Saturday, November 30, 2013

"Threads"

I have often thought the only way to "win" a nuclear exchange is to not use yours. That way you ensure at least some coherent civilisation remains. This British film explains why, and uses experts' views to build its scenarios and narrative. WARNING: This is a deeply disturbing film.

2 comments:

Dave said...

Saw it years ago. Very uncomfortable film.

the Keystone Garter said...

I'm finishing off Skunk Works. The highest value targets in Operation Desert Storm were taken out by 4 F117A stealths. There will be 1000 or more F-35s built. It is likely a few different Canada allies will have these planes: USA, Dutch, UK, Australia. There aren't enough targets to justify more than a dozen for Canada. For the F117A stealth R+D, different radar bands were tested on the runway against it. Either this basic step was missed by LM, or the vulnerability to L-band was covered up. Stealth composities are dynamic R+D; those who say such a plane will last 35-50 years are delusional. The composites wear out which is why the operating costs of stealth jets are high. The Blackbirds were technically too far ahead of their applications. The Soviets were behind in developing a prospective new mach-2 bomber fleet, so they were really needed. They were a jack-of-all trades craft like the F-35. But spy satellites did better spying...the F117As weren't used against Gaddafi in the late 1980s because their performance weaknesses were not wanted to be revealed to Russia. They were used against Iraq ODSt. This suggests only to buy a few of the newest variety, if they weren't vulnerable to L-band, every decade or so.
I'm working on defenses against AI/pandemics/sci-fi-WMDs. It is useful to have different payload capabilities for different sensors. We might want to sweep the cities of the world's EM activity in the future. It is useful to be able to bomb countries that don't ascribe to wise WMD treaties...but we don't really know what our payload requirements will be in the future. For this reason I suggest cheap jets with the ability to carry large payloads. With money being used to design payloads. I suggest the F111. It is cheap and has the largest payload size. I suggest subsidizing Bombardier to build a new version of the F111. There should be plenty of weight to apply stealth and invisibility cloak in the future.