Radio War Nerd #349 — Tactical Nukes

The brother who would have refuted the "I am become death" quote would have been Frank Oppenheimer, a peer of his on the Manhattan project and the founder of the famous bay area museum, the Exploratorium

War poetry https://www.rt.com/russia/564966-russia-opens-cultural-front/

Mark did make a prediction. He said Russia was setting the stage for an eventual withdrawal.

There was a real sense of inevitability about nuclear war in Europe in the eighties. Dutch ska band Doe Maar had a song called “the Bomb” which was about the futility of making a career if the bomb was going to fall anyway. https://youtu.be/Jw9i0bu7PyQ

Maybe the NATO bureaucracy is united, but everything I see about the EU looks messy as hell. Poland is arguing with everyone, Scotland's talking about another referendum, hungary is bowing out of every EU sanction, turkey is being Turkey- if europe holds together it will be in spite of all the drama everyone is stirring up.

About psychedelics: idk, though I’ve only taken LSD once (not counting one time that didn’t really take hold) I thought it was pretty great! I was sure some dark evil stuff was going to come up from my subconscious but it was a pleasantly weird experience of disassociation and ‘literalized metaphors.’ I could see how it would have been terrifying if you’d been dosed without knowing though! I guess I rolled the dice well. 🤷‍♀️ Anyway *ecstasy* is the one greatest drug in creation IMHO

Loose nukes! The memories come flooding back.

re whether a winter-long energy crisis will shift German public opinion in the direction “the Russians are hoping for”—does John and Mark’s take here assume the Russians blew-up Nordstream? Honest question because I don’t know whether they addressed the sabotage in an earlier episode. I think the best way to defend the NATO side of this gigantic human catastrophe is by giving the USA credit for pulling off such a complex, multifaceted maneuver to breathe life into their waning hegemony. A surprising number of my most loved sources have been fudging the characterization of the conflict. Kudos, Sleepy Joe?

I thought this was a really good episode. The point about the struggle to not normalize nuclear weapons was a really good one. We'd be in a totally different world if MacArthur got his way and the US used nukes just because. Also: Tactical nukes are small, in the double digit TONS of yield, not kilotons. The Davey Crockett nuke, pictured above, was a 20T yield nuclear weapon.

Mark and John don't understand why Putin would bring out tactical nukes. He would use them to take out bridges etc in Western Ukraine which are used for transporting military aid from the West. Too expensive to take them out with conventional missiles, you have to send a huge number of missiles to take out one bridge.

Germans loving the greens more really?? No one I know…. But that is what NATO would love you to believe…. The Duran and Tom Luongo have interesting versions on geo politics and economics, would love to hear a discussion with them to get even better overview.

Great episode, fellas. John is always at his best contemplating mass murder and Cold War idiocy, and Mark’s designation of Ukraine as the “graveyard of predictions” is a keeper. The thought of nuclear immolation warded off the pre-dawn chill of a Midwestern autumn while I walked my dog. But lol, have Brendan edit out the dig at 1997’s Peacemaker film if you ever plan to invite the Cockburns back to the show.

John/Gary, As a child I once had a fever dream in which I was an ordinary framed house, equipped with a cellar door, and seen in the third-person outside my "body" as if by night vision camera. A pack of gray wolves gathered in the yard around me. I reassured myself with a reminder that my foundation was built unusually deep so the wolves could not dig into the basement.

Addendum to the cheerful note the episode ended on: American elites don't even understand everyday Americans

The Davy Crockett had a yield of 20 tons of TNT, not Kilotons, the explosive radius was pretty negligible, it would probably blow up one or two buildings around ground zero, but the radiation would have killed everyone within a 200 meter radius of the explosion. The idea was to shoot it at a group of tanks and hopefully kill everyone inside.

As an Army brat in (West) Germany (1967-197 I) I had the distinct impression we were cannon fodder.

Didnt Baltimore get nuked in Tom Clancy's Sum Of All Fears?

Happily only the Northern Hemisphere would be uninhabitable after a Nuclear Exchange. So brush up an your Spanish and prepare to drag South America into the 21st Century fellow Colonists!

Good conversation but for an hour 42 minutes recorded on Oct. 12 it felt like there is a lot you guys are avoiding discussing despite the episode largely dealing with current events. Hopefully next time you'll release the elephant herd before it fills the whole room.

The Ukraine -Russia conflict is difficult to follow, mostly because you want to balance out the Russian accounts with Ukraine ones, but the Ukraine/NATO accounts all so incredibly shitty you never get any info let alone balanced

The way the krauts bundle up at 55 degrees, they’re gonna turn into krautcicles this winter

Everything new thing that Russia has tried i.e. the mobilization, has me scratching my head as to why didnt they just do it on day 1? Like you'd think the disasters in Chechnya might've taught them something. Its also kind of embarassing for Russians to be outnumbered. Like dont they have a reputation to uphold? At least to their neighbours? Is it 2022 and countries are still seriously doing the whole 'we'll be home by christmas/one swift kick and the enemy army will just collapse'.

Look at that Davey Crockett...

Been waiting for this