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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5436 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Argentina is one of the best places to be if the world goes to shit. There are no nuclear targets in South America. Prevailing wind patterns would prevent significant fallout from crossing the equator. Argentina has better demographics than Brazil and more space than Chile or miscellaneous Southern Hemisphere island nations.

Always good to be one step ahead.

Given that this is known, what are the odds that at least one of the nuclear powers has major population centers/rich areas of South America as some of their auto-attack targets if shit hits the fan? Nukes aren't exactly cheap things you can just throw around willy-nilly on a whim, so perhaps it wouldn't be worth it. But I know that if I were in charge, I'd try to make sure we've got a few reserved for targeting places that are of strategic non-importance for (1) spite (the big reason) and (2) making sure that they don't have advantages over us for the Mad Max-esque post-apocalypse. Better to be Immortan Joe than a War Boy. I might even devote some intelligence resources to tracking the top X richest individuals on Earth at all times and make sure that their latest-available/best-guess coordinates are targeted.

Due to treaty drawdowns and increased targeting, there's barely enough nuclear weapons to shoot at the primary targets, let alone throw spares at random third parties.

If Russia and the US got into a nuclear tiff and they both went countervalue, things could be really nasty. But if they went for counterforce, I think the overall impact in terms of "damage to civilization" would be more like, say, COVID than Max Max Part 0.

Argentina is out of range of most land-based balistic missles from countries other than the United States (I think Russia has some brand new models that can do it.) There's a lot of ocean where a balistic-missile submarine would be able to hit both Argentina and the United States from a single position, but I don't think anyone expects an isolated submarine crew to faithfully execute Plan Exterminate Human Civilization.

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