Had a interesting chat...

[Panther Al]

... over the weekend with a friend that works for one of the think-tanks specialising in defence matters in DC.

He does the 40K thing and while we was chatting in the FLGS, the subject of TW2K came up. He mentioned he heard of it, but never looked too seriously at it. So, this weekend, I brought my stuff, and over donuts and laptops, we went over the game and the background to it (This is V2.2 btw). Over a few hours he came to an interesting conclusion:

The way the Nukes was spread out over NA he called the true nightmare spread. All our planning for nuclear war worked on two assumptions:

Either there would be very limited (As in Sub/SAC bases, Primary Shipping Points, as well as DC and equivalent) targeting, or there would be massive wipe everything out bombardment.

By cherry picking a few of this, and few of that, it threw out all the planning. No one really assumed cities like Boston and New York would be anything but a large crater - not to mention Norfolk and other very large cities.

By not destroying them, while wrecking infrastructure targets (He counts Oil Production/Refinery facilities as basic infrastructure) it would put so much pressure on relief efforts there would be next to no chance to pull it off, without the destruction of the units trying to pull it off for any number of reasons.

This makes the idea of the total fragmentation of Civil Authority much more believable now in my mind.

He also laughed at a few other things: the less said about the concept of the Mexicans heading north the better, but he really laughed at the idea of Colorado Springs even existing after the strikes on Norad: and since we game in Frederick MD, the idea of a strike on Detrick allowing anyone to head up into Penn State via I70 is laughable.

He allows that the designers really had no idea of what nukes could do, and with the dirth of resources, he figures it was excusable to assume nukes wouldn't be as destructive as they should have been.


But it gives an interesting POV on things none the less.