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Some countries literally have no plans for warning the public. Like Australia… We have emergency warning systems that can do all the modern stuff like cell/tow
by techdragon 3y ago
Some countries literally have no plans for warning the public. Like Australia…
We have emergency warning systems that can do all the modern stuff like cell/tower area broadcast/push, websites, data feeds, and radio/tv station protocols for major enough events… which are all nationally coordinated, but actually activating them is delegated to state level control, so a national emergency is passed down to the state emergency management organisations… but while Australia would absolutely know we’ve got nukes incoming (5 Eyes intel, and our own massive over the horizon radar systems) and probably have some idea where they are headed… that’s a military matter with no publicly documented process.
We have a publicly documented process to handle a biological incident (weapon or accident doesn’t change how you deal with this much once it’s happened) and we’ve got a publicly document procedure for re-entering space debris (which we’ve actually used recently due to some random spaceX debris in a farmer’s paddock) …
But we have no plan for if we’re going to get nuked… which is only partly understandable.
We’re not exactly spread out enough that a dedicated nuclear attack couldn’t exterminate >90% of the entire population of Australia. Depending on the missile and it’s MIRV/Decoy ratio and the yield of the weapons, you could probably get above 90% with 3 or 4 ICBMs. There’s no infrastructure for sheltering, and we’re completely unprepared for the aftermath, having a plan that details how fucked the survivors might be is … not something I think a lot of government ministers want to sign their names to… bad optics…
However the counter argument is we’re a major US ally providing material support to US overseas military power projection by way of naval ports (which we just made more important as part of our sub deal making those ports more useful for US nuclear submarines) our significant regional radar coverage (JORN is quite the beast of a radar) and us hosting secure downlinks for the US orbital assets covering this hemisphere and us hosting a major communications facility which would likely play a role in ensuring the final communication of orders to submerged nuclear ballistic missile submarines in the event that a nuclear war actually happens. I find it hard to imagine Australia won’t have at least a couple of nukes headed out way somewhere early on the list of targets even if it’s not so much about Australia as it is about destroying and degrading the ability of the US armed forces to operate in the indo-pacific region.
So on the one hand… probably going to happen in the event the shit hits the fan so hard nuclear war starts… on the other hand there’s not a lot we can do to prepare or defend right now against the sudden outbreak of nuclear war. So why worry anyone with detailed plans for horrific doom. Sure if tensions rise we might get some US missile defence systems that could help make it less doomsday, but that kind of military planning is probably a classified bullet point on some future planning list based on one or more of the treaties Australia has with America already.
Oh and there’s the classic “On the Beach” if anyone is looking for more of this kind of horrible disaster scenario stuff.
- boondoggle16 3y ago>However the counter argument is we’re a major US ally providing material support to US overseas military power projection This seems like an enormous risk factor more than anything else. Australia and the EU are essentially vassals of the USA, but Australia seems wayyyy more vulnerable to armageddon. Since everyone's packed into such a tight space.
- andrewstuart 3y agoWhat would be the point of a warning?
- dweekly 3y agoGetting folks to shelter and thus increasing the survival rate of the population?
- jacquesm 3y agoYou might be able to get to a high point in time.
- mrguyorama 3y agoA sense of Duty to your people? I think people deserve the 8 minute warning to the end if it's possible. It's not right for the government to decide that "there's nothing to do about it", as the second a nuke launches, any ideas of "right" or "wrong" is moot and pointless, and all of philosophy goes down the drain. You have several minutes to have the last thoughts and sentences you will ever see. Say and do the things that matter to you in those moments. So what if people panic and murder or attack each other or loot or anything else? In a nuclear exchange, I'd argue pure and unadulterated anarchy is the only morally correct option, as the concept of "state" and "society" just failed catastrophically.
- defrost 3y agoOne of my early bits of library research involved archive dives for a book by (now) Emeritus Professor David Blair, pioneer in gravitational wave research in Australia [1]. The book was First and Final War: A Basic Information Manual on the Effects of Nuclear War Applied to Australia (1986) [2] and featured reasoning as to why Australia would be high on a first strike list, primary as a MIRV target covering radar and signaling installations. Also some early work on blast radius and fallout spread. It bears repeating that the submarine communications station (in Australia, there are others) responsible for sending fire commands is the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt [3] That still gets a laugh in Australia. [1] https://www.uwa.edu.au/Profile/David-Blair https://www.uwa.edu.au/Profile/David-Blair [2] https://www.amazon.com/First-Final-War-Information-Australasia/dp/0195546458 https://www.amazon.com/First-Final-War-Information-Australas... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Harold_E._Holt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Ha...