Remember, we don’t need the F-22, because it’s an obsolete throwback to the Cold War. Anyone who thinks that the US should have advanced warplanes is clearly a paranoid warmongering reactionary.
Many more photos and vids available on this thread:
http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,9186.0.html
Well, this is a tad creepifyin’:
Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine
Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device-a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.
The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.
The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels-including former top officials at the State Department and White House-say they’ve never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. “I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that.” They weren’t.
It was a technically clever system that would launch retaliatory nuclear strikes in the event that nuclear detonations were detected in Soviet territory and communications with command and control were lost. But as a deterrent, it was useless, since the Soviets never told anyone they had it. And of course, it was an automated system, and sometimes such systems decide to, for example, fly Airbus jetliners into forests. So the future of life on Earth was put into the hands of a computer system built by Socialist slave laborers.
And here’s the good part: it’s still on.
Here are some fun sci-fi story ideas:
1) A comet or asteroid hits Russia, and as a result Dead Hand wipes out the rest of the planet.
2) Someone in the Russian military decides to go rogue, hijacks the Dead Hand system and convinces it to go off.
3) Some jackass teenage kid in the Pacific Northwest is hacking the web looking to download as-yet unreleased games, and comes across a Russian server hosting “Dead Hand: Global thermonuclear War” and decides to give it a try.
4) Skynet.
5) Some mid-80’s piece of electonic hardware decides to give out and explode, causing the system to go off.
6) The Iranians finally get nukes, and not only lob a nuke over the US, setting off an EMP that reduces the US to stone-age subsistence, they do the same to the Russians a few weeks later when the Russians try to become the big badass on the block now that the US is out of the picture. The EMP sets off Dead Hand. The last scene is the President of the US on his knees begging for his life saying something like “But I was the good guy! I was nice to them!” as his own Secret Service agents cap him… and then the Russian citybuster goes off in the yard outside.
7) The Chinese nuke the Russians, and as a result, the Russians nuke the US.
Was it only April? There was President Obama, speaking (as is his wont) in Prague, about the Iranian nuclear program and ballistic-missile capability, and saluting America’s plucky allies: “The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles,” he declared. “As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile-defense system that is cost-effective and proven.”
On Thursday, the administration scrapped its missile-defense plans for Eastern Europe. The “courageous” Czechs and Poles will have to take their chances. Did the “threat from Iran” go away? Not so’s you’d notice. The dawn of the nuclear ayatollahs is perhaps only months away, and, just in case the Zionists or (please, no tittering) the formerly Great Satan is minded to take ’em out, Tehran will shortly be taking delivery of a bunch of S-300 anti-aircraft batteries from (ta-da!) Russia. Fancy that.
Awesome. Not only taking a giant dump on our allies, but also kowtowing to those who would gladly arm our enemies.
Oh, and flat-out lying. I’m amazed that anyone still supports Barky. Now, couple the foreign policy of appeasign those who would harm us while crapping on our allies with this:
Rising Debt May Cause Sun to Set on U.S. Economy
As an economic power, the U.S. may go the way of the British Empire because of the government’s increasing debt burden, according to Richard A. Posner, an economist and federal judge.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows how the public debt, or the national debt aside from liabilities for entitlement programs, has climbed in the past year.
…
Declining tax revenue, rising Medicare costs, congressional reluctance to cut spending or raise levies, and the likely cost of efforts to overhaul health care and promote climate control will push the debt higher, in Posner’s view.“At some point the wheels may start coming off the chassis,” he wrote. “The United States may find itself in the kind of downward economic spiral in which ‘developing’ countries often find themselves.” He drew the comparison with the British Empire, whose economic position in the early 20th century was similar to the U.S. role today.
It’s becoming more and more difficult to see Obama’s long term goals as anything but eliminating the US as a world player.
Seems the Soviets wanted to apply nuclear power to *everything* (the Commies did have the occasional good idea; but their followthrough tended to suck), and even built nuclear powered lighthouses. It makes sense… along the long northern coast of Russia, in the days before GPS, lighthouses would be a dire necessity; and being hell and gone away from civilization, an atomic powerplant would allow the lighthouses to operate a very long time between refuelings.
Pity that they allowed them to fall into radioactive ruins.
Check the link for more photos.
Abandoned Russian Polar Nuclear Lighthouses
One little-known aspect of relatively recent history is the murder of 6 to 10 million Ukranians (and Russians, and Khazaks) in the early 30’s by Soviet collectivists. History is replete with genocides and mass murders on horrific scales… the last century had not just the Holocaust perpetrated on European Jews by the German brand of Socialists in the early 1940’s, but also the wiping out of the Roma by that same merry band of big-government fanboys; the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides of the late ‘teens where Turks exterminated more than two million people who dared to not be members of the Religion of Peace; in Cambodia, the Commie Khmer Rouge did their damndest to reduce the population by about 1.7 million; in the late ’70’s Ehtipian Commies under Soviet-backed Mengistu Haile Mariam killed half a million or so because they might or might not have not been party faithful; in 1994, Rwandan Hutus killed about a million people in the fastest-death-rate genocide in history; then there’s Serbia, Sudan, Congo, Saddam and the Kurds… the list is extensive.
Oddly, though, all of these are better known than what is called the Holodomor. In 1932-33, between two and fourteen million Ukranians starved to death (or died of diseases related to famine). While agriculture that year was apparetnly not all that good world-wide due to bad weather, it really didn’t help that the Soviets were busy trying to appropriate all farms for the State. Ukranian farmers were understandably annoyed at having the fruits of their labor stolen by the “spread the wealth” crowd. As a result of growing nationalism in Ukraine, as well as region-wide resistance by the Russian/Ukranian/Khazak peasantry to the evils of collectivism, Stalin enacted policies that made things far, far worse. If Hollywood had any damned sense they’d make a couple epics about this. But that would annoy three groups:
1) Russians who are currently working hard to whitewash the record of Stalin. Yes, there really are such morons… sort of the equivalent of neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers, there are many in modern Russia who want Stalin to be seen as a hero, not the irredeemable monster he actually was.
2) People who think that collectivism is Good and that individualism and private property ownership is Bad. In other words, a good chunk of Hollywood…
3) Journalists. See: Walter Duranty.
Read more about the Holodomor here at the Weekly Standard. While the US staggered under the weight of the beginnings of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years, we did not see episodes of the Army surrounding farm towns and stealing all the food. Nor did we see mass cannibalism. For those sort of evils, you really need a “spread the wealth” mentality.
According to the Telegraph:
Over 1,000 people staged a rare anti-government rally in the semi-autonomous republic of Ingushetia, arguably the most volatile spot in the troubled region, after a prominent activist journalist was shot dead while in police custody at the weekend.
…
The escalation comes amid growing signs of local anger that while Russia has backed the right of self-determination for the Georgian breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Ingushetia, separatism in the Russian Caucasus has been brutally crushed.
The irony in this situation is down right schadenfreudelicious… Russia stomps a small neighbor ostensibly to allow a small “breakaway region” to gain its independence, while at the same time stomping some of it’s own “breakaway regions” that want their own independence. Sadly, prior to this latest bit of Putinesca, I was all in favor of Russia… for they were fighting Islamist fanatics and Al Queda wannabes, such as the Chechen monsters of Beslan, and having the Russians playing whack-a-mole with Jihadists is something I just can’t really complain about. But by invading and stomping Georgia (a nation that was *not* in violation of armistice treaties or even UN resolutions) in order to free annex South Ossetia and Abkhazia (regions which are *not* internationally recognized as being separate from Georgia), they have thrown away whatever claims they’ve got against their own breakaway regions. Worse, this will lead to a ratchetting up of Russian militarism, which must be countered by the West ane especially formerly Soviet Eastern European nations, which will be countered by the impressively paranoid Russians, which will be countered by the West, which… and on and on.
