rdfox
Know what you're doing yet?
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2019
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Trivia time! The actual event at Jonestown that inspired the "drank the Kool-Aid" meme didn't use actual Kool-Aid, it used Flava-Aid. Grape flavored, if memory serves, though I'd have to look that up again.I doubt they could even afford the name-brand these days. Probably used some crappy knock-off like Flava-Aid. Gives the mind-control drugs an extra Zing!, you know?
(Yes, I spend entirely too much time reading about disasters and such, because it lets me forget about my own depression for a while on the grounds that, hell, it could always be worse, I could have been in that...)
For the record, the UK is (or at least was) entirely capable of producing its own nuclear weapons. The US did not allow UK access to its nuclear programs at all after the end of World War Two until the UK tested its first indigenous atomic bomb in 1952. All told, the UK conducted 21 fully independent nuclear weapons tests, and another 24 joint US-UK tests, including five indigenous H-bomb tests in 1957-58; following those H-bomb tests, the US accepted that the UK had essentially caught up with US capabilities and offered full access to US nuclear weapons technology, which the Macmillan government took full advantage of to reduce the cost of the British nuclear arsenal by simply adopting US weapons instead of designing their own.[Briefly meditates upon Rule 8]
Perhaps. I do not believe that the Fallout background goes into the armaments of countries outside of the China/America conflict. However, the Trident system that the UK bought in 1980 was US made, and... There's no obvious source for a replacement.
While the Polaris and Trident systems were entirely US-made, there wasn't any component of them that couldn't be made in the UK, which had successfully produced and fired fission bombs, fusion bombs, and rockets capable of putting payloads into low Earth orbit (look up the "Black Arrow" program) entirely indigenously. Those are the three components of a missile-based nuclear deterrent, so if the UK decided it wanted to maintain a truly independent deterrent force, it certainly could develop one again--if you've developed the technology once, then it's not nearly as hard to develop it again.
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