Quote:
Originally Posted by Legbreaker
Officially the reserves are only supposed to serve inside Australia as a defence only force, somewhat like the WWII militia were supposed to, however once Indonesia makes it's move, 1st (less 1 Armoured Regiment aka Koalas - protected species not allowed outside Australia  ) and 7th Brigades are sent into action, 9th Brigade is sent to relieve 3rd in Korea who are brought back home for predeployment training and reaclimatisation for PNG and to give commanders an airborne option (3 Para battalion). |
That restriction on the Reserves only serving within Australia was watered down years ago. East Timor, Bougainville, the Solomon Islands are just a few of the places I can think of off the top of my head that Reserves have been sent to in recent decades. Heck, official ADF recruitment advertisements on TV have for many years suggested that overseas service is a potential benefit of joining the Reserves.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Legbreaker
The list of refineries from Wiki is a very decent starting point and only needs fairly minimal expansion to completely screw Australia. Another half dozen warheads aimed at shipyards and the like and it's all over. Hitting those targets will also still take out a huge percentage of the population, even if that wasn't the intended aim.
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Very true. Over here in my corner of this Wide Brown Land the Kwinana Refinery sits right on the coast, in a strip of industrial zoned land south of the main metropolitan area. Perth and it's satellite cities and suburbs occupy a long, narrow strip of very flat sand plain, bordered to the east by a continuous low escarpment rising up where the old shoreline used to be in ancient times. The prevailing winds along this section of the West Australian coast tend to be consistently from the south-west. A single nuclear warhead detonated over the Kwinana Refinery would demolish a very significant proportion of this region's heavy industry, shipbuilding and fuel refining capabilities. Conveniently that same warhead would also severely damage or destroy the nearby HMAS Stirling, the largest naval base in this part of the world and the home port for half of Australia's submarine fleet. Then, just as a nice little additional kick in the teeth, the radioactive plume would be carried by the consistent prevailing winds right across a significant part of Perth's southern suburbs and urban-rural interface (market gardens, dairy farms, quasi-rural redneck spawning grounds etc.).
And in the event of a summer nuking, the nuke plume would also tend to get trapped in the lower atmosphere by the almost-constant temperature inversion layer held in place over Perth by the eastern escarpment. Look, in a way a modest nuking would probably do Australians some good. As it is now we're so used to surviving on a continent that seems hell-bent on trying to kill us with its horrible climates, vast deserts, limited fresh water, inedible/angry/poisonous/morphologically confusing flora and fauna and soul-crushing isolation that we've developed cultural assumptions of near-indestructibility. Radioactive fallout would finally give us an environmental factor that we couldn't just avoid, ignore, blow up or shoot.