An explicitly speculative example imagines the Soviet Union capturing a partly completed Yamato-class battleship during an invasion of the Japanese home islands and finishing it for worldwide display. The episode treats this as a counterfactual, not as an event that occurred. In the scenario, the ship would advertise the capture of an imperial battleship and symbolically restore Russian honor after an earlier defeat by Japan. That prestige logic leads directly into the discussion of why visible surface warships could serve Soviet diplomacy better than hidden missile submarines.
Notable Point · 29:18-30:24
A Yamato counterfactual about Soviet prestige
An explicitly speculative Yamato scenario explains how a captured battleship might have served Soviet prestige, then leads into the diplomatic value of visible surface ships.