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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   709 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 18, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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You can remove a lot of the infrastructure if you don't mind slowing down the unloading. Even oil pipelines can be replaced with tanker trucks if those are available.

Imagine bombing a large parking lot with cruise missile or two. Sure, it'd lower the capacity and temporarily halt the use but it wouldn't take all that much effort to continue operation again. A port at its basics is just a dropoff point / parking lot for ships with the most basic structures being inherently resistant to any secondary effects of bombing (ie. anything outside the literal crater).

Just for comparison I used Nukemap to simulate dropping a 20 kT nuke on the Beirut port and there's no way to position that such that it'd take out more than half of the port with heavy damage (a heavy concrete pier is probably going to shrug off 5 psi overpressure). You'd have to use a dozen precisely aimed 10 ton bombs (roughly the yield of the largest non-nuclear bomb in US arsenal, not exactly something to be fired from a normal jet) to actually destroy all the piers themselves.

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