Not by me, of course. I have foresworn all my mad, super-villainous ambitions. (Well, all but two.) But let’s say somebody managed to break into the Rhymer-Lair and reprogrammed the flying robot sharks, radioactive mosquitos, and flying monkeys to serve him or her. Said interloper the uses the teleporter or whatnot to transport the sci-fi army into the middle of Bern, Lausanne, Geneva, & so forth. After twenty-four hours of battle, the Swiss are forced to submit. The conqueror immediately and publically disavows any further territorial ambitions.
Would any other nation intervene? Should any other nation intervene? Why or why not?
There was a distressing shortage of stupid threads on the front page, and I figured I was the best man to fix that.
Switzerland is a member of the United Nations, and would be able to take the issue of its invasion to the Security Council. What happens there is a matter of international politics, and it would depend on who was invading, of course. But the Security Council could authorise a military response, as it has in many other situations.
Hey, I said I wasn’t behind it. Your implicit skepticism in my disavowal of super-villainous ambitions shall not go unpunished.
I began to say, “The hell they are! Didn’t you pay any attention in 9th grade, doofus!” but then thought it would be best to check first. According to Wikipedia, they joined in 2002.
Stoopid geopolitical changes. :smack: I’m supposed to be informed of these things.
Considering Switzerland is landlocked and you’d have to go over France, Germany, Italy, or Austria to get to it, via air, river or land, yes, someone else would intervene. And they’d intervene long before anyone got to Switzerland.
Well, that’s why I specified teleportation as the method of ingress. Surely you don’t expect a thread I started to pay more than nominal attention to the laws of physics.
Okay, but even if you weren’t traveling through France, Germany, or Italy - no country would respond favorably to the presence of a large and formidable military occupying the country next door. Your assurances of non-aggression towards your new neighbors would have to be made very rapidly, and very credibly, to avoid a very serious response. Unless you had enough nukes that your neighbors couldn’t be sure of taking them all out in a first strike. Then they’d live with in. Maybe sanctions, but not a military response.
Every male in Switzerland is required to be a part of the military, and upon completion, every guy is then given a rifle to keep at home.
I would imagine a nation where everyone has a rifle in their house might be a bit testy when raiders come knockin’.
Depends on who invades. Since the laws of physics don’t matter here. let’s say the invaders are an army of the undead led by Satan’s demons.
Also, the invasion could go like this. One invading soldier with a knife teleports in behind each individual Swiss soldier. The war is over in 15 seconds, and almost no one knows it happens.
With invasion powers like this, you can’t really call it a war. The next morning you tell the world, “Nothing to see here. Move right along.”
Switzerland’s main interest aside from cheese, cuckoo clocks and neutrality is banking. The Bank for International Settlements is itself based in Basel, Switzerland. So I doubt the world would be content to sit back and watch teleporting ne’erdowells take over the most powerful financial institutions in the world.
NATO would likely get involved, as Switzerland is a member of the EAPC and PfP, as well as the OSCE, which includes most of the northern hemisphere.
We can’t trust these belligerents for their word, after all. They pose a grave threat to global security and must be destroyed!
Every Swiss male. So it’s a “mere” 80% of the healthy male population aged between 18 and 55 who has a rifle at home. My boss was missing one arm and felt like shit at not being able to do his patriotic duty - no wonder, given that I saw conversations where he met someone and the someone, noticing the prosthetic arm, would say “you have a prosthetic arm! You are not in the military, then?” “Ah, no, I can’t :(” “Ah! [silence carrying several speeches that would have made any guilt-toting grandmother proud] I see.”
Even before Switzerland joined the UN… the UN happened to be in Switzerland! Methinks Switzerland wouldn’t even need to complain before the UN went into hyperdrive and managed to scramble a fast response for the first time in decades.
I can’t :(” “Ah! [silence carrying several speeches that would have made any guilt-toting grandmother proud] I see.”