Tag: Essay

How To Nuke

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How much nuke-metal can you get out of Reactor X? As it turned out, nuclear proliferation scholar David Albright came up with an oversimplified rough formula, which he wrote in a briefing.

You need:

  1. The thermal energy created by the reactor. Note that thermal megawatts are different and greater than electrical megawatts.
  2. The capacity factor. As I’m not any kind of scientist, I would say just go with Albright’s recommendations or make it even lower than 0.5 if you’re using a press-ganged power reactor to simulate the extra work needed.
  3. The conversion factor. This is obvious in the slide for purpose-built production reactors, but for adapted ones, you need to look a little deeper. Fortunately, the same presentation has a comparative slide.

(Again, do not quote me on this. The very presentation says “this is for production not adapted reactors”, but oh well.)

So:

200mw production reactor: 200×0.6x365x.85=37kg of weapons grade plutonium in a year.

Adapted LWR power reactor: 1,400 mwth, wastage: 1400×0.35x365x.51= 91.2 kg of weapons grade plutonium in a year.

A Fat Man-level warhead is estimated to need anything from 6.5 kg (very low technology, used in said bomb itself) to 3kg. See here and here.

The Wargirl

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Made in Stable Diffusion

Anyone who’s seen my retweets knows how much I like tacticute. And Stable Diffusion gives me the chance to make tacticute in a variety of styles, clothes, and poses. The styles of these military women trend away from the fluffy model and more towards the semi-practical. I tend to give them shorter hair, and in the more photorealistic models, a rougher, harsh edge to their appearance. They may be tigresses worn down by the horrors of what they serve in, but they still have a kitten on the inside. But I digress..

Anyway, for the sake of fiction (obviously real life policy is complex and depends on so many factors), I must admit towards having my military females tending to be something other than armored infantry grunts. (All Union’s Cholpon is a medic, something women have done in battlefield support for thousands of years). Besides that, there’s vehicle crews, agents, even things like the descendants of the WWII Soviet scout-snipers. It’s not keeping them in the back and it’s definitely still putting them in harms way.

Even if there’s a mitigating factor in-setting (ie power armor,magic,even just the tone of things), I still have this bias. And I don’t mind if it’s done right, nor do I think it’s impossible to do right. I guess it’s just a partially subconcious reaction to the trend of “strong female girlboss who’s 5 foot 2 and scrawny and can do the most stereotypically masculine things better than the men can”.

Claude Larson and Library Music

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There lived a German musician named Klaus Netzle who more often went by the stage name Claude Larson. Although Netzle had many more aliases, as befit a stock music composer.

I find his work rather interesting. Meant as disposable background music, he wrote in many genres, and composed and performed many, many songs. Him and others like him made albums that filled vast business libraries but, with few exceptions, were not known to the general public until the internet.

I give you one of my favorite Claude Larson tracks:

The Hard Lesson

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The Ukrainian counteroffensive has not gained as much ground as hoped for. It’s important to see, as these respected experts did, that it’s not just a matter of insufficient equipment. Anyway, for a bit of Fuldapocalyptic contemporary commentary.

  • There’s the Russians getting better after their initial swing and a miss. Especially as…
  • There’s the problem that everyone, including the US, would struggle with an offensive against an opponent that has had months to fortify an inevitable and obvious avenue of approach over flat terrain
  • There’s the inherent material issues. After all, the last such offense I can think of that was a huge offensive against an opponent materially better in most ways was… the Battle of the Bulge. Which didn’t go so well for the attacker and devolved into a grindfest pretty quickly.
  • But there’s also the issues with Ukraine’s own military. Again, this isn’t something really to blame. Everyone (just look at Kasserine Pass) would struggle with complex operations after quickly raising an army in a rapid desperate period of total war. Yet mentioning these very real issues and mentioning their struggles as being due to something other than just the poor stingy west not giving them 200000000 tanks and a legion of Imperial Knights attracts a lot of angry criticism.
  • Ukrainians have every reason not to think like this, but from a western perspective, having a Ukraine with NATO/similar committment but without a bombed out strip of land in its east is vastly preferable to a Ukraine with said strip of land but still locked in a conflict.

The Cluster Debate

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So the Americans have provided cluster weapons to Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, the internet debates around them have not been the most fruitful or productive. The consistent opponents are one thing in that I find their arguments as flawed as they are understandable. Yes, it’s perfectly fine to be concerned about unexploded ordnance and collateral damage-as if there wasn’t plenty of that already, most of it caused by…. someone other than Ukraine.

But the more interesting thing to me has been the talk, largely from OSINT accounts, of treating clusters as an unstoppable superweapon. Between this and the Bayraktar TB2 slobbering of days past, it’s as big a sign as Michael Jordan’s baseball career that excellent talent in one area doesn’t equal having it in another. Anyway,

  • Concern about unexploded bomblets, and not just for collateral reasons, is valid.
  • Clusters are situational and even in the past before “normal” shells got better designed, had many situations where they were worse. They also had some where they were better.
  • Cluster shells will still be extremely useful, if only because they’re a fresh source of things that things that go boom.

Rediscovering Attrition

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Every so often an observer will encounter a war (the Ukraine conflict being the most recent) and then find that numbers, firepower, and the dreaded capital-A Attrition still matter, as they always have. Some of this is just seeing technological hype being inevitably worn down by realistic imperfection. But more of it is just because of the annoying way the Liddell-Hart/Boyd/Lind “MANEUVER WAR” crowd has wormed its way into military discourse.

Ok, so a lot of it is just WWII mythology of the Germans running circles around the French. But guess who’s amplified all that? Yep, the maneuverists. And in Liddell Hart’s case going all the way back to the first ever recorded battles where the “Indirect Approach” always won. So much as how people become legitimately shocked when, after a long dose of Pierre Spreyism, it turns out a new piece of military equipment actually works, they also become shocked when it turns out that fortifications are indeed viable if not essential, that the Big Breakthrough is hard, that maneuver has limits, and that there are few substitutes for force and attrition.

Studying actual doctrine even in maneuverist periods doesn’t make one surprised. After all, a Sov Kras Don Circ Heavy Opfor operational maneuver group gets going with a massive breakthrough concentration of firepower and stays going through mobile organic firepower. But going by popular media does.

On The Term “Thunder Run”

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One of the most curious military terms is “Thunder Run”. It originally referred to an armored push into Baghdad in 2003. It has since come to generally mean “any fast, tank-heavy offensive, especially into closed terrain where tanks are otherwise not the most suited.” Especially one that’s inherently high-risk, as this was. It takes nothing away from the skill and courage of the 2003 Thunder Runners to point out that the conventional Iraqi army in that period was massively flawed and worn-out and that it could have easily failed against a more capable opponent, as happened in a similar attempt in the Yom Kippur War.

However, I find it even more interesting in terms of etymology. See, the name “Thunder Run” is pretty self-descriptive. It’s an attack that’s swift like a thunderbolt and involves dozens of thundering-ly loud armored vehicles running towards the opponent. In other words, its something that even someone with little such experience can grasp the meaning of.

World War III Sports

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With the actual war done, the WW31987 blog turns its attention to the really important things: Sports! My personal hunches, since this is in July/August.

  • MLB stops the season and probably either voids it (sure beats the real life World Series cancelations of the 94 strike and the 1904 boycott), or goes straight to the playoffs after the war ends.
  • The NFL hasn’t started yet and won’t start the first game until the second week of September, and the war ends in late August. (Ironically, there was a disruptive strike that year, dunno how the war would affect that). Given its lucrative nature, I can see a wait and see approach followed by starting the season after the war.
  • The NBA and NHL start in the late fall and are thus largely unaffected.
  • For European soccer leagues, I’d say it depends on the country. The historical Bundesliga started several days before the war would have begun, though a crisis could have averted it. My hunch is that the countries not directly hit (ie, France, etc…, would just launch a delayed and possibly shortened season after the war’s end), while Germany, the nuke victims, and the Scandanavian countries that were invaded would wait and possibly cancel the seasons.

One footnote: 2020 was the historical season that Mike Trout qualified for the Hall of Fame (played in at least 10 seasons). With obvious fears of the season not being able to be completed due to COVID, there was talk as if it would count as official. The Hall responded by saying that 1994 counted for the sake of eligibility, and thus even a World Series less 2020 would as well. Or a World Series-less 1987.

Big Vs. Little Targeteering

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With regards to unguided bombs, one of those things that’s still a little iffy to me is what’s more suited for a few big bombs and what’s for a bunch of little ones. I can guess, with something like a strongpoint or large building being viewed as worthy of a giant demolisher while a group of enemy infantry/soft-skins is better suited for a large stick of small fragmentation ones.

I also have this suspicion that general purpose bombs are acceptable for most aerial targets. This is backed up by the data from the Gulf Wars showing the bulk of dropped bombs being Mk82s and derivatives. And of course, anything that can explode is not useless. Both of these below have uses and both can be deadly.