34 replies to this topic

[Spy Black]

The Pacific Northwest is screwed in a WW3 scenario involving nukes. The list of targets in 2022 is simply too long.

 

• Naden/Esquimalt
• Ault Field (24 or so miles)
• 4334 Squadron - 12 Wing (Pat Bay)
• Bangor Trident Nuke Sub base (around 45 miles as the crow flys)
• Naval Station Everett (around 60 miles)
• Indian Island nuke storage facility (40 miles)
• Naval Station Bremerton (80 or so miles)
• Joint Base Lewis McChord (95 miles)
• Hanford Nuclear "super site" (200 miles)
• Portland Air National Guard Fighter Wing 142 (225 or so miles)
• Any Boeing facility in or around Seattle/Everett

 

And just the general concept of nuking Seattle and Vancouver.

There are a few more nice targets that I've missed or not included.

 

So here in Victoria, we'd be quite royally screwed.

[Mike K.]

And CFB Comox north of us, for good measure.

Maybe all of these preppers with their underground bunkers were on to something.

[JohnN]

For Russian missile targets, could be that CFB Esquimalt is less valuable than hitting Bremerton 100 kms SE of Victoria) but in 2018, Putin made a presentation and part of that was showing multiple warheads raining down on Florida (image below) and apparently, Trump was not impressed: 

 

Putin showed a threatening video of nukes hitting Florida — and an outraged Trump snapped on him

 

-- President Donald Trump became outraged back in March after Russian President Vladimir Putin showed a video of nuclear weapons hitting South Florida amid his reelection campaign, a new report says.

-- South Florida doesn't have a ton of military value, and it's likely that Russia showed the video as a direct threat to Trump, who owns property there.

-- The news website Axios says Trump snapped on Putin in a phone call, saying that if he wanted an arms race, the US would beat him.

 

-- The call was reportedly the same one in which Trump is believed to have congratulated Putin on his election victory.

 

 

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[AllseeingEye]

The Pacific Northwest is screwed in a WW3 scenario involving nukes. The list of targets in 2022 is simply too long.

 

• Naden/Esquimalt
• Ault Field (24 or so miles)
• 4334 Squadron - 12 Wing (Pat Bay)
• Bangor Trident Nuke Sub base (around 45 miles as the crow flys)
• Naval Station Everett (around 60 miles)
• Indian Island nuke storage facility (40 miles)
• Naval Station Bremerton (80 or so miles)
• Joint Base Lewis McChord (95 miles)
• Hanford Nuclear "super site" (200 miles)
• Portland Air National Guard Fighter Wing 142 (225 or so miles)
• Any Boeing facility in or around Seattle/Everett

 

And just the general concept of nuking Seattle and Vancouver.

There are a few more nice targets that I've missed or not included.

 

So here in Victoria, we'd be quite royally screwed.

 

Yup; the idea of hitting Victoria with 3 warheads was due to it being a political center of decision-making, the fact we're a port with major docking facilities, CFB Esquimalt (naturally) and last but not least we have an airport which, like the docks, could be used to stage either Canadian or US aircraft and/or naval units in the case of Ogden Point, the harbour and again of course the navy base. Vancouver likewise due to YVR, its a major North American port, includes highway infrastructure for transporting military units/civilian equipment from elsewhere in Canada to the coast and very critically its a major power hub, i.e, BC Hydro has several facilities in the lower mainland including one very high security facility in Langley that would all warrant getting hit.

[todd]

You folks are such negative nancys. If you kept your head under a rock for the last 70 years in this town you’d be fine.


Victoria still has their air siren, Victoria Park in North Vancouver: https://scoutmagazin...air-raid-siren/

Don’t think any are still standing in the CRD?

Edited by todd, 19 March 2022 - 01:05 PM.

[Spy Black]

That air raid siren at the little Gordon Head store went off more than a few times when I was a kid living on a farm on Feltham Road.

That middle of the night wailing scared the crap out of me, as I was of that age where we knew what it meant, and knew what you were supposed to do, which was to climb under your desk at school, or your kitchen table at home ... a lot of good that would have done in retrospect and knowing what we know now.

 

I'm pretty sure 99% of the time it went off it was an equipment malfunction, but in the complete absence of anything resembling social media, all you could do was tune into AM radio the following morning, or wait until The Colonist got thrown at your door around 7:00am ... even then we usually didn't know what the siren going off was all about for at least a few days later.

Edited by Spy Black, 19 March 2022 - 01:41 PM.

[todd]

Shouldn’t today the cellular alert system be enough? No need for cool physical sirens, maybe they would have gone the way of the pay phone anyway

 

I suppose a smart enemy would run a cyber attack on our cellular system first

Edited by todd, 19 March 2022 - 02:20 PM.

[JohnN]

This is a 2009  image below of the base of the Horner Park air raid siren that I had seen every day walking to UVic.  Even that base has gone now but in early 2000s, I'd become aware that those sirens were being removed so tried to convince the Saanich Historical Artefacts Society to take it but they didn't seem interested - not the sort of attraction like farm machinery. 

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[Jacques Cadé]

Apparently the submarine base at Bangor, Washington (91 km from Victoria) is the largest single stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world: https://crosscut.com...ashington-state
 

For those of us who live in the Northwest, it has also been an unsettling reminder that we live at one of the centers of potential conflict — a ground zero if an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia should erupt. We would likely be nuked off the map very early in that exchange.

 

Seattle author Steve Olson knows this well. His book, The Apocalypse Factory, details the history of Hanford, the nuclear production complex whose role in the 1940s Manhattan Project was to churn out plutonium for the first atomic bombs. It was Hanford plutonium that fueled the bomb the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, the last time a nuke was deployed against people. During a recent interview on the PBS program The Open Mind, Olson reminded us that not only is the Puget Sound region home to the largest single stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, at Bangor in Kitsap County, but, “All of our current nuclear weapons have plutonium inside them that was made at Hanford.” The site is decommissioned but its legacy lives on, and so do long-term problems with radioactive and chemical contamination.

[JohnN]

Actually, because there is so much serious US nuclear war machinery close to Victoria, maybe the Americans have devoted more efforts to defend the region from incoming missiles? I wouldn't count on it - the Russians have been busy spending huge amount to upgrade their nuclear war-fighting capacity over the last decade or so. 

 

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock was set to 100 seconds to midnight in January and as of March 7 update, it hasn't moved. 

Obviously, with Russia's war on Ukraine, keeping the West at bay means threatening with nuclear retaliation but Russian propagandists have been threatening with annoying regularity for several years - such as Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) chief Dmitri Kiselyov on Russian prime-time television in 2014 threatening to turn the West into radioactive ashes ("в радиоактивный пепел"). 

 

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Edited by JohnN, 20 March 2022 - 09:11 AM.

[Victoria Watcher]

Pretty sure there will be no nukes as long as Tucker Carlson is on the Russian side.

[Spy Black]

Actually, because there is so much serious US nuclear war machinery close to Victoria, maybe the Americans have devoted more efforts to defend the region from incoming missiles? 

North America is defended by anti-ballistic missile battalions in Fort Greeley, Alaska - Vandenburg, California - and the American base in the Marshall Islands. 

 

These locations anticipate that the majority of ICBM's will originate in China, Russia, or North Korea, and come from the north, or the northwest.

The Americans are testing an all new, very advanced anti-ballistic missile system right now, which is expected to come online in 5 to 7 years, and which may or may not be similarly located.

[Victoria Watcher]

At the end of the day, humans probably deserve to get obliterated, anyway.

 

Bring it on.

[AllseeingEye]

That air raid siren at the little Gordon Head store went off more than a few times when I was a kid living on a farm on Feltham Road.

That middle of the night wailing scared the crap out of me, as I was of that age where we knew what it meant, and knew what you were supposed to do, which was to climb under your desk at school, or your kitchen table at home ... a lot of good that would have done in retrospect and knowing what we know now.

 

I'm pretty sure 99% of the time it went off it was an equipment malfunction, but in the complete absence of anything resembling social media, all you could do was tune into AM radio the following morning, or wait until The Colonist got thrown at your door around 7:00am ... even then we usually didn't know what the siren going off was all about for at least a few days later.

 

Ironically I lived just up the hill from the Horner Park siren in JohnN's picture above, starting in 1972; we sold the family house in 2012 and I was unaware it had been dismantled. Yeah they used to go off in bad weather, usually a combination of very high winds and rain would do it. Very eerie and somewhat Dr Strangelove-like.

 

Back then of course parents in particular had a very different outlook to the nuclear threat probably because all of us including their generation grew up in the Cold War and it and the threat of WWIII was always just "there" in the background.

 

You'll likely remember too the American Amchitka Island Cannikin test in 1971 - it was a 5MB device, packing about 400x the blast energy of Hiroshima; it occurred on a weekend and my parent's instructions - in spite of the fact the media speculated the blast could do anything from initiate a widespread earthquake to generate a tsunami along the coast of North America, were "...go down the street to X's house BUT be home in time for supper!". No panic, no fuss just be home in time to eat your dinner while it was hot, lol

[Spy Black]

I was in Grade 8 or 9 in 1971, at Cedar Hill School, and almost the entire school "skipped out" one afternoon (along with most other schools in Victoria) to go down to Centennial Square and protest the atomic test on Amchitka Island. 

 

It was some sort of grass roots jungle drum arrangement, as with the complete absence of social media, I can't even recall how we found out about this protest ... but there were probably 2000 or so students down there for the protest, so we must have had some sort of rudimentary student communication between schools!