What's going on in Ukraine?

[TheFrog]

Interesting analysis from ISW:

Key Takeaway: Russian President Vladimir Putin likely intends to annex occupied southern and eastern Ukraine directly into the Russian Federation in the coming months. He will likely then state, directly or obliquely, that Russian doctrine permitting the use of nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory applies to those newly annexed territories. Such actions would threaten Ukraine and its partners with nuclear attack if Ukrainian counteroffensives to liberate Russian-occupied territory continue. Putin may believe that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would restore Russian deterrence after his disastrous invasion shattered Russia's conventional deterrent capabilities.

Putin’s timeline for annexation is likely contingent on the extent to which he understands the degraded state of the Russian military in Ukraine. The Russian military has not yet achieved Putin’s stated territorial objectives of securing all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and is unlikely to do so. If Putin understands his military weakness, he will likely rush annexation and introduce the nuclear deterrent quickly in an attempt to retain control of the Ukrainian territory that Russia currently occupies. If Putin believes that Russian forces are capable of additional advances, he will likely delay the annexation in hopes of covering more territory with it. In that case, his poor leadership and Ukrainian counteroffensives could drive the Russian military toward a state of collapse. Putin could also attempt to maintain Russian attacks while mobilizing additional forces. He might delay announcing annexation for far longer in this case, waiting until reinforcements could arrive to gain more territory to annex.

Ukraine and its Western partners likely have a narrow window of opportunity to support a Ukrainian counteroffensive into occupied Ukrainian territory before the Kremlin annexes that territory. Ukraine and the West must also develop a coherent plan for responding to any annexation and to the threat of nuclear attack that might follow it. The political and ethical consequences of a longstanding Russian occupation of southeastern Ukraine would be devastating to the long-term viability of the Ukrainian state. Vital Ukrainian and Western national interests require urgent Western support for an immediate Ukrainian counteroffensive.

[Hellraiser]

[TheFrog]

Ukraine and its Western partners likely have a narrow window of opportunity to support a Ukrainian counteroffensive into occupied Ukrainian territory before the Kremlin annexes that territory (or brings up additional forces). This window of opportunity is not necessarily obvious. In a military sense, Ukrainian forces should begin their counteroffensive before Russian forces decide that their campaign has culminated and begin to dig into more orderly and possibly morale-boosting defensive positions. Poor morale and worse leadership have soundly degraded Russian forces; Ukraine should ideally counter-attack at the time of maximum Russian disorder before Russian forces have time to fully go over to the defensive and dig in.

Still from ISW.

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Seeing rumours that an entire BTG has mutinied and refused orders to try and cross the Donets again.

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Russian armour losses at Bilohorivka now stand at 100+.

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[Wrinkles]

Ukraine and its Western partners likely have a narrow window of opportunity to support a Ukrainian counteroffensive into occupied Ukrainian territory before the Kremlin annexes that territory (or brings up additional forces). This window of opportunity is not necessarily obvious. In a military sense, Ukrainian forces should begin their counteroffensive before Russian forces decide that their campaign has culminated and begin to dig into more orderly and possibly morale-boosting defensive positions. Poor morale and worse leadership have soundly degraded Russian forces; Ukraine should ideally counter-attack at the time of maximum Russian disorder before Russian forces have time to fully go over to the defensive and dig in.

Still from ISW.

I don’t know you from Adam, but by fuck you’re a pessimistic cunt. The Russians are on their arses, for fucks sake.

[Openside]

Interesting Long Read in the Guardian about the memory of nuclear war

We’ve seen in other contexts what happens when our experience of a risk attenuates. In rich countries, the waning memory of preventable diseases has fed the anti-vaccination movement. “People have become complacent,” notes epidemiologist Peter Salk, whose father, Jonas Salk, invented the polio vaccine. Not having lived through a polio epidemic, parents are rejecting vaccines to the point where measles and whooping cough are coming back and many have needlessly died of Covid-19.

That is the danger with nuclear war.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -dangerous

I'm very conscious of this. I'm 51, so was 18 when the cold war ended. My childhood and teenage years had an existential terror hanging over them. Anyone who's more than a few years younger than me doesn't remember that, and doesn't really realise what the overarching fear of nuclear war was during the cold war. I remember having regular nightmares about nuclear war when I was a kid, and I know many of my friends did as well. This worries me very much.

WTF? Seriously? I didn’t give nuclear war a second thought!!

[Hellraiser]

[GogLais]

Interesting Long Read in the Guardian about the memory of nuclear war

We’ve seen in other contexts what happens when our experience of a risk attenuates. In rich countries, the waning memory of preventable diseases has fed the anti-vaccination movement. “People have become complacent,” notes epidemiologist Peter Salk, whose father, Jonas Salk, invented the polio vaccine. Not having lived through a polio epidemic, parents are rejecting vaccines to the point where measles and whooping cough are coming back and many have needlessly died of Covid-19.

That is the danger with nuclear war.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -dangerous

I'm very conscious of this. I'm 51, so was 18 when the cold war ended. My childhood and teenage years had an existential terror hanging over them. Anyone who's more than a few years younger than me doesn't remember that, and doesn't really realise what the overarching fear of nuclear war was during the cold war. I remember having regular nightmares about nuclear war when I was a kid, and I know many of my friends did as well. This worries me very much.

WTF? Seriously? I didn’t give nuclear war a second thought!!

Much the same.here, born 1949. Aware of nuclear war as a theoretical possibility but it never seemed that likely.

[Guy Smiley]

Interesting Long Read in the Guardian about the memory of nuclear war

We’ve seen in other contexts what happens when our experience of a risk attenuates. In rich countries, the waning memory of preventable diseases has fed the anti-vaccination movement. “People have become complacent,” notes epidemiologist Peter Salk, whose father, Jonas Salk, invented the polio vaccine. Not having lived through a polio epidemic, parents are rejecting vaccines to the point where measles and whooping cough are coming back and many have needlessly died of Covid-19.

That is the danger with nuclear war.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -dangerous

I'm very conscious of this. I'm 51, so was 18 when the cold war ended. My childhood and teenage years had an existential terror hanging over them. Anyone who's more than a few years younger than me doesn't remember that, and doesn't really realise what the overarching fear of nuclear war was during the cold war. I remember having regular nightmares about nuclear war when I was a kid, and I know many of my friends did as well. This worries me very much.

WTF? Seriously? I didn’t give nuclear war a second thought!!

Paras eh... too dumb to know they were part of a Cold War.

[fishfoodie]

Interesting Long Read in the Guardian about the memory of nuclear war



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -dangerous

I'm very conscious of this. I'm 51, so was 18 when the cold war ended. My childhood and teenage years had an existential terror hanging over them. Anyone who's more than a few years younger than me doesn't remember that, and doesn't really realise what the overarching fear of nuclear war was during the cold war. I remember having regular nightmares about nuclear war when I was a kid, and I know many of my friends did as well. This worries me very much.

WTF? Seriously? I didn’t give nuclear war a second thought!!

Paras eh... too dumb to know they were part of a Cold War.

and they were blissfully unaware of how close they came with stuff like Able Archer; although how they missed the Cuba missile crisis is another thing entirely, when half the US was out in their back gardens digging shelters

[Enzedder]

Interesting Long Read in the Guardian about the memory of nuclear war



https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -dangerous

I'm very conscious of this. I'm 51, so was 18 when the cold war ended. My childhood and teenage years had an existential terror hanging over them. Anyone who's more than a few years younger than me doesn't remember that, and doesn't really realise what the overarching fear of nuclear war was during the cold war. I remember having regular nightmares about nuclear war when I was a kid, and I know many of my friends did as well. This worries me very much.

WTF? Seriously? I didn’t give nuclear war a second thought!!

Much the same.here, born 1949. Aware of nuclear war as a theoretical possibility but it never seemed that likely.

It was so far away, I didn't think about it much. But then I read Neville Shute's book - On the Beach??

[Uncle fester]

WTF? Seriously? I didn’t give nuclear war a second thought!!

Much the same.here, born 1949. Aware of nuclear war as a theoretical possibility but it never seemed that likely.

It was so far away, I didn't think about it much. But then I read Neville Shute's book - On the Beach??

Yeah, great book. Read it when I was about 12. Traumatised the fück out of me.

[Plim]

Part of it is age. I’m a bit(ish) younger than Openside and GogLais. I grew up through the years when the BBC were keen on screening Ken Loach-type dramas about nuclear apocalypse. And CND were very vocal. That fell away by the late ‘80s.

[Prembore]

Interesting Long Read in the Guardian about the memory of nuclear war

We’ve seen in other contexts what happens when our experience of a risk attenuates. In rich countries, the waning memory of preventable diseases has fed the anti-vaccination movement. “People have become complacent,” notes epidemiologist Peter Salk, whose father, Jonas Salk, invented the polio vaccine. Not having lived through a polio epidemic, parents are rejecting vaccines to the point where measles and whooping cough are coming back and many have needlessly died of Covid-19.

That is the danger with nuclear war.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... -dangerous

I'm very conscious of this. I'm 51, so was 18 when the cold war ended. My childhood and teenage years had an existential terror hanging over them. Anyone who's more than a few years younger than me doesn't remember that, and doesn't really realise what the overarching fear of nuclear war was during the cold war. I remember having regular nightmares about nuclear war when I was a kid, and I know many of my friends did as well. This worries me very much.

WTF? Seriously? I didn’t give nuclear war a second thought!!

Ditto. It was there but so were girls, and they were infinitely more terrifying

[Gumboot]

Part of it is age. I’m a bit(ish) younger than Openside and GogLais. I grew up through the years when the BBC were keen on screening Ken Loach-type dramas about nuclear apocalypse. And CND were very vocal. That fell away by the late ‘80s.

I was a card carrying, badge wearing CND member in the UK mid-80s. The nuclear threat felt very real and very close.

I still have this, which I bought at the time.

[Guy Smiley]

Part of it is age. I’m a bit(ish) younger than Openside and GogLais. I grew up through the years when the BBC were keen on screening Ken Loach-type dramas about nuclear apocalypse. And CND were very vocal. That fell away by the late ‘80s.

I'm 60... born in '61.

The Cuban missile crisis took place 16 months after my birth. JFK's shooting a year after that. While I wasn't reading papers at that stage, those events coloured the background of my childhood.... followed in quick succession by the Space Race and needing to beat the Soviets to the moon and what the Vietnamese call the American War, a heroic effort to stem the march of Communism in SE Asia...

the spectre of the Soviet Union and it's nuclear threat was a pervasive influence throughout my life. Popular culture was flooded with apocalyptic post nuclear dramas. The Iron Curtain was a phrase so common as to give tangible reality to an idea. The French carried out atmospheric nuclear tests in the South Pacific and went so far as to kill a Greenpeace activist on a boat moored in Auckland harbour when, in an act of government sponsored terrorism, two scuba divers attached a bomb to the hull... because the act of protesting their test program was too threatening to bear.

The shadow of nuclear war hung over us all. Being all gung ho blase about it... well, everyone has their version of reality.

[Plim]

Part of it is age. I’m a bit(ish) younger than Openside and GogLais. I grew up through the years when the BBC were keen on screening Ken Loach-type dramas about nuclear apocalypse. And CND were very vocal. That fell away by the late ‘80s.

I was a card carrying, badge wearing CND member in the UK mid-80s. The nuclear threat felt very real and very close.

I still have this, which I bought at the time.

That Raymond Briggs book (1982) is a great example. For better or worse, it’s hard to imagine that sort of doomy, let’s-disarm-ourselves stuff selling today.

[Gumboot]

The two pamphlets mentioned in When the Wind Blows are based on actual public information series such as Protect and Survive.[6] These sort of pamphlets go back as far as 1938, when the British government put out a leaflet, The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids.[7] It was updated after the Second World War to Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack[8] which was originally published in 1963, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Protect and Survive was published in 1980, shortly before Briggs began work on When the Wind Blows.

Many of James and Hilda's preparations came directly from the pamphlets:

Page 10 of Protect and Survive provided James with the directions for making the lean-to using doors to protect from radiation.
Page 14 of Advising the Householder demonstrated how whitewashing windows reduces fire damage by reflecting the heat from the nuclear blast.
Page 16 of Protect & Survive illustrated a box of sand for dishwashing.

Briggs was not the only one to criticise the pamphlets about preparation for nuclear war.[9] One of the best-known critiques was E. P. Thompson's anti-nuclear paper, Protest and Survive,[10] playing off the Protect and Survive series.

[Niegs]

I wonder what Zelenskyy's intel people thought about him appearing with Moscow Mitch?

[Kiwias]

WTF? Seriously? I didn’t give nuclear war a second thought!!

Much the same.here, born 1949. Aware of nuclear war as a theoretical possibility but it never seemed that likely.

It was so far away, I didn't think about it much. But then I read Neville Shute's book - On the Beach??

Born in 1954 and as Enzed says, NZ was so far away from the likely locations of a nuclear bomb blast. And then I too read "On the Beach" and it scared the f*ck out of me as I realised that radiation could cause damage to the entire globe.

[TheFrog]

Much the same.here, born 1949. Aware of nuclear war as a theoretical possibility but it never seemed that likely.

It was so far away, I didn't think about it much. But then I read Neville Shute's book - On the Beach??

Born in 1954 and as Enzed says, NZ was so far away from the likely locations of a nuclear bomb blast. And then I too read "On the Beach" and it scared the f*ck out of me as I realised that radiation could cause damage to the entire globe.

And I grew up thinking I should plan to move to your end of the world to escape any risk of nuclear apocalypse....


I remember being so moved when the Berlin wall fell. I was very naive and thought peace would return to our world.

[Biffer]

Part of it is age. I’m a bit(ish) younger than Openside and GogLais. I grew up through the years when the BBC were keen on screening Ken Loach-type dramas about nuclear apocalypse. And CND were very vocal. That fell away by the late ‘80s.

I was a card carrying, badge wearing CND member in the UK mid-80s. The nuclear threat felt very real and very close.

I still have this, which I bought at the time.

Yeah, I think it’s those of us raised in the seventies and eighties that this affected.

[Hellraiser]

[lemonhead]

For my brother born early 60s it was a pretty live concern. We don't get on but he's a smart guy and still have his copybooks to leaf through on how to build a shelter, which way the fallout would settle, basic survival kit etc.

As an 80s kid, When the Wind Blows was just another scary film like that one where cute rabbits rip each other's throats out and die of myxomatosis.

[Gumboot]

For my brother born early 60s it was a pretty live concern. We don't get on but he's a smart guy and still have his copybooks to leaf through on how to build a shelter, which way the fallout would settle, basic survival kit etc.

As an 80s kid, When the Wind Blows was just another scary film like that one where cute rabbits rip each other's throats out and die of myxomatosis.

Things changed a bit Once the Wall Fell.

[lemonhead]

Night and day.

My first realisation of the dangers was age 7 so by 1989 the footage rolls and I'm thinking Jesus, these Russians build some shoddy walls. Someone could get hurt.

[Rinkals]

If we are done with the self-absorbed navel gazing?