• Crashumbc@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    The same Russia that “indicated” the Ukraine special operation would take three days?

    Lol

  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Yeah?

    And we’d retaliate. Which is why they haven’t done it. They didn’t shoot down the satellites in the cold war and they aren’t going to do it now unless they’ve decided the world without satellites is just so much better.

    How is this news? China could nuke the West Coast tomorrow and the Canadians might invade Maine to secure a maple syrup monopoly! Actually, that’s more likely than anything else in this thread…

    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de
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      5 months ago

      Cutting a couple undersea fiber cables and completely fucking the whole internet is very easy. Humanity has so far just kinda silently agreed to not fuck with that.

      • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Sure, but welcome to 2024, where we have mirrors and cdns and the cloud with distributed everything.

        Not saying disconnecting the americas from eurasia wouldn’t be a big deal, but the internet would keep working.

        Elon would be very happy.

      • rustyfish@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Date notified: February 24, 2022

        Red line: “Interference” in Ukraine by outside powers

        Date broken: February 24, 2022

        This one send me flying.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It’s like a mini MAAD…

      To Putin, any significant threat to his power in Russia is destruction. Ukraine is making inroads as I type this, if they get too far into Russia, it could dominoe into Putin losing power.

      If it ever actually looks close to that, he ain’t going to be attacking Internet cables, he’ll be launching nukes.

      But once a nuke launches, it’s over for all of us. So he needs an intermediate step that he could do and would fuck a bunch of shit up by doing, but it’s not a nuclear bomb.

      • troed@fedia.io
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        5 months ago

        once a nuke launches, it’s over for all of us

        No, it really isn’t. Nuclear winter and the idea of thousands of Tsar Bombas belongs to the 70s. Even in an all out nuclear war today using the full (working? - doubtful regarding Russia) arsenals it would be a catastrophe with hundreds of thousands of dead but mostly we’d be continuing on as before afterwards.

        I grew up during “duck and cover” and iodine in the cupboard. That’s not where we are anylonger.

        • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          Also rockets are a pain to maintain, theres a reason the US military is trying to move away from the minutemen over towards gravity controlled nukes. Does anyone think Russia can properly maintain theirs.

            • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              Its the fact that my name is vault dweller and not thw fact that my picture is of the Mer remover Pelinal Whitestake.

              Anyways my name is a reference to Fallout one which is a lot more depressing about the whole apocalypse thing, tonally its probably closer to a boy and his dog. I dont fear the bomb but I aint welcoming it either.

        • JesusSon@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          If life taught me anything it is that all you need to do is hide under your desk, duck, and cover. You can survive anything from a tornado to nuclear holocaust with that one.

        • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          So you’re saying if the Russians struck Manhattan it would be relatively little impact. You think of the ten thousand nukes the US and Russia have on average will kill less than a hundred people. Or if just Russia, less than two hundred people per.

          I think each nuke is tens of thousands of immediate deaths followed by hundreds of thousands of mid to long term radiation fatalities. If we pretend that 25% of their 5000 or so nukes works, that’s still 1250 nukes. If each nuke of that 1250 works and kills 100,000 each, that’s 125 million people. I don’t think this is so far fetched given that a little over 80% of Americans live in urban areas.

          I just don’t know how a society can recover if the majority of it’s urban centers gets nuked and there is residual radiation there for the foreseeable future. Japan recovered because the nukes were small and there was only two sites, and that still caused about 110,000 casualties.

          How many submarines do you think they have in the Atlantic and Pacific with nuclear strike capabilities? How many nukes do you think are in range of major north american cities?

          • troed@fedia.io
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            5 months ago

            Have you? Or have you fallen for russian influence operations?

            The ~1500 or so nuclear weapons Russia and the USA have in active service each are mostly much smaller tactical nukes compared to the insane my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours stuff that happened in the 60s.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Putin won’t do that. It’s been made very clear to him he has 2 choices in that scenario, leave power peacefully for the old dictators home, or attempt to launch his nukes and immediately get yeeted by the USAF. Possibly the USN if he’s vacationing near a coastal area. It’s been made known to him that he does not have the operational security to keep the CIA from tracking him at all times and that his location would be target number 1 in such a situation.

  • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    I find the threat of GPS loss to be hard to believe. Theyd have to take out 38 GPS satelites and presumably any of the other navagation satellites American allies have in orbit, and presumably theyd have to not damage their own navigation satelites in the process. I also doubt they could do that all at the same time, or quick enough that no one could respond. Im sure they have the capability, and im sure they have an idea of what the operation would have to look like but in terms of a plan that’s actionable, I have big doubts.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss that threat.

      They know exactly where in the sky they are. They know what frequencies their antennas are tuned to. I’m betting burning out those transceivers would not be an impossible feat.

      I also don’t know how well they put up against really large lasers

      They’ve also been fully capable of putting s*** into space for years. I would not put it past them to have some form of combination weather/spy satellite and weapons platform out there.

      • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        They must be aware of the concept of re-ta-lia-tion. You shoot down my satellites, I shoot down yours. Nobody wins and we are all back 40 years.

      • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 months ago

        Where though? They just gonna fly enough jammers up into orbit to cover the entire path and all the satelites and pretend thats not going to also jam every navagation satelite including their own and China, their biggest allys? I don’t see it.

        • Boddhisatva@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Blowing up the GPS satellites is certainly an option and there’s not much we could do to stop them. We know that China has succesfuly tested an anti-satellite missile in 2007. I would not be surprised if Russia was working on the technology at the same time. If they can’t or don’t want to blow up the satellites, then they could perhaps launch their own jamming satellites to orbit near the existing GPS satellites would work.

          Edit: It just occurred to me that you don’t need to jam them. Just put up your own satellites that mimic the GPS satellites to throw off the calculations of anyone trying to use them. Your devices wouldn’t know which signals were legit.

          • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            5 months ago

            Just put up your own satellites that mimic the GPS satellites to throw off the calculations of anyone trying to use them. Your devices wouldn’t know which signals were legit.

            Do this, then get absolutely raw dog fucked by the US (and any other competent) military, who has absolutely no issue with ground nav or weapons guidance because they all use encrypted GPS signals.

          • Skua@kbin.earth
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            5 months ago

            The Soviet Union proved that it was able to shoot down satellites in the 60s. The technical difficulty of hitting a satellite with a missile is not really an obstacle here

            • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Yeah, the Soviet union could also mass produce tanks and planes. Russia today…

              Glances at Ukraine

              Is using almost exclusively Soviet stock.

          • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            China doing it in 2007 was big news because they joined the club. The West and Russia has had the capability for decades.

        • snooggums@midwest.social
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          5 months ago

          Jam some strategic locations, like air travel hubs or highly populated areas for the highest impact. No need to jam wide open low population areas without military targets.

            • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              5 months ago

              I also just don’t see anyone in Russia deciding that were going to trigger article 5 by using a jammer on US soil. The risk reward is non existent unless they can make the whole country GPS and internet dark at the same time. Imagine that many resources going on the ground in a country as large as America. It’s basically asking Ukraine to regain any territory they had a counter invasion plan ready for.

            • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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              5 months ago

              The jamming equipment could be the size of a briefcase; the received signal is below the noise floor.

              Or it could be one satellite already in the air beaming to a specific area. Or a constellation of satellites already in the air who handoff coverage of a specific area. Or a hack of an existing satellite constellation command and control channel to reprogram the transmitters to cover up GPS L band.

                • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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                  5 months ago

                  I’m familiar with radio systems. You could absolutely put a 1 kW L-band jammer in a briefcase, with an effective radius of probably a couple of miles.

            • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              That’s easy you just drive the truck into the area. It’s when you turn it on that’s the issue. You’re going to meet a lot of people very fast.

  • vegeta@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Maybe they could get an compromised/friendly/useful idiot/individual installed in the hightest levels of government who, either intentionally or unintentionally, would funnel secrets to them which help facilitate mass disruption?

    ohh wait…

  • Tyfud@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    The internet was literally created by the DoD to have a communication system that was resilient to foreign attacks. If one part of it goes down, it can still work with the parts that aren’t down. This is built into the design.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yes, this is really like a tiny dog barking its head off, because it’s convinced it can’t be harmed.
      Russia and Putin have been embarrassing themselves for a while now.

  • lettruthout@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    In the Julia Roberts move “Leave the World Behind”, they mention a process of destroying a country. (I vaguely recall that the process was attributed to a real person.) One of the steps was to take down the internet. With lack of information chaos develops, and the country destroys itself.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Not really. We had a country before the internet, we’d just fall back on that. It would be painful but very doable.