Nojay

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• Commented on Grand Guignol Tropes
  There was also the Christopher Anvil "Pandora" stories written for Allagog back in the 60s about the invasion of Earth by aliens, told from the alien point of view. They were, apart from their spacecraft, a little behind the...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  The 4-engined (never 6-engined) Shackleton was operational into the 90s as a stopgap for the muchly-delayed MRA4 Nimrod. There was great rejoicing in the aviation restoration world when they were finally retired as that freed up a large number...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Colonel Paul Tibbetts said that the core (pit) for the third bomb was on its way to San Diego from Los Alamos when the surrender was announced on the 15th of August. It could have been delivered to Tinian...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  The main port for Hiroshima is Kure, a few kilometres south-east of the city centre. It's a major ferry and cargo port and shipbuilding/repair facility as well as being a base for the Japanese Maritime SDF. It's also where...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  Hiroshima is not a port; you might have meant Nagasaki which was both a port and a major shipbuilding and ship repair city. Of course the original target for the Fat Man plutonium bomb was the city of Kokura...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  The research program of the Manhattan Project was run by Oppenheimer but the bomb production program was run by General Groves. I don't think there was an equivalent to Groves in the German project, to their detriment....
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  I understand that the British V-boat on deployment gets a Royal Navy SSN as an escort as they are regarded as being an asset worth the effort to protect. The V-boats also have torpedo tubes and are capable of...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  A "dirty bomb" during WWII would have been pointless -- this was a time when radium baths were still thought to be healthful for people. In the 1950s the US and UK performed nuclear weapons tests which included marching...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  The Republic of China was a Permanent Member from 1946 through 1971 and it was in no way a first-rate world power, never mind being a non-nuclear state to this day. There is no mechanism for removing a Permanent...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  A common mistake is to think that the Security Council permanent seat with power of veto Britain holds is dependent on the demonstrable possession of nuclear weapons under national control. It is plausible in that all five permanent members...
• Commented on Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament
  The SSN solution to replace Trident won't work -- at the moment Trident can hit anywhere on the planet that's worth hitting FROM anywhere on the planet that's deepwater ocean and international waters in less than an hour from...
• Commented on The last refuge of scoundrels
  I think you're making my point for me here -- Rommel was a tactical master at attacks and manoeuvering but he sucked at the really important generalling business, that is the politicking, the logistics and organisation and the financing...
• Commented on The last refuge of scoundrels
  So why didn't Rommel have more men and tanks at Al Alamein instead? He was the superior military mind in the conflict after all, wasn't he while dim old Montgomery just plodded away putting together the force needed to...
• Commented on The last refuge of scoundrels
  So when Rommel and Montgomery went head to head at Al Alamein, who came out on top? Montgomery wasn't a Lee or a Rommel or even a Patton (thank the Lord!) but then again the supreme commander for D-day...
• Commented on PSA: Ignore the news
  ANFO mix is widely used in quarrying as it's a cheap medium explosive that's simple to prepare and easily handled as a slurry mix dispensed from a tanker using pumps. It's normally initiated with a couple of kilos of...
• Commented on The last refuge of scoundrels
  Montgomery was what they needed in the Falklands War. Those who denigrated Montgomery in the aftermath of D-Day forgot the factor that Montgomery never let go of in his thinking and planning, that he had no appreciable reserves left...
• Commented on The last refuge of scoundrels
  What were the manning levels though? In the mid-80s an agreement with the NUM effectively preventing surface-mining of coal ended and a number of new surface mines were opened employing only a small workforce compared to that needed to...
• Commented on Obituaries
  British steel production is no longer focused on producing plate for shipbuilding the way it was in the 1970s, it produces specialist steels in much smaller quantities but at higher values per tonne and with vastly fewer workers per...
• Commented on Obituaries
  Some "handouts" worked (Nissan in Sunderland, for example) and some didn't (British Leyland in Bathgate) although that one was before Maggie's time and it was a straightforward Government-owned and controlled enterprise. Other government-supported manufacturing lasted for a time like...
• Commented on Obituaries
  The steel mills did get modernised in the 80s but the new heavily automated modern mills employed a tenth of the labour force. British Steel employed 100,000 people in the mid-70s, some of them shovelling oresands into 1920s-era open-hearth...
• Commented on Why I don't self-publish
  Charlie already parallelises first-pass proofreading and copyediting; he punts chunks of his work-in-progress to a group of pre-readers and gets feedback from them about technical details and infelicities, part of his "go back and fix stuff" writing process. Works...
• Commented on How I feel this morning
  Surprised? Once they went after the News Of The Screws and took that down journalistic regulation was pretty much inevitable and the Good and Great can breathe easy again. Have they emailed you with details on how to apply...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Oil, probably. Seal oil and whale blubber contracts....
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Agrochemicals were a problem for the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq since a pesticide production line was pretty much indistinguishable from a chemical weapons plant at first glance. What's more a few quick plumbing changes, alter temps and pressures...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  If all those things aren't a Constitutional problem why do they end up before the US Supreme Court which is there mainly to adjudicate on whether something is Constitutional or not? I mean, the PPACA was contested in the...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  How much equal protection did the American tribes get under law from the later Amendments? Black folks? In 1865 Queen Victoria was a powerless figurehead, much as British royalty had been since Charles I tried arguing differently and was...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  What happened after version 2.0 of the American Constitution and Bill of Rights was put in place? Oh yes, the 3/5ths compromise, displacement and extermination of the local indigenes and finally the American Civil War. Really we in the...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Actually the Soviet forces in East Germany were there to forestall yet another invasion by the capitalist powers allied with the rebuilt German military. If you think I'm kidding try counting the invasions and attacks on Soviet borders since...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  I am reminded of the US-UN article in The Onion from when the US was attempting to build a Grand Alliance of Freedom! to go after naughty Saddam's WMDs. The US-UN was to be a new version of the...
• Commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  They want a rump UK which will vote for the Conservatives in the next elections because "they're going to take us out of Europe". That includes a lot of traditional Labour voters who are anti-EU but who would switch...