I think looking at national threats by their GDP is kind of weird. Afghanistan led to the downfall of the USSR but had basically nothing going for it economically. The US also blew decades of effort and money. ISIS plowed through its region with sheer mongol-like savagery and managed to wreak havoc in major western countries sometimes as well. America went basically all out trying to stop Vietnam, then one of the poorest countries on earth, and got nowhere.
Gas is currently cheap and that makes Russia’s economy look small. If prices, say, quintuple globally and Russia keeps pumping out the same quantity, that’s a huge jump despite few internal changes and they’d have the world by the balls. Meanwhile, the Swiss could decide to all retire tomorrow permanently and drop their relatively huge GDP (half of Russia’s) to 1% of what it is now and the world would probably shrug and move on.
Russia is depended on globally for food, fuel, and loads of random resources. They’re just temporarily considered cheap while some things (eg banking) are currently considered high value. That could change very quickly.
This is ahistorical. The US in no way, shape, or form when "all out" trying to stop North Vietnam. It was a poor country, but it was heavily armed and resupplied by the USSR and China, including leveraging some of the newest fighter jets, SAMs, etc. the USSR had to offer.
What would be considered "all out" if not dropping the most bombs in human history, and double the amount of WW2? There is no higher level.
Categorically false. There were huge swaths of Vietnam that were off limits to bombing.
>Laos is the most bombed country in world history due to the US trying to stop Vietnam.
Yes, with a fraction of the warplanes, airmen, etc. due to advances in technology like strategic bombers and cluster weapons. The overall air efforts are incomparable to what transpired in WWII.
>What would be considered "all out" if not dropping the most bombs in human history, and double the amount of WW2?
If only there was a term to encapsulate such a concept...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war
>There is no higher level.
There absolutely is a higher level. Google what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki near the end of WWII.
I live not far from there. Seen the range of the damage first hand. The extent of the damage in SE asia is far larger and people are still de-mining the area.
And civilian deaths were colossal in Vietnam. Rapes and massacres (that includes by Americans, yes) certainly weren’t just directed at combatants. Just because American deaths were low doesn’t mean the US didn’t go all out on obliterating the country unlike anything they’ve done before.
Btw, the fire bombings in Japan were far more disastrous than the nuclear weapons. I suggest you Google them. The nuclear weapons were more of a major spectacle. Vietnams bombings exceed even the Japanese fire bombings, both of which destroyed their entire countries. The napalm and agent orange attacks most certainly weren’t fine tuned either and had massive effects on Vietnamese civilians—lasting even to today. Burning and poisoning the earth will do that.
… and right now you can see how "successful" they are with their nuclear power plants: so "successful" that they have to import energy because a lot of their nuclear power plants are currently offline, due to unexpected problems related to safety. Even better, the current hot weather also causes serious problems and reduces power output.
What a statement.
> It's really been the German greens hellbent on holding back nuclear across the EU
The German Greens, stalling investments into nuclear energy across the world. A powerful cabal.
IEA on France's energy mix: https://www.iea.org/countries/france A few articles on Germany being against nuclear: https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-to-veto-eu-plan-to-l... https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/01/08/why-germans-rema...
We need to quickly transition now to force the government to fund improved transmission and supply. Our governments aren't great at building things for future needs, but when your citizens are in danger of going without electricity, you bet your ass these politicians will do what needs to be done.
As an example, look at the mRNA vaccine development.
In the end I see it as having multiple independent energy-generating clusters (each building, or each city, or each country) and sharing excess energy outside the cluster only when needed.
They can’t, though. Apartment buildings are too efficient at packing people together to have enough per capita roof square metrage for panels. Practical wind turbines are huge. A typical wind turbine blade is longer than the height of a 10 story building. Geothermal is also rather impractical as a source of energy, due to low thermal conductivity of the rock.
> In the end I see it as having multiple independent energy-generating clusters (each building, or each city, or each country) and sharing excess energy outside the cluster only when needed.
You are describing here exactly the current status quo. That how energy works right now.
But has RR actually shipped one of these?
I'm on the fence about an all electric future- we simply don't have the grid capacity in most parts of the world - but the Germans and French who control the EU should have been developing SMNR years ago. They are now in an energy checkmate situation with a hostile country with an economy the size of Italy. Not clever,