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UK Cold War Era Nuclear War Plans Revealed
NicerGuy writes "The BBC reports that documents from 1975, recently released by the National Archives, detail in part the UK's plan in the event of nuclear strikes during the Cold War. An audio download of the prepared radio broadcast is available. Several other topics are covered." From the article: "Further documents released this week reveal that two pandas in London Zoo sparked fears a diplomatic rift could flare up between Britain and China in the 1970s."
"Oh bloody hell, the Yanks have really done us in this time."
To be fair to them as well, they do give you a choice, if that counts for anything.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
A few weeks ago Poland revealed (to the dismay of Russia) the nuclear war plans from the days of the warsaw pact. The map was a truly scary prospect. Much of Poland would be annihilated in that nuclear war. Here's one article covering that story. You can find lots more. One interesting disclosure was the war games map with all the nuclear strike sites marked on it.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Sorry; forgot to mention in previous post that there is a version of Realplayer for Linux, so Linux users http://www.real.com/linux?pcode=rn&src=freeplayer_ partner&opage=freeplayer_partner can apply.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Furthermore, my friends and I play a lot of pen-and-paper role-playing games set in Europe (Call of Cthulhu mainly) and they always accuse me of a "lack of realism" in the manner in which my characters behave. My response to said friends? "They're British. They boil their meat. They drink warm beer. I don't have to explain their unusual behavior; just play the damn game."
I can now add: "They'd let their entire population be atomized in order to wipe out the 'hippie menace.'"
Here's a little self-plug for something somewhat related that I scanned. A "Civil Defense Manual" for Seattle from 1951. Check it out, there's some unintentionally amusing stuff in there.
Do not read this sig.
Liquidation probably refers to the unfortunate state that the British economy had reached in the 1970s.
In addition to facing a nuclear threat (vaporization) there was a serious possibility that the country might collapse economically (liquidation).
Eventually the government got support from the IMF.
Of course the Soviet Union might have taken advantage of the situation if an economic collapse did happen in which case you might have had both sequentially.
Lots of different government papers got released at the same time, so it tends to get reported together.
Dude, mplayer is your friend. It is capable of using native Win32 codecs (included on many sites as a tarball) and it will play just about any format known to man. There are also plugins for Firefox which allow you to start mplayer by clicking on them funky Windows Media Player "only" links.
OK, so they have plans for dealing with a nuclear strike. But what about the aftermath? What's their plan for dealing with a psychopathic terrorist wearing a Guy Fawkes mask?
Easy, they call The DOCTOR.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
A panda walks into a bar. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why? Why are you behaving in this strange, un-panda-like fashion?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda walks towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
From Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
What could possibly go wrong?
I had a huge laugh tonight after I read about the US Army's plans to invade CANADA! Seems that back in the 1930s we made plans just in case we went to war with Britain. And back then the Canucks had a plan to invade the US. Let's see, where's the link...
Raiding The Icebox
I figure the Canadians will never forgive US for neglecting to conquer them.
Years back, I went to Tijuana and looked around and thought, "this place needs adult supervision." And a few years after that, I went to Sault Ste. Marie and saw the perfectly manicured lawns, clean streets, and perfect order. And I thought, "this place has a bit too much adult supervision."
The parent is off base by saying that the Iraq war was an attempt to keep Israel from nuking the Middle East. That said, he is dead on about that danger. North Korea is notorious for selling anything to anyone for money. North Korean diplomats are known use their diplomatic immunity to smuggle as narcotics simply to get some extra funding for the state. They sell weapons to everyone and anyone who will buy them.
The fear that they would sell to a terrorist organization is very well founded. Further, the fear that Israel would respond to a nuke being used in its territory by glassing over a piece of the Middle East is very well founded. The scenario is not hard to imagine.
Pick your favorite Palestinian resistance group that has state or pseudo state backing. Both Iran and Syria either actively support some of these groups, or blatantly turn a blind eye to them. Imagine if such a group bought a nuke from North Korea. They throw it in a boat, park it off Tel-Aviv, then detonate. They then make their usual claim of responsibility. Now Iran or Syria is sitting there with their pants down. I don't doubt for a single instance that Israel would nuke the capital of any nation that looked even a little guilty of harboring that group. Further, you need to realize that it wouldn't matter if the nation harboring the terrorist rounded up all of them and shot them the next day. Israel [i]would[/i] make an example of them regardless of what they did. There isn't a doubt in my mind that at least one Middle Eastern city would be nuked, if not more.
Now you are sitting there with a very pissed off Iran or Syria. Hell, it isn't like these nations ever liked Israel to begin with, but could you imagine how they would feel after getting nuked? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where this mess would lead.
Nukes are bad, m'kay? Any nation that gets nuked will nuke someone else back if they can find a target. Nukes are horrible weapons of mass destruction, and most nations would make a lesson out of any nation that would dare to use them. If Britain, the US, or (and especially) Israel had a nuke used on them, these nations would respond in overwhelmingly violent manner for the singular purpose of leaving in the history of the world a genocidal incident showing just how horrible these weapons can be.
I sure as hell hope no nukes go off in my life time, because you can rest assure that if one nuke goes off, another one is going to follow somewhere else.
You can also go here:
m l
/usr/lib/win32 (you may have to create it depending on your distro) and all of a sudden you can play wmp files in mplayer and several other media palyers on Linux (not encoded ones but DVD Jon's got a fix for that i hear).
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.ht
and download the essential codecs package.
Un-bunzip it and copy the contents of the resulting folder into
If you put mozilla and mozplugger on you can then play embedded media (make sure that konqueror is set for the plugins dirs).
Sadly, the BBC is still using closed formats but they do have a fully open audio/video codec in development that they will hopefully use in future.
BTW No, I don't work for the BBC but they are one of the few organisations in Britain worth caring about.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.