In the end, I guess ships are just really big floating tanks.
Only at very short range, and against tiny patrol boats.
Yeah, apparently there has never been a settlement over Sakhalin Island, which is north of Japan.
Good time for Japan to just take it now.
Right, looking at the Wikipedia page for that patrol boat it looks like its only good use in-theatre is for recon and to prevent random small craft from running a blockade, unless it can be surreptitiously fitted with a missile. It doesn’t look like it can be used for bombardment, which is what would influence the battle in Odessa.
Constitutionally, Japan is not allowed to act as an aggressor in war. (As they’ve chosen to interpret the document, rather than as the plain reading that they’re simply not allowed to have a military.)
That said, if they claim that the territory is part of Japan then they’re allowed to act in the “defense” to save the islands from Russian invasion.
Because
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The Russian advance is far slower, and less successful, than it should have been. By this point, according to pre-war expectations, Kyiv should already be in Russian hands, most of Ukraine east of Lviv should be Russia’s and Moscow should be erecting a puppet government already in Kyiv by now. Instead, Russia hasn’t even achieved 10% of that.
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With the massive morale advantage, amount of equipment and weaponry flowing into Ukraine from Europe and America, and personnel advantage (millions of Ukrainian partisans vs. just a few hundred thousand Russians,) eventually the momentum is going to shift so significantly in Ukraine’s favor that it will push Russian forces back, in fact perhaps even back to pre-war borders. The Russian casualties have been so absurdly high - roughly 450x worse than the American loss of men in Iraq and Afghanistan, if calculated on a deaths-per-day basis - that it’s only a matter of time before Russia’s army simply snaps and buckles. The psychological factor is huge. Which side is having rock-bottom morale and Operation Desertion Storm right now?..Not the Ukrainians.
To use a Michigan vs. Appalachian State analogy, it’s as if not only is Michigan failing to crush Appalachian State by 6 touchdowns as was expected by gamblers, but in fact Appalachian State is holding tough, wearing down Michigan’s players, and about to take the lead.
Practically, Georgia is a lot harder for the West to send support to than Ukraine, and the various -stans even more so. Central Asia more or less belongs to Russia and China unfortunately.
It’s not a football game. There’s a better than even chance that decades after this is all over, there still won’t be a consensus about who “won”.
If Ukraine is still an independent nation after a few decades they won.
I feel like a staple of Cold War spy fiction was the West trying to get any sort of cypher tech and any other sort of countermeasures for electronic warfare. So how the hell does Russia just let an EW system fall into the hands of Ukraine (and probably eventually NATO), assuming this is true?
A bit off topic, but is it possible, from a chemistry standpoint, to one day develop conventional explosives that are powerful enough (when put in a MOAB-sized bomb) to be equivalent to a very weak/small nuke? It would probably have to be dozens or hundreds of times more powerful than TNT.
Such weapons, if developed, could be used to achieve maybe 1/10 or 1/3 the effect of tactical nukes while still saying, “Hey, we haven’t crossed the nuclear threshold.”
Emphasis mine, and I quoted just part of your post, all of which I thought was excellent and very well said.
I’m finding it hard to reconcile that with your earlier statement that direct NATO intervention to help Ukraine would trigger Putin to launch a nuclear strike. We cannot be held hostage and let entire nations be destroyed just because a single madman is purportedly in control of nukes. Some risks are worth taking, especially when the madman in question may launch them anyway:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/22/europe/amanpour-peskov-interview-ukraine-intl/index.html
Define small nuke. The B61 could go as low as 0.3 kilotons. The warhead for the Davy Crockett could go as low as 10 tons, about the same as a MOAB.
Chemical explosions are hard. Big booms simply require lots of material, though work is still ongoing. A lot is in packing as much nitrogen into materials that really don’t want that much nitrogen. There’s an academic lab in Germany that does explosives research and their papers are always a hoot to read. One of my favorite notes was that they didn’t get more than the sodium salt of a new compound analyzed by differential scanning calorimetry because the first thing they tried to analyze blew up and destroyed the DSC.
From CNN:
Some towns in Ukraine don’t have more than 3-4 days’ worth of food, according to aid agency
Can they eat any Russians they kill? It might discourage the invaders. Anyway, if they didn’t want to be eaten, they shouldn’t have invaded.
On the flip side, I hope this is true:
I’d be suspicious about them “just letting” it happen, myself.
Doesn’t help either that the twitterer is so breathless about “whatever the de-escalation factions want” and “boners”.
At this point incompetence seems a lot more likely than conspiracy.
As asterion notes, nukes can basically get arbitrarily small (though they get very inefficient at that point, being not much more than a “fizzle”).
There’s not an enormous amount of headroom in chemical explosives. There’s continuing research into nitrogen compounds; there’s a hexanitrogen crystal that supposedly has around 9.2 MJ/kg (TNT is 4.6 MJ/kg). No one knows how to stabilize such a compound.
You can get more energy out of a fuel-air bomb. If you could somehow get stable metallic hydrogen, you could conceivably build a bomb with >120 MJ/kg energy density. That’s just the chemical energy–you’d also get a decent kick from the metastable metallic state decomposing into the gaseous state. That’s >25x the density of TNT.
That’s all completely hypothetical, though (no one knows if it’s even possible to stabilize metallic hydrogen). Fuel-air bombs (the thermobaric or “vacuum bombs” you’ve heard of) are real of course, but don’t typically use hydrogen and therefore have a more modest energy density improvement over conventional explosives.