewish organizations in the collective west: these Jews have been avoiding living in the fascist jewish state like a plague.
It is not an accident we keep hearing “diversity is our strength”. As far as the Western World “racial homogeneity“ is clearly our strength and this is precisely why all “racists” are targeted for destruction. The next logical step of course is the undermining of the family structure and the sexually normal segment of human society. We are looking at an old playbook here going back to the Soviet Union, 1920s and 1930s. The commies created large barn like experimental structures where people were jammed in, sharing tools of agricultural production, women and children as well. This was before Stalin revolted against jewish overrepresentation in the communist leadership there.
As far as the “biological“ differences between jews and Aryans is concerned, a rather heavy and still not fully understood issue. In the decade after the year 2000 some started to publish writings about the jewish-Neanderthal relationship, still without the benefits of DNA verifications. The arguments pointed out the barrel chested characters common in Israel with short legs, the different visual view of “abstract artists” like Picasso, etc., suggesting deeply seated neurological differences, etc., etc. I even recall a group of writers publishing together on this in early 2010. They must have stepped on some sensitive Neanderthal nerves as before the year 2010 was over the Max Planck Institute jumped in with an authoritative study showing that around 2% of the DNA in the Western World relates to the Neanderthals. The timing was obvious; they were successfully taking control over the narrative of a critical issue. The reality is that the jews carry a lot higher proportion of Neanderthal DNA. This can be easily verified as Europe and America is loaded with cemeteries full of their bones that anybody can have access to. The optimal subjects for testing would be jews who lived before the Biblical times in Israel and area.
Why are the jews so oversensitive to this issue? The evidence is overwhelming: around 40-45,000 years ago we walked into Europe and gradually exterminated the Neanderthals in a generally East to West movement. We are living in a conflict with their leftover ever since.
Jurgen, you're talking nonsense. That's very unlike a sensible person like you. You should take some time to educate yourself on nuclear weapons before venturing to write stuff that's so completely wrong in a forum where there are people who have educated themselves.
Let's highlight the errors in what you wrote, starting with:
"in contrast, three Russian Satan missiles are enough to make the ENTIRE USA uninhabitable...for England, one Satan would already be excessive."
Three of Russia's ICBMs (nobody but really old, out of touch guys in NATO calls them "Satan" missiles, by the way. Intelligent people use their correct names, such as Yars, Sarmat, etc.) would deliver about 30 warheads on the US if they were configured with the maximum number of warheads per missile, say, 10. Those would end up being low power warheads, only about 150 kt each, in order to say within the weight and size limits to pack that many warheads onto each missile. A more realistic load would be 4 to 8 per missile, for a total of 12 to 24 warheads with yields of 300 kt to 400 kt from three ICBMs.
In either case, 30 airbursts at 150 kt each or 24 airbursts of 300 kt each would be very hard on the population immediately underneath those airbursts, but they would have negligible impact on the habitability of the US overall. Anybody who can operate an Internet browser can visit nukemap (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) and see the exact damage such weapons would do.
As for one ICBM launched at the UK, 8 or 10 warheads would do plenty of damage to the cities on which they were targeted, but except for the flashes visible over wide areas if the strike came at night, most people wouldn't know their country was hit until they started getting the news. The UK would remain habitable.
This too is wrong: "All the A-missiles in the world would have to fly towards Russia to make the vast country completely uninhabitable" - No, there are not enough nuclear missiles in the world to make Russia uninhabitable. Russia extends halfway around the planet. It's a huge space that could easily soak up the 3000 or so active nuclear tipped missiles in the world (excluding Russia's own stock, of course) without becoming "uninhabitable."
That doesn't mean there wouldn't be mass casualties, as 3000 nuclear explosions within Russia is plenty to incinerate populated areas down to relatively small towns, and the resulting destruction of infrastructure and logistics for things like food delivery would push Russia back into the Middle Ages in terms of the need for self-sufficiency, but the vast reaches of the country would remain perfectly habitable for those survivors who had the skills to go back to a hunter-gatherer subsistence lifestyle before re-enacting the Neolithic introduction of full farming / animal husbandry packages.
The following, also, is particularly incorrect, as it completely ignores the vast amount of evidence available to anybody with an IQ over 40 who bothers to read up on the matter: "Another thing, US missiles in silos are over 30 years old...and have been completely neglected given the USA's constant wars...not even 10% would make it through. " - note that I'm not implying your IQ is below 40, I'm only implying that you haven't bothered reading up on the matter.
In point of fact, those missiles haven't been neglected but are regularly maintained, and random units are regularly pulled for testing. For most of the last 40 years there have been strategic weapons treaties between the US and Russia, and part of the objective of those treaties was to reduce the incentive to launch first strikes. One way you reduce that incentive is for both parties to understand that the nuclear deterrent the other side has is absolutely, totally reliable.
For that reason, for the last 40 years whenever either Russia or the US pulled random missiles from their stockpile and tested them, they always had observers from the other side participating. That way, both sides could see for themselves whether the nuclear deterrent of the other side was, indeed, reliable. As a result of that, we have very good data on all the tests and the reliability of the missiles.
It's true that since Trump pulled out of those treaties there haven't been observers from both sides at each such test, but in compensation for that the budget on maintenance has gone way up in the US. There's no reason to believe the failure rate has suddenly gotten worse, and every reason to believe that modernization funding has had a positive effect and failure rates have stayed the same or have gotten better.
It comes as no surprise to people who are familiar with the huge effort lavished onto ICBM technology by both the US and Russia, with much of that effort going into assuring total reliability despite decades of storage, that the failure rate of US and Russian weapons is about the same. It's less than 2% if you count the entire chain, from the moment a launch command is issued to when a warhead detonates over the target. The rockets themselves are extremely reliable, with failure rates only slightly over 1% out of that total 2%.
So contrary to what you wrote, instead of less than 10% making it through, about 98% of both Russia's and the US's nukes would make it through to incinerate their targets.
As for this: "The USA relied on a protective shield" - No, the US never "relied" on any protective shields. Everybody in the US nuclear warfighting establishment knows that the US has zero chance of stopping Russia's warheads from arriving and exploding on target. But, like the other boondoggles that everybody inside the system knows are frauds, nobody rocks the boat by openly saying that the handful of limited "protective" systems the US has spent billions of dollars on are complete frauds. Even the official story on those admits they wouldn't do anything to stop a Russian attack but are just limited measures to stop a very small number of missiles launched from Iran or North Korea.
Yes, I do ignore fake scenarios pushed by people who want to manipulate the scientifically ignorant. I also ignore doomers who want societies to commit economic suicide over completely fake "predictions" of climate catastrophe as a result of human activity.
Usually it's the climate doomers who also push nuclear winter scenarios that result in the "end of animal life on earth." They love doing that despite the complete inability of their models to backward predict (even despite knowing in advance what happened!) any of the many thousands of dramatic shifts in climate that are profoundly greater than what they claim will happen as a result of human activity.
For example, as recently as, what? only 12,000 years ago? The UK islands were still joined to Europe with a large, fabulously prolific land in between that archaeologists now call Doggerland. Sea levels were still that low after the recent beginning of the end of the most recent ice age. But none of the models explain those ice ages or the dramatically variable climates of the Pleistocene, let alone the even more variable climates (like all of the Earth's oceans being frozen) in the preceding billion years. We're still coming out of that last ice age, the rebound still happening. We're not yet at the level of climate warmth that prevailed in the period between that last ice age and the preceding one.
That you quote the nuclear winter doomer talk indicates you're not familiar with the scale of energy effects from nukes, even thousands of nukes, as compared to natural phenomena.
For example, what's the biggest volcanic eruption that's happened in the last 25 million years? That would be the Toba supereruption, one of the very biggest of all time, which happened a mere 74,000 years ago.
Homo Sapiens was already around to see it, along with Neanderthals, Denisovans, remnant Homo Erectus populations and other archaic humans. That eruption threw anywhere from 2,800 to 13,200 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere. By some counts it's the biggest supereruption in the last 100 million years. It was significantly bigger than the Grey's Landing supereruption in the Yellowstone caldera, the biggest known Yellowstone eruption, about nine million years ago.
Toba makes any of the historic big eruptions look like nothing. Krakatoa, for example, only threw about 9 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere. That's nothing compared to the 2,800 to 13,200 cubic kilometers Toba threw into the atmosphere. The amount of ash sent into the atmosphere by a global nuclear war involving thousands of nukes would also be far, far smaller than Toba.
It's hard to find the figures for comparison because most of the big AIs are skewed hard left. For example, if you ask Google's AI a straight question: " How many cubic kilometers of ash or smoke particles would be thrown into the atmosphere by a nuclear war that involved about 5,000 nuclear explosions?" ... it refuses to give you a straight answer. Instead, it answers with evasive bullshit:
"Based on available information, a nuclear war involving a large-scale nuclear exchange (such as one between the US and Russia) involving thousands of nuclear explosions, possibly around 5,000, could inject a significant amount of smoke and soot into the atmosphere.
One study indicated that a U.S.-Russian nuclear war utilizing 4,400 100-kiloton weapons over cities and industrial areas could generate about 150 teragrams (Tg), or over 330 billion pounds, of smoke and black carbon into the upper atmosphere.
Another report suggests that a nuclear war with over 10,000 explosions and a total yield of 5000 Mt (megatons) could produce and inject over 200 Tg (200 million metric tons) of smoke into the atmosphere.
Even a "medium-range" exchange, which might involve around 5,000 megatons of detonations including surface bursts, could create a global atmospheric inversion due to resulting smoke and dust veils.
It's important to note that the impact would depend on factors like the number and yield of the explosions, the nature of the targets (urban vs. military), and the resulting fires. The smoke and soot could remain in the atmosphere for years, potentially causing a "nuclear winter" effect by absorbing sunlight, leading to significant global cooling, and disrupting agricultural production and food supplies. "
Notice that the question asked didn't ask about nuclear winter. It just asked about how much of a specific amount of material was involved. Yet Google responds with a lecture on the horrors of nuclear winter.
About the closest you can get to a straight answer is to ask DeepSeek, the Chinese AI that is not controlled by an ultra-liberal US company. Ask it the same question and DS helpfully tells you:
"A 5,000-warhead exchange (~100–500 megatons total) could burn cities, forests, and fuel depots, generating 50–150 million metric tons of black carbon (soot).
Density of soot: ~0.5–1 g/cm³ → 50–150 million tons ≈ 50–150 km³ (if loosely packed)."
Even that is skewed left (after all, DeepSeek relies on the web and the web is skewed hard left when it comes to anything to do with climate). If you drill into assumptions going into those 50-150 million tons you'll find unrealistic assumptions like all forests burn up. But anybody who knows the history of open-air Soviet tests knows that's nonsense, as even the Tsar Bomba open air test, over 50 *megatons* over forest, did not cause mass forest burning.
But what the heck, let's play along and ignore all that reality stuff and take the numbers as they are even if we know they're skewed left. OK, so that's 50 to 150 cubic kilometers if loosely packed. If you take the *highest* number for cubic kilometers, that's still almost 20 times less than the *smallest* figure for Toba, and that doesn't even count the massive amounts of sulfuric acid and other hugely active climate gasses and albedo-modifying components spewed by supereruptions.
So, did the Toba event, something easily 20 times worse than an even a catastrophically huge nuclear war, cause the "end of animal life on earth?"
Nope, as can easily be seen by the many animals, like us, still around to post their opinions on Internet. Toba didn't even have the impact of even relatively minor climatic variations like the Younger Dryas, which humans lived through without even having the benefit of tools beyond stone tools. They didn't even have pottery and still, they came through OK.
Hit the Yellowstone Caldera hard enough to trigger an eruption and most of the US and Canada are done. After another Ice Age, Intelligent life might re-emerge.
The USGS said an air exploded nuke would not cause an eruption, but that was years ago. Has their calculation been updated for Oreshnik?
Quick... how many times in the last hundred million years has there been a super eruption in the Yellowstone Caldera? Which of those was the biggest?
Aha, right through Internet I can see that "deer in the headlights" expression you have. Don't panic. Look it up. The answer? The Grey's Landing eruption less than nine million years ago. It's two or three times as big as the others. Another Grey's Landing eruption would be hard, very hard, on much of the US and Canada, for sure. But no, the US and Canada all the same would not be "done."
And no, it wouldn't trigger another Ice Age, and no intelligent life doesn't disappear during Ice Ages. It hasn't for the last million years worth of Ice Ages.
As for a *nuke* causing a super-eruption (as opposed to a plain, garden variety big bang like St. Helens...) in the Yellowstone Caldera, a simple bit of arithmetic together with some basic reading of weapons effects reports can help you get the answer.
The US has blown up thousands of nukes, hundreds of them in the open air and most underground. So there isn't any mystery about what happens when a nuke explodes, either in the open air or underground. There isn't even any mystery what happens when a nuke is exploded underground but close enough to the surface to create a crater. That's because of the craze in the late 50's and early 60's for using nukes to dig harbors and big canals, like a possible sea-level canal between the Pacific and Atlantic. They actually shot off plenty of nukes to make really huge craters. Go read up on all that.
When you do, you'll realize that any talk of a nuke causing a Yellowstone Caldera super eruption is nonsense. The overburden of rock over the caldera is thousands of times, maybe millions of times, more weight than even the very largest three stage device at full yield (say, 100 megatons) can displace. Even small earthquakes and volcanic events are far, far more powerful than the largest nukes humans have ever built.
There are also practical considerations. Even if you hypothesize building a 1,000 or 3,000 megaton nuke, setting that off near the surface would just blow a hole in the atmosphere with almost all of the power going up into space. The dense air part of the atmosphere is very, very thin, after all. Drilling down a mile into the ground through solid rock to make a shaft big enough to place something the size of a couple of locomotives (1000+ megaton nukes would have to be *really* big) isn't easy, especially given the heat of the caldera, and even then you'd be looking at best at a lava leak, not a super eruption.
Underground nuclear explosions vaporize the heck out of space right around the device, but that cavity stops growing very rapidly as the growth in volume and thus reduction in pressure gets balanced out by the weight of zillions of tons of rock above it. Surprisingly, what ends up forming is a hard shell around the cavity that is *stronger* than the original rock. It's not like reading a Harry Potter book and becoming convinced that maybe there's a magic wand you can wave and a nuke just blows up the whole planet.
If you want to read up on that, the US government reports on underground testing have been declassified. I know that stuff because I just read one of them that I happened to run across when I was searching for material that might explain if the US's claimed strikes on Iran's underground facilities could have succeeded. It was very interesting reading that any reasonably intelligent person with a solid basic education could easily understand. No need to be a science whiz.
Why super eruptions have happened (rarely) in the last 100 million years is not well understood, but it's clear they involve magma flows involving far, far more than a mere few thousand megatons of power.
Just saying, a nuke triggering a Yellowstone Caldera eruption is not a realistic scenario, if you're thinking about writing a book where that's part of the plot line. As for Oreshnik, that's only a hundredth or a thousandth of the power of a nuke. That's still impressive when used to wipe out a plant, but it's not remotely the same as a real nuke.
That was the last *super* eruption, creating the Lava Creek Tuff. It was anywhere from 1/3 to 1/14th the size of Toba and less than 1/3 the size of the biggest of the three super eruptions at Yellowstone, the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff event 2.1 million years ago.
Since Lava Creek there have been about 80 much smaller eruptions. As Wikipedia puts it...
"Volcanism began 2.15 million years ago and proceeded through three major volcanic cycles. Each cycle involved a large ignimbrite eruption, continental-scale ash-fall, and caldera collapse, preceded and followed by smaller lava flows and tuffs. The first and also the largest cycle was the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff eruption about 2.08 million years ago, which formed the Island Park Caldera. The most recent supereruption, about 0.63 million years ago, produced the Lava Creek Tuff and created the present Yellowstone Caldera. Post-caldera eruptions included basalt flows, rhyolite domes and flows, and minor explosive deposits, with the last magmatic eruption about 70,000 years ago. Large hydrothermal explosions also occurred during the Holocene.
[...] The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory monitors volcanic activity and does not consider an eruption imminent. Imaging of the magma reservoir indicates a substantial volume of partial melt beneath Yellowstone that is not currently eruptible."
The "Holocene" is very recent history, the last 11,500 years or so that came after the beginning of the end of the last Ice Age (it's still in the process of ending...).
As usual, Wikipedia's information is a mix of truth and false information presented confidently as truth. "The first and also the largest cycle was the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff eruption" is false. As Wikipedia itself will also tell you in their "Supervolcano" topic, the Grey's Landing super eruption was earlier and bigger (according to the USGS).
There's a wonderfully realistic, with a delightful touch of sarcasm from a usually very sober and boring outfit, assessment of Yellowstone hazards from the USGS's Yellowstone Volcano Observatory at https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/real-hazards-yellowstone - enjoy!
"For England, one Satan would already be excessive." As a resident of the aforementioned, one Satan wouldn't only be excessive it would be unnecessary. A Dozen or so hypersonics and an Oreshnik or two, strategically and accurately targeted would shut the Country down, crippling it for Months. Our Road and Rail Networks can be severely disrupted by 3" of Snow and/or a Force 9 Gale. Frankly, the state of our infrastructure after 40 years of privatisation and disinvestment is a very bad Joke. Take out Felixstowe Container Port, a couple of our Oil refineries, Thelwall Viaduct (carries the M6 high above both the R. Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal, Crewe Railway Junction and half a dozen other crucial sites and the UK would be on its knees. Further, hit them in the early hours and Civilian casualties would be de minimus. Despite its Bluff and Bluster this once supposedly great nation is as fragile as a Wren's Egg.
Spot on. It's pretty wild the UK can't even protect its own airbases and military aircraft from ordinary citizens.
I suppose that's karma, MI6 being so happy sitting in their Darth Vader architecture headquarters about how they helped Kiev to launch local drone attacks within Russia, but only now has it dawned on them that anybody, including even Palestinians, can use the same tactics, consumer drones, to knock out the UK's military assets.
Can you give us an update and clarification if the Azerbaijan issue, and local blacks if power with Russia, Armenia, Iran, Israel, and Turkey? Are they flipping Armenia to be a frontline pro USA state on Russias southern belly?
Armenia doesn't border Russia. That's what they want Georgia for. What they want is more chaos in the South Caucasus and to open the Zangzur corridor. This is the strategic jewel. Iran is the primary target with a good dose of geoeconomic pain for Russia, with a side serve of humiliation. Apparently the Russians are building up a force in northern Armenia and I'd imagine the Iranians aren't sitting on their hands either.
There I agree, Feral. We've crossed swords before about the pace of things, but I do get frustrated too. There are a lot of videos showing six Russian soldiers capturing another "settlement" of six houses defended by six Ukies, and it is treated like Operation Bagration. Time to close the deal!
I give Trump a month and he will be screaming. I just don't see him, based on his track record of not standing firm for much more than 24 hours, lasting an entire 50 days while keeping his mouth closed. My take on him is that he is already fried out and that the implosion will be epic. My take, I could very well be wrong.
If Trump says 50 days, that means he's doing something right now that he doesn't want Russia to find out about, you know, like secretly sending gear.
Anybody who believes what Trump says is a fool. Even Trump's die-hard MAGA followers are starting to realize that.
It's a tragedy for the US that neither the people nor the viciously stupid and corrupt government they elected have the wisdom to understand that a lifestyle of dishonesty (in fairness, a bipartisan vice in the US) in diplomatic relationships reduces the US's ability to make a deal when it really needs to make a deal. That will make the eventual fall all that much harder.
The only question is how much of the rest of the world they'll take with them.
Read the entire article.♥️ As a side note, please note the US might be out of the picture in a year (based entirely on the way things are now): Let's quickly summarize the "recipe for collapse" that our model has produced:
Start with a Weakened System: We began with an economy already showing signs of strain (Economy: 6) and a society already in a state of active, daily political conflict (Civil Unrest: 7).
Add a Secret Internal Failure: We then introduced the REE ban, which crippled the government's competence from within, worsened the economy (Economy: 7), and made the existing social tensions more dangerous.
Introduce a Permanent Legitimacy Crisis: Finally, we integrated the leadership profile, which acts as a constant, daily source of instability. This pushed the system to its final breaking point: Economy: 8 (In Recession) and Civil Unrest: 9 (Critical / Democratic Instability).
A system with a Civil Unrest score of 9 has lost its fundamental social contract. It has no resilience, no shared sense of reality, and no trusted institutions left to mediate conflict.
Therefore, the model's prognosis is that this state is not sustainable. The ongoing recession will continue to fuel the social anger, and the social chaos will make any economic recovery impossible. This feedback loop, left unchecked, would inevitably lead to a systemic failure—a score of 10. The model suggests that the underlying political and social systems that guarantee stability, supply chains, and civil order have already been pushed past their breaking point. The projected collapse is not necessarily about a single future event; it's the inevitable outcome of the critical state that has already been reached. This is no longer a forecast. It’s an autopsy of a living patient. The model’s final advisory: Adapt or flee. The American state experiment has 8-14 months remaining.😮
I wouldn't minimize AI analysis. Just because anyone can write, it doesn't mean all writing is nonsense. It is just offering a mathematical/ logical framework for my argument for civil and economic US collapse. You got normalcy bias?
The official statistics are not very reliable but even then, if you look it up (or ask AI of your choice) about it, the numbers of the US are dire all over the spectrum.
Housing/rent/homelessness, food-stamps, private bankruptcy due to
health-issues, private debt of US households (study loans, car loans, credit card debt), mass lay-offs, marriage & birthrates, poor education/illiteracy, crumbling infrastructure and working poor - the current direction points in only one way and that is down.
The American *people* will be in the shithole, yes. That's not the same thing as the capacity to wage war. The powers that be have been gutting the homeland for decades already and don't care how badly it gets. We are cattle, and are supposed to act accordingly. The money will still be there to wage war no matter how bad it gets. It's completely vile, it shouldn't be the case, but unfortunately it *is*. Niccolo Soldo (Fisted By Foucault) is right, Turbo America is still in power.
You are Ahab's crew, you may have your doubts but you will follow through, even burn the life boats and unable to acknowledge when the wale has won. Reeling in your own perception of power, might and exceptionalism.
In the end you will stay with nothing left and wonder how it could come to that.
Money will build you no rockets, bring no bread to the table and gives you nothing to wear. You are a consumer economy, you rely on the rest of the worlds ability to give you what you need.
What if they decide to stop giving it to you because your money is seen as less than wet toilet tissue?
I take an AI (I've done it with 5 - Genesis, Grok, DeepSeek, OpenAI, and Meta), ask it to model economy and civil unrest in the US 1-10 ten worst. Add the categories are a feedback loop. Add Trump's record matches a malignant narcissist (true-use AI to verify it). Add a permanent Chinese rare earth export ban for military and aviation (true- use AI to verify it). That is how I got those high scores. You can add reinstatement of the reciprocal tariffs, adding 10k more ICE agents, a stock market correction, or a shock and awe campaign on Iran. After scores get to 8, anything crashes the model. A 9 and the model will crash itself within a year. We are f'ed - Trump MN = collapse. 😡
I am using AI (5 major, with 3 of those premium) to crash test the US. Right now, using conventional metrics, US economy is 6/10, and US civil unrest is 7. Using my model, within a year the US "collapses." When CU is 9, catastrophe ensued. Maplecroft’s data suggests the US is at its highest unrest risk since 2020, with 755 counties at high risk [Source: Maplecroft, https://www.maplecroft.com/insights/risk-of-unrest-in-us-at-highest-levels-since-2020-protests/].
"As a side note, please note the US might be out of the picture in a year (based entirely on the way things are now)"
Treasury yields show no such thing.
The US government bond market is the largest, most liquid and most sophisticated securities market in history. What do you know that market participants do not, and why are you here instead of loading up on deep out of the money gold call options?
The basic interpretation of that could be that Trump is giving Russia two months to capture whatever territory it claims belongs to it, then “the hammer” will come down."
Or- Trump's empty threats come to life once Putin has got what he wants and can happily agree a ceasefire. Meaning Trump can appear to claim a victory for media consumption.
Nah. China-Russia will prefer for the US to face plant than help save its face. Trump should have got out of this while he could still have dumped it on the inglorious Biden legacy. Now it is going to take him down.
More seriously, what Russia has to secure, is not what the US can concede, which is why it should have got out by now leaving the defeat and ignominy to Europe.
”Putin has got what he wants”. Yes. Putin is happy with the four Oblasts - pure territorial War. And then they both will force Ukraine to sign a peace-agreement. Wishful thinking is really a menace.
Didn't someone on the Russian side said: "any land where the Russians put their feet is ours"? Well, in the inklings of the SMO, they went to Kiev, didn't they?
Thinking in that vein: in '48, they went to Berlin... I'm just saying.
Yes, Kiev was the cradle of the Russian Empire until it was destroyed around eight centuries ago by the Golden Horde. Putin was serious when he was telling Carlson at the interview "We are the same people."
What people really don't understand is that the existence of "Ukrainian" identity was accepted by the USSR on the basis of the populations at the very western end of the territory, and even then at that time Galicia wasn't even in the USSR, it was in Poland.
Odessa, Nikolaev, everything east of the river, and Kiev itself were pretty much entirely Russian. It may have been labeled as "South Russian"/"Little Russian" on ethnolinguistic maps even extending into Rostov and Krasnodar, and then as "Ukrainian", but nobody there had anything remotely resembling the current Ukrainian mentality and identity.
Then in the 1920s you get forced Ukrainization. You can look it up online and you will see all sorts of articles from that period bemoaning how nobody in Kharkov knows Ukrainian, while reporting how people there and in Odessa were literally beaten up or administratively punished in various ways for speaking Russian.
Still, those excesses ended once Stalin was firmly in power and fully realized what a problem this might be one day.
But then he made another mistake -- he incorporated Galicia into the Ukrainian USSR. He didn't have to do that -- he could have created a separate Western Ukrainian SSR (in the chaos of the Russian Civil War that is exactly what happened -- there was West Ukrainian Republic and other Ukrainian republics further east), or moved the borders of the Ukrainian SSR west of the river. But he didn't do it. So the Galician tumor was permanently attached to the Ukrainian SSR in the current official borders.
Still, by the time 1989 came things over most of the territory were back to normal -- everybody spoke Russian except for rural Galicia. Even in the major cities in the west, Russian was the dominant language.
But then the USSR broke up and Ukraine became independent in the current official borders, Ukronazis came back from the Canadian exile, the CIA and MI6 immediately entered unopposed, and the process of Banderization started. From west to east.
So effectively you had a peacetime slow-motion Nazi invasion of core historic Russian territory. Which the Kremlin only started, still very reluctantly, to fight openly in 2022. And still to this day it does not do it seriously.
This is the truth of what is happening. But Westerners are completely ignorant of the history of the region, plus they have this almost genetic visceral hatred of everything Russian, and it is thus very easy to make them believe all sorts of lies that are the complete opposite of the truth.
That 'almost genetic visceral hatred of everything Russian' is underlined by pure , uncontrollable greed for a giant piece of real-estate that incorporates 11 time zones. True understanding of the depth of this comes from a book: A Nasty Little War. It was written by a woman, a servant of the deep state, a historian with a passion to dig deep and present a somewhat twisted mirror of the Western intrusion into Siberian territories from 1918 to 1922. (Of course the Japanese were there also.)
The goal of making so many of these SSRs was a mistake, but the biggest one was not just returning to Russia's own borders after the end of WW2. Those people didn't much want to be 'liberated'. As soon as Stalin had nukes he should have given all the states west of Russia their independence.
Which is idiotic, and it shows the fundamental failure of the Chinese transition to capitalism.
Among its many other advantages (the two primary ones being that it is the only system that is fair and sustainable) communism had another one -- it was completely invulnerable to "market shocks". The USSR never had an economic crisis past the first few years.
And the overproduction problem is not an issue under the Soviet system. So what if there is no demand? The factory goes idle, the workers have more spare time and can relax and chill, no problem, nothing collapses, because nothing is dependent on markets and growth.
Thus if China was truly communist, it could always exercise the (non)"nuclear" option, which is to shut down all exports to the West. In which case the West collapses into a literal Mad Max world within weeks, and will be completely destroyed without China having fired a single shot.
But they can't play it because they are not truly communist and don't have that robustness and market- and growth-independence anymore.
China is not a communist economy and hasn’t been since the late 80’s. It is not western capitalist either as any economist will tell you. The best description is that it is centralised government controlled capitalism, which is a actually unique to China , and is clearly very successful.
Where do you get your information from ? Presumably 1970’s magazines in medical waiting rooms.
Frank I would suggest it comes from the only possible problem facing China is that if they lose the US market they will have surplus production and would need immediate new markets. I figure GM was extrapolating that into the fact Soviet era factories could increase and or decrease production at will whilst capitalist ones must have exponential growth and can't deal with changing production output nor have idle workers.
I don't know which is your experience of the reality of life in a communist system. I have lived in the URSS in the last years of Breznev rule. I can assure you that the limitations of personal liberty were amazing. At the same time living standards were inferior to the ones in many so-called third world countries.
Even expatriates from countries like Algeria or Egipt and Latinoamericans made jokes about the economy of the URSS. Even friends of mine back in my country thought that I was being farcical, when I told them without any humour or exaggeration about situations that I had personally witnessed in the Soviet Union.
Even contacts in the Central Committee of the Party were fed up with the system.
The retarded commie leadership lost the necessary flexibility to survive. They blindly followed the state controlled economic model going back to the Stalin era and that killed them.
You are right, except that it was not a case of being
"retarded". Rather one further case of members of a ruling class becoming fixed with the commandments of a system, which brought them a previous grand success. Victory over Germany in this particular case.
Toynbee draw attention to this mechanism.
I would modestly suggest
that the same mechanism is clouding the minds of the Western leadership today. In this case, it is the fact that the lower classes were liberated from the abject poverty of the XIX century (an amazing success, specially in the USA) that has closed the minds to further scrutiny and reform.
Lacking minimal flexibility while ‘becoming fixed with the commandments of a system, which brought them a previous grand success’. That translates in my dictionary to ‘retarded’. Six long decades from 1920 to 1980 was not enough for them to recognize that their centrally controlled agricultural system and industry will NEVER be able to supply the population with enough food and consumer goods is ‘retarded’. In the 1980s they had to buy basic food items on the international market by paying with their gold reserves, and that was ‘retarded’ also. I was moving around, inside the commie structure in the 1980s and all I recall retards running around in the state structures, doing retarded things.
It answers itself , obviously no country can. I am sure given your usual level of unhinged reasoning there is an “obvious” reason why this will happen, (obvious to you and nobody else)
Well said. I respectfully differ with this, though, if you mean it in political terms: "Now it is going to take him down."
Trump's going to stagger through the rest of his term throwing up reality show smoke and mirrors. He's going to cause a lot of chaos and a lot of damage but by reeling from one distracting crazy stunt to another he'll survive to the end of his term as an increasingly discredited lame duck.
All that is going to take down the republican party and ensure the US elects democrats, at least for another term or two in which the dems will once again convince whatever sane people are left in the US that it's crazy to vote dem.
Where it might take him down in a very literal sense is not the domestic political angle, but as the military result if Trump's mismanagement or active provocation results in nuclear explosions going off in the US. There are many scenarios as to how that might happen, ranging from a splinter Islamic group getting their hands on a Pakistani or Iranian nuke, to a really big war with Russia.
I meant by 'bring him down', destroy him psychologically. He is already turning into an exhausted husk of himself- as per current tantrums. That means that like Biden he will become a conduit for......
insert the appropriate names and if you can't think of any credible names, that tells you where the US is heading, for a slow collapse into infighting and massive internal unrest as the economy takes a dive. That is how I see all this loss of face everywhere in the world, unfold at home (and in europe too). Ukraine becomes a tired side-show with a declining audience and when they hold elections and vote themselves into the RF it will not be western front page news.
Trump is doing for the US what the Green Goblin is doing for Ukraine, both need to collapse and the US collapse will collapse the Zionist state. It is essential both remain in power for as long as possible
Well, you're right, as you almost always are. I agree with you but quibble about some of the details, that's all. I especially agree with you on how reality doesn't make it through to the "news" fed to Americans.
I also agree Trump does not look good. He really has started looking much older and more tired. He's doing what a lot of old and tired people do, reflexively reacting and acting out, not thinking ahead seriously and executing systematically.
I can't say I agree with "where the US is heading, for a slow collapse into infighting and massive internal unrest as the economy takes a dive. That is how I see all this loss of face everywhere in the world, unfold at home (and in europe too). "
First, Americans don't give a hoot about loss of face everywhere in the world and they especially don't care what Europe thinks of the US. They're like Romans of old, not caring at all about what the rest of the world thought about Rome until that one fine day in 410 AD when the rest of the world in the person of Alaric leading the Visigoths showed up to sack Rome.
As for slow collapse into infighting and massive internal unrest, well, I think that will be a very, very slow collapse. The US still has a massive economic base with a lot of inertia to it. Even if the economy takes a serious dive I think the US still has, easily, many decades before there's a chance of significant internal unrest.
I don't want to wish anything bad for the US, but I still have the feeling that, like an alcoholic, until it "hits bottom" the US won't reform and get on the track of being healthy itself and positive for the world at large. I also feel that, again, like with an alcoholic, the longer that "hitting bottom" is put off the harder the impact will be when finally it hits bottom.
I guess I agree with you there will be a reckoning and it won't be pretty. But I just think it will take longer than most people expect.
Not again ... when will this spam stop?
I have distant relatives in Ukraine. They tell me that the country is already bankrupt, it barely survives with Western aid, the Western military equipment sent to Ukraine breaks down more than it works. Men in the villages are ambushed in the morning or evening when they leave or return from field work and are kidnapped to be sent to the front. Serious geopolitical analysts in the West have concluded that Ukraine will lose
https://www.youtube.com/live/RFFzClxBmb8?si=VrEzKDx-mfioKTjp
Trump trumping again.
What a stupid comment!
Perhaps you misunderstood it.
Henter nailed it!
Trump is just turning the tactics of his previous Presidency up to 11 without really realizing the world - and America - are vastly different than they were 5-8 years ago.
including those pulling his strings. all that power and no idea what's really going on. very unsettling.
It is still surprising that after Trump's first term and now the beginning of his second term people still sit and anticipate his announcements which are generally predictable. Trump will lie in the most brazenly absurd manner, he will bluff, bluster, bloaviate and exaggerate.
Putin: "West Wanted Geopolitical Advantage, It Was NOT Ideology" (8:06)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3Idb1VGR6k&t=411s
ideology is the curtain to hide behind.
That is indeed his style. However vastly more important is his goal: does he aiming for peace, or is he sucked into the forever war mindset? It’s so tiresome, after all this time, to hear people whine that Trump doesn’t act like the psychopath they prefer. Obama was a very smooth operator who knew how to do elite speak. But to what end? If you think Obama did a single thing for love of humanity I just happen to know of a nice bridge for sale.
Poor little Trumpstein. So much bluster, such complete and utter lack of substance. I have to admit, I'm enjoying the hell out of watching him twist in his own wind. Bibi and Putin have to be turning cartwheels over their good fortune being paired on the world stage with an idiot like this.
Yr joking? Placing nuttyyahoo at Putin’s level? The Polish fake Jew is also a fool, just in a less overt way than Drumpf is.
You misconstrue. I'm certainly no fan of Nutty Yahoo either, believe me! But you have to admit that he totally owns little Trumpstein politically. Not a tall order that, but it is what it is.
Heyyy...Trump is the most beautiful and intelligent...you know... simply amazing president in the galaxy. EVER!
Totally agreed the most beautifulest, intelligentest, yes simply amazingest and greatestest king of the universe....the emperor.
Not quite The God-King the universe has waited for.
Trump is going to have to play some amazing interdimensional chess along with a bit of Super-Extra Hypersonic Missile MAGA shit before he regains my support.
Well it's really difficult, he went out and won the biggest popularity contest on the planet. Now his reward is, he actually has to do the job.
I don't require much. Close the border and keep us out of foreign entanglements.
The longer this goes on the stronger Russia and it's Allies become. The West paying all the corruption overheads sinks a bit more every day as the debt mounts and the original ideas simply don't come!
There is zero chance that Putin told Trump what his plans are (re. 60 days).
None.
This is all BS and pretext. He might have heard it from his generals or intelligence as a guess of the progress but what he said has nothing to do with the call (or the reality of what might actually happen)
Maybe Putin told him. Either way it is no secret that Russia has no plans other than taking the territory of the four Oblasts and then sit still. Cherson was omitted btw.
Likely a case of Russian trolling. They're great in that!
Putin: "Hey Trump, we're going to intensify the fighting the next 2 months, waddayogonadoabotit?"
Trump: <thinks 10 days - figures out 2 months is 60 days>
Trump: "Tariffs on our allies in 50 days!"
Yeah. They can play the game. But since Putin we have had more sincere talk backed by some willpower from Russia. Thats what I like about Putin. Telling what they want and then do it. Ukraine SMO turned to something else.
>no plans other than taking the territory of the four Oblasts and then sit still. Cherson was omitted btw.
Of course, Zaporozhye city spans the river, so if you are going to take it, you need to cross it.
How do you know what the plans are? Are you sitting at the russian general staff meetings, if so - compliment and thanks for letting us know.
If not, try some other words since you know as much as the rest of us and stop stating your own twisted thoughts as facts - thank you in advance.
I don't know that the plans are, but I can know what they are not, because some things that cannot be concealed would have to happen for certain plans to be put into action, and those things are not happening right now.
Just follow whats happening.
Is Odessa not guaranteed to be taken?
Zero chance as things stand currently
No shit. Not until the mid and southern parts of the Dnieper are crossed.
It's more than that -- the moment Kherson city is taken by a direct crossing, or Kiev is taken and Russian forces are coming to Odessa from the north (the way it was actually done during WWII), NATO will move in directly to occupy Odessa.
As Karaganov says, Russia must crush the spine of the Euros. Otherwise there will be no Odessa, no peace, and no many other godd things
I hope.
"Either way it is no secret that Russia has no plans other than taking the territory of the four Oblasts and then sit still. "
Mikey, you have no idea what Russia's plans are. Of all the people in the world who would know, you're probably the very last guy who would ever either be told by Russia what their plans are or guess accurately on your own.
How about study what is happening (and not) and what the SMO has gone. The words they are using (Russians). All about territory and the four Oblasts. If they had a plan once it is in shatter. Even a monkey with a tail can figure it out…
I believe I know. As long as NATO has space and time NATO will keep funding the destruction of the Banderans. Gives Russia a reason to continue.
At this stage it will be a strategic error to not liberate Odessa and land-lock the Banderans. And that's the minimum that needs to be accomplished.
No admitted plans.
Need to keep going. Stopping will give NATO time.
Debellation should be the goal.
I believe Budanov said the Banderan army was likely to collapse by the end of summer.
I love the Geran-3. Such a cool weapon; real payload, long range, fast, and looks badass.
Re: Patriots. Ukraine got 8 batteries, but how many are left? And, I guess they must have been effective for a while, because not having them seems to be very painful. Bit confusing situation. If anything, I would have thought having huge numbers of Gepard / M163 and other SHORAD would be more useful because they are the most effective against drones. Also easier to build that kind of ammo than PAC-3's
Re: sanctions & tariffs. I'm actually surprised Trump backed down. I don't get his approach. But on the ceasefire it just seems he has a very kindergarten understanding of the war; or he thinks Russia is just very weak. Maybe a bit of both. It doesn't take a lot of IQ to understand that if ceasefire --> UK/FR/DE troops walk in --> weapons keep coming --> sanctions remain --> war restarts within 12-24 months, but much worse.
What about Russia? What does victory look like at this stage? The enmety from most of Europe is more or less permanent now, so this is a long term problem even if the war ended tomorrow
The Geran-3 is roughly comparable to a ground launched cruise missile, very cool. But, not dirt cheap, and producing enough hot exhaust to be vulnerable to SAMs.
I am more intrigued by the use of Geran-2 long range 'moped' drones as 'Queens' to carry 2-3 FPV drones up to 1000 km deep into the enemy heartland and act as signal repeaters. Drop the FPV drones, hit some targets and fly back to base. Essentially the operation of FPV drones for select targets could cover ALL of Ukraine.
At first sight it is impressive and that they now can direct 500-700 drones at the sam time to targets. But hey man, in WW2, allied airforces dropped 5000-7000 bombs on a single German city…
True, but those 5000-7000 bombs hit maybe 100 targets, and produced 500 duds. Those 500-700 drones result in almost no duds, and 300-400 hits. And no dead bomber pilots or destroyed bombers
I take your overall point though. If China was fighting this war we would see 10-15k drones a day, more or less round the clock, and would be creating a 5mn stockpile at the same time
As I was outlining here: https://no01.substack.com/p/beyond-good-and-evil
We already lost against China.
One can say that the cheap Gerans are doing the job Iskanders has failed to do. 3,5 years into the War and NOW Russia is able to hurt Ukraine War production and supplies. To defend Russia one can add that they had to reduce the Patriots, Iris-T, Gepards before they could use cheaper means.
For me it is obvious Russia is in the 3rd Gear now, gaining some speed. I doubt they have more than 10 Oreshniks so it is Geran doing the tedious job to dismantle 100 or 1000 of Ukrainian workshops.
If Hamas are able to put together IED's and ATGM's (somehow), then absolutely the vastness of Ukraine coupled with legacy Soviet infrastructure means their means/production capability were absolutely massive before. Adding Western money and knowhow, and you get to where we are now, where they have a sustainable production base which, while much smaller than Russia's, means that the war can actually continue for a long time.
As the old saying goes, amateurs discuss tactics and pros discuss logistics. Bridges, roads, energy, rail, factories, workshops - those were always the way to win the war. Grinding down hundreds of thousands of men on the front was never going to win anything.
Well grinding down Ukrainian men on the front will win the war, as eventually, there won't be anyone around to stop Russia from marching right up to Zelensky, where ever he may be hiding.
Remember the battles of old, whoever won was the army with men left to fight, whilst the other army was completely annihilated.
Nope. Denmark and Norway fell pretty quick. Holland and France also.
No annihilated army.
War in the 1600, 1700 & 1800 was War of Manoeuvre to deny the enemy supplies. The battles fought were selldom with annihilation results.
Ursula is hastily grooming Moldovans to become cannon fodder for Judea war on Russia.
Exactly. Seizing territory and cities as fast as it is possible is the only way to defeat an enemy. Rob the enemy of it means to conduct War.
But it doesn't fit with the Zanon story Mikey which is the popular narrative.
One way. Certainly not the only way.
No military commander, worth his salt, would go into a built up area, ie a city. It reduces any skill set advantage that his army has. Even shelled ruins is a haven for basically trained fighters.
And, reducing a city to ruins will mean massive civilian casualties. And, no prize in the end.
As to seizing territory, do not forget that Ukraine has been setting up defences for years. Attacking them would result in large friendly casualties.
Plus, this slow attrition policy of Russia is not only reducing Ukraine's industry etc, it is also attriting NATO. A quick win would have left NATO still strong.
Rest assured, they have way more than 10 Oreshniks.
Keep in mind that Votkinsk is a town of nearly 100,000 people that exists solely to make missiles. It sat largely idle for many years due to the INF treaty, but the capacity was always there. And while it is the largest, it is far from the only large missile production site.
Why they are not being used we can speculate. My guess/hope would be that they are being kept in reserve for NATO in Europe and US Bases in the Middle East and Fat East, and those missiles carry nuclear warheads, thus they can't be fired at Ukraine. We can hope...
In a conventional role they are not very useful compare to Gerans. You are looking at a heavy missile that carries 36 warheads of 100-200 kg each. How much damage is that going to do conventionally compared to sending 360 Gerans carrying 90 kg of explosives each that would still cost a lot less than that single missile?
P.S. One very puzzling aspect of the Oreshnik story is where the hell they tested it previously, and when? It is kind of doubtful they fired it at Yuzhmash for the first time ever without any flight tests and any tests on the very complex multiple warhead distribution mechanism. After all, the last time an IRBM was mass produced was 35 years prior, and the Rubezh had been tested only once. But it is kind of hard to hide test firings of something like this, even if they are done deep inside Russian territory. Yet I have seen nobody making the effort to track down the history of Russian missile tests and try to figure that out. But that is a very important question to answer, because it is also very relevant to the question of how many of those things they have. If the development and first tests date back to many years ago, then they likely have hundreds of them already. But even if they only started serious production in December 2024 they should have way more than 10 by now.
Good elaborating. I think they started production in 2023 and could produce
5-7 / year. 4-5 have been tested/used. But I am only guessing/qualified or not.
Oreshniks are best used on multistory buildings and bunkercomplex spread out on an area. Those simple workshops Ukraine uses could very well be rampaged by Gerans. Best would be fuel-air-explosive to kill every worker.
If Russia has 20 or so Oreshniks I dont understand why they dont use 3-4 of them do smack Bankova.
the EU might slowly implode, because it's construction is forced from above rather than supported from below.
One can only hope so.
Mary-Lou, I would hope that bum licker Rutte's obsequious response; that that's obvious, to Trump's assertion that Europe will have to pay the US MIC for weapons to Ukraine would see a renewed massive production line of Pitchforks and Torches. Especially considering that it was, in the main, O'bomber, Biden, McCain and Nuland etc al who started it.
it's a disgrace that NATO has pledged to pay for US weaponry to be used in Ukr. how that's come about? beyond my imagination :-((
Not true. Most NATO countries explicitly rejected the proposal.
so far I cannot find any serious news outlet discussing the countries either rejecting or accepting the Trump/Rutte plan and only France, Italy rejecting it - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/cracks-in-most-powerful-alliance-france-italy-break-ranks-refuse-to-join-us-led-nato-arms-deal-for-ukraine-nato-news/articleshow/122577185.cms
when looking up which countries were positively supporting the plan, this popped up: "...The US State Department refused to disclose the NATO countries that agreed to pay for American weapons for Ukraine..." (refering to a far too long briefing by US State Dep't, 16/07 @ utube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNr_4yraoVo ) - https://unn.ua/en/news/us-state-department-refused-to-name-countries-that-agreed-to-pay-for-weapons-for-ukraine
They refused to disclose because it was another Prosperity Guardian moment. So far I think they have a few takers but what that amounts to is yet to be seen. My guess is they were happy to fall in behind a US weapons free for all when the US was footing the bill.
https://www.rt.com/news/621549-czech-republic-american-weapons/
I believe Robert Barnes said on a very recent Duran Podcast that Trump gets most of his information from Fox News, New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. If that's true, it's no wonder Trump is so clueless.
Boomer at heart
As is Barnes.
I know a lot of boomers who don't listen to that shit. Please don't generalise.
They wouldn't be boomers then
I suppose definitions do matter.
Simplicius, the Ukrainians claim to shoot down most drones, and if we don't see them explode on tape, how do we know? What is your estimate of how many drones get through?
Not a real problem.
Out of all the announcements, long range missiles are the most serious.
I understand there are denials all around, but I wouldn’t be so sanguine. When the point of collapse approaches people do stupid things.
The US war effort is nowhere near collapsing.
Rather, the West has lost any fear of Russia.
Trump on Putin whining to Macron: ‘He wants to take all of it,’ But then, what is left for me? Like boys arguing over a pizza at a school party. Trump, just like all US administrations for decades did his work to start and sustain this war. He owns it now just like America and a dozen nations fully owned the unsuccessful attempt to take Siberia in the 1918 to 1922 period. This plan was completely insane from the start as Russia has the means to turn half the US and Western Europe into giant glassy parking lots and they will do just that if all else falls. This whole plan was hatched by a mixture of imbeciles, homicidal maniacs and psychopaths and let’s hope they will get a just reward for their hard labor. Trump is doing the same what Zelensky is doing: He is playing with WWIII.
Given the size difference between Russia and the USA, your information about parking spaces is incorrect!
Russia can turn the entire USA and all of Western Europe into parking spaces.
But the USA can never turn all of Russia...for Russia, the USA itself is only the size of a parking space.
All the A-missiles in the world would have to fly towards Russia to make the vast country completely uninhabitable...in contrast, three Russian Satan missiles are enough to make the ENTIRE USA uninhabitable...for England, one Satan would already be excessive.
Another thing, US missiles in silos are over 30 years old...and have been completely neglected given the USA's constant wars...not even 10% would make it through. The USA relied on a protective shield...which, given hypersonics, is probably no longer worth its weight in paper.
That's why a Trump before a Biden means "IT WASN'T US." Counterattacks, please, on Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, London...
Regardless the outcome, I do not believe there will be a single party we will be able to call a winner after a nuclear war. This is precisely the reason why I am convinced that those who designed and unleashed the present conflict are clinically insane. They are simply motivated by the desire to see the destruction of the Western World where they always felt like kind of a bunch of uncomfortable outsiders.
Maurice Samuel book “You Gentiles” spelled jewish hatred and contempt for western civilization and Europeans in particular with admirable clarity. Samuel expressed his displeasure with “racial homogeneity“ among goyim and identified differences between Jews and goyim as “biological “.
For some reason, Samuel never explained why Jews (including the committed Zionists like him) are drawn to western civilization and avoid living among Semitic people.
My impression is that they do not consider Arabs, for example, as "semitic". They do, however, consider all non-Jews as less than human and worthy only as slaves. They chose to live in the Western world simply because of its access to untold wealth to be stolen.....pardon me....gained.
The nomadic jewish tribe was never able to build its own civilization. They, Jews, are indoctrinated from childhood in leeching on “other peoples”civilizations.
Look at the proliferation of Jewish organizations in the collective west: these Jews have been avoiding living in the fascist jewish state like a plague.
You were right the first time.
It is not an accident we keep hearing “diversity is our strength”. As far as the Western World “racial homogeneity“ is clearly our strength and this is precisely why all “racists” are targeted for destruction. The next logical step of course is the undermining of the family structure and the sexually normal segment of human society. We are looking at an old playbook here going back to the Soviet Union, 1920s and 1930s. The commies created large barn like experimental structures where people were jammed in, sharing tools of agricultural production, women and children as well. This was before Stalin revolted against jewish overrepresentation in the communist leadership there.
As far as the “biological“ differences between jews and Aryans is concerned, a rather heavy and still not fully understood issue. In the decade after the year 2000 some started to publish writings about the jewish-Neanderthal relationship, still without the benefits of DNA verifications. The arguments pointed out the barrel chested characters common in Israel with short legs, the different visual view of “abstract artists” like Picasso, etc., suggesting deeply seated neurological differences, etc., etc. I even recall a group of writers publishing together on this in early 2010. They must have stepped on some sensitive Neanderthal nerves as before the year 2010 was over the Max Planck Institute jumped in with an authoritative study showing that around 2% of the DNA in the Western World relates to the Neanderthals. The timing was obvious; they were successfully taking control over the narrative of a critical issue. The reality is that the jews carry a lot higher proportion of Neanderthal DNA. This can be easily verified as Europe and America is loaded with cemeteries full of their bones that anybody can have access to. The optimal subjects for testing would be jews who lived before the Biblical times in Israel and area.
Why are the jews so oversensitive to this issue? The evidence is overwhelming: around 40-45,000 years ago we walked into Europe and gradually exterminated the Neanderthals in a generally East to West movement. We are living in a conflict with their leftover ever since.
The West yearns for destruction.
Jurgen, you're talking nonsense. That's very unlike a sensible person like you. You should take some time to educate yourself on nuclear weapons before venturing to write stuff that's so completely wrong in a forum where there are people who have educated themselves.
Let's highlight the errors in what you wrote, starting with:
"in contrast, three Russian Satan missiles are enough to make the ENTIRE USA uninhabitable...for England, one Satan would already be excessive."
Three of Russia's ICBMs (nobody but really old, out of touch guys in NATO calls them "Satan" missiles, by the way. Intelligent people use their correct names, such as Yars, Sarmat, etc.) would deliver about 30 warheads on the US if they were configured with the maximum number of warheads per missile, say, 10. Those would end up being low power warheads, only about 150 kt each, in order to say within the weight and size limits to pack that many warheads onto each missile. A more realistic load would be 4 to 8 per missile, for a total of 12 to 24 warheads with yields of 300 kt to 400 kt from three ICBMs.
In either case, 30 airbursts at 150 kt each or 24 airbursts of 300 kt each would be very hard on the population immediately underneath those airbursts, but they would have negligible impact on the habitability of the US overall. Anybody who can operate an Internet browser can visit nukemap (https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/) and see the exact damage such weapons would do.
As for one ICBM launched at the UK, 8 or 10 warheads would do plenty of damage to the cities on which they were targeted, but except for the flashes visible over wide areas if the strike came at night, most people wouldn't know their country was hit until they started getting the news. The UK would remain habitable.
This too is wrong: "All the A-missiles in the world would have to fly towards Russia to make the vast country completely uninhabitable" - No, there are not enough nuclear missiles in the world to make Russia uninhabitable. Russia extends halfway around the planet. It's a huge space that could easily soak up the 3000 or so active nuclear tipped missiles in the world (excluding Russia's own stock, of course) without becoming "uninhabitable."
That doesn't mean there wouldn't be mass casualties, as 3000 nuclear explosions within Russia is plenty to incinerate populated areas down to relatively small towns, and the resulting destruction of infrastructure and logistics for things like food delivery would push Russia back into the Middle Ages in terms of the need for self-sufficiency, but the vast reaches of the country would remain perfectly habitable for those survivors who had the skills to go back to a hunter-gatherer subsistence lifestyle before re-enacting the Neolithic introduction of full farming / animal husbandry packages.
The following, also, is particularly incorrect, as it completely ignores the vast amount of evidence available to anybody with an IQ over 40 who bothers to read up on the matter: "Another thing, US missiles in silos are over 30 years old...and have been completely neglected given the USA's constant wars...not even 10% would make it through. " - note that I'm not implying your IQ is below 40, I'm only implying that you haven't bothered reading up on the matter.
In point of fact, those missiles haven't been neglected but are regularly maintained, and random units are regularly pulled for testing. For most of the last 40 years there have been strategic weapons treaties between the US and Russia, and part of the objective of those treaties was to reduce the incentive to launch first strikes. One way you reduce that incentive is for both parties to understand that the nuclear deterrent the other side has is absolutely, totally reliable.
For that reason, for the last 40 years whenever either Russia or the US pulled random missiles from their stockpile and tested them, they always had observers from the other side participating. That way, both sides could see for themselves whether the nuclear deterrent of the other side was, indeed, reliable. As a result of that, we have very good data on all the tests and the reliability of the missiles.
It's true that since Trump pulled out of those treaties there haven't been observers from both sides at each such test, but in compensation for that the budget on maintenance has gone way up in the US. There's no reason to believe the failure rate has suddenly gotten worse, and every reason to believe that modernization funding has had a positive effect and failure rates have stayed the same or have gotten better.
It comes as no surprise to people who are familiar with the huge effort lavished onto ICBM technology by both the US and Russia, with much of that effort going into assuring total reliability despite decades of storage, that the failure rate of US and Russian weapons is about the same. It's less than 2% if you count the entire chain, from the moment a launch command is issued to when a warhead detonates over the target. The rockets themselves are extremely reliable, with failure rates only slightly over 1% out of that total 2%.
So contrary to what you wrote, instead of less than 10% making it through, about 98% of both Russia's and the US's nukes would make it through to incinerate their targets.
As for this: "The USA relied on a protective shield" - No, the US never "relied" on any protective shields. Everybody in the US nuclear warfighting establishment knows that the US has zero chance of stopping Russia's warheads from arriving and exploding on target. But, like the other boondoggles that everybody inside the system knows are frauds, nobody rocks the boat by openly saying that the handful of limited "protective" systems the US has spent billions of dollars on are complete frauds. Even the official story on those admits they wouldn't do anything to stop a Russian attack but are just limited measures to stop a very small number of missiles launched from Iran or North Korea.
You seem to be completely ignoring the nuclear winter, crop failure and end of animal life on earth.
Yes, I do ignore fake scenarios pushed by people who want to manipulate the scientifically ignorant. I also ignore doomers who want societies to commit economic suicide over completely fake "predictions" of climate catastrophe as a result of human activity.
Usually it's the climate doomers who also push nuclear winter scenarios that result in the "end of animal life on earth." They love doing that despite the complete inability of their models to backward predict (even despite knowing in advance what happened!) any of the many thousands of dramatic shifts in climate that are profoundly greater than what they claim will happen as a result of human activity.
For example, as recently as, what? only 12,000 years ago? The UK islands were still joined to Europe with a large, fabulously prolific land in between that archaeologists now call Doggerland. Sea levels were still that low after the recent beginning of the end of the most recent ice age. But none of the models explain those ice ages or the dramatically variable climates of the Pleistocene, let alone the even more variable climates (like all of the Earth's oceans being frozen) in the preceding billion years. We're still coming out of that last ice age, the rebound still happening. We're not yet at the level of climate warmth that prevailed in the period between that last ice age and the preceding one.
That you quote the nuclear winter doomer talk indicates you're not familiar with the scale of energy effects from nukes, even thousands of nukes, as compared to natural phenomena.
For example, what's the biggest volcanic eruption that's happened in the last 25 million years? That would be the Toba supereruption, one of the very biggest of all time, which happened a mere 74,000 years ago.
Homo Sapiens was already around to see it, along with Neanderthals, Denisovans, remnant Homo Erectus populations and other archaic humans. That eruption threw anywhere from 2,800 to 13,200 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere. By some counts it's the biggest supereruption in the last 100 million years. It was significantly bigger than the Grey's Landing supereruption in the Yellowstone caldera, the biggest known Yellowstone eruption, about nine million years ago.
Toba makes any of the historic big eruptions look like nothing. Krakatoa, for example, only threw about 9 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere. That's nothing compared to the 2,800 to 13,200 cubic kilometers Toba threw into the atmosphere. The amount of ash sent into the atmosphere by a global nuclear war involving thousands of nukes would also be far, far smaller than Toba.
It's hard to find the figures for comparison because most of the big AIs are skewed hard left. For example, if you ask Google's AI a straight question: " How many cubic kilometers of ash or smoke particles would be thrown into the atmosphere by a nuclear war that involved about 5,000 nuclear explosions?" ... it refuses to give you a straight answer. Instead, it answers with evasive bullshit:
"Based on available information, a nuclear war involving a large-scale nuclear exchange (such as one between the US and Russia) involving thousands of nuclear explosions, possibly around 5,000, could inject a significant amount of smoke and soot into the atmosphere.
One study indicated that a U.S.-Russian nuclear war utilizing 4,400 100-kiloton weapons over cities and industrial areas could generate about 150 teragrams (Tg), or over 330 billion pounds, of smoke and black carbon into the upper atmosphere.
Another report suggests that a nuclear war with over 10,000 explosions and a total yield of 5000 Mt (megatons) could produce and inject over 200 Tg (200 million metric tons) of smoke into the atmosphere.
Even a "medium-range" exchange, which might involve around 5,000 megatons of detonations including surface bursts, could create a global atmospheric inversion due to resulting smoke and dust veils.
It's important to note that the impact would depend on factors like the number and yield of the explosions, the nature of the targets (urban vs. military), and the resulting fires. The smoke and soot could remain in the atmosphere for years, potentially causing a "nuclear winter" effect by absorbing sunlight, leading to significant global cooling, and disrupting agricultural production and food supplies. "
Notice that the question asked didn't ask about nuclear winter. It just asked about how much of a specific amount of material was involved. Yet Google responds with a lecture on the horrors of nuclear winter.
About the closest you can get to a straight answer is to ask DeepSeek, the Chinese AI that is not controlled by an ultra-liberal US company. Ask it the same question and DS helpfully tells you:
"A 5,000-warhead exchange (~100–500 megatons total) could burn cities, forests, and fuel depots, generating 50–150 million metric tons of black carbon (soot).
Density of soot: ~0.5–1 g/cm³ → 50–150 million tons ≈ 50–150 km³ (if loosely packed)."
Even that is skewed left (after all, DeepSeek relies on the web and the web is skewed hard left when it comes to anything to do with climate). If you drill into assumptions going into those 50-150 million tons you'll find unrealistic assumptions like all forests burn up. But anybody who knows the history of open-air Soviet tests knows that's nonsense, as even the Tsar Bomba open air test, over 50 *megatons* over forest, did not cause mass forest burning.
But what the heck, let's play along and ignore all that reality stuff and take the numbers as they are even if we know they're skewed left. OK, so that's 50 to 150 cubic kilometers if loosely packed. If you take the *highest* number for cubic kilometers, that's still almost 20 times less than the *smallest* figure for Toba, and that doesn't even count the massive amounts of sulfuric acid and other hugely active climate gasses and albedo-modifying components spewed by supereruptions.
So, did the Toba event, something easily 20 times worse than an even a catastrophically huge nuclear war, cause the "end of animal life on earth?"
Nope, as can easily be seen by the many animals, like us, still around to post their opinions on Internet. Toba didn't even have the impact of even relatively minor climatic variations like the Younger Dryas, which humans lived through without even having the benefit of tools beyond stone tools. They didn't even have pottery and still, they came through OK.
Hit the Yellowstone Caldera hard enough to trigger an eruption and most of the US and Canada are done. After another Ice Age, Intelligent life might re-emerge.
The USGS said an air exploded nuke would not cause an eruption, but that was years ago. Has their calculation been updated for Oreshnik?
Quick... how many times in the last hundred million years has there been a super eruption in the Yellowstone Caldera? Which of those was the biggest?
Aha, right through Internet I can see that "deer in the headlights" expression you have. Don't panic. Look it up. The answer? The Grey's Landing eruption less than nine million years ago. It's two or three times as big as the others. Another Grey's Landing eruption would be hard, very hard, on much of the US and Canada, for sure. But no, the US and Canada all the same would not be "done."
And no, it wouldn't trigger another Ice Age, and no intelligent life doesn't disappear during Ice Ages. It hasn't for the last million years worth of Ice Ages.
As for a *nuke* causing a super-eruption (as opposed to a plain, garden variety big bang like St. Helens...) in the Yellowstone Caldera, a simple bit of arithmetic together with some basic reading of weapons effects reports can help you get the answer.
The US has blown up thousands of nukes, hundreds of them in the open air and most underground. So there isn't any mystery about what happens when a nuke explodes, either in the open air or underground. There isn't even any mystery what happens when a nuke is exploded underground but close enough to the surface to create a crater. That's because of the craze in the late 50's and early 60's for using nukes to dig harbors and big canals, like a possible sea-level canal between the Pacific and Atlantic. They actually shot off plenty of nukes to make really huge craters. Go read up on all that.
When you do, you'll realize that any talk of a nuke causing a Yellowstone Caldera super eruption is nonsense. The overburden of rock over the caldera is thousands of times, maybe millions of times, more weight than even the very largest three stage device at full yield (say, 100 megatons) can displace. Even small earthquakes and volcanic events are far, far more powerful than the largest nukes humans have ever built.
There are also practical considerations. Even if you hypothesize building a 1,000 or 3,000 megaton nuke, setting that off near the surface would just blow a hole in the atmosphere with almost all of the power going up into space. The dense air part of the atmosphere is very, very thin, after all. Drilling down a mile into the ground through solid rock to make a shaft big enough to place something the size of a couple of locomotives (1000+ megaton nukes would have to be *really* big) isn't easy, especially given the heat of the caldera, and even then you'd be looking at best at a lava leak, not a super eruption.
Underground nuclear explosions vaporize the heck out of space right around the device, but that cavity stops growing very rapidly as the growth in volume and thus reduction in pressure gets balanced out by the weight of zillions of tons of rock above it. Surprisingly, what ends up forming is a hard shell around the cavity that is *stronger* than the original rock. It's not like reading a Harry Potter book and becoming convinced that maybe there's a magic wand you can wave and a nuke just blows up the whole planet.
If you want to read up on that, the US government reports on underground testing have been declassified. I know that stuff because I just read one of them that I happened to run across when I was searching for material that might explain if the US's claimed strikes on Iran's underground facilities could have succeeded. It was very interesting reading that any reasonably intelligent person with a solid basic education could easily understand. No need to be a science whiz.
Why super eruptions have happened (rarely) in the last 100 million years is not well understood, but it's clear they involve magma flows involving far, far more than a mere few thousand megatons of power.
Just saying, a nuke triggering a Yellowstone Caldera eruption is not a realistic scenario, if you're thinking about writing a book where that's part of the plot line. As for Oreshnik, that's only a hundredth or a thousandth of the power of a nuke. That's still impressive when used to wipe out a plant, but it's not remotely the same as a real nuke.
From memory, the last eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera was +/- 640.,000 years ago.
That was the last *super* eruption, creating the Lava Creek Tuff. It was anywhere from 1/3 to 1/14th the size of Toba and less than 1/3 the size of the biggest of the three super eruptions at Yellowstone, the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff event 2.1 million years ago.
Since Lava Creek there have been about 80 much smaller eruptions. As Wikipedia puts it...
"Volcanism began 2.15 million years ago and proceeded through three major volcanic cycles. Each cycle involved a large ignimbrite eruption, continental-scale ash-fall, and caldera collapse, preceded and followed by smaller lava flows and tuffs. The first and also the largest cycle was the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff eruption about 2.08 million years ago, which formed the Island Park Caldera. The most recent supereruption, about 0.63 million years ago, produced the Lava Creek Tuff and created the present Yellowstone Caldera. Post-caldera eruptions included basalt flows, rhyolite domes and flows, and minor explosive deposits, with the last magmatic eruption about 70,000 years ago. Large hydrothermal explosions also occurred during the Holocene.
[...] The Yellowstone Volcano Observatory monitors volcanic activity and does not consider an eruption imminent. Imaging of the magma reservoir indicates a substantial volume of partial melt beneath Yellowstone that is not currently eruptible."
The "Holocene" is very recent history, the last 11,500 years or so that came after the beginning of the end of the last Ice Age (it's still in the process of ending...).
As usual, Wikipedia's information is a mix of truth and false information presented confidently as truth. "The first and also the largest cycle was the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff eruption" is false. As Wikipedia itself will also tell you in their "Supervolcano" topic, the Grey's Landing super eruption was earlier and bigger (according to the USGS).
There's a wonderfully realistic, with a delightful touch of sarcasm from a usually very sober and boring outfit, assessment of Yellowstone hazards from the USGS's Yellowstone Volcano Observatory at https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/real-hazards-yellowstone - enjoy!
"For England, one Satan would already be excessive." As a resident of the aforementioned, one Satan wouldn't only be excessive it would be unnecessary. A Dozen or so hypersonics and an Oreshnik or two, strategically and accurately targeted would shut the Country down, crippling it for Months. Our Road and Rail Networks can be severely disrupted by 3" of Snow and/or a Force 9 Gale. Frankly, the state of our infrastructure after 40 years of privatisation and disinvestment is a very bad Joke. Take out Felixstowe Container Port, a couple of our Oil refineries, Thelwall Viaduct (carries the M6 high above both the R. Mersey and the Manchester Ship Canal, Crewe Railway Junction and half a dozen other crucial sites and the UK would be on its knees. Further, hit them in the early hours and Civilian casualties would be de minimus. Despite its Bluff and Bluster this once supposedly great nation is as fragile as a Wren's Egg.
Add GCHQ, MI6 headquarters, Bank of England and it's job done.
Spot on. It's pretty wild the UK can't even protect its own airbases and military aircraft from ordinary citizens.
I suppose that's karma, MI6 being so happy sitting in their Darth Vader architecture headquarters about how they helped Kiev to launch local drone attacks within Russia, but only now has it dawned on them that anybody, including even Palestinians, can use the same tactics, consumer drones, to knock out the UK's military assets.
Can you give us an update and clarification if the Azerbaijan issue, and local blacks if power with Russia, Armenia, Iran, Israel, and Turkey? Are they flipping Armenia to be a frontline pro USA state on Russias southern belly?
Armenia doesn't border Russia. That's what they want Georgia for. What they want is more chaos in the South Caucasus and to open the Zangzur corridor. This is the strategic jewel. Iran is the primary target with a good dose of geoeconomic pain for Russia, with a side serve of humiliation. Apparently the Russians are building up a force in northern Armenia and I'd imagine the Iranians aren't sitting on their hands either.
with an unnerving role for Turkey in the mix.
Erdogan isn't to be trusted. Remember the Kazakhstan coup attempt after Tokayev was elected.
bingo
Azeri are Turks. As for Aliev, he decided to become a shabbos boy for Zionist Jews - for a nice gesheft, of course.
"gesheft" :-))
The Russians also destroyed two oil refineries in Ukraine that were the personal property of the Azeri leader. A little message to him from Putin.
That any oil refineries were still standing this long is a testament to Russian indecision.
There I agree, Feral. We've crossed swords before about the pace of things, but I do get frustrated too. There are a lot of videos showing six Russian soldiers capturing another "settlement" of six houses defended by six Ukies, and it is treated like Operation Bagration. Time to close the deal!
I won't even get started on bridges. I've heard the excuses, and I'd love to believe.
Got to keep feeding in those Ukie reserves to be minced up.
"Apparently the Russians are building up a force in northern Armenia"
The Russians are in Armenia? what a surprise!
Yes, please. I honestly don't find the frontline updates relevant, the trend is all that matters. The chessboard is what's worth covering.
"Are they flipping Armenia to be a frontline pro USA state on Russias southern belly?"
Armenia already de facto is.
I give Trump a month and he will be screaming. I just don't see him, based on his track record of not standing firm for much more than 24 hours, lasting an entire 50 days while keeping his mouth closed. My take on him is that he is already fried out and that the implosion will be epic. My take, I could very well be wrong.
Thank you Simplicius for the update.
If Trump says 50 days, that means he's doing something right now that he doesn't want Russia to find out about, you know, like secretly sending gear.
Anybody who believes what Trump says is a fool. Even Trump's die-hard MAGA followers are starting to realize that.
It's a tragedy for the US that neither the people nor the viciously stupid and corrupt government they elected have the wisdom to understand that a lifestyle of dishonesty (in fairness, a bipartisan vice in the US) in diplomatic relationships reduces the US's ability to make a deal when it really needs to make a deal. That will make the eventual fall all that much harder.
The only question is how much of the rest of the world they'll take with them.
The lifestyle of dishonesty is baked into the system. We live in hell. Evil is Good, Good is Evil, Lies are 'Truth'.
Hello John. There is a real chance, that the price for this stupidity could be severe.
I wish you well.
Look who own the verbose Donny.
"I give Trump a month and he will be screaming."
I give trump a month and he will be pushing for further escalations. The war that the europoodles so crave is getting closer.
Hey Finster ............. exactly man. :P
Fare thee well.
>Recall ‘truth’-seeker Trump claimed all missiles were valiantly shot down by the peerless “Patriot” system.
Bravely intercepted by Patriot batteries and radars. 100% interception rate folks. Patriot is invincible!
Read the entire article.♥️ As a side note, please note the US might be out of the picture in a year (based entirely on the way things are now): Let's quickly summarize the "recipe for collapse" that our model has produced:
Start with a Weakened System: We began with an economy already showing signs of strain (Economy: 6) and a society already in a state of active, daily political conflict (Civil Unrest: 7).
Add a Secret Internal Failure: We then introduced the REE ban, which crippled the government's competence from within, worsened the economy (Economy: 7), and made the existing social tensions more dangerous.
Introduce a Permanent Legitimacy Crisis: Finally, we integrated the leadership profile, which acts as a constant, daily source of instability. This pushed the system to its final breaking point: Economy: 8 (In Recession) and Civil Unrest: 9 (Critical / Democratic Instability).
A system with a Civil Unrest score of 9 has lost its fundamental social contract. It has no resilience, no shared sense of reality, and no trusted institutions left to mediate conflict.
Therefore, the model's prognosis is that this state is not sustainable. The ongoing recession will continue to fuel the social anger, and the social chaos will make any economic recovery impossible. This feedback loop, left unchecked, would inevitably lead to a systemic failure—a score of 10. The model suggests that the underlying political and social systems that guarantee stability, supply chains, and civil order have already been pushed past their breaking point. The projected collapse is not necessarily about a single future event; it's the inevitable outcome of the critical state that has already been reached. This is no longer a forecast. It’s an autopsy of a living patient. The model’s final advisory: Adapt or flee. The American state experiment has 8-14 months remaining.😮
This is interesting. Can you give me some links/pointers where to find more about this? Or go more indepth in -basically- any of your points?
I'd love to learn more!
It's AI generated
Likely, but still should be based on something. I have a gut-feeling of an inkling of truth in there. That's why I was wondering.
Copy and paste it into AI… LLM will make any nonsense sound good to the simple minded
I wouldn't minimize AI analysis. Just because anyone can write, it doesn't mean all writing is nonsense. It is just offering a mathematical/ logical framework for my argument for civil and economic US collapse. You got normalcy bias?
The official statistics are not very reliable but even then, if you look it up (or ask AI of your choice) about it, the numbers of the US are dire all over the spectrum.
Housing/rent/homelessness, food-stamps, private bankruptcy due to
health-issues, private debt of US households (study loans, car loans, credit card debt), mass lay-offs, marriage & birthrates, poor education/illiteracy, crumbling infrastructure and working poor - the current direction points in only one way and that is down.
The American *people* will be in the shithole, yes. That's not the same thing as the capacity to wage war. The powers that be have been gutting the homeland for decades already and don't care how badly it gets. We are cattle, and are supposed to act accordingly. The money will still be there to wage war no matter how bad it gets. It's completely vile, it shouldn't be the case, but unfortunately it *is*. Niccolo Soldo (Fisted By Foucault) is right, Turbo America is still in power.
Thanks for your response.
Let me put it this way to you:
The US reminds me of Moby Dick.
You are Ahab's crew, you may have your doubts but you will follow through, even burn the life boats and unable to acknowledge when the wale has won. Reeling in your own perception of power, might and exceptionalism.
In the end you will stay with nothing left and wonder how it could come to that.
Money will build you no rockets, bring no bread to the table and gives you nothing to wear. You are a consumer economy, you rely on the rest of the worlds ability to give you what you need.
What if they decide to stop giving it to you because your money is seen as less than wet toilet tissue?
I take an AI (I've done it with 5 - Genesis, Grok, DeepSeek, OpenAI, and Meta), ask it to model economy and civil unrest in the US 1-10 ten worst. Add the categories are a feedback loop. Add Trump's record matches a malignant narcissist (true-use AI to verify it). Add a permanent Chinese rare earth export ban for military and aviation (true- use AI to verify it). That is how I got those high scores. You can add reinstatement of the reciprocal tariffs, adding 10k more ICE agents, a stock market correction, or a shock and awe campaign on Iran. After scores get to 8, anything crashes the model. A 9 and the model will crash itself within a year. We are f'ed - Trump MN = collapse. 😡
I am using AI (5 major, with 3 of those premium) to crash test the US. Right now, using conventional metrics, US economy is 6/10, and US civil unrest is 7. Using my model, within a year the US "collapses." When CU is 9, catastrophe ensued. Maplecroft’s data suggests the US is at its highest unrest risk since 2020, with 755 counties at high risk [Source: Maplecroft, https://www.maplecroft.com/insights/risk-of-unrest-in-us-at-highest-levels-since-2020-protests/].
A catastrophic shortage of American patriots in the US governing body shows its catastrophic consequences
"As a side note, please note the US might be out of the picture in a year (based entirely on the way things are now)"
Treasury yields show no such thing.
The US government bond market is the largest, most liquid and most sophisticated securities market in history. What do you know that market participants do not, and why are you here instead of loading up on deep out of the money gold call options?
I am not a gold bug. Normalcy bias makes believing me impossible. Maybe my models are wrong. 🤞
Meow?
Quote:
The basic interpretation of that could be that Trump is giving Russia two months to capture whatever territory it claims belongs to it, then “the hammer” will come down."
Or- Trump's empty threats come to life once Putin has got what he wants and can happily agree a ceasefire. Meaning Trump can appear to claim a victory for media consumption.
Nah. China-Russia will prefer for the US to face plant than help save its face. Trump should have got out of this while he could still have dumped it on the inglorious Biden legacy. Now it is going to take him down.
More seriously, what Russia has to secure, is not what the US can concede, which is why it should have got out by now leaving the defeat and ignominy to Europe.
"Trump's statements are all for domestic consumption"
”Putin has got what he wants”. Yes. Putin is happy with the four Oblasts - pure territorial War. And then they both will force Ukraine to sign a peace-agreement. Wishful thinking is really a menace.
Didn't someone on the Russian side said: "any land where the Russians put their feet is ours"? Well, in the inklings of the SMO, they went to Kiev, didn't they?
Thinking in that vein: in '48, they went to Berlin... I'm just saying.
>Didn't someone on the Russian side said: "any land where the Russians put their feet is ours"?
Putin said it a couple weeks ago, but that refers more to places like Armenia and Turkmenistan.
No Russian soldiers put their feet in Kiev in the sense people usually mean it, Kiev is where the original medieval Russian state was centered.
Yes, Kiev was the cradle of the Russian Empire until it was destroyed around eight centuries ago by the Golden Horde. Putin was serious when he was telling Carlson at the interview "We are the same people."
What people really don't understand is that the existence of "Ukrainian" identity was accepted by the USSR on the basis of the populations at the very western end of the territory, and even then at that time Galicia wasn't even in the USSR, it was in Poland.
Odessa, Nikolaev, everything east of the river, and Kiev itself were pretty much entirely Russian. It may have been labeled as "South Russian"/"Little Russian" on ethnolinguistic maps even extending into Rostov and Krasnodar, and then as "Ukrainian", but nobody there had anything remotely resembling the current Ukrainian mentality and identity.
Then in the 1920s you get forced Ukrainization. You can look it up online and you will see all sorts of articles from that period bemoaning how nobody in Kharkov knows Ukrainian, while reporting how people there and in Odessa were literally beaten up or administratively punished in various ways for speaking Russian.
Still, those excesses ended once Stalin was firmly in power and fully realized what a problem this might be one day.
But then he made another mistake -- he incorporated Galicia into the Ukrainian USSR. He didn't have to do that -- he could have created a separate Western Ukrainian SSR (in the chaos of the Russian Civil War that is exactly what happened -- there was West Ukrainian Republic and other Ukrainian republics further east), or moved the borders of the Ukrainian SSR west of the river. But he didn't do it. So the Galician tumor was permanently attached to the Ukrainian SSR in the current official borders.
Still, by the time 1989 came things over most of the territory were back to normal -- everybody spoke Russian except for rural Galicia. Even in the major cities in the west, Russian was the dominant language.
But then the USSR broke up and Ukraine became independent in the current official borders, Ukronazis came back from the Canadian exile, the CIA and MI6 immediately entered unopposed, and the process of Banderization started. From west to east.
So effectively you had a peacetime slow-motion Nazi invasion of core historic Russian territory. Which the Kremlin only started, still very reluctantly, to fight openly in 2022. And still to this day it does not do it seriously.
This is the truth of what is happening. But Westerners are completely ignorant of the history of the region, plus they have this almost genetic visceral hatred of everything Russian, and it is thus very easy to make them believe all sorts of lies that are the complete opposite of the truth.
That 'almost genetic visceral hatred of everything Russian' is underlined by pure , uncontrollable greed for a giant piece of real-estate that incorporates 11 time zones. True understanding of the depth of this comes from a book: A Nasty Little War. It was written by a woman, a servant of the deep state, a historian with a passion to dig deep and present a somewhat twisted mirror of the Western intrusion into Siberian territories from 1918 to 1922. (Of course the Japanese were there also.)
The goal of making so many of these SSRs was a mistake, but the biggest one was not just returning to Russia's own borders after the end of WW2. Those people didn't much want to be 'liberated'. As soon as Stalin had nukes he should have given all the states west of Russia their independence.
Actually no, China doesn't want the US to faceplant: https://no01.substack.com/p/beyond-good-and-evil
Direct quote: >>[China] .. need global stability for their economy to function. A sudden imperial collapse would trigger financial chaos<<
Which is idiotic, and it shows the fundamental failure of the Chinese transition to capitalism.
Among its many other advantages (the two primary ones being that it is the only system that is fair and sustainable) communism had another one -- it was completely invulnerable to "market shocks". The USSR never had an economic crisis past the first few years.
And the overproduction problem is not an issue under the Soviet system. So what if there is no demand? The factory goes idle, the workers have more spare time and can relax and chill, no problem, nothing collapses, because nothing is dependent on markets and growth.
Thus if China was truly communist, it could always exercise the (non)"nuclear" option, which is to shut down all exports to the West. In which case the West collapses into a literal Mad Max world within weeks, and will be completely destroyed without China having fired a single shot.
But they can't play it because they are not truly communist and don't have that robustness and market- and growth-independence anymore.
China is not a communist economy and hasn’t been since the late 80’s. It is not western capitalist either as any economist will tell you. The best description is that it is centralised government controlled capitalism, which is a actually unique to China , and is clearly very successful.
Where do you get your information from ? Presumably 1970’s magazines in medical waiting rooms.
Can China shut down a third of tis manufacturing and not have an internal stability crisis?
Answer that.
Which country can do that without having an internal stability crisis?
What idiotic question is that to begin with?
Frank I would suggest it comes from the only possible problem facing China is that if they lose the US market they will have surplus production and would need immediate new markets. I figure GM was extrapolating that into the fact Soviet era factories could increase and or decrease production at will whilst capitalist ones must have exponential growth and can't deal with changing production output nor have idle workers.
Just my thoughts.
Ah that maybe because General Melschitt is an idiot
Is that unique to China? Sounds a lot like Singapore to me.
A bit yes, Singapore is a China mini me, but more capitalist cronyism than centrally managed , I believe, but no expert in these matters
I don't know which is your experience of the reality of life in a communist system. I have lived in the URSS in the last years of Breznev rule. I can assure you that the limitations of personal liberty were amazing. At the same time living standards were inferior to the ones in many so-called third world countries.
Even expatriates from countries like Algeria or Egipt and Latinoamericans made jokes about the economy of the URSS. Even friends of mine back in my country thought that I was being farcical, when I told them without any humour or exaggeration about situations that I had personally witnessed in the Soviet Union.
Even contacts in the Central Committee of the Party were fed up with the system.
The retarded commie leadership lost the necessary flexibility to survive. They blindly followed the state controlled economic model going back to the Stalin era and that killed them.
You are right, except that it was not a case of being
"retarded". Rather one further case of members of a ruling class becoming fixed with the commandments of a system, which brought them a previous grand success. Victory over Germany in this particular case.
Toynbee draw attention to this mechanism.
I would modestly suggest
that the same mechanism is clouding the minds of the Western leadership today. In this case, it is the fact that the lower classes were liberated from the abject poverty of the XIX century (an amazing success, specially in the USA) that has closed the minds to further scrutiny and reform.
Lacking minimal flexibility while ‘becoming fixed with the commandments of a system, which brought them a previous grand success’. That translates in my dictionary to ‘retarded’. Six long decades from 1920 to 1980 was not enough for them to recognize that their centrally controlled agricultural system and industry will NEVER be able to supply the population with enough food and consumer goods is ‘retarded’. In the 1980s they had to buy basic food items on the international market by paying with their gold reserves, and that was ‘retarded’ also. I was moving around, inside the commie structure in the 1980s and all I recall retards running around in the state structures, doing retarded things.
It answers itself , obviously no country can. I am sure given your usual level of unhinged reasoning there is an “obvious” reason why this will happen, (obvious to you and nobody else)
Well said. I respectfully differ with this, though, if you mean it in political terms: "Now it is going to take him down."
Trump's going to stagger through the rest of his term throwing up reality show smoke and mirrors. He's going to cause a lot of chaos and a lot of damage but by reeling from one distracting crazy stunt to another he'll survive to the end of his term as an increasingly discredited lame duck.
All that is going to take down the republican party and ensure the US elects democrats, at least for another term or two in which the dems will once again convince whatever sane people are left in the US that it's crazy to vote dem.
Where it might take him down in a very literal sense is not the domestic political angle, but as the military result if Trump's mismanagement or active provocation results in nuclear explosions going off in the US. There are many scenarios as to how that might happen, ranging from a splinter Islamic group getting their hands on a Pakistani or Iranian nuke, to a really big war with Russia.
I meant by 'bring him down', destroy him psychologically. He is already turning into an exhausted husk of himself- as per current tantrums. That means that like Biden he will become a conduit for......
insert the appropriate names and if you can't think of any credible names, that tells you where the US is heading, for a slow collapse into infighting and massive internal unrest as the economy takes a dive. That is how I see all this loss of face everywhere in the world, unfold at home (and in europe too). Ukraine becomes a tired side-show with a declining audience and when they hold elections and vote themselves into the RF it will not be western front page news.
Memory hole time. War? What war?
Trump is doing for the US what the Green Goblin is doing for Ukraine, both need to collapse and the US collapse will collapse the Zionist state. It is essential both remain in power for as long as possible
Well, you're right, as you almost always are. I agree with you but quibble about some of the details, that's all. I especially agree with you on how reality doesn't make it through to the "news" fed to Americans.
I also agree Trump does not look good. He really has started looking much older and more tired. He's doing what a lot of old and tired people do, reflexively reacting and acting out, not thinking ahead seriously and executing systematically.
I can't say I agree with "where the US is heading, for a slow collapse into infighting and massive internal unrest as the economy takes a dive. That is how I see all this loss of face everywhere in the world, unfold at home (and in europe too). "
First, Americans don't give a hoot about loss of face everywhere in the world and they especially don't care what Europe thinks of the US. They're like Romans of old, not caring at all about what the rest of the world thought about Rome until that one fine day in 410 AD when the rest of the world in the person of Alaric leading the Visigoths showed up to sack Rome.
As for slow collapse into infighting and massive internal unrest, well, I think that will be a very, very slow collapse. The US still has a massive economic base with a lot of inertia to it. Even if the economy takes a serious dive I think the US still has, easily, many decades before there's a chance of significant internal unrest.
I don't want to wish anything bad for the US, but I still have the feeling that, like an alcoholic, until it "hits bottom" the US won't reform and get on the track of being healthy itself and positive for the world at large. I also feel that, again, like with an alcoholic, the longer that "hitting bottom" is put off the harder the impact will be when finally it hits bottom.
I guess I agree with you there will be a reckoning and it won't be pretty. But I just think it will take longer than most people expect.
Spliter islamic groups are mostly and usually controlled by CIA and/or Mossad.
Trump in a nutshell: more war, more debt, and no list.
All three contrary to his election platform.
What a shitshow.
Did anyone seriously expect otherwise?
That is an honest question, BTW.
I did.
Well, good that you got wise.
Too many humans just keep doubling down.