![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
May. 9th, 2004
[BRIEF NOTE] On Apocalypses Averted
May. 9th, 2004 05:35 pmMonday evening, I was having dinner with James B. when the topic of the conversation switched to NATO-Warsaw Pact nuclear wars.
There is a sensible explanation for this. Honestly. The topic of the 2300AD role-playing game setting came up, and I mentioned Canada in the context of that setting. 2300AD is the extension of the Twilight 2000 wargame setting three centuries into the future, following a relatively mild NATO-Warsaw Pact nuclear war which devastated the Northern Hemisphere but largely bypassed a neutral France. Canada suffered some 30 nuclear explosions of note, including a two-megaton warhead directed against port facilities in Toronto.
James mentioned that barring some miracle (perhaps conscription into the military) he'd be dead, along with most of the inhabitants of downtown Toronto. Not that this wouldn't have surprised him before die Wende, given the sheer number of nuclear warheads extant in the world at that time--forty thousand nuclear warheads available to the United States and the Soviet Union, with another couple of thousand available to Britain, France, Israel, and China--and the deployment of vast conventional NATO and Warsaw Pact military forces along the inter-German frontier. Escaping death for anyone unfortunate enough to live in the Northern Hemisphere in the context of these bombs and their consequences--irradiation of vast territories directly through the blasts and indirectly through fallout, the certainty of a nasty nuclear winter indeed, the destruction of the fundamentals of civilization over tens of millions of square kilometers--would be a feat. Perhaps it would be one that no one in their right mind would have wanted to accomplish.
( My own experience with nuclear apocalypses, such as it is. )
( What actually happened, again? )
( What does our past luck mean for us 21st century types? )
We Westerners--whatever that term means, if it means anything at all--can be hurt. We're the only ones, though, who can destroy ourselves. We should try to remember that.
( Counter )
UPDATE (5:46 PM) : Crossposted to Bonoboland.
There is a sensible explanation for this. Honestly. The topic of the 2300AD role-playing game setting came up, and I mentioned Canada in the context of that setting. 2300AD is the extension of the Twilight 2000 wargame setting three centuries into the future, following a relatively mild NATO-Warsaw Pact nuclear war which devastated the Northern Hemisphere but largely bypassed a neutral France. Canada suffered some 30 nuclear explosions of note, including a two-megaton warhead directed against port facilities in Toronto.
James mentioned that barring some miracle (perhaps conscription into the military) he'd be dead, along with most of the inhabitants of downtown Toronto. Not that this wouldn't have surprised him before die Wende, given the sheer number of nuclear warheads extant in the world at that time--forty thousand nuclear warheads available to the United States and the Soviet Union, with another couple of thousand available to Britain, France, Israel, and China--and the deployment of vast conventional NATO and Warsaw Pact military forces along the inter-German frontier. Escaping death for anyone unfortunate enough to live in the Northern Hemisphere in the context of these bombs and their consequences--irradiation of vast territories directly through the blasts and indirectly through fallout, the certainty of a nasty nuclear winter indeed, the destruction of the fundamentals of civilization over tens of millions of square kilometers--would be a feat. Perhaps it would be one that no one in their right mind would have wanted to accomplish.
( My own experience with nuclear apocalypses, such as it is. )
( What actually happened, again? )
( What does our past luck mean for us 21st century types? )
We Westerners--whatever that term means, if it means anything at all--can be hurt. We're the only ones, though, who can destroy ourselves. We should try to remember that.
( Counter )
UPDATE (5:46 PM) : Crossposted to Bonoboland.
From The Guardian:
Once, on soc.history.what-if, I asked posters what would have to happen in order to get feminist terrorism off the ground. I don't think that the idea is entirely implausible; the general consensus in the discussion seemed to be that the failure of specifically feminist terrorism to get off of the ground lay in the specific application of revolutionary ideology to the female question. With a sufficiently creative theorist, I'm sure that this issue could be overcome.
Even now, Afghanistan has the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which fought against both the Soviet occupation and the Taliban. I think the country needs something a bit more hard core, though. Clearly, there are some men in Afghanistan who deserve something nasty.
Girls 'poisoned by militants for going to school'
Greg Bearup in Islamabad
Monday May 3, 2004
The Guardian
Three young girls in eastern Afghanistan were in critical condition in hospital last night after being poisoned, apparently by militants as punishment for attending school.
Read more.
Once, on soc.history.what-if, I asked posters what would have to happen in order to get feminist terrorism off the ground. I don't think that the idea is entirely implausible; the general consensus in the discussion seemed to be that the failure of specifically feminist terrorism to get off of the ground lay in the specific application of revolutionary ideology to the female question. With a sufficiently creative theorist, I'm sure that this issue could be overcome.
Even now, Afghanistan has the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, which fought against both the Soviet occupation and the Taliban. I think the country needs something a bit more hard core, though. Clearly, there are some men in Afghanistan who deserve something nasty.