Switch off at the socket?

The Natural Philosopher wrote:
[email protected] wrote:


"Steve Terry" wrote in message
...
"Java Jive" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:48:03 +0100, brightside S9
wrote:
snip
Churchill's obstinacy in refusing to negotiate with Hitler was
criticised shortly after the beginning of the war, IIRC around the
time of Dunkirk. Would we have won if he'd negotiated?


Well yes, as long as the Japs still attacked pearl harbour

It's just the Yanks would have had to invade Britain first

Which probably have meant we'd have also got Marshall plan
money like the rest Europe

Not a chance..
The yanks wouldn't have started the Manhattan project, the Germans
would have had extra resources to attack Russia and would probably
won. America would have ended up fighting a Germany which had massive
resources to use and would have been A-bombed into submission around
1948.

Its very hard to tell waht was in the Reich's mind.

Certainly de-judification of Europe was one aim, extension of Germanies
hegemony, and elimination of the 'poison of Jewish Bolshevism' was
another, so yes, Russia was always going to be a target.


Hitler had basically wanted to
- leave England the empire
- take over Europe/Russia
- leave the rest of the world alone.
And had hoped that England/UK would essentially if not be an ally in
this, at least allow it to happen.


I read a very cogent book on the psychology of the Reich, in which the
point was made that it was an unstable system that could only hold
together when faced by an external threat. So war was inevitable.

The USA was never interested in joining in, and arguably did not really
feature as a fighting force in Europe, or affect the outcome of the
European war byd essentially making the Iron Curtain exist where it did,
rather than leaving probably just France, and the Netherlands free of
Sovbloc domination, rather than the whole of western Europe.

The European war was won by the Russians with very little assistance.

Britain, and Churchill's policy was essentially damage limitation. With
US FINANCIAL and materials assistance, the UK was able to halt Hitler's
advances in the west, preserve the integrity of the UK, and just about
protect its supply routes from the commonwealth and the USA.

Ultimately as I said, Russia won the land war..no need for tricky D-Day
landings. Just build more tanks and blast a path in. Peasants were cheap
and plentiful.

I strongly suspect that the whole Marshall plan thing was really a
Churchillian ploy 'If the west goes under, so does your biggest export
market, and you can whistle for the money we owe you'.


Similar to the banking crisis . Western Europe was 'too big to fail'

Even the atomic weapons that might have been developed would not have
totally affected the outcome of the war. Their strategic importance was
in psychological terms. To force a surrender from the Japanese. They
could never have been produced in sufficient quantities in time to be
more than weapons of terror rather than tactically significant. Allied
bombing of Dresden caused more damage and death than either Nagasaki or
Hiroshima.

That's a familiar myth. ISTR current figures are about 25,000 dead at
Dresden, about 80,000 at Nagasaki and and 140,000 at Hiroshima (by the
end of 1945 - many more since). More destructive than anything was the
firebombing of Japan in early 1945.

--

People like you are the reason people like me have to take medication.

?John Wright

Java Jive wrote:
at top
level meetings, they continually urged the other allies to reopen the
front in Western Europe far sooner than actually happened at D-Day,
and the allies failure to do so seems to have caused Stalin to think
that his country was being sacrificed to save Western lives, and he
never seems to have forgotten or forgiven that.


And IMHO he was completely right to think it too. My enemies enemy is
not my friend.


Britain, and Churchill's policy was essentially damage limitation. With
US FINANCIAL and materials assistance, the UK was able to halt Hitler's
advances in the west, preserve the integrity of the UK, and just about
protect its supply routes from the commonwealth and the USA.

Attrition again, materials assistance was the most important
contribution - an example, liberty ships.


No argument.

That's a familiar myth. ISTR current figures are about 25,000 dead at
Dresden, about 80,000 at Nagasaki and and 140,000 at Hiroshima (by the
end of 1945 - many more since). More destructive than anything was the
firebombing of Japan in early 1945.

You're both guilty of some inaccuracy there ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing...n_World_War_II

"... killed up to 135,000 civilians. Estimates of civilian casualties
vary greatly, but recent publications place the figure between 24,000
and 40,000"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...g_of_Coventry/

In this programme about the bombing of Coventry shown only last night,
which unfortunately I've already erased, IIRC the figures were 38,xxx
for Dresden, compared with 5xx for Coventry?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_...a_and_Nagasaki

"The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in
Nagasaki by the end of 1945,[4] with roughly half of those deaths
occurring on the days of the bombings. Amongst these, 15-20% died from
injuries or the combined effects of flash burns, trauma, and radiation
burns, compounded by illness, malnutrition and radiation sickness.[5]
Since then, more have died from leukaemia (231 observed) and solid
cancers (334 observed) attributed to exposure to radiation released by
the bombs.[6] In both cities, most of the dead were civilians."


which makes the point that the VAST majority of casualties were not
killed by anything other than the direct blast and radiation. Fallout
victims were very few and far between.

I must say I had the 135,000 figure for dresden in mind.Certainly 100k.

Its alarming that you can lose 100,000 people and not know where they
went though.

So lets get some perspective on all this mortality.
52 people killed in the tube bombings. Plus one shot by the police.
1500 hospital acquired infection deaths every year
Similar amount killed on the UK roads.
3,000 civilians killed in 911 approximately.
30,000 for Dresden, making an average.
100,000 for a small yield atom bomb, that took what - 4 years to make?
And needed total air supremacy to be delivered to its target?
plus a couple of hundred more definitely dying of related cancers and
disease.
Imagine if it had got shot down, and reassembled and sent back.,..

And 0 people killed by nuclear power stations anywhere in the world last
year.

And about 70 definitely known to have died in the words worst nuclear
accident, and maybe 200 in total with shortened life spans.

So the cost of oil in one single oil related incident(being as how
Islamic terrorism wouldn't exist or have any money without the profits
made out of Islamic oil) causes more deaths than all the nuclear power
the world has ever known, put together, and causes 10% of the deaths
from the worst conventional bombing raids ever, and ...

"World War II casualty statistics vary greatly. Estimates of total dead
range from 50 million to over 70 million.[36] The sources cited on this
page document an estimated death toll in World War II of 62 to 78
million, making it the deadliest war ever. When scholarly sources differ
on the number of deaths in a country, a range of war losses is given,in
order to inform readers that the death toll is uncertain. Civilians
killed totalled from 40 to 52 million, including 13 to 20 million from
war-related disease and famine. Total military dead: from 22 to 25
million, including deaths in captivity of about 5 million prisoners of war."

So WWII in total accounted for marginally more than the population of
the United Kingdom, now.

Put's the atom bomb in a new light really? a mere bagatelle.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher
saying something like:

Put's the atom bomb in a new light really? a mere bagatelle.

That's me convinced. Yep.

The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Grimly Curmudgeon wrote:
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher
saying something like:

Put's the atom bomb in a new light really? a mere bagatelle.

That's me convinced. Yep.
Yiu shoudl do some sums. Count u[p all teh [proibale nucealr wepiohns in
megationnage, calcuate teh number of people that would be kiled, and
then lok at how many died in WWII.


The success of nuclear weapons as a deterrent consist maaily in them
being able to reach the people who control and direct wars. Dead
soldiers and civilians never stopped anyone.

Red or white?

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Grimly Curmudgeon wrote:

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher
saying something like:

Put's the atom bomb in a new light really? a mere bagatelle.

That's me convinced. Yep.

Yiu shoudl do some sums. Count u[p all teh [proibale nucealr wepiohns in
megationnage, calcuate teh number of people that would be kiled, and
then lok at how many died in WWII.

The success of nuclear weapons as a deterrent consist maaily in them
being able to reach the people who control and direct wars. Dead
soldiers and civilians never stopped anyone.

I popped your post into my spellcheck, and --

You should do some sums. Count u[p all the [probable nuclear weapons in
megatonnage, calculate the number of people that would be killed, and
then look at how many died in WWII.

The success of nuclear weapons as a deterrent consist mainly in them
being able to reach the people who control and direct wars. Dead
soldiers and civilians never stopped anyone.

-- only "u[p" defeated it... But now your point is clear.


Fliss

--
He said: You guys need anything?
She said: Yes, a tear in the space-time continuum
so he can go back and say 'I love you'.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher
saying something like:

Yiu shoudl do some sums. Count u[p all teh [proibale nucealr wepiohns in
megationnage, calcuate teh number of people that would be kiled, and
then lok at how many died in WWII.

And that's relevant, how?

The success of nuclear weapons as a deterrent consist maaily in them
being able to reach the people who control and direct wars. Dead
soldiers and civilians never stopped anyone.

Oh, true enough. Problem is, the concept of a limited nuclear exchange
is just a dream. When the nukes start getting lobbed like confetti,
we're all ****ed. Makes your comparison with WW2 casualty figures a sick
deluded joke.

"Grimly Curmudgeon" wrote in message
...
When the nukes start getting lobbed like confetti,
we're all ****ed.

We all used to speculate about just who would get ****ed immediately after
the four minute warning.

Bill