So how are y'all preparing for the Apocalypse?

[Fish Owl]

If Churchill had used gas, Hitler would have used gas. But Hitler's first choice was a negotiated peace with Britain.

I highly doubt it would be possible. Britain is not far away from mainland but it is still an island and RAF had air superiority. By the way there is another possible scenario for Apocalypse and I find it more possible than gas or nuclear one: biological weaponry. Luckily nobody except Japanese ever tested it in actual warfare. I often wonder how many Chinese died from artificial disease during WW2. Their death toll is so huge I highly doubt it was all natural reasons.

If Churchill had used gas, Hitler would have used gas. But Hitler's first choice was a negotiated peace with Britain.

He often said that England and Germany are natural allies and his Third Reich would be similar to British Empire. And he had actually a lot of high-ranking supporters in London.

 

[Av Demeisen]

Interesting that you mentioned it. He just changed his mind about it
By the way I just love how people talk about ecology and climate change after buying their new iphone, new computer, new car and all the kinds of similar stuff. So eco-friendly.

Trump will remain Cap'n Flip-Flop, but in the end he will have to placate the knuckle-dragging inbreds and amoral types who voted him into office.

 

[Fish Owl]

Trump will remain Cap'n Flip-Flop, but in the end he will have to placate the knuckle-dragging inbreds and amoral types who voted him into office.

A lot of people voted for him just to keep Hilary from the White House. And vice versa.
Sadly situation in USA are remarkably similar to Ukraine in 2010 when it all started in the same fashion "only morons will vote for that man!" stuff. I really hope Americans will make a big breath and calm down. Morons or not - it's approximately 50% of nation.

 

[Av Demeisen]

Morons or not - it's approximately 50% of nation.

Only about 57% of eligible Americans went out to vote and Trump lost the popular vote.

 

[Fish Owl]

Only about 57% of eligible Americans went out to vote and Trump lost the popular vote.

he still has 61.9 million votes. That's a huge number. Calling them all "knuckle-dragging inbreds and amoral types" is not a great way to keep nation united.

 

[Av Demeisen]

he still has 61.9 million votes. That's a huge number. Calling them all "knuckle-dragging inbreds and amoral types" is not a great way to keep nation united.

You don't unite behind or play nice with fascists and racists. In July 1932 the NSDAP got 13.1 million votes, that's 37.4%. Another huge number.

 

[Fish Owl]

You don't unite behind or play nice with fascists and racists. In July 1932 the NSDAP got 13.1 million votes, that's 37.4%. Another huge number.

Claiming that other people are fascist and don't have rights to vote and elect their candidate is just another sort of fascism. If Trump and his followers will break the law - people have every right to make him go like it was with Watergate Scandal. Trump haven't done anything radical yet (and in my opinion never will) but there are call to arms all over the internet.

That's a recipe for civil war.

 

[Av Demeisen]

I don't deny anyone's right to vote, although on occasion racist parties have been banned in democratic countries. But perhaps some people are too uneducated, purposely misinformed, plain dumb, bigoted, racist to vote, let alone run for office. And this seems to me to be a real problem in the USA.

 

[Fish Owl]

And this seems to me to be a real problem in the USA.

Sadly it is similar in all democratic coutries except really small ones. To change this we need to promote education. And first rule of education is respect. Even for people who don't know any manners. Discipline should be enforced but never disrespect.

 

[Vaz]

I'm preparing by hoarding Jaffa Cakes, many many Jaffa Cakes. I know Jaffa Cakes, and I have the best Jaffa Cakes.

Yum, the orange bit in the middle reminds me of a certain hairpiece.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

RAF had air superiority

Once Hitler gave up the pre-invasion attempt to destroy the RAF fighter capability in the fall of 1940, he turned to strategic bombing of English cities by night. There was little the RAF could do to stop it. When I was a little boy in Liverpool in the early 1950s, there were still blocks and blocks of rubble.

In 1944, came the V-1 buzzbombs, which didn't stop until Allied troops overran the launch sites. Then came the longer-range V-2s which were worse. Hitler could have used gas at any time. Instead he used millions of tons of TNT.

And he had actually a lot of high-ranking supporters in London.

After Churchill replaced Chamberlain, the influence of Lord Halifax and his ilk became nil. The Duke of Windsor was packed off to the Bahamas and never officially heard from again.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Morons or not - it's approximately 50% of nation.

More like a quarter. Almost of half of Americans didn't even bother to vote.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Trump will remain Cap'n Flip-Flop,

I'm surprised that, after all these months, people don't understand what Trump is doing. Here it is in a nutshell:

Trump is not a politician. That's one of his appeals. So what is he?

A celebrity brand. That should be obvious. He's spent decades building his brand into one of the most recognizable in the world.

Politicians have policies. Brands have taglines and slogans. They are not meant to be analyzed and parsed. "I'm loving it!" and "Just do it!" are content-free statements that are only intended to have an effect on the consumer: specifically, the effect of making consumers feel good about themselves in association with the brand.

In the past week, Trump has supposedly reversed himself on key policies -- "Lock her up! Build a wall! Torture terrorists!" -- but he hasn't reversed himself because those were never policies. They were just things he said to motivate consumers to like his brand. It's clear from his conversation with the New York Times that he had never actually thought about them.

Now the campaign is over and he has to redefine his brand, so he is saying different things. The point is, there is no point trying to analyze Trump as if he is a politician with an agenda. Because he just isn't. It would be like trying to analyze a camel as a horse.

Millions of Americans wanted a non-politician to run their country. They wanted someone without experience (or even interest) in governance. Now they've got what they wanted. We'll see if they still want it as the months roll on.

But Trump will continue to build and maintain his brand. That's all he's ever done. It's all he knows how to do.

 

[Fish Owl]

Hitler could have used gas at any time.

He never used it against Soviet Union for similar reasons. He knew it would be the end of Germany.

After Churchill replaced Chamberlain

I totally hate Chamberlain. In my opinion he is to blame for WW2. After Hitler rose to power even Mussolini said that Hitler is an animal and brutal barbarian. He was forced to sign treaty with Germany only after Hitler killed another fascist leader - Austian dictator Dollfuss. And all that time Chamberlain was like "we need to cooperate with Hitler, he can be negotiated with, look how good Olympic games was in 1936". And he could actually prevent war by imposing embargo on trade with Germany and thus crumbling its attempts to rebuild army and navy.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

I totally hate Chamberlain. In my opinion he is to blame for WW2.

You have to understand the context of the times. In the 1930s, Britain was full of widows and old maids who had never married because of all the men senselessly killed in “the Great War.” There were legions of young people growing up without fathers. Wherever you went, you ran into gibbering, trembling wrecks who had been mentally destroyed by what they had seen and done in Flanders.* Because of the early enthusiasm for “pals battalions,” there were whole villages and urban neighborhoods with almost no men who had been of fighting age in August, 1914.

As Hitler rearmed Germany, Churchill was virtually a lone voice crying in the wilderness. If it hadn’t been Chamberlain, it would have been someone with the same policies. It was the tenor of the times.

* In the 1950s and 60s, some of them were still around. We had them in all the Canadian towns I grew up in. They were one of the reasons my dad (who had joined up on the first day of the WWII, fought in France, survived Dunkirk and the Blitz, went back and fought in France and Germany) told my brothers and me, "If they ever come for you, shoot yourself in the foot. Don't go to war."

 

[Fish Owl]

You have to understand the context of the times.

"If they ever come for you, shoot yourself in the foot. Don't go to war."

I can totally understand people from Britain and France who advocated peace or even surrender. Because after surrendering France didn't suffer the way it did in WW1. In Eastern Europe and Russia it was “fight Germans or they will kill you and send your family to gas chamber” – no alternative except fleeing to Siberia and dying there from hunger and cold.

But this is my entire point: Chamberlain could prevent Germany from rearming itself and didn’t do it. I think people in British and USA higher circles very well understood the possibility of new war but were sure that Germany will collide with USSR in Poland in 1939 and selling war assets to Germany was too profitable to forfeit.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Chamberlain could prevent Germany from rearming itself and didn’t do it

I'm not sure how. France didn't act when Germany remilitarized the Rhineland. I doubt that Britain could have sent an expeditionary force across France to do the job. If Chamberlain had tried to, he would have been ousted by his cabinet and probably replaced by Halifax, who was definitely pro-Nazi in those days.

It's quite true that the establishments of Britain and France expected Hitler to go east -- that's what he'd said he'd do in Mein Kampf. Of course, all of those hopes came crashing down when Hitler and Stalin made their non-aggression pact.

But during the time Hitler was reviving the Luftwaffe and building the Bismarck, it was politically difficult enough even to get Britain to rearm, let alone trying to interfere in Czechoslovakia or Austria. Bear in mind that once Germany and the USSR had invaded Poland, which Britain was sworn to defend, there wasn't much the UK could do other than send an ill-equipped force to Norway.

It was a good thing there were no serious German movements westward in 1939 -- the Sitzkrieg -- because there wasn't much the British could have done about it. They were busily calling up troops and equipping them with WWI weapons, and building modern aircraft as fast as they could. What they had in stock, like Faerie Battle fighters and Blenheim bombers, were hopelessly outclassed by the Luftwaffe.

And, of course, preparing to fight the last war. When my dad joined the Royal Engineers in September, 1939, he was immediately trained in digging trenches.

 

[Fish Owl]

I'm not sure how.

By imposing trade embargo. Germany relied heavily on shipments from USA. In 1939 it was too late for trade war because in that time Hitler already had raw materials from Eastern Europe and even trade relations with USSR (raw materials in exchange for modern machinery, both leaders were unhappy since they were arming each other before inevitable war). But in 1933-1939 every leader including even Mussolini would be in favor of isolating Germany.

And, of course, preparing to fight the last war. When my dad joined the Royal Engineers in September, 1939, he was immediately trained in digging trenches.

In USSR preparations for war started in early 30-th. Every kid was trained to jump with parachute, shoot, build shelters and almost all adults had military experience from WW1 and Civil War. This is why there was some heavy resistance and guerilla warfare in occupied territories. There were literally no civilians back then in USSR.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

By imposing trade embargo. Germany relied heavily on shipments from USA

Chamberlain would have had no effect on USA exports to Germany. In the 1930s, there was a strong pro-Nazi movement in the USA, the German-American Bund. There was also the America First movement, whose spokesman was national hero Charles Lindbergh. Their influence of Congress and public opinion severely constrained Roosevelt. Even after Hitler had overrun France, Belgium, Norway, Holland, and Denmark, the pro-German, anti-war factions made it impossible for Roosevelt to come into the war on Britain's side.

I grant you that Chamberlain was more of a hoper than an a doer, but there wasn't much he could do. The tide of public opinion was anti-war. In America, it was especially anti-European war.

 

[JacenAster]

And how many ordinary bombs and rockets? Even during WW1 there was enough weapons to destroy the whole world. Theoretically. By the way there are actually 10,144 nuclear weapons according to latest data.

I'm not sure where you got your data, even the most conservative counts(ones that include only known or solidly supported numbers) by groups like ican estimate over 15,000(Source), with the 23,000 number I originally quoted being a less conservative count, which assumes that no military in possession of them is going to give real numbers and extrapolates actual numbers from building programs.

Term 'Nuclear winter' was coined by Carl Sagan. He actually claimed that burning Kuwait oil fields will have similar effect.

Just because he coined it, doesn't mean much about it's use. As for the Kuwait fires, those actually did cause some fairly significant regional effects. However, the smoke cloud was unable to breach the high altitudes that would cause lasting or global scale issues. This was primarily because the burning of oil is not an overly energetic reaction, in the grand scale of things. I used the proven data on the effects of volcanic eruptions as the practical proof of concept precisely because it provides an more energetic reaction, the eruption pushes the soot/ash cloud into the upper atmosphere, and nuclear detonations would do the same. Again, the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions is a proven climactic effect, not an estimate or guesswork.

There were similar articles in 1920-th that described gas holocaust just the way we now know nuclear. And both never happened for similar reasons. First of all you need to detonate all those weapons at the same time, you need to be sure that all of them will detonate and none will be destroyed by counter-measures before detonation, malfunction and such. And you need a madman in each country to push the button. And even Hitler didn't use his gas arsenal in 1945.

So, a single point first. I don't personally believe a nuclear apocalypse is actually possible any longer. Countermeasure systems have rendered the nuclear arsenals of pretty much everyone inane. Save only in the case of mass saturation, which could still work, total destruction by nuclear arsenal has mostly become a non-issue. My points were addressing the faulty idea that if it did actually happen, it wouldn't be so bad. Not, if it will happen at all.

Having said that, you've got some flawed logic in the above quoted section. You do not need to detonate them all at the same time to get these effects, and you only need a single madman. The later, only needing a single madman, is the result of the current policies by the major world powers. As it stands, and this has been true since the Cold War, once mass launch occurs by one side or the other retaliation is largely released into the hands of the standby launch crews and early warning systems. It's even worse if any strikes actually hit, as that triggers a near certain independant retaliation by sub commanders who are inherently disconnected from the chain of command.

Finally, it can be argued that Hitler didn't use his gas arsenal precisely because he wasn't a madman. Racist? Absolutely. A fanatic? Obviously. A madman? No, not at all. He would never have gotten so far as he did, enjoyed such support, if he were a madman who desired destruction for the sake of destruction. The idea that he was a "madman" is a comforting lie people tell themselves, to assure themselves that monsters like Hitler aren't like them. To pretend, in the dark places of human thought, that such monsters are really monsters, rather than something any human can become under the right circumstances.