I hope this is done by a copper circuit, and not via TCP/IP and a VPN. Actual POTS circuits still have a place in this world.

Oh my. History lesson time, Florida was originally the land of the native indigenous people. Spain explored, spread diseases (probably smallpox), which wiped out many of the indigenous population, then claimed Florida for the Spanish Crown. Can’t really give it back to the indigenous, because most of those tribes are now gone.

We could, remove all humans, fence it off, and let nature reassert itself, but I don’t see that happening, because there is no profit in it.

Thank you for listening to my TED-talk :)

Just make a Negotiable Affection Day, that will cover all the variants.

I would (gently) suggest that you look around GitHub for a project titled OPEN-RISOP. That is a simulation of ~2100 warheads targeted on the USA. This is the red team approximation. There are three scenarios represented: Counter-Force, Counter-Value, and a combination of CF+CV. Counter-Force being an attack aimed at strategic assets and the immediate supporting facilities. Counter-Value is roughly what is being wrought upon Ukraine now. The trade off CF+CV is a blend of the two. It is also interesting that some targets (of which there are 9,000+) do not have a fallout pattern associated with them. My presumption is that those targets are neither hardened nor have a wide land area. An example is a natural gas compressor station. They do not need a warhead, but could be sufficiently damaged by a conventional cruise missile warhead.

Russia does not have enough nuclear warheads to hit every US target With one, because some of those warheads are assigned to targets in the EU and in other countries. So the ~2100 is a fair guess. That Russia is rapidly burning thru cruise missiles, is good, because that also goes into equations involving targeting. Some of the 9,000+ targets in the hypothetical OPEN-RISOP list are thermal power plants, the same type that are currently being hit in Ukraine.

The sooner that Russia gets out of the global strategic warfare game, the better for all of us.

There was some stories back in 1989 … about the reliability of the Russian PALs. During perestroika, The US/west tried to assist in reducing the nuclear arsenal, and make it so that none of them would trigger without absolute control. That has been 30+ years ago, so my recollection may be hazy, but I know there were some efforts.

The problem with a warhead triggering accidentally, is that there could be massive amount of finger pointing about whose warhead just went off. Clancy wrote about the procedures in one of his books, that involve taking air samples of the debris, to try to determine the source(s) of the fissile material. If Clancy got the story right, we had better all hope that sanity prevails until such time as the details can be sorted out.

When Russia was using nuclear capable cruise missiles a few weeks back, there were substantial comments that the debris field around the impact contained no radioactive material. Apparently Ukraine (or someone with long range weapon identification capability) realized rather quickly what type they were, and wanted to tell equally quickly if they were a deliberate non-warhead payload, or a real payload that failed to detonate. Crappy world we live in when those questions need to be answered in minutes.