The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Ilya Muromets]

The Japanese plan at that point was to make a complete victory as costly as possible to the Allies so that they'd get terms more favorable to them rather than the unconditional surrender the Allies demanded in the Postdam Declaration. Part of the plan included garrisoning the Home Islands with whatever they had left to make life sheer hell on any Allied invaders.

EDIT: Well, garrisoning is not quite the word. More accurately, they were planning to turn the Home Islands into pretty much a nightmarish guerrilla warfare scenario. Basically Okinawa writ large.

[Baughn]

Hm. Fine. And - I've heard this one before, but - what if the americans had nuked an empty area of forest instead?

[Ilya Muromets]

Why waste a perfectly good bomb? Especially one with all of the money and research that got poured into it on an empty patch of land? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both selected because both were legit military targets:

Hiroshima had the Second Army and Chugoku Regional Army headquartered there, and the Army Marine Headquarters in a nearby port. The city also had large depots of military supplies, and was a key center for shipping.

Nagasaki was also a huge port city and was involved in the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.

[Baughn]

Because of all the people who'd get killed?

..dammit, I suppose they weren't really thinking of the japanese as "people" by that point, were they?

[tim31]

In part it comes down to how many allied lives they spared by not having to invade the Home Islands. Okinawa was a terrible business(the entire hopping campaign was) and continuation of the war in the Pacific was going to mean redeploying battle-hardened(battle-weary) assets from Europe.

[usagihunter101]

I remember reading somewhere that the Japanese were training their women and schoolchildren to attack American soldiers with bamboo spears. If we had actually invaded instead of just dropping the bombs, not only would it have cost us dearly in men and material, but we would've had to essentially raze the entire home islands.

Going in a new direction though, it seems that the current way of using portal warfare could be more streamlined. It says in the story that they have the portal equipment setup down to 45min, right? It seems to me that if the portal equipment is compact enough to carry by helicopter, why not just take out the assembly bit and build the equipment into the helicopter frame itself, powered by the aircraft

It could be easily managed by only slightly modifying existing airframes, meaning that it could be fit into wartime production. The benefit being that you'd have the capability to create portals immediately after you land.

Hell, you could take the same thing, build it into a big jet's airframe and have essentially a airborne aircraft transporter that flies over an area, create a portal, and planes can fly in from halfway around the world!

Now that's thinking with portals!

EDIT: First post, by the way.

[Singular Quartet]

Why waste a perfectly good bomb? Especially one with all of the money and research that got poured into it on an empty patch of land? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both selected because both were legit military targets:

Hiroshima had the Second Army and Chugoku Regional Army headquartered there, and the Army Marine Headquarters in a nearby port. The city also had large depots of military supplies, and was a key center for shipping.

Nagasaki was also a huge port city and was involved in the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.

There was also the fact that they couldn't build another bomb for a few years, IIRC. They couldn't purify (Is this even the right term?) weapons grade uranium fast enough to make another bomb.

[Ilya Muromets]

Because of all the people who'd get killed?

..dammit, I suppose they weren't really thinking of the japanese as "people" by that point, were they?

I'm not gonna say that "let the Japs burn!" wasn't part of it, because prevailing attitudes and several years worth of hostility would guarantee that there would be a lot of feelings of that nature. But, that notwithstanding, the targeting of the cities was sound military thinking--you always aim to take out big chunks of the enemy's war-making capability.

However, do you really think a conventional invasion would've been less hard on the civilians? If anything, it would've caused more deaths of the civilian population for a more prolonged period if the US played to the Japanese's tune and tried to take on their guerrilla-Japan plan.

AS for a forest target... well, again, a weapon that expensive cannot and will not be wasted on a purely symbolic intimidation attack. That's not just ruthlessness, that's sound logistics sense. There has to be real damage to the enemy's war-making capability, a "return" if you will for what you spent in developing the weapon. More so if you have limited numbers of the weapon system in question. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were significant parts of the enemy's war-making capabilities, so they were legitimate targets. It's unfortunate people were there, but it's naive to think that in war there won't be collateral damage. And, back then, civilian deaths on a wide scale had become understood as part of the package of war (what with all of the cluster bombing of cities and city-by-city invasions and whatnot). It's unrealistic to think that "we won't attack a military target because of all the civilians" would have even entered into a military planner's mind.

[phongn]

There was also the fact that they couldn't build another bomb for a few years, IIRC. They couldn't purify (Is this even the right term?) weapons grade uranium fast enough to make another bomb.

A third device was waiting to be assembled, at which point none would be available for a month or two - at which point mass production would begin. Remember that the Manhattan Project not only aimed to produce a weapon, but industrial production of them.

[Darth Wong]

Don't take the comparison too literally. Whether material is brittle or ductile is a consequence of its molecular structure (just like.. everything else), so it should be possible to make diamondoid that's ductile en-masse yet still about as bullet-resistant as usual. In fact, that's pretty much the point; ceramic plates are, well, plates, and inconvenient to cover joints with. It might still be heavy, but I'm not going to believe it's too heavy until I see some figures. Diamond is, after all, extremely strong for its weight.

So with no real evidence at all, you're going to assume that this stuff will be as ductile as steel armour, but as hard and strong as diamond? That's great. And people should take you seriously because ...?

Hold on, wasn't logistical support a non-issue with portals, now?

No. You still need to maintain and repair vehicles, and this is essentially a vehicle.

Using lots of micro-scale motors, to be exact. Don't even start on that one; finding a way to make multiple motors cooperate was done a very long time ago, and many motor designs achieve higher power-density as they get smaller. Power supply is harder, but natural gas would work; we have functional micro-turbines today.

Don't be stupid. The problem is not making the motors co-operate. The problem is overcoming the law of mechanical leverage. Simply put, the motors in an exoskeletal armour suit cannot have good leverage because you're claiming it will all be compact. In a robotic leg, mechanical advantage would be provided by having the transducers in the middle of the leg, with leverage provided by distance from the fulcrum point. But you're talking about transducers on plates outside the leg. Just how much mechanical advantage are they going to have?

You keep looking at technical difficulties from the perspective of what you can make work, while ignoring the parts that won't work. It's sci-fi wank cherry-picking.

And what about power source? Are your nanotech wank fantasies also going to make super-miniaturized batteries?

Also.. yes? I was always assuming the entire suit would be operating on nanotech. Not much point in not doing it, assuming that it's also being built by nanofactories. The advantages, like atomically perfect seals, are too large to overlook.

Atomically perfect seals? Just how much advantage do you expect to get from that?

Though I suppose now you'll be saying something about how nanofactories wouldn't work to build one, much less in one piece. Sorry, but I'm not going to believe that; much more knowledgeable people than me think they would, so you'd need to figure out something they haven't

Nice appeal to anonymous authority. Got any more worthless bullshit you'd like to sling my way?

"Highly varied nutrients and fluids" doesn't apply, and you know it.

It disproves your bullshit claim that biology is low-maintenance.

Electricity covers most of the energy requirements (it might also need natural gas, depending), while the durability of these structures is high enough that it won't need much in the way of repair unless it actually absorbs damage, in which case, you can switch it out via a portal and repair in some specialized workshop somewhere.

Bullshit. Mechanical shock to all of the mechanisms and joints will cause wear and tear, thus forcing routine maintenance. Real-life tanks and aircraft require regular maintenance after every use, even when they take no battle damage, or they will break down. You do realize this, right? Oh wait, you'll just wave your hand and say "nanotech! I win!"

Because a Hummer with a .50cal gun on it is a far more effective demon-stopper for the money than a guy wearing some imaginary wanktech power armour that doesn't exist?

Unless you have to enter a building. For battlefields that can actually fit a hummer (or a tank), power armor is a no-starter. For a medieval-ish city with tiny, meandering streets?

What makes you think you would be able to enter a building with a bulky power suit on? Oh right, I forgot: you think it would be no bulkier than clothing, because ... nanotech!

[R011]

Surely they would have surrendered before it came to that?

Considering the preparations they were making and the determination of the military to fight until the last, that is likely not so. Certainly they were not going to do so for months. Paul Nitze writing the US Strategic Bombing Survey report on Japan estimated that the Japanese might surrender without invasion sometime between the beginning of November and the end of December. Considering that about two hundred thousand Chinese and Indonesians were dying each month under Japanese brutality, and an increasing number of Japanese would have been dying of famine and disease, it's good for all that they gave up when they did. Another point is that the conventional bombing campaign was about to move into a new phase, the destruction of transport infrastructure. Had they done that, then the Allies would have been unable to feed the Japanese after surrender s we did historically.

but - what if the americans had nuked an empty area of forest instead?

There are a few reasons why they didn't.

- If the device did not work, it would be counter-productive.

- It would be difficult to prove that the US did use a practical weapon of war rather than some experimental device.

- A demonstration would be far less dramatic and might not impress the Japanese sufficiently.

- If a demonstration didn't cause them to surrender, then the Japanese might take countermeasures making further use less effective.

- Using the devices without destroying targets would be wasteful, particularly if the Japanese didn't surrender. At the time, the US only had three of them. Had the devices not pushed the Japanese into surrender, then destroying those targets would have proved useful.

Indeed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been spared so far only because of their value as potential nuclear targets. Without nuclear weapons, they would have remained on the target list and have been bombed conventionally in due course with similar casualties.

As it happened, a demonstration was not at all likely to have worked considering that actually initiating a device over Hiroshima did not.

I suppose they weren't really thinking of the japanese as "people" by that point, were they?

It’s worse than that. The National Command Authority in both the UK and the US knew that the Japanese and the Germans were as much people as anyone else. We killed them anyway because winning the war was more important than any moral qualms they may have had. Note though, that unlike our enemies, we did only what we believed we needed to do to win the war and when we had, we made sure that our former enemies were treated as humanely as reasonably possible.

[Baughn]

I'm not going to keep this up. Whether you respond or not, this is my last post on the subject; it's not very productive. So let me just provide some links that verify this stuff.

Don't take the comparison too literally. Whether material is brittle or ductile is a consequence of its molecular structure (just like.. everything else), so it should be possible to make diamondoid that's ductile en-masse yet still about as bullet-resistant as usual. In fact, that's pretty much the point; ceramic plates are, well, plates, and inconvenient to cover joints with. It might still be heavy, but I'm not going to believe it's too heavy until I see some figures. Diamond is, after all, extremely strong for its weight.

So with no real evidence at all, you're going to assume that this stuff will be as ductile as steel armour, but as hard and strong as diamond? That's great. And people should take you seriously because ...?

http://www.isracast.com/article.aspx?id=28 <-- Here's one near-future variant.
https://www.nas.nasa.gov/News/Techrepor ... 97-029.pdf <-- I don't know if you can call NASA an authority, but see their comments on the brittleness of carbon nanotubes on page seven - the section on space elevators. The actual authorities would, of course, not be as well known, but go ahead and ask Drexler if you like.

Hold on, wasn't logistical support a non-issue with portals, now?

No. You still need to maintain and repair vehicles, and this is essentially a vehicle.

Using lots of micro-scale motors, to be exact. Don't even start on that one; finding a way to make multiple motors cooperate was done a very long time ago, and many motor designs achieve higher power-density as they get smaller. Power supply is harder, but natural gas would work; we have functional micro-turbines today.

Don't be stupid. The problem is not making the motors co-operate. The problem is overcoming the law of mechanical leverage. Simply put, the motors in an exoskeletal armour suit cannot have good leverage because you're claiming it will all be compact. In a robotic leg, mechanical advantage would be provided by having the transducers in the middle of the leg, with leverage provided by distance from the fulcrum point. But you're talking about transducers on plates outside the leg. Just how much mechanical advantage are they going to have?

You keep looking at technical difficulties from the perspective of what you can make work, while ignoring the parts that won't work. It's sci-fi wank cherry-picking.

I'm perfectly aware that micro-motors won't have any mechanical advantage, which is why I repeatedly stated that their output would be torque - rotation. You'd need macroscopic structures to translate that into the movements necessary for power assistance, most likely by using the distance between the two sides of the fabric. Even then, you'd still have enough issues with lack of leverage that the power assistance would be limited to what could be described as sane levels, instead of the ridiculous (Vaporization would become an issue, except that the classical scaling laws don't hold all the way down) levels suggested by sufficiently tiny electrostatic motors - see http://www.crnano.org/essays04.htm#Scaling - however, the motors can still produce extreme levels of force without necessarily having very high wattage.

Of course, the point is that making the motors smaller does not significantly reduce mechanical advantage, so long as you're smart enough not to try driving a lever at four nanoradians or something like that. You can move the force around without worrying about mechanical advantage, by moving it as torque. You do need to worry about structural strength, but not much more than usual.

And what about power source? Are your nanotech wank fantasies also going to make super-miniaturized batteries?

I repeatedly mentioned MEMS gas turbines. If you can't be bothered to read what I'm actually posting, I don't see why I should bother to post. One last time, then: http://files.asme.org/IGTI/Knowledge/Articles/13045.pdf

Also.. yes? I was always assuming the entire suit would be operating on nanotech. Not much point in not doing it, assuming that it's also being built by nanofactories. The advantages, like atomically perfect seals, are too large to overlook.

Atomically perfect seals? Just how much advantage do you expect to get from that?

It sure as hell ought to help against pheromones, or other chemical agents. That it also limits the exposure of internal mechanisms to dust is just a bonus.

Though I suppose now you'll be saying something about how nanofactories wouldn't work to build one, much less in one piece. Sorry, but I'm not going to believe that; much more knowledgeable people than me think they would, so you'd need to figure out something they haven't

Nice appeal to anonymous authority. Got any more worthless bullshit you'd like to sling my way?

No. Go argue with http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Nanosystems/toc.html.

"Highly varied nutrients and fluids" doesn't apply, and you know it.

It disproves your bullshit claim that biology is low-maintenance.

It's low-maintenance due to being self-maintaining. The "specialized nutrients and fluids" you talk about are readily available in most areas of the world from simple foraging; an army lives on its stomach, but is in many cases perfectly capable of satisfying that stomach from local resources. Oh, except that would be a war crime. Boo hoo. They're still capable of it.

Electricity covers most of the energy requirements (it might also need natural gas, depending), while the durability of these structures is high enough that it won't need much in the way of repair unless it actually absorbs damage, in which case, you can switch it out via a portal and repair in some specialized workshop somewhere.

Bullshit. Mechanical shock to all of the mechanisms and joints will cause wear and tear, thus forcing routine maintenance. Real-life tanks and aircraft require regular maintenance after every use, even when they take no battle damage, or they will break down. You do realize this, right? Oh wait, you'll just wave your hand and say "nanotech! I win!"

Notice that I said "won't need much", not "won't need any". The strength of carbon bonds, as opposed to the metal/composite parts used in airplanes, will still reduce that need to reasonable levels, especially if you stop to consider that a suit of armor that isn't being shot at won't be subject to the same forces as the internals of a tank engine or airplane.

Because a Hummer with a .50cal gun on it is a far more effective demon-stopper for the money than a guy wearing some imaginary wanktech power armour that doesn't exist?

Unless you have to enter a building. For battlefields that can actually fit a hummer (or a tank), power armor is a no-starter. For a medieval-ish city with tiny, meandering streets?

What makes you think you would be able to enter a building with a bulky power suit on? Oh right, I forgot: you think it would be no bulkier than clothing, because ... nanotech!

If it were, they wouldn't be able to use it, therefore the protection will be downscaled until they can. We're talking about a material far stronger than current soldier-mounted armor, so why the hell would you think it also needs to be bulkier?

Are you assuming "power armor" equates to "lift tank", or something? It means "lift armor, and possibly extra bolted-on supplies".

[ray245]

Seriously, just because the story has more science fiction/fantasy element to it does not mean we would suddenly gain nano-tech body suits in such a short amount of time.

[Baughn]

"Several decades" is a short amount of time, now?

[Simon_Jester]

Because of all the people who'd get killed?

..dammit, I suppose they weren't really thinking of the japanese as "people" by that point, were they?

Not really, and the Japanese were returning the favor.

More specifically, the idea of cities getting blown into rubble by kilotons of explosives was not unusual during the World Wars. After what happened to places like Nanking, Warsaw, Cologne, and Stalingrad, the bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was nothing all that unusual, except that it took a lot fewer men and planes to do the same amount of destruction.

=======

Implicit in all of this is that R&D hasd been hit very hard. Not stopped, but fundamentally reorientated. It's now directed to immediate objectives; finding out about Universe-Two and how it works, finding out about Portals and how they work. Comparing the rules of physics in Universe-Two with those in Universe-One and trying to work out how they differ and why. Trying to compensate for the fact that Universe-Two is non-Euclidean. Working out better ways to kill the inhabitants of Universe-Two quickly and efficiently. Far-field, non-immeditaely useful projects like Nanotechnology will be put in cold storage...

Contrary to mythology wars aren't good for basic science. They're very good for applied science but lousy for basic research. Forgetting that fact cost Germany WW2 (along with simultaneously taking on the US economy and the Russian Army but that's another story)

I still don't think this is quite fair to Baughn, because he was originally talking about what happens after the current war is over, with the clearly implied assumption that there would be a hiatus of some years before we felt ready to go a-viking through every Bubble Universe we can find.

Yes, you don't do basic research in the middle of a war mobilization, but that doesn't mean the research is permanently cancelled even after the war ends.

========

Granted. Lately, I've been starting to wonder why they don't nuke Uriel; they're risking his escape.

I think they're reasonably confident they've got him cornered; if he was going to portal out himself he already would have, and anyone portalling in to save him will (they expect) be detected. And dropping nuclear weapons on your own territory is something you do only as a last resort and only after checking with the highest possible command levels.

As long as portalling is off the table, and they have reasons to think it is, hunting him with bazookas makes more sense than blasting the whole area with a hundred kilotons.

=======

As for the Elder Things, they survived just fine, despite being strictly material entities. They didn't manage to wipe out Cthulhu's spawn, and were in fact defeated, and forced to cede land - but they still held these abominations in check. In fact, the only thing that the Elder Things' wars prove is that a strictly material being can defeat these non-euclidian guys with 'curious weapons of molecular and atomic disturbances.' Oh, and the strictly material Elder Things managed to fight these guys to a standstill right after some world-shattering geological upheaval had wrecked a large number of their cities. Of course, they didn't fight Cthulhu himself, but his 'star spawn' who were presumably much more numerous and expendable. The Elder Things are, unusually for Lovecraft monstosities, somewhat sympathetic, and have motives and mentalities we can understand.

Yeah; I got the same feeling reading "At the Mountains of Madness"

On the other hand, it's pretty clear to me that they had higher technology than we do, even if we're a lot farther along now than we were back in the Diesel Age when Lovecraft was writing. Whatever techniques created the shoggoths, for instance, are definitely well beyond what we're capable of today. I find it highly unlikely that the Elder Things lacked the level of science and engineering needed to duplicate something like our nuclear arsenal.

So while I'm not saying "canon-Cthulhu is unlimited!" here, I would point out that canon-Cthulhu did manage to fight a post-atomic civilization more advanced than our own to a standstill and force them to cede control over a continent-sized landmass. Not the kind of thing you want to run into during dimensional exploration, to put it mildly. And definitely more than this setting's "Legions of Hell" managed.

[Guardsman Bass]

"Several decades" is a short amount of time, now?

It is when you're effectively immortal (as the undead are) - and even more so if/when they figure out some type of contraption to allow the undead to travel for extended periods of time back on Earth and its universe.

[Baughn]

I see.

I can believe that would happen, and I can't really say I'd be sad if potentially world-ending technologies like AI or nanotech (for safety, that's the conservative assumption) are slowed down, but..

It would sadden me if the outcome of this war is a general slowing-down of our development. I like living in interesting times; slowing down for no good reason would feel like returning to the old, pre-scientific method, pre-renaissance methods of "development".

I'd also worry that we'd eventually end up like the Race, from Worldwar. Culturally stagnant, technically superior, but eventually running into someone they can't deal with fast enough to avoid the enemies' technological progress overrunning their own.

[ray245]

I see.

I can believe that would happen, and I can't really say I'd be sad if potentially world-ending technologies like AI or nanotech (for safety, that's the conservative assumption) are slowed down, but..

It would sadden me if the outcome of this war is a general slowing-down of our development. I like living in interesting times; slowing down for no good reason would feel like returning to the old, pre-scientific method, pre-renaissance methods of "development".

I'd also worry that we'd eventually end up like the Race, from Worldwar. Culturally stagnant, technically superior, but eventually running into someone they can't deal with fast enough to avoid the enemies' technological progress overrunning their own.

Cool technology/= practical.

[Stuart]

Why did they start the manhattan project, anyway? The USA basically had Japan beat.

****Sigh.**** You really need to read a book called Downfall by Richard B Franks. It conclusively demolishes nonsense like that. Point in question. No, the U.S. didn't have Japan beat, the Japanese military were continuing to plan a major "decisive battle" in Kyushu in which they believed American casualties could be so astronomic that the U.S. would grant them what amounted to a ceasefire-in-place. That would have constituted a major Japanese victory. In order to gain that objective, the Japanese armed forces were prepared to accept that 65 percent of the population would die of disease and starvation before the battle even started. By August 1945, the US was beginning to come to the opinion that the Japanese assessment was correct, that if an invasion was attempted, the casualties would be so horrendous that continuing the war would be a political impossibility.

Hm. Fine. And - I've heard this one before, but - what if the americans had nuked an empty area of forest instead?

Why waste a perfectly good nuclear device? Look, after Hiroshima, the Japanese Army dismissed the nuclear destruction of an entire city as being irrelevent to the decision on whether to continue the war or not. So what would blowing up an empty area of forest achieve that wiping out an entire city did not. Damn it, after Nagasaki, elements of the Japanese Army attempted a coup to reverse the decision to surrender and keep on fighting. This idea that a demonstration would have acheived anything collapses in the face of historical fact. If anything it would have been counterproductive in that it would have diluted the shock effect of using a device on a real target.

Because of all the people who'd get killed?

Got news for you. War means fighting and fighting means killing. If you don't want to be on the receiving end of killing on an industrial scale, don't start wars. A little realism is good for the soul here.

dammit, I suppose they weren't really thinking of the japanese as "people" by that point, were they?

More Hmmm. You need to do a lot of studying on WW2 and especially the end-game. To some extent its true that the Japanese were cordially hated by the vast majority of Americans in 1945 and nobody got upset over their deaths. However, that doesn't mean they weren't regarded as people. They were; they were regarded as a brutal, ruthless and treacherous group of people but people nonetheless. You might be interested to know that Kyoto was actually excluded from the target list because of its cultural importance and lack of war industries. The fact that a blockade and bombardment solution to ending the war would leave a very high proportion of the Japanese population dead was one reason why the decision to drop nuclear devices on Japan was taken.

I remember reading somewhere that the Japanese were training their women and schoolchildren to attack American soldiers with bamboo spears. If we had actually invaded instead of just dropping the bombs, not only would it have cost us dearly in men and material, but we would've had to essentially raze the entire home islands.

That's correct. The Japanese Army plan for the defense of the home islands was utterly ruthless. Initially they were going to cut off all food supplies to people who couldn't fight (hence the percentage of dead before the battle) and then create a situation where the U.S. troops would be forced to kill everything and everybody in their paths. The idea was that the situation would by so horrifying to the Americans that they would back off. It's conceivable they could have pulled it off.

There was also the fact that they couldn't build another bomb for a few years, IIRC. They couldn't purify (Is this even the right term?) weapons grade uranium fast enough to make another bomb.

We had a third device (another Model 1561) ready to go. Primary target Kokoda, secondary Niigata. HEU was in short supply but plutonium was OK. Production would have been four to six devices a month thereafter. I think what you remember is that after the Japanese surrender, the US dismantled all its nuclear device production lines and rebuilt them. they did that because the originals were jerrybuilt and unsafe. As a result, the US produced no nuclear devices between the end of 1945 and late 1946. That was a very well-kept secret.

[Darmalus]

Makes me wonder how history might have turned out had the coup succeeded, and we had been forced to starve & nuke Japan into submission. Would they even have been able to rebuild after that? Hard to imagine a world where Japan is a third world nation, whose only export is cancer ridden refuges.

[Stuart]

Makes me wonder how history might have turned out had the coup succeeded, and we had been forced to starve & nuke Japan into submission. Would they even have been able to rebuild after that? Hard to imagine a world where Japan is a third world nation, whose only export is cancer ridden refuges.

If we substitute Germany for Japan, my book "The Big One" goes into the effects of a nuclear strike on a country. Essentially, that country ceases to exist. It's not just the nuclear strikes themselves that do for the target and its population, its tha aftermath. For example, almost all hospitals are in the target areas, so are all the railway nexi and what road system there is. There'll be millions of people with massive third degree burns and only a few hundred beds left to treat them. There would be no way of getting food or medicine - or even clean water -to the survivors. In TBO, the team that worked out the effects of the strike (232 nuclear devices on 200 cities across Germany) believed there would be approximately 8 - 10 million survivors out of a population of 64 million. Japan would be at least as badly off.

[JN1]

I think that Japan might have even been worse off than Germany in a TBO type scenario; Japanese cities would, AFAIK, be even more susceptible to the effects of a firestorm.

Btw, Stu someone on Amazon.com thinks you must be a German hating fascist (no sense of irony evidently). You're not, are you?

[Simon_Jester]

I think that Japan might have even been worse off than Germany in a TBO type scenario; Japanese cities would, AFAIK, be even more susceptible to the effects of a firestorm.

Btw, Stu someone on Amazon.com thinks you must be a German hating fascist (no sense of irony evidently). You're not, are you?

Based on what I've heard him say, I'm going to guess "no."

Stuart's novels hit on a theme I've run into in other works: that the Germans are rather lucky they didn't do slightly better, because they managed to lose just before the nuclear arsenal invented specifically to be used on them was available.

To survive the war as a country with a future, the Germans would have had to do either vastly better*, or no better than they actually did. Getting caught in the middle (as they did in the TBO novels, based on the plot synopses I've read) would not have been a good idea.

*Probably antihistorically so; one nation can only accomplish so much against a world in arms.

[Stuart]

Btw, Stu someone on Amazon.com thinks you must be a German hating fascist (no sense of irony evidently). You're not, are you?

No, but I do wish people would learn about the effects nuclear weapons have on the people they are used on before casually recommending their use .

To survive the war as a country with a future, the Germans would have had to do either vastly better*, or no better than they actually did. Getting caught in the middle (as they did in the TBO novels, based on the plot synopses I've read) would not have been a good idea.

The Germans in TBO did about as well as they could have and probably a bit better. I really doubt that they could push as far east as I described and some of the wunderwaffe that are mentioned in the book probably wouldn't have worked at all. But, I wanted to give the Germans every break possible and then show it still wouldn't have done them any good. I don't think the guy who did that review liked the idea that the Germans simply couldn't win.

[Baughn]

In my defence, I'm European; we didn't cover the pacific scenario in any detail greater than "the USA basically destroyed the japanese navy". I'll look up that book; it sounds interesting.

On the note of books..

Stuart, before I go ahead and order on amazon, are your books available in ebook form anywhere? Particularily that one?