I read the wikipedia article, but I don't see how this scenario seems probable, it notes the nukes have to pass by russia to strike North Korea, thus creating the world war.
But the US has nuclear subs with nuclear wardheads! Most likely there is one close to NK and then no need to pass over russia...
It's an awful book. In the scenario, the US does launch SLBMs from a submarine close to North Korea, and they hit in minutes. But for some reason the author thought that's is plausible that the US would also launch 50 land based ICBMs. Why?
The author's technical expertise is very limited. She thinks that satellites fall out of the sky if their electronics are destroyed by an EMP attack. There are many other mistakes, you are better off skipping this book.
3. Not using the ICBMs in time removes the possibility to use them at all, because the enemy, knowing where they are, will obviously destroy them. Therefore: "use it or lose it".
4. Because of #1, #2 and #3 there is a a limited time to launch a counter-attack at all using the land-based ICBMs.
5. Because the chairman of the JSC is pushing hard for strike option Charlie, which the president ultimately caves in to.
As for the EMP and satellites, that part comes from an interviews with Yago and Pry as well as Pry's book. Satellites certainly won't drop from the skies like burning seagulls, but if they cannot course correct because their electronics are fried, they will fall back into the atmosphere and burn much sooner than otherwise.
Not really. It's more like "don't use it so you can lose it". The US has enough SLBMs that the ICBMs can all be lost without significant loss of deterrence capability. However their existence complicates tremendously the calculus of an adversary. If the US does not use its ICBMs in the early moves of a full-scale nuclear war, its adversaries need to allocate missiles to disable them. From wikipedia [1]:
> The solid fueled LGM-30 series Minuteman I, II, III, and Peacekeeper ICBM configurations consist of one LCC (launch control center) that controls ten LFs (launch facilities) (1 × 10). Five LCCs and their fifty associated LFs make up a squadron. Three squadrons make up a wing. Measures were taken such that if any one LCC was disabled, a separate LCC within the squadron would take control of its ten ICBMs.
> The LGM-30 LFs and LCCs are separated by several miles, connected only electronically. This distance ensures that a nuclear attack could only disable a very small number of ICBMs, leaving the rest capable of being launched immediately.
That is actually the reason the land-based ICBMs of the US are not MIRV'ed: in order to take them out you need to spend at least one warhead to take out one warhead.
The US nuclear strategists have given a name to this: the "nuclear sponge". Most certainly the options given to the President account for this. Nobody without top secret security clearance can know, including the book's author, but it's highly unlikely that a pre-scripted nuclear counterattack of the US against a single NK ICBM would remove 50 missiles from this "sponge", when a much better alternative is to use SLBMs.
> It's an awful book. In the scenario, the US does launch SLBMs from a submarine close to North Korea, and they hit in minutes. But for some reason the author thought that's is plausible that the US would also launch 50 land based ICBMs. Why?
See my other comment, but to summarize - because they worry that an incoming attack would destroy the land-based ICBMs before they have a chance to launch them, taking out one third of the Nuclear Triad.
I don't think this was the book making up stories - the book is half fiction, half interviews with actual people who worked on these plans and gave inside info on them. This unfortunately appears to be a realistic scenario.
> they worry that an incoming attack would destroy the land-based ICBMs
We are used to mentally think of the Earth as seen in a sideways 2D projection. But if you look down from above the North Pole, you can appreciate how different an ICBM trajectory that goes from North Korea to Washington is from one that goes to Wyoming, Montana or North Dakota. There is no way to mistake one for the other, and the author does not even claim that this happened in her scenario; the incoming ICBM was fairly quickly identified as targeting something on the East Coast.
Which brings us to another thing. Geography is very funny, but it happens that an ICBM from NK to Washington overflies thousands of miles of Russian territory. An ICBM from Wyoming to NK overflies mabye a fifth as much, because it flies over a lot over the Bering Sea and the Sea of Ohotsk. Why are the Russians not worried when the NK ICBM overflies their country, but they are willing to commit suicide when the US counter overflies does the same, but over a much shorter distance? Well, they should not be worried in either case, because a missile can't just drop down in midflight, but an author that thinks satellites can fall from the sky can also think that a missile in suborbital flight can take 90 degree turns.
Look into the "Nuclear Triad". The US has three ways to fight back against a nuclear attack - land-based ICBMs, bombers, and submarines.
It is unknown how the US would react to a missile launched from NK, but for various reasons, it is likely to respond with a massive counter-attack. This is partially for deterrence (the whole idea behind the MAD doctrine), and partially for fear that if ICBMs are not launched right away, they could be deactivated by an incoming first strike.
Indeed, in the scenario laid out in the book (Spoiler Warning), after launching an ICBM, NK also launches missiles from a submarine that take out various parts of the US in minutes, far faster than the ~25 minutes for the ICBMs to get to the US from NK. Had the ICBMs not been launched before, it is probable they would be destroyed, taking out one leg of the "triad".
> Unfortunately, very few repliers are addressing the first point that I made in my comment: "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."
Seems very hard to accurately measure, could be that people don't know what was released in their decade but the stuff from the 80s is easy to pinpoint.
> 8. Our most violent impulses are stirred up by similarity, not difference. For example, hatred of immigrants (and their hatred of the locals) is amplified when both live in the same neighborhood and the barriers that previously existed have been removed
Aren't people living far from immigrants the biggest xenophobic group? Cities are much more progressive on immigration issues despite having more of a mix, directly contradicting that theory.
The most xenophobic group appear to be people who don't have any dissimilar people in their social group or immediate surroundings, but occasionally see one on TV or go to the Big City and get upset about it.
It was definitely found during Brexit that places with fewer immigrants were most pro-Brexit.
What I really like about YouTube is that for any given polity you can watch slick stuff on state channels and get the official line, and you can also watch "home videos" of normal people doing normal people stuff to get some idea of the day to day. The Texan making chili is just a few clicks away from the Caucasian making shashlik.
Sure, but more often than not - esp in cloud scenarios, sometimes you just get a machine that is having a bad day and it’s quicker to just eject it, let the rest of the infra pick up the slack, and then debug from there. Additionally if you’ve axed a machine, and got the same issue, you know it’s not a machine issue, so either go look at your networking layer or whatever configs you’re using to boot your machines from…
That made me laugh. Thank you. Of course, it is not DNS. DNS has become the new cabling. DNS is not especially complicated, but cabling is neither. Yet, during dot.com and subsequent years the cabling was causing a lot of the problems so that we get used to first check the cabling. But it only took a few more years to realize that it is not always cabling, actually failures are normally distributed.
Is it wrong to check DNS first? No, but please realize that DNS misconfiguration is not more common than other SNAFUS.
Imagine a pencil drawing of Spongebob, but using tiny dots rather than strokes, collapsing onto itself, forming what looks like two separate masses (of sponge particles?) which then collapse together in the end.
Yes but without the need for the full furniture. One should be able to miniaturize everything else but the action. I think such compact designs will eventually appear but the difference in real action versus very good hybrid digital actions is of highest interest to musicians who typically have access to real pianos. Roland, Yamaha, Kawai, and others have been moving in that direction over the years and the top models by Yamaha and Kawai have passable actions though they still have a large piece of furniture around them.
Yeah, the one size fits all is grating, for example my wife is not really into computers but she likes to see what I put around the house and just to ask questions and understand what I'm doing. She didn't have anyone to really ask questions growing up, and online wasn't so great so now we just talk and seeing a new box is just an occasion for discussion.
I read the wikipedia article, but I don't see how this scenario seems probable, it notes the nukes have to pass by russia to strike North Korea, thus creating the world war.
But the US has nuclear subs with nuclear wardheads! Most likely there is one close to NK and then no need to pass over russia...