Posted: Sep 18, 2015 11:33 am
Matt_B wrote:crank wrote:If you had sustained cutoff of transportation, we are talking biblical level events. There wasn't much of a fuel shortage in the 70's, that was panic buying, and almost trendy. There were stories of people getting in line for gas with more than half full tanks. I lived in Austin and never had to wait for gas, maybe 1 in 10 times all the pumps might be occupied, but that's a couple of minutes, no stations ran out of gas that I ever saw. I've read some serious scenarios of this, can't remember where, the system is not set up to cope with no trucks hauling shit. Hit a few tankers now and then, take out some big refineries, and things could get very ugly very quickly.
I think the view of the oil crises of the 1970s would depend a lot on where you were at the time. Although embargoed, the US had considerable domestic production and in some areas there'd have been practically no reliance on imported oil, while other countries, such as the Netherlands, were completely cut off and had to find new suppliers within weeks before they ran out. Markets crashed and governments fell, but nobody - so far as I'm aware - ran out of food and descended to cannibalism.
And yes, it might technically be possible to cut off a country's fuel supply by acts of sabotage, but I still can't see such a scenario as likely. Tankers are notoriously difficult to sink, and refineries are designed so that they can survive quite serious fires and explosions and be brought back on line within a few weeks, so it's not like even the most determined terrorist organization could take many out before the remainder were locked down much higher levels of security.
I never said any of that was likely, it was only to highlight the precariousness of city food supplies. I'm curious about tankers being notoriously hard to sink. Have any been attacked before? I mean by, say a Western power, Russia or China? I did a quick googling and could only find pirating type attacks, and a laughable attempt to bomb from the outside, they needed divers to tell them if there had even been an attack. That would be quite a sight. The biggest one ever made over 1500 ft. The largest ones in use can carry more than what Britain uses in a day. But I bet a single A10 with the right ordinance could take one out without any problem, or one torpedo. They can't fight back and they're not armored. It would definitely be an interesting matchup.