Review: Unclear Physics

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Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons

In Unclear Physics, Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer takes a look at the ultimately unsuccessful nuclear weapons programs of Saddam’s Iraq and Libya. Instead of a technical perspective, she looks at them from a political/organizational one, showing how poor state structures (in the case of Iraq) and nonexistent ones (in the case of Libya) hampered them. From the outside, there aren’t any shocking revelations: Iraq could have had a bomb by the mid-late 1990s without the Gulf War or a similar catastrophe, while Libya’s was going nowhere by 2003.

But from the inside, it’s a detailed look at human failure,in terms of dealing with low technology, dictator paranoia, dictators not understanding, and disorganized factionalism. Some of it comes across as legitimately fun to read.

Unclear Physics has two big apparent weaknesses. The first is its academese tone. The second and worse one along the similar nature is that she writes in a kind of inside baseball tone as if this an argument among nonproliferation academics, saying “the conventional wisdom says ______” when she means the previous conventional wisdom among people in that very small niche. It’s arguments that I’ve never even heard, for better or worse, as someone who’s for an amateur read up a lot about nuclear proliferation.

But this is still a great book at showing the soft human side of an otherwise hard technical issue.

Review: Icebreaker

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Icebreaker

Perhaps Viktor Suvorov’s most infamous work is Icebreaker, a revisionist historical book that claims that Stalin was juuuuuust about to invade the rest of Europe from the east when the Germans launched a preemptive attack in 1941. What makes this not just wrong in the sense that his book on the hyper-Spetsnaz was inaccurate but outright disturbing is that someone else publicly stated such a claim repeatedly. Said someone else was famously portrayed in a movie by Bruno Ganz.

Thankfully, the book itself does not make the best case for this incredible claim. It’s not just that with hindsight and primary sources (that Suvorov inaccurately claimed were destroyed to cover them up) the image of the shambling wreck in peacetime formations that was the 1941 Red Army facing off against the bunched-up offensive force of the 1941 Wehrmacht. (Fun fact BTW: The Germans actually had a 3-2 numerical advantage in the early part of Barbarossa, and even more in practice if you account for the terrible logistics of the Soviets then).

The only evidence besides ‘trust me bro’ that Suvorov puts forward is basically “The Soviets had lots of ____ [such as fast tanks and/or paratroopers] that clearly meant they were meant for an offensive into western Europe.” It couldn’t just be that their doctrine was on mobile warfare and that they tried and failed to implement it defensively.

I knew about how bad its premise was, but I wasn’t expecting so weak an argument. Which is probably a good thing. Unlike this book.

A Thousand Words: BeamNG Drive

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BeamNG Drive

One reason why Fuldapocalypse hasn’t been updating much is BeamNG Drive. It is an automobile sandbox with realistic physics that allows someone to do so much. Now on its own the game does not look like much. You can drive around maps that range from tiny to several virtual square kilometers, do some challenges like races or time trials or seeing how far you can get on an almost empty fuel tank, etc…

But that is like saying like sports is just throwing/kicking a ball around. With just the stock game (and the mods for this are numerous and excellent), you can control everything from big truck fronts to tiny old cars. The seemingly mundane can turn into fun, like towing a trailer with cargo many times the weight of the car pulling it, and doing so on a dirt mountain road without mishaps (easier said than done).

You have to make your own fun in BeamNG, but there’s a lot of it.

Classic Cars Were Terrible

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So yeah, time to bust the legend of super-classic cars. In short. They sucked.

This video shows the biggest reason I dislike “classics”. They were/are horrifically, monstrously, massively unsafe. Bad seatbelts even assuming people wore them (they didn’t), cars that were basically metal sculptures designed with no concern for the people inside in mind, and yeah.

Ah, but what about the handling? Good question. Your car engine was either so underpowered that a modern econobox can match it or it was a gargantuan rocket inside a frame that could barely contain it, which doesn’t exactly help with safety. And said engines burned through gas so massively that the supposed halcyon days of cheap gas (even beyond inflation) often actually weren’t. Oh yeah, and they were tremendously space-inefficient.

But they built them to last unlike todays evil capitalist planned obsolesence machines, uh…? Well, I’ll just point out that an odometer on an old car being a full order of magnitude (10 times/1 digit) lower in max numbers speaks for itself. But even if it didn’t, you remembered the survivors who stuck around, the lovingly maintained Cadillacs and not the five millionth Chevy Nova that instantly broke down.

So yes, in everything except raw performance (and sometimes not even then), this rightfully regarded bottom-feeder 2017 Mitsubishi Mirage is vastly superior to the fin-boats of old.

Review: Hooves, Tracks, and Sabers

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Hooves, Tracks, and Sabers

Raconteur Press’s Hooves, Tracks, and Sabers is an anthology of alternate history cavalry stories. You get helicopters in Southeast Asia (but not the way you might think), airships (of course) in the American Civil War, and plenty of good old horsies. While none of the stories are bad, a lot just feel like historical fiction with different names, which is a problem a lot of alternate history unavoidably has (I think that World War IIIs actually avoid this by being something so completely different from say, the Vietnam War, but that’s another story).

Thankfully, there are ones that go above and beyond that. My favorite is a World War I divergence where the Tsar Tank actually works. How can you not love a giant armored tricycle? Anyway, while the execution may not be the best in every case, the concept is so great that I still recommend this collection (and lament that I couldn’t write a story about armored recon units in the Soviet-Romanian War for it).

Review: The Athlete

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The Athlete

With football/handegg season now upon us, I figure a sports book is in order. As good as any other is Jon Finkel’s The Athlete, a biography of Charlie Ward, a quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy and then went on to a long and successful pro career…. as a basketball player. Especially since, by basketball standards anyway, Ward wasn’t even very tall.

To get the negative out of the way, this is a rose-tinted view of him that excuses one of his most infamous incidents (which thankfully just amounted to him saying something dumb and not doing anything). It also praises him as if he was Jim Thorpe or Bo Jackson, which is just a little too much in my eyes. But it’s still an interesting look at a man who succeeded in two places where almost everyone can’t succeed in one.

A final interesting piece is that Finkel doesn’t really try to answer the counterfactual everyone is going to ask: Could Ward have been a viable NFL quarterback? Could have been Russell Wilson two decades earlier, or an undersized runt who’d get crushed by pro defenders? The correct answer is “We don’t know”, but it’s a little disappointing to not even consider it.

While not the best book, this is a good look at someone I knew growing up from his time on the Knicks.

The Worst Pilot Ever

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On May 22, 2020, Pakistan International Airlines Flight 8303 crashed in Karachi, killing 98 people. Its pilot, Sajjad Gul, may have exhibited the worst judgement and skill of any pilot involved in an air disaster ever, and he and almost a hundred other people paid the price.

In written and video form, it’s horrifying to behold. There was good weather, a familiar and established plane, no mechanical issues, no foul play, and nothing save for someone who went in on a crash course, had countless opportunities to step back from the brink, and did not.

Absent pilots who crashed on purpose or otherwise did things like make bets that they could land blindfolded (they couldn’t) or reenact the flight of Icarus, this is the least competent aircrew I’ve seen. By the final too-late moments, Gul and copilot Usman Azam were apparently trying to do two contradictory things (which gives you a sign of how bad the crew resource management was).

Review: Star Eagles

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Having loved Starmada, I eagerly embraced Star Eagles as a fighter equivalent. I wanted a small unit space fighter game that balanced customization with play-ability and am happy to note that it succeeded in sating that desire. Star Eagles is based on movement templates, activation dice, and special playing cards that a player can use.

It’s not perfect, but I’ve been able to do viable battles with a lot of ships adapted from a lot of different ideas, and that’s what matters. I recommend it to tabletop space battle enthusiasts.

Review: Tank Warfare

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Jeremy Black’s Tank Warfare is a history of the century-plus history of the metal tracked armored vehicle known as the tank. Published in 2020, it wasn’t able to cover the wars in Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, but that’s not its fault. There are however a significant amount of things that are its fault.

The book is a popular history broad-brush overview. Perhaps its biggest weakness is that it’s too broad for its own good. Tangets towards every tank developed and exported by everyone in the time period happen at the expense of actually exploring the topic. Which would be more tolerable if it hadn’t actually focused on World War I in depth simply because there were few types of tanks to cover. The balanced look at the earliest AFVs there give a picture of what might have been.

This is basically just a generic coffee table tank book, but it had the potential to be more.