One difference is that a nation which developed the weapon has the innate ability to maintain and restock such weapons. The inherited stockpile would have a shelf-life that the custodian nations may not have the ability to replace.

Nuclear winter is a flawed concept and has largely been shown to be barely possible, even under the politically motivated worst case scenarios of the original authors... these same people thought the Iraqi oil well fires from GW 1 would cause a nuclear “winter” effect, it turned out they didn’t do shit outside of the…

I certainly don’t want to be “more tempted” to use nukes, but I also see value in maintaining the nuclear deterrent, and that means having reliable weapons. It’s not just for the U.S., but for our allies in East Asia (Japan, ROK), so that they’re not, in turn, tempted to develop their own deterrents. I just don’t see…

-“After all, America’s military might can easily topple any third world government, the military part of the operation is not the challenging one; it is the political one that follows that is most perilous.”-

I think you have to come in fast and land quickly in case the ship moves due to the ocean. Better to get down fast than have the deck slam into the aircraft from below.

What you are describing is a boosted fission bomb. In a fusion, or thermonuclear, bomb, you have it backwards: a fission bomb is the catalyst for the fusion reaction.

Exactly. I’ve never understood the mindset of Earthlings only being able to think that what we know is the only way to do things. Who the hell could even guess what some other life form has come up with. For all we know, they could be standing the room next to us, watching humans masturbate to porn all day. Or sending…

Well, you’d make some effort to ensure that the beach was “safe” for the landing to occur. Drone the crap out of the missile systems. Parachute spec ops to secure the beach?

Stories like that with absolutely no context are worthless. Like how a Rafale ‘shot down’ an F-22 in another exercise.

Who in the heck is the gall to release a report claiming to have any kind of precision in their prediction about what might happen “By 2080”?

So, no more technology or genetic yield improvements in the future? Or is the resulting overproduction expected to reduce profits to the point farmers cut back?

Which is why I say that people who don't know shit about computer networks should not be able to pass laws that effect them. But these are a bunch of scared old men and women that is being pushed and backed by the clueless masses who also don't know shit about how the net works.

As a European I don’t like it either. Not because I think they’d be bad candidates, but because I think it’ll get into the same problems as the EU has gotten itself.

Oh yes sure...“defending it’s airspace” - from a lone Su-24 operating over Syria. Only a moron would see anything good out of this situation. I suspect escalation is on the way now, we’ll see how ‘brave’ Turkey is when faced with the backlash.

Yup. In the heyday of Cray, IBM, Digital etc., each supercomputer was basically built from scratch with proprietary processors—often designed specifically for supercomputing applications. At that time, the list of supercomputers was significant since it did reflect some fundamental technological superiority. Today’s…

Teddy Bears? Ewoks are Human Eating fur beasts... you know they were gonna cook up some Roast Luke with a side of Han before the Golden God C-3PO was about the unleash his “wrath”

These are not the 72 virgins they were expecting.

Doctor’s also report that he was able to remember to “Pass it to Kobe.”

Her titles don’t matter. She is a part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor!

War? That’s more or less how the US conducted the “peace” for most of the 1960s. Though it was controversial even at the time, my (mis)understanding is that it ended less because of philosophical epiphany than because of the rather sobering cleanup cost after one of several weapons-related accidents, the one in…