Poor Poland
Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - 7:30 PM
[permalink]
There’s a saying in the world of European
History that you haven’t really exerted yourself on the world stage until
you’ve invaded Poland. The reason is
that everyone’s done it – Russia, Germany, the Greeks (probably), hell, even France went through
there once – and the reason for that
is that Poland is really flat and it’s really easy to get from one side of it
to the other. I always sort of thought
that in modern-day warfare, with high-tech precision strikes and airplanes
nuclear weapons and all, Poland’s big disadvantages would become kind of
moot.
But, according to some papers recently released by Poland’s
newly-elected, conservative government (funny
story about that), the Warsaw Pact nations had a pretty good idea of what
a cold war nuclear holocaust across Eurasia would look like – with Poland, of
course, getting “all but wiped off the face of the Earth”.
The current defense minister, Radek Sikorsky, called seeing the included map for the first time a “personally
shattering experience”. Sorry, Poland, but looks like no matter how
much the science of human warfare advances, they’ll always find a way to
include you guys at ground zero.
Incidentally, I got this amusing
nuclear tidbit off of a cool site that a friend of a friend is developing – www.commontimes.org:
an “interactive news site where you select the top stories and share your
views about the day's events.” It
seems like it’s going in a Google
News direction, but – so far, anyway – it’s got more cool stuff
and less boring stuff. Anyway, go
check it out, they have news links and some numbers I don’t understand.
Archive
Home
