Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
bbc.co.ukIn retrospect, it seems like it was a bad idea for Western countries to assume that things were going to remain peaceful after the fall of the USSR. Glad to see the threat of war being taken seriously.
Unfortunately it not "just" about war now. The changing climate has also significantly increased the risk for major disruptions on social services such as fresh water supply, electricity, sanitation, and roads/track. We now also need to add those to the list of real risks to prepare for.
Niall Ferguson recently gave a speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocYvwiSYDTA (Address to the 2024 CIS Consilium on the Gold Coast),
in which he says that WWIII may be a more urgent risk. It's a race.
This reminds me of Department of Defense Climate Risk Analysis from three years ago where they remind us that there will be increased international conflicts due to the effects of climate change:
https://media.defense.gov/2021/Oct/21/2002877353/-1/-1/0/DOD... (1.5 MB PDF)
Interesting (and very plain, understandable, commonsensical) - but of course some running conflicts are not not strongly related to climate change.
Of course, when Niall Ferguson spoke, it looked at the contingency: he sees a possibility of catastrophic consequences that may come much earlier than the climatic "Armageddon". (Well, in some news peices today they spoke about "before Xmas"... It makes the order of events very definite.)
I feel the worst will be migration. This is going to be pretty ugly.
What "assumption" are you talking about? There has been continuous work (even if some of it mistaken) to reduce the chances of that happening.
Definitely some elements of some western countries are guilty of what you're alleging, but I don't think enough to justify saying the countries themselves did.
I never understood why the west didn’t help more with the legitimate government forces in Russia, even if it meant more spies and what not. It was clearly crumbling and that’s when stuff like crime and corruption breed, even more so than in the old USSR, but we just sat back and patted ourselves on the back instead of seeking out allies in Russia.
The West did prop up Yeltsin and his insane economic plan, because he was a useful idiot, and then at the eleventh hour, he named Putin his successor, just before he resigned due to... Taking a bribe of a few thousand dollars. Apparently (in a society full of grifters), that was enough to burn him, not attacking parliament with artillery and tanks and killing 200 people.
The problem wasn't lack of government power, the problem was that shock therapy was a fucking awful way to handle the transition, that Yeltsin was a shitty autocrat who carried out a successful, bloody coup (Which didn't stop him from enjoying Western support - which would overlook any autocratic power grab, as long as Russia under him underwent shock therapy. Friggin' Bill Clinton campaigned for him), and that NATO turned from a purely defensive alliance to an offensive alliance and started acting unilaterally in what Russia felt was it's sphere of influence. (After a few years of good relations and bilateral collaboration.)
All that turned out to be a great way to rebuild an antagonistic relationship.
If you really want to point fingers at, though, I suppose you could blame Gorbachev for failing to keep the USSR intact and resigning, handing over power to assholes like Yeltsin. Gorbachev was a far better statesman and general human being than his successors were.
Why would you say that when we have NATO?
And look how bare the arsenals have become to the point where supporting Ukraine has become difficult. European NATO is dependent on a US that starting Jan 20 will sit this one out.
Ok sure, but surely NATO wouldn't exist if there were some assumption Russia weren't a threat?
I just watched Patlabor 2 last night, about a civil war in post-Cold War Japan. The main theme is the following: The thing about one-in-a-million events is that they are eventually going to happen once the other 999,999 occur. Thus a government which does not plan for one-in-a-million scenarios is truly derelict and incapable of survival.
> The thing about one-in-a-million events is that they are eventually going to happen once the other 999,999 occur.
Nitpick: I get your point, but phrasing it like this is basically the gambler's fallacy. That's not how probability works.
You could ask though if, given the changed environment, the one-in-a-million event still has the odds of one-in-a-million. Or if one-in-a-million is really such a rare thing if you make a billion draws...
Better formulation:
a one-in-a-million event that is tried a million times has a ~63% chance of happening.
yes, that doesn't suffer from gambler's fallacy, but actually surprises people and makes them forget about the issue you're talking about and focus on the probabilities that they don't understand and have no tools to understand... and that's when the 1 in a million event takes place, while they are distracted
> that they don't understand and have no tools to understand
Why are they not scholarized? What are they doing in the wild? There's an infestation and it is mentioned marginally, as opposed to red-level crisis?!
> while they are distracted
They should be trained towards the conditions for focus pre-emptively!
We live in the real world though. As you know.
Yes Orb, and it's a problem, and that's why we engineer! ;)
“Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.”
(The author is left as an exercise for the reader)
The movie asks what is the point of JSDF if Japan isn’t under any threat … then somebody in an F-16 fires a TV guided missile into the Yokohama Bay Bridge. It’s a good movie, you should watch it.
Sounds good indeed!
Fantastic movie, great political plot, great direction. Part 1 is decent, too.
That’s not really how odds work. I could take 1,000,000 cycles or 10,000,000 cycles or even more for a 1/1,000,000 to happen.
I put the odds at least 10% this century.
The literal title is "If the crisis or the war comes". Swedes and the Swedish language has a somewhat poetic tendency to refer to things in definite article, embodying them, when wanting to underline the seriousness.
If a war reaches Sweden in the next years, I think it's safe to say we know which war it will be.
It's like the Finnish defense forces. Their training exercises have the OPFOR, the imaginary opposing force usually designated with the color yellow for the sake of the exercise, approaching from the East. Funny that, wonder why.
While this Swedish linguistic tendency isn't related to Russia, on that topic we have an old saying: "Lede fi [archaic: evil enemy] kommer från öst."
A simple note: if you live sufficiently south for p.v., in a home, you can sustain services disruptions significantly:
- p.v. with storage means freezers operational, and freezers means food, protein in particular, for potentially very long periods
- even without p.v. a home in the wood means being able to heat in the winter sourcing wood in nature, uncomfortable but still heat, also usable to cook
- you have room to store water, from the aqueduct with a personal pump in home pipes, so with p.v. you get cold and hot water, potentially for a week or two, and in nature sources tend to be common at our latitudes
In an apartment in a dense city you can just keep a bit of water, but still much less than the countryside, next to zero chance for p.v. and energy storage, very limited chance to source water in nature, even issues to walk for many stairs if elevators have no energy. Long story short: you can't be resilient. Oh, and you might be targeted because hitting a city it's easy and some damages are assured, hitting the countryside is essentially wasting weapons. Remember as well: with wood you can cook various long lasting foods, like rice, beans, ... without wood or locally produced energy your cooking ability going down to zero.
Floods? Spread homes might be or not at risk, but they are still spread, meaning few per flooded are, so rescuing it's doable as temporary shelters, emergency food supply etc. Dense areas? The same in risk terms, but extremely hard to help simply because there are too many people hit together.
Earthquakes? Very similar, plus the fact that light homes tend to allow quick escape, tall buildings do not, and even if they might be well designed in seismic terms they are still very problematic. Fires? idem.
Long story short: it's pointless to publish such next-to-obvious recommendations, some could do something, many could not.
War and survival are communal activities. Tight dense communities tend to do better as people can support each other. Isolated dwellings are just ridiculously vulnerable in comparison. The next group of hungry/angry people who turn up will roll right over you. If you want to survive you should have neighbors and make friends with them.
Not in all known wars so far. In all wars we know cities are bombing, hungry, criminal while SPREAD (not isolated) areas are often simply ignored by the war and in nature you can both source and produce food.
Beside in spread area you have friends as well as in city, but there we are all collaborative even when we do not like each other much because we are few, in cities we are strangers in the crowd.
This sounds like rural beliefs about something that you personally dislike. Enjoy your bubble!
This is what I tell my family. If the worst comes and everyone is panicking, you need to keep calm and do not do things for the sake of doing something. If the worst comes, the greatest risk is falling and breaking a leg, infection, or getting accidentally shot. You can survive for two weeks without eating. You need to drink constantly. In modern times, I would rank the most important devices as the mobile phone and the automobile. One is for communication and the other is for evacuation. The other important things are identification cards, medicine, and cash.
>In modern times, I would rank the most important devices as the mobile phone and the automobile.
If you're referring to those being important in a major disaster, I'd disagree. Any major disruption can knock out celular networks and in a war they'd be deliberately targeted.
Instead, your best bet would be a predetermined plan for how to get in contact with loved ones if the comms and electrical grids collapse (where to meet, when, and where to leave notes possibly).
As for cars, maybe in certain scenarios, such as having an offroad vehicle stored in some isolated place that you can reach, but if an earthquake, flood, war or some other disaster suddenly strikes, roads will be one of its major victims, rapidly being damaged and in any case clogged with heavy traffic. A car of any kind inside a city would probably be next to useless after a serious disaster.
Instead, you would be better off with a few motorbikes/dirt bikes, or even better, bicycles safely and carefully stored against possible theft. Having these for your family, and possibly some kind of compact cart that can be hitched up for pulling supplies or anyone who simply cant ride their own bike would be much more flexible and usable no matter how badly your region's transport infrastructure is devastated. Bikes (motorized or manual) can cover nearly any terrain and don't need roads if they're even minimally built for off-roading.
You don't need to live that far south for this to work. I live in Sweden at around 60°N and the ~14kW of PV panels on the barn roof provide enough power for that purpose through most of the year, the period November-February excluded. In that period it tends to be cold so keeping food for a longer time is not a problem. I live in the woods and heat and heat the house with a wood-burning stove and a wood-burning kitchen stove (which I use year-round for cooking) as the only heat sources so we're not dependent on electricity. We have our own water well and our own wastewater facilities (not dependent on electricity like 'modern' versions are) so we can keep our standard of living with or without outside power and facilities.
It is not pointless to publish recommendations because it makes people consider the possibility of regular facilities not being available. While city dwellers may not be able to keep more than a week's worth of supplies before they need resupply or evacuation that makes them more prepared for such eventualities than those who think they will always be able to use their mobile devices to order from the plethora of restaurants their city offers. It can make the difference between organised chaos and disordered mayhem if that war or crisis were to occur.
Be Prepared! is not just the boy scouts of old motto - no idea what the modern watered-down version of that institution professes - but also just a good idea. It does not mean you need to become a prepper but it does point out the need for some self-reliance because that whole fragile house of cards which is the service economy may just come tumbling down some day.
Nothing new here, the Swedish government has been publishing this guide since the second world war [1] and updates it regularly. It is not directly related to an increase in international tensions and would have been published even if Putin and his cronies were out on the pony farm. The last update was published in 2017/2018 by the previous labour-led government, now that Sweden is part of NATO it needed an update to reflect that fact. Previous versions were published in 1943, 1952, 1961, 1978, 1983, 1987, 1989, 1991 and 2017/2018.
I still have mine from 2017 in a kitchen drawer, as an immigrant it was quite informative, it's how I've learned that Sweden will never surrender and any messaging about it is enemy agitation to be ignored.
> that Sweden will never surrender and any messaging about it is enemy agitation to be ignored.
Oh ye, the outlawing of losing wars. Not very convincing for adults but I guess teenagers think it sounds cool.
The "Sweden will never surrender" part refers to the brochure warning against enemy propaganda which suggests that Swedish forces have surrendered and people should leave enemy forces unharmed. It is mentioned on page 5 of the English-language brochure:
So how do you enforce an armistice when the standing order is "never to surrender"? I.e. not "enemy propaganda" but government orders. You would have units disregarding it left and right.
I don't think it is a good idea to give the soldiers the impression that they will fight to the last man, since that encourages killing their officers at an earlier stage than they would otherwise. Preferably, you want to lure with some peace agreement that is just around the corner, such that the soldiers believe that there is hope for them.
Swedish defence is organised according to a system called 'totalförsvar' or 'total defence' which includes not only fighting forces (army, air force, navy, marines, etc.) but also civilian support forces. People who are included in this system - which can be anything from medical personnel to linemen and truck drivers - have assigned roles and a command structure or 'krigsplacering' (wartime assignment). The message that 'Sweden will never surrender' is aimed mostly at civilians who are outside of the military command structure but may be included in the civilian support forces. It is not aimed at keeping some bearded Swede with a rusty axe hiding in the north-western mountains for 30 years after Sweden has lost a war, it is aimed at the trucker who may be exposed to enemy propaganda.
If Sweden ever were to surrender in war it will most likely be broadcast by the prime minister and/or the king/queen (Sweden is a constitutional monarchy). Until such a time and until such a message is confirmed we'll just assume that Sweden has not surrendered.
> I don't think it is a good idea to give the soldiers the impression that they will fight to the last man, since that encourages killing their officers at an earlier stage than they would otherwise. Preferably, you want to lure with some peace agreement that is just around the corner, such that the soldiers believe that there is hope for them.
I think you are confusing Sweden with some other country.
It's part of the defence strategy to not allow quick capitulation due to enemy's propaganda, the idea is to form armed resistance on the vast Swedish forests as a last resort for insurgency.
Of course if pushes come to shove the reality is not black and white, no need to be an asshole about it because every adult understands that, quite juvenile of you to think they don't. Guess your kind of rhetoric earn points with the teens, no?
> no need to be an asshole about it because every adult understands that, quite juvenile of you to think they don't.
I am sorry. I agree most people 'get it'. The point I am trying to make is that those who don't 'get it' are a big problem if you have nifty slogans like that. Also in a non-total war setting.
> Guess your kind of rhetoric earn points with the teens, no?
I honestly believe that my rhetoric would score very low amongst teens.
American perceptions (like yours) tend to be very literal and absolutist. Nobody in Sweden will have difficulty with this wording!
Related:
Sweden's 'Doomsday Prep for Dummies' guide hits mailboxes today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173777 - Nov 2024
Exceptionally well-armed NATO + JEF members, and Finland well within distance to use conventional artillery to turn St Petersburg to rubble. This is a public-awareness and support-building exercise rather than a real concern. This is like the RAF frequently issuing press-releases about intercepting Russian jets.
Well, yes, but it is not some PR-influenced look good and like us on Facebook -thing for any of the Nordic nations.
It's about being prepared for all kinds of eventualities, whatever they might be.
For example, last year and early this year heavy winds fell trees on electric lines both in Finland and Sweden, cutting off electricity locally for many days. There was a pandemic not too long ago. Waterworks problems have happened in the past in Finland and also happened this year in Sweden. DDoSing happens here and there, it can impact banks and such.
In addition, grayzone/hybrid operations i.e. all kinds of stupid bullying are constantly conducted: for example, earlier today a submarine cable between Germany and Finland (C-Lion1) was cut, and later today another submarine cable between Lithuania and Sweden was cut as well. Such cables don't just snap by themselves.
Like the Finnish page says: "Prepared people cope better".
https://www.suomi.fi/guides/preparedness
https://www.msb.se/en/advice-for-individuals/the-brochure-in...
> Such cables don't just snap by themselves.
Your general points are valid, but undersea cables do fail for many reasons. A few moments of googling turns up industry failure statistics. Most are still due to human activity in some way (but unintentional, like an anchor drag) but plenty are due to the natural environment of the sea floor.
> conventional artillery to turn St Petersburg to rubble
Well, let's really hope not. (Let us hope that nothing of worth is ever destroyed, and let us not speak about destruction of universal goods lightly.)
Edit: let us be even more clear (possibly in light of the dismissing feelers who just passed by). If you are into destruction of the cultural heritage, you are the enemy. Complexities just come later.
Are human lives worthwhile to be destroyed? Are they not universal enough? Because I don't see much respect for those around the world... starting, but not ending there, with the russian soldiers themselves.
Some will be of the opinion that what may not respect cultural heritage may not have the same worth.
Sorry.
Edit: I will express it again, and to stress the point: some things are the fruit of the drive towards construction. Some other things may be destroyers. So, it all depends. No, we will not attribute worth to destroyers.
No such thing as cultural heritage if destroying it would achieve the war goal of significantly lower the enemy's morale, irrespective of what international law says about it.
It's not a matter of law, it's a matter of judgement: in front of a threat to what should be respected every cell in the world should become and antibody to erase what revealed as the lowlest scum from the actors.
Putin is hoping and taking action to ensure otherwise.
That reinforces my point instead of changing it.
Destruction of the Worth = bad.
I.e. it is part of what should be fought.
No need for artillery. Drop a big enough A-bomb in the right place in the Gulf of Finland, and it does nil in most of the gulf but it does send a tsunami straight up to St Petersburg. Thus the rationale for that causeway/seawall they built for the A118 thru Kronstadt.
Uh..
If we turn St Petersburg into rubble, I doubt anyone will be worrying about a few trifling conventional weapons. NATO and Russia go at it, and we're all just sitting around next month waiting for the Chinese, Brazilians, Indians and South Africans to sort out who is responsible for which relief efforts.
Actually, now I think about it, that quad will probably be far more concerned with determining the disposition of the remaining NATO/Russian warheads. So even relief efforts might be impacted by their more pressing concerns.
In any case, the world would just be a mess for a good long while.
NATO and Russia go at it and everyone is screwed, there will be no winners, nobody on the sidelines, no picking through the spoils.
Wars are usually like this and yet, they happen. It's not so unlikely.
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, there would be nations that survive a NATO/Russia war. Namely, any nation in the Southern Hemisphere not called Australia or New Zealand. Mother Nature's winds and Father Physic's half lives combine to give unaligned southern hemisphere nations the break of a lifetime. (Or of a species' lifetime I guess?)
All that said, you are absolutely right about "spoils". No one is gonna be thinking about "spoils". Probably top of everyone's list of questions will be, "How many warheads are left? And what remnants of NATO or Russia control them?"
We're talking about two groups who would have conclusively shown they are perfectly willing to use their nuclear arsenals to achieve their goals. That, combined with the fact that their goals would become a whole lot less lofty overnight makes me think the world would become a very precarious place.
That's an old assumption. Modern modelling shows that the southern hemisphere gets it's share from the northern hemisphere relatively fast. Only the shortest lived isotopes won't make it down there. Then there is the dust/smoke/black carbon to consider. If there is much, that will make it down there, too. Causing weather weirdness, misharvests, and so on.
The mineshaft gap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y
s/it's/its
If NATO and Russia are doing a big nuclear exchange I don't think its a wild assumption that the US and Russia also nuke China, India, and any other country that might theaten to pick apart their carcass after the bombs stop going off.
Nobody is gonna be in a situation to reassert control.
In the past, things like volcanic eruptions have detectable effects on world temperatures and crop yields.
During the cold war, there was a widespread theory that an all-out nuclear war would produce a similar effect; there are, after all, a great many warheads out there. So it was theorised that even countries that didn't participate in a nuclear war would end up with crop failures and mass starvation. The so-called "nuclear winter" or "nuclear holocaust".
Thankfully this theory has not yet been put to the test.
why would Australia get hit? no where near Russia, not in NATO, no nukes, and too small of a military to mount a serious offensive
for that matter they're not going to be able to supply much relief effort, either. hopefully they'll pick a side - India or China - and ride out the eventual hegemonic war between those 2.
Australia did contribute troops to most US-led military expeditions of the past century. Is it that unlikely that in the event of complete nuclear devastation of the Northern Hemisphere, they would be happy to tip the scales in favour of their allies among the survivors by dispatching a few tens of thousands of troops to mop up what is left of the Russian side, which would only be up against a few disorganised pockets of resistance with no supply chain to speak of?
Also, there is a chance that in the event of a full-blown nuclear exchange Russian leadership would see the showdown as fundamentally civilisational, and seek to take Australia down simply because it is unambiguously an outpost of Anglo-American culture.
1.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap - ZAP!
2.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoal_Bay_Receiving_Station - Brrzzt!
3.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Defence_Satellite_C... - Sparkle!
0.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Ha...
One of the places that sends the "shoot 'em up boys* signal to the stealth nuclear subs.
> "shoot 'em up boys"
I'd thought these days the signal would be "OK Boomer"?
(I'm still impressed that the РВСН has St Barbara as a patron saint. They claim that it's because they were founded on her day, 17.12.59, but I'd bet it has rather more to do with towers and lightning strikes as attributes, as well as her existing patronage over artillerymen, tunnellers, and explosives workers in general. They make severe waffle irons in Chelyabinsk: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/OUQPxihQfQDuPE-8f8X1... )
> why would Australia get hit?
when you have 30 000 warheads you might as well sprinkle them around for all allies of NATO for good measure. When you are doing a nuclear exchange that's the strategy anyway.
I'm assuming our Navy would harbor there when other ports were gone.
Maybe the Australians wouldn't allow that?
I guess I always assumed they would. Kind of like North Korea with Russian warships. I don't think we could take the chance that the Russian naval assets harbored in N Korea were harmless. Likewise, I'm assuming Russia wouldn't be able to make the assumption that American warships harbored in Australia were harmless.
I don't know? Maybe everyone's naval ships just surrender or something? I doubt it though. Your nation being destroyed is, in my mind, more reason to fight in those circumstances, not less.
> Maybe the Australians wouldn't allow that?
I think the US leases bases in Australia. Given that a single aircraft carrier group contains more power than the ADF combined I would suggest any that limp back to Australia's shores would be able to continue using these ports.
> If we turn St Petersburg into rubble, I doubt anyone will be worrying about a few trifling conventional weapons
Yes, exactly, that's why this isn't going to happen.
That's what a functional government looks like. High-information, low-controversy, consolidating citizens around a shared truth.
Sure, but which is the cause, and which the effect?
Edit: Huh, a totally legitimate question that points directly at the underlying cause, and downvoted to the limit. Does it hurt that much to admit that people are getting exactly the government they want?
A pamphlet talking about "in case of war..." seems like it is making war itself more likely. "Shared truth" seems like it's reaching also.
Why would that make war more likely?
That pamphlet is not new, they've been doing it since WWII.
Wearing a helmet makes falling more likely? Vaccination makes disease more likely? Fire drills increase the chance of fire? Information about bear awareness makes bear encounters more likely?
Of course not. Civil defence is a good thing, sticking your head in the sand is not. Also, the brochure is not just about war but also about other crises. Sweden can experience 'interesting' weather which can leave people out of reach of rescue services for a while so 'be prepared' is just good advice.
No but in places where you're likely to fall, be sure there will be pamphlets that tell you to wear a helmet...
But the pamphlets weren't the ones making you more likely to fall.
That is exactly the point, they are telling you to prepare for war
> Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war
Don't start it, in the first place. Not having an agressive stance also helps. /s