Cortese's Corner - The Off-Topic Chat Thread

September 1939 all over again. Goodnight everybody.

 

Don't think the West have the cajones to intervene.

But then the Third Reich didn't have nuclear weapons.

 

Exactly.

 

I doubt it in all honesty. He may 'claim' Crimea but won't go full scale into Ukraine. Mind you, that's kind of what we said about Hitler. There'll be lots of huff and puff, but there's no way we'll militarily intervene in this, which I agree would mean end of days really.....

 

With our current Military strength we couldn't defend the Isle of Wight, so I think we should keep our noses out of any sabre rattling.

 

Unfortunately we'll be sitting on American coat tails, a bit like the little kid at school crowing over the shoulder of his big brother. Oh to be Swiss at times like this.....

 

I just worry that Putin is sliding gradually into full-on megalomaniac dictator mode, and, as I said earlier, there are so many comparisons with the way the Nazis played games with the German minority population in both Czechoslovakia and the Polish Corridor. Of course, the West have given no promises on intervention, and would be insane to, but once the threat of nuclear war rears its head, which it could, what does NATO do?

 

What do you mean? Us yodelling while others are scrapping?

 

Oh I think he's been there for quite some time. If you've not seen it, the post Qwerty put up earlier is excellent.

 

Putin understands the first rule of great power action in the nuclear age: he who moves first wins, because even brinkmanship is too dangerous (and likely economically devastating) these days. There is little the US or anyone else could have done to prevent this, and if Putin wants to set up Eastern Ukraine as a Russian-aligned puppet state -- and risk becoming enmeshed in a full-on civil war on their doorstep that would make Chechnya look like a flipping dance recital -- there isn't a hell of a lot that can stop him.

 

About time humanity was wiped out, lets have a nuclear war!

 

Perhaps my Fallout experience will put me at an advantage!

Not that it teaches much other than to make cities out of aircraft or aircraft carriers and hope you don't get killed/enslaved by psychopaths.

 

I was rather hoping, that if we were to have an apocalypse, that it would be zombies.

 

^WHS

We're not going to go wading into a war with Russia here. William Hague will do a bit of moral posturing, and the US and Russia won't invite each others diplomats to their parties for a while. But the simple truth of the matter is that the preservation of Ukraine's borders isn't important enough to us or the US to risk a conflict with Russia. The only thing that I can see creating a World War scenario in the next 100 or so years, would be if a serious deficit of a vital resource occurs, and everyone moves to secure it. Posturing over politics away from our own borders just isn't the spark it used to be, and too many lessons have been learnt.

 

I missed out on the Fallout phase as a kid, so if there is a nuclear war, I'm ****ed.

 

Fallout: New Vegas Ultimate routinely drops to $5. Highly recommended, and not just because it will give you a glimpse of what life will be like in a year or two.

 

This is exactly why the Ukrainian people wanted to ally with the EU...they feared being sucked back in with Russia. Their President wanted this because he was no doubt going to do very well financially out of it.

 

The death toll in the Chinese massacre now 33 with 130 injured. The weapons used were machetes and most dead were described as the least able who could not run away. The group responsible are believed to be Muslim separatists who recently crashed a car into a crowd in Beijing.

 

If true, it's the continuation of a particularly nasty set of circumstances. The Uyghurs have been caught between two tracks...winning independence via peaceful means (which has generally resulted in all manner of things being inflicted on them without anyone in the outside world giving a damn) and resorting to terrorism (which has gotten attention, but has gone down just about as well as terrorism generally does). Acts like this are about the best thing the central Chinese government could hope for...doesn't accomplish much of anything, and it doesn't exactly show the separatists in the best light. The crackdown and mass imprisonments won't get the same headlines, but they will come.

 

Fallout 3 will give you a better idea of what life will be like in a year or two as Vegas was protected from the nuclear war to some extent by anti-ballistic lasers (or missiles, I can't remember tbh) so only a few nukes exploded in the area around Vegas. I doubt Britain has any anti-missile capability so we'd be more like Washington D.C. which got the full force of the Nuclear war