https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-polymarket-user-made-more...
I'm not sure why the author singled out Telecom Italia Sparkle.
It's over for the EU. They rested on their laurels for too long and cowardice rotted them from the inside.
I don't think Denmark will put even a smidge of resistance up. Trump is going to bark some orders, boots are going to hit the ground and it's fait accompli.
Capture Trump?
Invade the US?
The idea the EU is some bureaucratic hellhole incapable of anything is really odd and nigh-universal - I'm used to righties adopting it from Brexit & antipathy for social demoracy, but I'm not used to see it as a despondent wailing from people otherwise sympathetic to it.
Note no one even mentioned the EU - it's so universal a reaction to "US is acting bad" that it came out of nowhere. Not to pick on you: when I was first replying, I also replied as if it was the EU! Had to go back and read the comment I was replying to and corrected myself before posting.
I'd imagine programs from: the Nordics and Poland+Baltics. Maybe Germany, probably not.
Ssetting aside the whole non-proliferation thing, or expense (see NK), etc.
Let's get serious, please.
Even now, the EU Commission is trying to 'defuse' the Greenland situation by trying to invoke NATO's fifth article, as if that's worth anything without the will of the USA behind it. You know, instead of like actually drawing out plans for a military alliance, economic retribution (remember all those sanctions against Big Tech which fell apart the moment Trump made even the slightest comment against them?) or… just about anything.
Laws are worth even less than the paper they're written on, and no amount of naïve idealism (and calling it that is me being generous!) will change that. NATO membership is worthless other than as an aesthetic signifier.
Europe withdraws from the non-proliferation treaty, publicly resolves to building and maintaining a European nuclear deterrent and greenlights members who have been militarily threatened (the Baltics, Poland and Denmark) to start clandestine programmes.
The last part doesn't even have to happen. Hell, none of it has to happen. But that would be playing from strength.
Unfortunately, Europe is not politically unified enough to do this. (Same for Asia.)
For example France could gift or sell Denmark some nukes, possibly with a Rafale as a launch platform. Denmark would be an instant nuclear nation-state.
I'm not sure there is the political will though.
The others have been variants of "Celebrating liberation of the Venezuelan people from the illegitimate dictator, a new dawn for democracy! (oh and everyone (not naming names) please behave and try to be mindful of international law and human rights from now on)"
Not a single word about the dead, for one.
While the NYTimes headline names France as critical, here's Macron (still only posting) on Twitter: https://xcancel.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/200752538697719404...
Meanwhile POTUS is over there talking literally and openly about how US are "going to run things" and motivating it with taking the oil and how they don't really care about democracy one way or other.
This goes so far that one of the ministers of the government met in Spain with Delcy Rodriguez, bringing her a few briefcases of something that hasn't been explained yet, despite her being subject to a travel ban in the EU.
Of course this is a progressive government so the EU said absolutely nothing about it.
These actions by Trump are only reinforcing that we will see even more of a push for everybody to get their own nukes, even in Europe.
People do not need to yell "bad trump", to have his actions result in decisions being pushed forward like this.
Theodore: "speak softly and carry a big stick"... and nuke(s) is a BIG stick.
Yesterday:
> Adding to the alarm, Katie Miller, a right-wing podcast host and the wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, posted an image of Greenland superimposed with the American flag and the caption "SOON!"
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/greenland/trump-venezuela-atta...
Fragile egos. Narcissists desperately need to feel good about themselves. They're caught in a cycle: feel worthless -> do bad things (feed the ego) -> feel worthless.
Mr. Trump good.
Trump derangement syndrome bad.
If Mr. Trump does what you say eventually, then it was good. (see rule #1)
I see this frequently on HN since the re-election, won't speculate as to why: only way around the downvote is to criticize policy generically, untethered to time, with some sort of micro-focus like you're sharing new information about how things work, not discussing current events.
You're mixing up your VCs?
Same reason this post got flagged and died.
Also what was written in that comment if you can tell and why it died?
Another quick question but is there no storage of flag/died posts on hackernews? Seems like its possible with things like https://hn.live/ or I saw some other website like this as well. Perhaps, something like this can store flag/dead posts but I am not really sure if it has any use case but I am just curious what was written in that post.
they're not deleted, just hidden. you can toggle "showdead" in your profile settings.
Greenland is a massive strategic liability for the US and Europe (although the EU still has its head in the sand they are starting to wake up some).
I expect every major world power has a plan to (attempt to) do precisely that to their enemies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_bomb
> The US Navy used sea-launched Tomahawk missiles with Kit-2 warheads, involving reels of carbon fibers, in Iraq as part of Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War in 1991, where it disabled about 85% of the electricity supply. The US Air Force used the CBU-94, dropped by F-117 Nighthawks, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on 2 May 1999, where it disabled more than 70% national grid electricity supply.
I would not, however, take "Trump said something" as indicative of much. "It was dark, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have, it was dark, and it was deadly" is both visibly untrue from the video evidence available, and is the precise sort of off-the-cuff low-fact statement he's prone to.
Trump just seems the worst person in the world to play a game of telephone with on such a subject.
For example: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2025/05/16/pentagon-silent-a...
> “The F-35, we’re doing an upgrade, a simple upgrade,” Trump said. “But we’re also doing an F-55, I’m going to call it an F-55. And that’s going to be a substantial upgrade. But it’s going to be also with two engines.”
> Frank Kendall, the secretary of the Air Force during former President Joe Biden’s administration, said in an interview with Defense News that it is unclear what Trump was referring to when he discussed an “F-22 Super,” but it may have been a reference to the F-47 sixth-generation fighter jet… Kendall said it is also unclear what Trump was referring to when he discussed the alleged F-55.
From what I remember reading, they were able to gain air dominance not because Iranian air-defense was bad, but because it was put almost completely out of service for a brief period of time by people on the ground - be it through sabotage, cyber-warfare, drone attacks from inside, allowing the Israeli jets to annihilate them.
Wouldn't that constitute air defense being "bad"? There are no "well technically it should have worked" in war. Failing to properly secure the air defense sites is bad air defense.
Although I do agree, that in war only the final outcome is important. It's just that in this case it failed not necessarily because of technology, but because of humans.
I'm having trouble thinking how power outages can be deadly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_European_heatwaves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
You'll get some food poisoning deaths from food that got too warm in fridges. People who rely on home medical equipment like oxygen concentrators. Car crashes in busy intersections that no longer have traffic lights. Fires from candles. etc. etc. etc.
Even critical infrastructure eventually craps out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/science/atomic-clock-late...
It reminds me of when people claimed the whatsapp numbers leak put lives at risk because people might use it in countries where it is banned.
In another sense, it is similar to arguments against tasers, where they are being evaluated in a vacuum instead of being evaluated against their alternatives. If you compare tasers to guns, or power outages to bombs, then they are safe rather than dangerous.
Nah, I disagree here.
Tasers do indeed offer an alternative to guns. But they allow more force in other situations, where officers would previously have had to deescalate because "just shoot them" wasn't justified.
Cops now use a taser where zero force might previously have been used.
The data would make that more likely, because deliberately adding a longer route doesn't achieve much. It's not usually going to get any traffic.
For example, maybe some misconfiguration caused these routes to be published because another route was lost. Which could very well be the actual cyber attack, or the effect of jamming, or breaking some undersea cable, or turning off the power to some place.
Technology is notoriously expensive to develop and manufacture. One must either have native capacity (and thus, the wealth) to do so, or must get it from someone else.
Other Western/US-aligned countries might have the ability to do so, albeit at geopolitical and economic cost, because the only thing you're likely to gain from kicking the US out of your tech stack and infrastructure is a tech stack and infrastructure free of the US. Meanwhile American companies will be developing new features and ways of doing things that add economic value. So at best, a wash economically. Maybe the geopolitical implications are enticing enough.
Places like Venezuela? Nah. They'll be trading the ability of Americans to jack with their tech infrastructure for the ability of the PRC, Non-US Western nations, or Russia to jack with their tech stack.
The geopolitics of technology are a lot like a $#1+ sandwich: the more bread you have, the less of someone else's $#1+ you have to eat.
[Of course i agree with the broader point of dont become dependent on the technology of your geopolitical enemies]
But by now, the big wheels sure are turning for good in the EU. I’m (we’re, probably) just bitter for everything that was destroyed so need- and carelessly.
They're applying secondary sanctions on Russian oil so China and India stop buying it despite there being a war on. Hardly "turning to Russia".
For the longest time I thought they'd gone too far, but now we're the clowns putting on a show.
I don't believe that NK's nukes deter the US from doing anything. Would NK nuke Guam and risk getting carpet-bombed with nukes for endless days and nights until even the ants are dead? Artillery on Seoul doesn't matter. The US would just ask SK to evacuate it.
The US doesn't do anything about the DPRK because it's not economically relevant (i.e. it doesn't have the world's largest oil reserves etc). In an ironic way, their economy being closed-off and mostly unintegrated with the Western world maintains the peace.
They are the North Korean leadership saying that if the US (or China or anyone really) tries to surgically decapitate them (like the US just did in Venezuela) then the nukes are used to take the attackers with them
If you don't have the triad then you need to brandish your capability more ostentatiously, like France does with its deliberate refusal to commit to a no-first-strike policy. This is (one of the many reasons) why North Korea does so much sabre-rattling: they don't have a (publicly known) nuclear triad for deterrence.
CN 3
FR 2
RU 3
UK 1/2
US 3
The Russians really have a quad (they also have mobile, truck mounted ICBM's that form a significant part of their deterrent, offering some of the guaranteed second-strike advantages that the US gets from SSBN's- and which their SSBN program does not provide nearly as well as the USN does). The Chinese only recently added a manned aircraft leg of their triad with the JL-1. The Indians technically have a triad- just no silo based systems, all of their land based missiles are from TELs, and they only have two SSBN's and do not do alternate crews so more than 1/3 of the time they don't have any deterrent at sea. The Israeli's are not believed to have any sea-based ballistic missiles, their sea-based deterrent would be Popeye cruise missiles and so vulnerable to interception. The Pakistanis are still building their first sea-based deterrent. The French and the UK have no land-based missiles, they are only sea-based and airplanes. The South Africans invested in the Jericho missile more for its space launched capabilities than its warhead delivery abilities, and never really looked at anything sea-based, so far as is publicly known.
At risk of sounding like gpt, the triad is not silo/boomer/bomber, it's land-based/airborne/seaborne.
Whether or not the survivability of your land-based ICBMs are due to mobility or hardened bunkers doesn't change much at the strategic level.
I won't claim to be as much an expert on Russian doctrine, but they seem to consider their mobile missiles to be a survivable second strike weapon, while silo based missiles are obviously not. Because their boomer fleet does not offer the same assured second strike, they rely on those mobile missiles to play a greater deterrent role then the US does.
1: That is the official justification for the US silos. The real reason for silos is, if you want to build a truly insane number of strategic warheads, silos are the only way to afford it- ships and planes and even TELs are too expensive. So first the US (worried they were behind because of the Missile Gap) built a thousand Minuteman (then tripled the deployed warheads with MIRV on the Minuteman-III). Then the Soviets responded with 1000 SS-11s of their own. But if you are only building a few hundred warheads total, you don't bother with silos, they don't add as much value as other delivery mechanisms.
I'm saying: Whether or not the Russians consider their silos to be more or less survivable than their truck-based missiles is immaterial, and doesn't change the calculus at the strategic level, because one of two things has to happen in a first-strike situation:
- You blanket the entire country in nuclear detonations and pray that you catch all the trucks scurrying around like nuclear-armed mice
or
- You spam dozens of missiles at a small number of hardened targets and hope you dent them (missile sponge silos)
Either way, you're severely depleting your arsenal to an infeasible level to do this. These are both counter-force attacks where targeting is the only difference, which the Strategic function does not concern itself with. That's a tactical consideration. Survivability of a land-based asset achieved by different means is still survivability of a land-based asset. In other words, it's still functionally a triad.
In the case of France in particular, the argument I recall reading is that: a) France was entering a period of austerity in defense spending as the Cold War ended, b) its siloed missiles were obsolete and in need of upgrades which promised to be costly, and c) France isn't very large geographically, so the "missile sponges" were limited to that little plateau north of Marseille which is pretty darn close to several major population centers, where an Ivy Mike-sized airburst could endanger Avignon and Marseille, not to mention leave a plume of fallout all the way into Germany.
But I'm just an ex Air Force officer who's been to France a bunch, so idk how accurate that is.
>The real reason for silos is, if you want to build a truly insane number of strategic warheads, silos are the only way to afford it
On this I'm in complete agreement.
I've seen open-source estimates that the 33rd Guards Rocket Army can distribute their three divisions of mobile missiles across something like 5,000 square miles of Siberia, mostly steppe/taiga (which the 7917/79221 are supposed to be capable of launching from, again according to open source reporting). That's more than 10% of all of North Korea, to give an idea why it would be different for the two countries. Being open-source, I don't have a good estimate for the survivability of the TEL, but let's somewhat arbitrarily say 5PSI is the limit. A 300kt W87 can put 5PSI over 3 mi^2, so doing 5,000 mi^2 would be about 1700 of them, for a grid-square blanket search. That seems to be impracticable, just for one third of their missiles(1).
So I think it's more about guaranteed second-strike than soaking (e.g. at three warheads per silo you'd need ~600 missiles to soak up that many warheads, instead of the 70-odd from mobile). Which is why I have seen some people consider those missiles as more about assured second-strike than missile-soak, with hints that the Russians consider that their role. The Russian doctrine does not align exactly with the American one (2) for sure and there are hints that the Russians consider road-mobile to be different from silo deployments.
1: I'm not as clear on how much deployment space the 27th Guards Rocket Army, in the European parts of Russia has, and whether they will run into similar problems to the French wrt population centers. There is also a whole separate discussion about how much counter-force and counter-value are truly separate on the receiving end, given, e.g. if Barksdale gets nuked Shreveport is going to be very very sad. But the RAND people were sure they were distinct!
2: At least, as far as this monolingual American can tell. My main source for this is the Arms Control Wonk blog and podcast, which actually does read and report on what the Russians describe as their doctrine, they are my source for the "Russians seem to consider road-mobile as more survivable second-strike than silos."
The core parts for MAD land-based missile silos (to soak up the enemy's missiles) and submarines (to ensure a second strike). Planes are largely a diplomatic deterrent inasmuch as they're easy to send out and easy to recall.
But Pyongyang isn't playing MAD. It's playing credible threat. And for a credible threat, you just need missiles. (On land or on subs.) The point is that you raise the stakes of e.g. a Maduro operation to risking Los Angeles.
But again, because MAD first and foremost is a deterrent, you want to provide diplomatic offramps for both you and your adversary. This is crucial. Putting the B-52s on airborne alert sends a very strong message, but so does recalling them from airborne alert.
By their very natures, SSBNs and ICBMs are not capable of playing this role.
How do you evacuate 10 to 15 million(counting Incheon in) of people, fast? Where to?
It assumes ~130,000 casualties from a worst-case surprise attack on population centers by the North.
If a conflict started ramping up, evacuations would rapidly shrink this.
A significant deterrent, sure. But it rapidly becomes less and less meaningful as the DPRK builds its nuclear arsenal.
Erm, it's kind of demanded for people to go out and die to defend national sovereignty in nations that have a draft. For myself, I'd prefer to be vaporized than bleed out in a trench if it really comes down to it.
The problem is that if you eliminate ~20% of a nation's population, supply chains, continuity of government, and the economy aren't going to last long. Social organization breaks down much more widely than people die. The resultant pullback of all the trapping of society - reliable food supply, clean water, transportation infrastructure, electricity, heat - is going to kill many more people than the nukes will.
I could tolerate a coupe but I’d prefer a sports car :-/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Weather_Emergency_Operat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Greek_Island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_Mountain_Complex
With the rise of solid fuel ICBM and then MIRV leading to the truly massive number of warheads pointed at the US, the US switched to airplanes for the most important continuity of government issues, figuring that the skies 30,000 above the US will largely be secure (presuming the plane is appropriately EMP shielded) due to the many US geographic advantages, and so it is the best place to ride out the initial attack and then take stock, get to somewhere safe, and figure out what to do from there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Looking_Glass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TACAMO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-6_Mercury
But the North Koreans can have no illusion that the skies above their country will be safe: there are several major enemy airbases a few minutes from their border, their entire airspace is routinely surveilled and powers hostile to them have made large investments in stealthy air superiority fighters, so the air is not a safe place for the DPRK continuity of government plans. The DPRK does have trains but I would not consider those safe in the event of a major war, since rails are difficult to keep secret.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taeyangho_armoured_train
So bunkers are the best they can do, given their circumstances.
What's worse is.. it worked.
Japan attacked the US first, and by Hiroshima the US had 110,000 dead in the Pacific theater. Imagine living through that before judging them.
Also perhaps worth noting that after the first bomb the Japanese government was not planning to surrender. The second dropping moved things to a deadlock where half of the ministers—both in the small war council, and the larger full government—wanted to the surrender and the other half did not.
The Emperor had to be called in—an almost unprecedented action—to break the tie. Then, even after the Emperor had made his decision, there was a coup attempt to prevent the "surrender"† broadcast:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
I do not know how anyone can think that Japan would have stopped fighting without the bombings when two bombings barely got things over the line.
The book 140 days to Hiroshima by David Dean Barrett goes over the meeting minutes / deliberations and interviews to outline the timeline, and it was not a sure thing that the surrender was going to happen: the hardliners really wanted to keep fighting, and they were ready to go to great lengths to get their way (see Kyūjō above).
The Japanese knew for a year before the bombings that they could not win the war, but they figured that by holding out—causing more causalities of Japanese, Americans, Chinese, Filipinos, etc—the US would lose their resolve and terms could be negotiated so that Japan could (e.g.) keep the land they conquered in Manchuria, etc.
† A word not actually used by the Japanese in the broadcast.
I've read convincing arguments (sorry, I cannot find them now) that this reasoning is mostly bogus.
One, the decision of dropping the bombs wasn't coordinated with planners of Operation Downfall, so casualties weren't a consideration. As such, it cannot be "civilized" (because the intent to be civilized just wasn't there).
Two, those casualty numbers rest on arbitrary assumptions about what the Japanese would or wouldn't do that don't hold up to real scrutiny, and ignore a host of options other than "full scale invasion" or "nuke".
Three, you cannot discount the flex towards the USSR, an argument many Japanese to this day maintain was a major reason. Which wasn't a civilized reason either.
It seems rather immoral to a high degree to send some Americans to their deaths unnecessarily because we didn’t want to use a weapon we had in our possession to end a war that we did not start.
"Our" people?
That kind of moral calculus simply doesn't track with me: I'm neither from the US nor Japan, plus I think considerations of "civilization" fly out the window once you start thinking like this.
But also, it's a kind of goalpost shifting. Either the calculations were the justification, in which case it matters whether they were right, or they weren't. It's not right to argue "well, the actual numbers don't matter because...".
> Either the calculations were the justification
The person I responded to was trying to suggest the number of American lives saved was a lot fewer than estimates. Instead of saving 1,000,000 Americans it "only" saved 50,000 or something and because of that, the calculus to use the bomb wasn't as "good" as it otherwise would be if it had saved more lives.
I say if it saved a single American life it was worth it, and was righteous, thus the shifting around of how many American lives saved is pointless because we know the lower bound is 1, and 1 was all you needed.
It was pretty simple: you said "they’re our people and their lives matter more" and I explained that they are not "our" people because you're not talking to an US American: you're talking to a South American. They are not "my" people.
I also claimed that, in any case, arguments out of "our" vs "their" people are fundamentally not about being civilized (which was the root of the argument, let me quote it for context: "dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option. Oppenheimer et al. deserve their acclaim.").
You can make "us vs them" arguments, but it has nothing to do with being civilized, and it doesn't save anyone from accusations of barbarism. I mean, Hitler also thought in terms of "us vs them", and look how he is regarded today.
> The person I responded to was trying to suggest the number of American lives saved was a lot fewer than estimates. Instead of saving 1,000,000 Americans it "only" saved 50,000 or something and because of that, the calculus to use the bomb wasn't as "good" as it otherwise would be if it had saved more lives.
The person you responded to was me. Your understanding of my argument is incorrect. I argued that the number mattered because the actual number is used to say "the invasion [Operation Downfall] would have caused more casualties than dropping the bomb, therefore the bomb 'saved' Japanese lives too". Please don't tell me you haven't heard this argument, which is very well known and in fact was mentioned by the original commenter I was responding to. This moral calculus has been quoted thousands of times; I'm pointing out it's misleading and dishonest.
You simply can't have your cake and eat it too. Either the numbers matter or they don't; and if they do matter, it matters that they are well justified and accurate. And it matters whether they were really thinking of these numbers when they decided to use the Bomb(s), or whether they are an a posteriori justification!
(Besides, as a sibling commenter argued, more aptly than I did: US planners wanted to use the Bomb because they had it and had spent a lot of effort developing it. They were primed to use it. They wanted to test it on a real city, with real humans, and they wanted to send a message to the Soviets, too. All excuses -- Operation Downfall, American vs Japanese lives, etc -- were a posteriori, retroactively deployed to not be portrayed as cold hearted).
> I say if it saved a single American life it was worth it, and was righteous, thus the shifting around of how many American lives saved is pointless because we know the lower bound is 1, and 1 was all you needed.
This is fundamentally wrong and doesn't support the argument from "civilization" which, again, was the argument I was responding to.
If you are going to argue American lives are worth preserving more than lives from other countries, not only do I disagree (how would you feel if I told you they are less worth preserving?), but it's also not about being civilized. So we can abandon that pretense!
Seventy two Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were already completely destroyed before the two atomic bombs were dropped. The two cities destroyed by atomic bombs were on a list to be destroyed regardless.
To the people killed, injured, or left in the shell of a city with no food or water it made very little real difference whether the cause was HE+incendiaries OR high burst shockwave from atomic bomb - the M&M statistics (death and injury, both immediate and following) were similar in either case.
The greatest military imperative to drop the atomic bombs were pragmatic .. they were developed at vast expanse for use on Germany but were not ready until after Germany surrended .. to close off an R&D program without a live target test on targets already targetted for destruction just seemed ... wasteful.
After the bombs were dropped, everything changed. Public awareness and perception. The need for post war PR. The start of the Cold War race with soviets over atomics. The pressing need for auto biographies and centre staging from actors late to the story, etc.
Much of the "justification" for dropping atomic bombs was retconned after the fact.
That urgency and willingness to surrender was before Japan knew that the USSR had already agreed with the allies to declare war on them at the Yalta conference in February. The USSR committed to declaring war on Japan "two or three" months after Germany fell, which happened on May 8th. They declared war on Japan on August 8th.
We did not forward any of this information onto the other allies. Instead we chose to nuke Japan on August 6th. The Emperor was allowed to remain as a figurehead.
[1] - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28458-document-39b-magic-...
More to the point, while Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible events, they were cheap lessons compared to what it would have cost humanity to establish the taboo of nuclear warfare later, in Korea or elsewhere, with bombs 10x to 1000x their size.
And I don't think there were any real lessons learned. We nearly nuked ourselves during the Cold War multiple times. And today, with bombs that make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like primitive weapons, you have people acting like nuclear war isn't something 'that' fearful. We killed hundreds of thousands of people largely for the sake of trying to get a slight geopolitical edge over the USSR. And that's far better than the alternative of there being no reason at all. In no world are the arguments about it saving lives valid, even if you attach 0 value to the life of the Japanese for having audacity to be born in the wrong country.
----
Leo Szilard was a critical scientist in the story of the atomic bomb, and he's also full of just amazingly insightful quotes. [1]
- Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?
- A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb.
- Even in times of war, you can see current events in their historical perspective, provided that your passion for the truth prevails over your bias in favor of your own nation.
So no, they wouldn't be considered war crimes, any more than the equally-destructive firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden would be considered war crimes. Meaning, of course they would be considered war crimes, but only if the victims had won the war. That's the idea behind war. War is about doing the worst stuff you can do to the other guys, then doing whatever you can to claim the moral high ground afterward. So it's best avoided when possible.
Szilard was a great guy, and in fact he was behind the original missive to FDR that kicked the program into gear. It's as impossible -- and as inappropriate -- for us to judge him and his motivations as it is for us to second-guess Truman's decision to drop the bombs. However, he's all wet with that particular argument. Unlike Germany there was never any question that the Allied side would win the war, bomb or no bomb. The question was, what would be the cost, and who should pay that cost. I'm fine with Japan paying it. They would certainly have done the same to us, and they would certainly have skipped the subsequent navel-gazing.
By the way, it's easy to argue that the 'slight geopolitical edge' that the Bomb gave us over the USSR saved millions of lives in the future. For instance, it's far from clear that North Korea wouldn't be better off today if MacArthur had been allowed to have his way.
Imagine that the Russians had either somehow beaten us to the Bomb, or had invaded Japan in the absence of our ability to deter them. Given a choice between suffering Hiroshima and Nagasaki at our hands, and suffering a half-century of Communist rule, do you really think Japan would be better off in the latter scenario?
To kill a billion people by conventional bombs would require years of sustained effort costing trillions of dollars, and I imagine the army doing that killing would collapse under the moral horror of its own actions far before that number is reached. On that other hand, thousands of nuclear weapons can be deployed by a very small group of amoral people with instantaneous destructive effects.
[0]https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-air-force-lands-fighter-p...
And even if all of those fields are destroyed in the US, the 747s modified for AF1 (VC-25s) are capable of in flight refueling, they can stay up for about three days before the oil needs to be changed on the engines and they are forced to land. So they can still reach Australia or some place far away from the US if the rest of the US is totally destroyed.
The US is vulnerable to that scenario as well, even though the military’s willingness to comply with literally textbook illegal orders is not encouraging.
They drive old cars, have slow internet and can't visit the coliseum. They're not invited to the cool parties.
Plenty of places have uranium and unless they are being watched like Iran they can just set up clandestine enrichment operations.
There are 9 nuclear-armed states today. Likely this has set us on a path where nuclear war is inevitable.
It's really hard to guess how retaliation would happen in practice, a large-scale nuclear war certainly isn't inevitable.
The most likely targets for nuclear strikes right now are also non-nuclear states.
It's scary, but in some scenarios one nation can absolutely nuke another nation without threat of getting nuked themselves. In reality, the cat coming out of the bag looks more like that than nuclear armageddon.
It's scary, but it's fine!
In 1998 neither India nor Pakistan were considered members of the nuclear warhead club.
Then India detonated 5 warhead sized kiloton and sub kiloton class thermonuclear (fusion / hydrogen) weapons .. and within 20 days Pakistan responded with six atomic tests (non fusion, larger than warhead size).
The interesting thing about that exchange is that India suprised the world intelligence community pants down with capability and execution, and Pakistan's speed of response was equally suprising.
Despite the spectacle of rapid cross fire of eleven nuclear weapons and tense international responses the small nuke treats didn't escalate into anything larger .. and likely served to keep heads a little cooler wrt both India and Pakistan.
All up there has been > 2,000 nuclear detonations across the globe, some definitely intended to intimidate or otherwise push the envelope of possibility.
In that light another small nuke that avoided civilians and had a military target is unlikely to escalate although it would certainly cause a collective intake of breath and give pause.
I said Russia dropping a nuke on a Ukranian military site will not escalate into a nuclear war. I say this because so many people assume that it would and it makes no sense.
Of course, other options such as biological weapons have been explored in the past. Ukraine wouldn't necessarily have to invest all that much to prepare retaliatory operations capable of killing millions of Russians in the case of a nuclear attack.
The only problem with such less orthodox means is that they're almost necessarily covert, and therefore can provide limited deterrence. "We have ways to impose immense costs if necessary" just doesn't sound that scary when the means are a secret.
Game theory works when players know the payout matrix. When the assumed payout matrix is shown to be false, you get very chaotic, almost random results, because you can't assume that your opponents will correctly choose the rational choice. With WMDs, the consequences of that can be deadly. That's why both nuclear proliferation and "limited" nuclear war are such fraught choices, and why the major nuclear powers have worked so hard to avoid them. They've run the game theoretic simulations and understand that it doesn't lead anywhere good.
I agree with you. It's really bad and it's a slippery slope. It's also true that there are many scenarios where you can launch nukes without repercussions. That's the misperception I'm pointing out.
It seems extraordinarily unlikely we'd have attempted such a thing if Venezuela had nukes.
And frankly, the Venezuelan military is absolutely tiny and has been facing the same economic issues as the rest of the country. They have 24 F-16s, but rumor is none of them work anymore, maybe some SU-30s, but those would be shot down pretty much as soon as they were scrambled. There was pretty heavy bombing before hand to knock out AA. And they bombed Chavez's tomb, which is quite a dick move of there wasn't any AA there; blowing up a graveyard for shits and giggles on an op is some shit even cartels have a little bit more respect than to do.
IDK, the whole thing seems like equally could have been mostly what it says on the tin, with no more than the normal intelligence HUMINT/SIGINT/*INT cloak and dagger crap to have the right intelligence.
Is that confirmed? because i think that would be a textbook example of a war crime.
I think people are suspicious because Maduro allegedly didnt seem to make it to a bunker in time, which if things are being bombed and helicopters are showing up on radar, one would think he would have sufficient time to get to some secure room, which in turn would delay things enough for reenforcements to arrive.
I think some of the suspicion is that we are talking about helicopters not fighter jets, which seem like they would be easy to take out even with how degraded their military is. But idk
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cly1x12v33jt
> One image claiming to show the tomb actually shows the aftermath of a real US strike on the nearby Cagigal Observatory. The observatory is reportedly used by the General Command of the Bolivarian Militia branch of the Venezuelan military.
> We’ve also seen a viral image claiming to show extensive damage to the mausoleum but this appears to be an an AI-manipulated version of a real picture of the building published in 2013.
> Plus, the Hugo Chavez Foundation posted its own videos on Monday to show people the tomb was intact and called on people in Venezuela not to spread speculation.The videos displayed Monday’s date on a phone before zooming in on the Cuartel de la Montaña 4F to show there was no visible damage to the building.
1. Did Ukraine control the nukes, or did Russia?
2. Could Ukraine keep them working on its own?
3. If nukes stop invasions, why do nuclear countries still get attacked?
On top of that the Soviet nuclear lockout systems are rumored to be much simpler than the American ones. Whereas the American system is rumored to be something like the decryption key for the detonation timings (without which you have at best a dirty bomb), the Soviet lockout mechanism is rumored to just be a lockout device with a 'is locked' signal going to the physics package. If that's all true, taking control of those nukes from a technical perspective would be on the order of hotwiring a 1950s automobile.
Taking physical control would have been more complex, but everything was both more complex and in some ways a lot simpler as the wall fell. It would have ultimately been a negotiation.
2) See above.
3) Which military nuclear power has been attacked by the kind of adversary that you can throw a nuke at? Yes, it doesn't remove all threats, but no solution does. Removing a class of threat (and arguably the most powerful class of threat in concrete terms) is extremely valuable.
Your computer is designed and built in China therefore your computer belongs to Chinese and China. Right?
> See above
Maybe you should see how good the Ukraine was at keeping their naval assets after they used the totally legal methods to obtain them. Maybe then you would have a clue on how good they could had maintained them.
The previous owner was the USSR, who ceased to exist, and who Ukraine was a part of.
> Maybe you should see how good the Ukraine was at keeping their naval assets after they used the totally legal methods to obtain them. Maybe then you would have a clue on how good they could had maintained them.
Are you talking about the ships that weren't originally that Russia mostly scuttled on their way out of Sevastopal, in addition to stuff like a 70% completed nuclear powered carrier that even Russia couldn't maintain the sister to, and didn't fit in any naval doctrine that made sense for Ukraine?
Not quite.
> and who Ukraine was a part of
Oh, so there were some wedding contract what stated what in case the parties.. part - there would be the transfer and division of assets? When why Belorussia didn't received their part of the navy? Kazakhstan? Georgia? Baltics, because they surely "were parts of USSR"?
> Are you talking about the ships that weren't originally
That weren't originally what? I know you degraded to just throwing words with your blanket knowledge but again you can find out the fate of the ships the Ukraine used totally legit means to obtain from Russian Federation with a quite short trip to Wikipedia.
Actually, exactly. We're specifically talking about the arsenal of the 43rd Rocket Army of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. A force not reorganized until much later to be under the Russian Federation, and the relevant 1990 Budapest Memorandum occurred before the 1991 creation of the CIS.
Rather than a vague "not quite", would you care to elaborate?
> Oh, so there were some wedding contract what stated what in case the parties.. part - there would be the transfer and division of assets? When why Belorussia didn't received their part of the navy? Kazakhstan? Georgia? Baltics, because they surely "were parts of USSR"?
I think a divorce settlement is actually a pretty good model actually. Those other states rankly didn't have the means to keep them, but should have been otherwise compensated for that loss. However, as I described above, Ukraine literally designed and built large portions of these systems as was capable of keeping them.
> That weren't originally what? I know you degraded to just throwing words with your blanket knowledge but again you can find out the fate of the ships the Ukraine used totally legit means to obtain from Russian Federation with a quite short trip to Wikipedia.
I'm dyslexic and accidentally a word while editing. Are you incapable of telling what was meant by context, or where you just looking for a reason not to address the point made?
Good, you made a first step, now do the other two.
> but should have been otherwise compensated for that loss
It's quite amusing what you are clearly imply what some state shouldn't be compensated at all.
> Are you incapable of telling what was meant by context, or where you just looking for a reason not to address the point made?
Yes, I'm incapable of telling why you threw something completely unrelated to the question. I'm not LLM.
> Ukraine literally designed and built large portions of these systems as was capable of keeping them.
Ah, yes, the mighty Ukraine who solely done that, right? Every other nation, state and people in the USSR didn't do shit to that. I have a feeling you are thinking about that issue as some sort of video game: just a couple of factories and a bunch of special units. But the things are not like that in RL.
This is uncalled for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why not take the thread somewhere constructive by writing out a more complete, stronger argument?
The question is whether china would be capable of maintaining the equipment they created and have physical possession of, not whether they can root it without physical access.
Russia may have just continually pushed the envelope until it became clear there wasn't a bright red line, and eventually someone would push the button.
And the point of nukes isn't to launch them. By then you've already lost, you're just making good on your offer to make the other shmuck lose too.
They don't even need that. They just needed ambiguity.
Ukraine absolutely fucked up giving up its nukes, that's abundantly clear with the benefit of hindsight.
Do you understand that nuclear weapons don't work like that, and leaders with nuclear buttons give orders to launch nuclear weapons every few months? And only they know they're using a training launch code; everyone else finds that out when the missiles does not fly off at the end of the launch sequence.
Russia invades. Ukraine launches nukes. Every major city in Ukraine is ash. Several major cities in Russia are ash. Millions die plausibly.
That scenario is not what would happen from an invasion.
Zelensky would not have used nukes to prompt the death of millions instantly. He would have proceeded with the same defensive war.
The false premise rests on: it's better for everyone to die than live under Russian occupation. That would overwhelmingly be chosen false by the population in question that is being invaded.
All those people that lived under Soviet Russia occupation, they were better off dead in nuclear fire than living under said occupation? Obviously not what the masses would have chosen (just look at what they did choose to do while living under Russian occupation - how many gave up their lives to fight back?). It's fundamentally why nuclear weapons as deterrant is largely fraudulent. They're solely viable as a last option against total oblivion at the hands of an enemy: it entails everyone dies, which means there has to be a good enough reason for everyone to die to justify use.
As someone from a country that used to be under russia n boot - the fireball is preferable.
Well, Russian occupation usually means your town slowly undergoes mass extermination and genocide....
so yes? nuclear fireball is potentially preferred
Tactical nukes are in ambiguous territory. Russia launching a blizzard of nukes at Ukraine is difficult to distinguish from Russia nuking NATO. To turn Ukraine into glass, Russia would need to gamble that Washington and France trust it.
Which is indistinguishable from a Russian first strike. Russia glassing Ukraine is about as rational as it launching a first strike. So serious people would have to weigh–based on incomplete information–whether Putin is still in charge and if tens of millions of lives might be saved if we neutralise their silos first.
Outside nuclear holocaust, Russia, on launching a strategic nuclear strike on Ukraine, would have crossed a red line Beijing, New Delhi and Tehran each value. (The last because Russia's justification for glassing Ukraine is easily copy-pasted by Israel.)
It's really not. Once they've launched, it's pretty clear where they're going. All NATO needs is enough time to respond, and they absolutely have that.
> Outside nuclear holocaust, Russia, on launching a strategic nuclear strike on Ukraine, would have crossed a red line Beijing, New Delhi and Tehran each value. (The last because Russia's justification for glassing Ukraine is easily copy-pasted by Israel.)
If you look, their nuclear policy is to respond overwhelmingly to a nuclear strike. India for instance has officially said they "will not be the first to initiate a nuclear first strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail". https://web.archive.org/web/20091205231912/http://www.indian... That's diplomatic speak for 'we reserve the right to glass you after any nuclear strikes in our territory'.
What are you basing this on? Even back when warheads were strictly ballistic we couldn't do that. Russia's arsenal, today, contains maneuverable warheads.
Flip it around: if we committed to a first strike on Russia and China, is there a world in which we wouldn't say it's to glass North Korea?
> All NATO needs is enough time to respond
This is not how strategic nuclear exchanges are ever modeled. Because it's now how strategic war plans are ever written.
Use it or lose it. Silo-based missiles are sitting ducks. By the time nukes are landing in Ukraine they could be landing across a good chunk of Europe and Turkey.
> If you look, their nuclear policy is to respond overwhelmingly to a nuclear strike
I'm not saying India will nuke Russia. I'm saying India and China would both exact a price from Russia for normalising nuclear war in the modern context. This has been repeatedly messaged by both in respect of the Ukraine invasion.
> Flip it around: if we committed to a first strike on Russia and China, is there a world in which we wouldn't say it's to glass North Korea?
Because while you can't tell how far a missile is going to go, you can tell how far it has gone. We're more than capable of tracking that a missile has gone past what would make sense for a Russian strike on Ukraine.
And you'd be able to tell if a launch made sense to attack NK from the US or not. Orbital mechanics and the burn patterns of ICBMs don't really let you redirect at the last minute, and the trajectory wouldn't really make sense.
> This is not how strategic nuclear exchanges are ever modeled. Because it's now how strategic war plans are ever written.
> Use it or lose it. Silo-based missiles are sitting ducks. By the time nukes are landing in Ukraine they could be landing across a good chunk of Europe and Turkey.
Europe and Turkey have no silo based weapons left. It's all either airborne or submarine delivery these days.
In this scenario the weapons are all already in the air, or on submarines where they've been as safe as they always are.
> I'm not saying India will nuke Russia. I'm saying India and China would both exact a price from Russia for normalizing nuclear war in the modern context. This has been repeatedly messaged by both in respect of the Ukraine invasion.
Once again, the context here is a Ukrainian nuclear (even if tactical) first strike, and the subsequent Russian retaliation. "Punitive" retaliation is all of their strategy. This has already been normalized. Which is why a "tactical" nuclear strike would never make sense.
Generally speaking, a bunch of Russian silos lighting up would put us at DEFCON 1. We’re not waiting until it passes Ukraine. It we want to engage any boost-phase ABM, we’re not going to let it. (Which leads to its own issues.)
> you'd be able to tell if a launch made sense to attack NK from the US or not
At some point. But waiting will cost you precious minutes, and you don’t know what else is in position e.g. off your coast.
> Europe and Turkey have no silo based weapons left
I was unclear. I meant conventional forces that would be targets in a first strike.
> "Punitive" retaliation is all of their strategy. This has already been normalized
Strategic retaliation for tactical nukes has not been normalized. This is still entirely ambiguous and hotly debated.
Again, flip it around. If you knew China and Russia would stand down if they thought you were just nuking North Korea, you could use that to gain material advantage in a first strike.
I already said they'd be at DEFCON 1.
> At some point. But waiting will cost you precious minutes, and you don’t know what else is in position e.g. off your coast.
Waiting might also keep you out of a nuclear war. They know exactly how long they can wait.
> I was unclear. I meant conventional forces that would be targets in a first strike.
Convential forces are inconsequential wrt a full nuclear strike.
> Strategic retaliation for tactical nukes has not been normalized. This is still entirely ambiguous and hotly debated.
I already quoted you the exact policy from one of your examples.
> Again, flip it around. If you knew China and Russia would stand down if they thought you were just nuking North Korea, you could use that to gain material advantage in a first strike.
If you were retaliating because NK had already set off a tactical nuke in your territory? Once again, the orbital mechanics don't work like that. Looking at it, the only thing you could hit from US silos launched so that they look like they're hitting North Korea would maybe be Hong Kong. Which once those missiles go past North Korea, China is already considering it a first strike and retaliating, so you didn't really gain anything.
If you notice, most countries with nuclear weapons also have published and publicized nuclear use policies. These documents usually highlight lines and conditions under which they will consider the use of nuclear weapons. This is by design. Ambiguity in nuclear policy invites miscalculation. Of course, you don't want complete certainty, lest you risk your enemy push right up to your line and no further; you want your lines defined, but a little blurry, so that the enemy is afraid to approach, much less cross. This is called strategic ambiguity. This is why Russia has been criticized a lot by policy experts for their repeated nuclear saber-rattling. They're making the line too blurry, and so Ukraine and their allies risk crossing that line accidentally, triggering something nobody truly wants to trigger.
In the case of a nuclear-armed Ukraine, given Russia's tendency to like to take over neighboring countries, they could include "threats to territorial integrity" as a threshold for going nuclear. They could also be a little more 'reasonable' and include "existential threat to the state" - which the initial 2022 invasion very much would fit.
What this looks like in practice is that Russia, in their calculations, would factor in the risk of triggering a nuclear response if they tried to take Ukrainian territory. Now, they may believe, as you seem to, that Ukraine would not risk the annihilation of its people over Crimea/Donbas. At which point, Russia would invade, and then Ukraine would have to decide. If Ukraine does not escalate, then they will lose deterrence and credibility for any future conflicts, assuming they survive as a state. If Ukraine does escalate, announces to Russia they will launch a nuclear attack to establish deterrence (reducing ambiguity that this is a full nuclear exchange), and then launches a single low-yield nuke at Russian invading troops, they place the ball back in Russia's court: Ukraine is clearly willing to employ nukes in this war - do you believe they won't escalate further, or do you believe they will launch their full arsenal if you continue?
This is essentially a simplified version of deterrence theory. The idea is to give the other side all possible opportunities to de-escalate and prevent a full nuclear exchange. If you do not back up your policy with actual teeth - by using nukes when you said you would - you're signalling something very dangerous.
This is also why nuclear-armed states do not tend to rely solely on their nuclear deterrence. They want a solid layer of conventional capabilities before they have to resort to their proverbial nuclear button. A strong conventional force keeps conflicts below the nuclear threshold, where deterrence theory tends to get very dangerous, very fast.
Most nuclear doctrines are ambiguous by design. ("Reserve the right," et cetera.)
But they are not. We can thus look at the people who make decisions, but not at the countries themselves. So, it’s most likely not about joining NATO, but about European integration and economic growth.
The only reason Ukraine joining NATO is a problem is if Putin/Russia (or someone else) wants to attack them.
I know there's a real risk of peaceful trade, mutual alliance, humanity, and democracy from breaking out in such circumstances but somehow I think the risk might be worth it for the billions of us who aren't completely fucked up megalomaniacs.
I mean, that's objectively not true since Libya, who attacked no one, but had a NATO bombing campaign to assist their civil war.
NATO is no longer a purely defensive pact.
No, it wasn't put on paper anywhere.
No, it wasn't mentioned (much) when the countries of eastern Europe all chomped at the bit to join NATO in the 90s.
No, it completely makes the Budapest Memorandum bunk.
No, the people of Ukraine absolutely do not have the agency to want to pivot towards the EU and become wealthy and stable like the former Warsaw Pact countries did. It must have been the CIA, so Budapest is bunk again!
(and other lies the war apologists tell themselves)
It would probably rule out the type of decapitation strike the US did, but bgp hijacking is way way below on the escalation ladder.
The US couldn't just fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Most likely every single one of those helicopters would end up being shot down.
Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention.
Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.
No. The obstacle isn't Chinese intervention, the obstacle is that such an operation would have to be significantly larger and it would take longer. There would be much more air defense assets to suppress, and some of them would be impossible to effectively defeat.
A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation by North Korea. Both countries would also certainly have better safeguarding mechanisms for their heads of state, during that bombing they would be evacuated and now you'd probably be looking at the very least at a weeks-long operation.
Assassination is a different thing, but I would suspect that for purely psychological reasons a rapid kidnapping operation like this would be far less likely to invite anything more than symbolic retaliation than a single targeted missile strike. This kind of operation would be far more confusing for the enemy than a simple assassination, and the window during which for example nuclear retaliation might make sense tends to be rather small.
>Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.
Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one. They'd have shot down every single helicopter. You don't even need fancy missiles, a bunch of .50cal machine guns will do the trick.
I have serious doubts they can manage anything more than a fizzle yield, but also only give them a one-in-three chance of a successful ballistic launch. It may be the case that they don't even have the preparatory work done, in which case hours isn't enough to launch, they'd need days/weeks. In any event, we're talking about one or two missiles only, and the Navy's ability to shoot those down in the midcourse/terminal phase is sufficient for such a small salvo.
If North Korea wanted to nuke us, they'd be better off handing the warhead off to some terrorist group to truck it across the Mexican border. Supposing their stuff is even small enough to smuggle.
>Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one.
But it doesn't have a China willing to rush in with 1 million PLA infantry. Which is really North Korea's only saving grace. Even if we got Kim out before they could mobilize, they'd be strutting and posturing for weeks, and there are any number of places they could fuck things up in retaliation. Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, they might even stir shit up with India. They could, one supposes, send a few divisions to Russia on loan, and enter into the Ukraine fray. And no clever strategy is going to counter that stuff. Some of this stuff they're already considering and only hesitant... a North Korea operation might goad them into working up the courage to try it.
Why is that? Of the 6 North Korean nuclear tests, only the first one was so low-yield that it might have been a fizzle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...
One, nobody exactly allows independent observers so we only really get seismo readings from those tests. And they don't make alot of sense. Yields should've been higher for plutonium cores, it's not lightweight stuff. And I wouldn't put it past them to have somehow pulled a fast one to fool foreign intelligence agencies (though stockpiling thousands of tons of high explosives fake a successful nuclear test seems beyond farcical). Just seems wrong.
Would that even work? I'd expect there to be obvious spectral differences, making such deception unrealistic.
Similarly, if a head of state is killed by poison or other similar means, you could hardly expect nuclear retaliation when their successor later discovers what happened.
An important part of deterrence is broadcasting that you've done this though. It all works much better if your enemies approximately understand your processes
The existence of a plan does not equate to the feasibility of its execution. A submarine-based deterrent is indeed the "gold standard" for survivability, but it is not the only standard. There is enough pain for the US that they wouldn't actually attack Pakistan.
The US does have the advantage that the surviving Pakistani nukes might very well end up flying to India instead :)
These are the states whose Senators are in play this year [1].
Let's say Trump decides it's fuck-around-with-Islamabad-o'clock. He fucks around. Pakistan nukes at India. How many of those Senate seats flip as a result? I'm going to guess none.
Let's go one step further. Pakistan nukes Al Udeid and Camp Arifjan (both theoretically within range of their Shaheen-III). American troops are killed. Does the President's party lose any seats? At that point, I'd bet on a rally-'round-the-flag effect.
The truth is there isn't political downside to the President fucking around with Pakistan. Its nuclear deterrent isn't designed to contain America. And it can't threaten us with maybe the one thing that could make Trump suffer, a refugee crisis.
If America does something to pakistan, then pakistan wouldn't bomb India but rather America
In your scenario India did literally nothing. I know the rivalry but even then India has its own nukes and if India wasn't part of the plan then case would be on America
A much more likely scenario is that Pakistan's military would take over (Pakistan has never been really stable after its independence) and their ties with china would grow and China would feel threatened as well and if things go the same as venezuela that is that Trump says that they would control pakistan for time being (similar to venezuela) then China would be genuinely pissed and a WW3 conflict can arise considering China could send their military there and the possibility of nuke could be a choice if the war really happens between America/China but the possibility of it is really really slim and depends on how the war goes.
This is a mistaken assumption. It is very likely that the nukes would always fly to India unless the US somehow communicated their intent before acting.
In a situation where you're launching nukes in retaliation, you're usually not waiting very long to think about where you're going to be sending them to.
This isn't an option. Not within a nuclear window. The only bases within range are Al Udeid and Camp Arifjan. Hence its inclusion in the above scenario.
> then China would be genuinely pissed and a WW3 conflict can arise
This is tantamount to saying Pakistan can't actually retaliate. Which is my point. Pakistan's nuclear deterrent doesn't actually deter America. China does.
It does, US cannot disregard the consequences of a strike on India regardless of their relationship with India.
On a normal day it'd probably not be a huge problem for Pakistani ballistic missiles to penetrate those bases’ own air defenses. However if the US was planning a strike, there'd certainly be Aegis BMD coverage there, which would be a problem. It's possible they'd even deploy THAAD to protect some bases.
The US could probably bomb even Beijing, it doesn't really tell you anything that they were able to bomb Iran also.
Still probably quite a bit different then helicopter inserted decapitation strike.
The only consistent action for the US to take, given they - and much of the world - do not consider Maduro the legitimate President of Venezuela, was to remove him from power.
However, just because there are just war grounds for Maduro's capture per se doesn't mean the operation was justified by just war principles. It wasn't. It takes more than just the fact that the ruler is tyrannical to justify an operation like this. Operations like this can risk civil war and all sorts of horrible fallout that also need to be considered. There must be a realistic plan following the removal of the tyrannical leader. As always, justice must be upheld always. And of course there are the procedural and legal aspects that Trump totally ignored.
Furthermore, Trump has revealed that once again, he's full of shit. He and his people have been chanting their opposition to regime change operations and various military involvement for years, even until a few months ago. And now, voila.
Reality is not that black and white. We may no longer have formal colonies, buy the world is still carved up by spheres of influence by the superpowers. Displease them and you'll find out how limited your sovereignty really is.
You have to assume everyone is willing to die over every single thing short of obliteration.
So what's the scenario then? Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela launches its nukes, everyone dies on both sides. Please, explain that laughable premise. Everyone in Venezuela dies for Maduro? Go on, explain it, I'll wait.
Back in reality: Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela shakes its fists at the sky, threatens nuclear hell fire. Nothing happens. Why? The remaining leadership of Venezuela does not in fact want to die for Maduro.
With Iran, North Korea, or Ukraine, the calculus is different.
Now do this same exercise for Taiwan.
US attacks, Maduro threatens to launch nuke(s) ... then what? Do you call bluff?
Maduro was capture in a militair base (as he did a Saddam, switching sleeping locations), he almost made it into a safe room. What if he had nukes and made it to the safe room. You know the expression "Cornered rat"... For all he knew, the US was there to kill him. The US killed his 30 Cuban bodyguards so high change Maduro thought its his end.
> "Cornered rat" refers to the idiom that even weak individuals become desperate and dangerous when given no escape, often applied to intense political or military pressure.
The scenario that you called, that nobody wants to die for Maduro, is you gambling that nobody want to die for him or not follow the chain of command! Do you want to risk it? No matter how many precaution you take, are you really sure that not one or more nukes go to Texas or Miami?
This is why Nukes are so powerful, even in the hands of weaker countries. It gives a weaker country a weapon that may inflict untold dead to the more powerful country (let alone the political impact). Its a weapon that influences decision making, even in the most powerful countries.
Do you think the US and EU would have hesitated to send enough arms to keep Ukraine comfortably fending off Russia if they weren't afraid of the nuclear threat that Russia kept toying with?
Why would it?
1. "Nuclear capability" is not binary. The available delivery mechanisms and the defensive capabilities of your adversary matter a lot.
2. MAD constrains both sides. It's unlikely that an unpopular Head of State getting kidnapped would warrant a nuclear first strike especially against a country like (Trump's) America, which would not hesitate to glass your whole country in response.
3. It's extremely risky to "try" a nuke, because even if it's shot down, does it mean your enemy treats it as a nuclear strike and responds as if it had landed? That's a very different equation from conventional missiles. E.g. Iran sends barrages of missiles because they expect most of them to be shot down. It's probably not calculating a scenario where all of them land and Israel now wants like-for-like revenge.
Heads of state are generally pretty good at delegating the C&C of their nukes to people they are pretty popular with. That's orthogonal to popularity polls of the populace.
You could automate the process or compartmentalize it enough so that no one knows they are essentially committing suicide. But in that case you are removing human reason from the loop and your system will be too sensitive.
Essentially you have an automated deadman’s switch. Either you tune it to be too sensitive and the thing goes off because you went out of contact for a few hours—likely resulting in your own death.
Or you tune it to be not sensitive enough and your attacker takes advantage of the delay to take control of or destroy the system.
Why care whomever is in power next? You could just do your job.
So, the solution is to press the nuclear button, get a couple hundred million dollars from an offshore account in Cyprus, and live in any country of your choice. Why care about polls in this hole, and what the US will do with this hole in response to the use of nuclear weapons?
The chances of all of those people escaping the country after nuking the US is close to zero. The entire country would mostly likely be completely destroyed before you could make it out. Even if you did make it out, your friends and extended family definitely won’t.
And good luck spending that money when the US is intent on hunting you down. In this scenarios your boss wasn’t safe with a nuclear deterrent, you’re definitely not.
I think this is a situation where even if Venezuela had nukes, this still would have happened.
a. Don’t use nukes, everyone moves one rung up the ladder. b. Use nukes. Ladder is destroyed, everyone dies horribly.
Using nukes only makes sense if everyone is going to die horribly anyway. It’s an empty threat otherwise.
Our systems are designed around ICBM detection.
A tactical/suitecase nuke like the old US Army Green Light teams wouldn't trigger that. In fact, it would likely take awhile to trace. The "limited nuclear war" concept.
We can see that nobody was going to resist the operation in Venezuela, so it doesn't really matter that Venezuela doesn't have nukes. Using nukes isn't just a matter of pressing a button, it involves a lot of people and processes - thus any significant opposition inside the force or just widespread sabotage will make it unusable.
But it seems equally likely to me that he was sold out by somebody in the VZ government/military. And that the paltry military resistance was because they saw direct confrontation with the US as suicidal.
Not impossible but certainly in the tinfoil hat range of possibilities.
It sounds stupid. Maduro has no way to enforce the deal, and the US has no incentive to fulfill this deal.
> We can see that nobody was going to resist the operation in Venezuela, so it doesn't really matter that Venezuela doesn't have nukes.
To use it, no resistance is matter. One person must do their job to launch a nuclear weapon. That's all.
> it involves a lot of people and processes
It doesn't matter. Nuclear deterrence exercises are conducted regularly. And their peculiarity is that no one except the person with the red button knows whether it's an exercise or whether the missiles will actually be launched this time.
So when the order to launch comes, many people will be performing a large number of complex processes which will result in the use of nuclear weapons. Because they regularly receive such orders and carry out these processes.
The short answer is that there hasn't been a ton of movement across the market at large, but since Saturday, bonds have been swinging up towards the all-time high they set last December. Can't say for certain that that movement is tied to VZ though.
[1]:https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as8048ref=loworbitsecur...
Apparently that is part of implementing ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) in TLS 1.3 where the DNS hosts the public key of the server to fully encrypt the server name in a HTTPS request. Since Nginx and other popular web servers don't yet support it, I suspect the 7% of requests are mostly Cloudflare itself.
(1) https://radar.cloudflare.com/?ref=loworbitsecurity.com#dns-q...
The new development (encrypted client hello) is you no longer have to send the hostname. So someone listening in the middle would only see you connected to an AWS/etc IP. This will make blocking websites very difficult if they use shared services like cloudflare or cloud VPS hosting.
I see this as a very good development and a big win for privacy. I have been running my own DNS server for years to prevent passive logging, but could basically do nothing against the SNI leak.
Until some clueless judge orders all of cloudflare to be blocked.
Though I worry that instead western governments will beat the judges to the punch and start asking things like DNS providers or even HTTPS servers to keep logs that can be subpoenaed much like a telecom company keeps a log of each phone call ("metadata"), or else be blocked...
In terms of privacy, your DNS history probably isn't very interesting. It's almost all going to be requests for the top social media sites. Which governments have full access to the stuff you post there.
If you don’t use a CDN at all, the destination IP leaks what site you’re trying to connect to (if the domain is well known). If you use a CDN without ECH, you send an unencrypted domain name in the HTTPS negotiation so it’s visible there. ECH+CDN is an attempt to have the best of both worlds: your traffic to the site will not advertise what site you’re connecting to, but the IP can still be shared between a variety of sites.
It’ll be interesting to see how countries with lighter censorship schemes adapt - China etc. of course will just block the connection.
In theory, sites could eventually require ECH to serve anything at all. But we're very far from that.
I doubt the Chinese government would care about that. They don't depend on the west for their online services any more than we depend on them. All that would happen is that the internet would bifurcate to an even greater degree than it already has.
It's extremely helpful at home in the west as a countermeasure against data monetization and dragnet surveillance. It certainly isn't perfect but at least it reduces the ability of ISPs to collect data on end users as well as forcing the government to formally move against the cloud providers if they want the data. Not that I want the cloud providers having my data to begin with but that's a different rant.
So for example, Firefox since version 119. Or Chrome since 117
Now, for most services ECH doesn't have an encrypted target server. But the important choice in ECH was in this case it just fills that space with noise. An encrypted message also looks like noise. So you can block all the noise, in case it's secrets, or you can let through all the noise (some of which might be secrets) or I suppose you can choose randomly, but you can't do what such regimes want, which is to only forbid secrets, that's not a thing.
We've been here before. When sites starting going to TLS 1.3 lots of HN people said oh, China will just block that, easy. But the choice wasn't "Use TLS 1.3 or keep doing whatever China is happy with instead" the choice was "Use TLS 1.3 or don't connect" and turns out for a lot of the Web China wasn't OK with "don't connect" as their choice, so TLS 1.3 is deployed anyway.
For ECH, China can just require you turn it off. Or distribute their own blessed distribution. It’s the more marginal censorship regimes that will be in an interesting spot. Especially ones where the ISPs are mostly responsible for developing the technical measures.
To actually "inspect" TLS 1.3 you need the keys which are chosen randomly for each session by the parties - so either (1) you have a mathematical breakthrough, (2) you have secured co-operation from one or both parties (in which case they could equally tell you what they said) or (3) in fact you don't have inspection.
As you observe forward secrecy was already possible in TLS 1.2 and China's "Great firewall" didn't magically stop that either. In fact what we see is that China blocks IP outright when it doesn't want you to talk to an address, the protocol doesn't come into that. What we changed wasn't whether China can block connections, but how easy it is to snoop those connections.
> For ECH, China can just require you turn it off
So did they? Remember, I'm not talking about some hypothetical future, this technology is actively in use today and has been for some time.
China was already leaning on passive DPI and L3 blocking before TLS 1.3 complicated (but as I said, did not preclude) downgrading to PFS ciphers. The reason being that for about the last 10 years, many sites (including default CDN settings) used SSL profiles that only allowed PFS ciphers. For such a server, downgrade attacks are already not useful to the Great Firewall, so adding TLS 1.3 to the mix didn’t change anything.
> So did they? Remember, I'm not talking about some hypothetical future, this technology is actively in use today and has been for some time.
Google Chrome (for example) will now use ECH if the website has the relevant DNS record - but it doesn’t use the anti-censorship mechanism in the spec to make requests to servers that haven’t enabled it look like they may be using ECH. This, combined with the fact that China can just not serve the relevant DNS record by default, means it doesn’t really impact the great firewall.
This is actually a good example of the non-technical side of this: Chrome could send a fake ECH on every request, like the spec suggests. This would perhaps make China block all Chrome traffic to prevent widespread ECH. But then Chrome would lose out on the market share, so Google doesn’t do it. Technical solutions are relevant here, but even the most genius anti-censorship mechanism needs to content with political/corporate realities.
Nope. That's specifically guarded against, so double good news. 1) You get to learn something new about an important network protocol and 2) I get to tell you a story I enjoy telling
Here's the clever trick which is specified in RFC 8446 (the TLS 1.3 RFC)
In TLS we always have this "Random" field in both Client Hello and Server Hello, it's 32 bytes of random noise. At least, that's what it usually is. When a server implements TLS 1.3 but it receives a connection (in your scenario this is from a middlebox, but it might equally be somebody's long obsolete phone) which asks for TLS 1.2 then when it fills out the Random for this connection the last eight bytes aren't actually random, they spell "DOWNGRD" in ASCII and then a 01 byte. If the client seems to ask for any older version of TLS which is supported then the server writes DOWNGRD and then a 00 byte instead.
As you hopefully realise this signals to a client that a MITM is attempting to downgrade them and so they reject the failed attack. You very likely have never seen your web browser's diagnostic for this scenario, but it's very much a failure not some sort of "Danger, Chinese government is spying on you" interstitial, because we know that warning users of danger they can't fix is pointless. So we just fail, the Chinese government could choose to annoy its citizens with this message but, why bother? Just drop the packets entirely, it's cheaper.
You might wonder, why Random ? Or, can't the MITM just replace this value and carry on anyway ? Or if you've got a bit more insight you might guess that these questions answer each other.
In TLS the Client and Server both need to be sure that each connection is different from any others, if they didn't assure themselves of this they'd be subject to trivial replay attacks. They can't trust each other, so to achieve this both parties inject Random data into the stream early, which means they don't care if the other party really used random numbers or just (stupidly) didn't bother. Shortly after this, during setup, the parties agree on a transcript of their whole conversation so far.
So, if the Random value you saw is different from the Random number your conversation partner expected, that transcript won't match, connection fails, nothing is achieved. But if the Random value isn't changed but somehow we ended up with TLS 1.2 it says DOWNGRD and a TLS 1.3 capable client knows that means it is under attack and rejects the connection, same outcome.
Now, I said there was an anecdote. It's about terrible middle boxes, because of course it is. TLS 1.3 was developed to get past terrible middle boxes and it was mostly successful, however shortly after TLS 1.3 non-draft launch (when the anti-downgrade mechanism was enabled, it would not be OK to have anti-downgrade in a draft protocol for reasons that ought to be obvious) Google began to see a significant number of downgrade failures, connected to particular brands of middlebox.
It turns out that these particular brands of middlebox were so crap that although they were proxying the HTTP connection, they were too cheap to generate their own Random data. So your TLS 1.3 capable browser calls their proxy, the proxy calls the TLS 1.3 capable server, and the proxy tells both parties it only speaks TLS 1.2, but it passes this bogus anti-downgrade "Random" value back as if it had made this itself, thus triggering the alarm.
Obviously on the "Last to change gets the blame" basis Google had customers blaming them for an issue caused ultimately by using a crap middlebox. So they actually added a Chrome feature to "switch off" this feature. Why do I mention this? Well, Chrome added that feature for 12 months. In 2018. So, unless it is still 2019 where you are, they in fact have long since removed that switch and all browsers enforce this rule. That 12 months grace gave vendors the chance to fix the bug or, if they were able to, persuade customers to buy a newer crap middlebox without this particular bug, and it gave customers 12 months to buy somebody else's middlebox or (if they were thus enlightened) stop using a middlebox.
It’s not just encrypted server name indication (ESNI), it is the whole hello now (ECH)! So you don’t leak anything.
HTTPS is the name of a protocol, which is mostly used to make the World Wide Web work, but we do lots of other things with it, such as DNS-over-HTTPS aka DoH.
However HTTPS is also the name of a type of DNS record, this record contains everything you need to best reach the named HTTPS (protocol) server, and this is the type of record your parent didn't previously know about
In the boring case, say, 20 years ago, when you type https://some.name/stuff/hats.html into a web browser your browser goes "Huh, HTTPS to some.name. OK, I will find out the IPv4 address of some.name, and it makes a DNS query asking A? some.name. The DNS server answers with an IPv4 address, and then as the browser connects securely to that IP address, it asks to talk to some.name, and if the remote host can prove it is some.name, the browser says it wants /stuff/hats.html
Notice we have to tell the remote server who we hope they are - and it so happens eavesdroppers can listen in on this. This means Bad Guys can see that you wanted to visit some.name. They can't see that you wanted to read the document about hats, but they might be able to guess that from context, and wouldn't you rather they didn't know more than they need to?
With the HTTPS record, your web browser asks (over secure DNS if you have it) HTTPS? some.name and, maybe it gets a positive answer. If it does, the answer tells it not only where to try to connect, but also it can choose to provide instructions for a cover name to always use, and how to encrypt the real name, this is part of Encrypted Client Hello (or ECH)
Then the web server tells the server that it wants to talk to the cover name and it provides an encrypted version of some.name. Eavesdroppers can't decrypt that, so if many people share the same endpoints then eavesdropper can't tell which site you were visiting.
Now, if the server only contains documents about hats, this doesn't stop the Secret Hat Police from concluding that everybody connecting to that server is a Hat Pervert and needs to go to Hat Jail. But if you're a bulk host then you force such organisations to choose, they can enforce their rules equally for everything (You wanted to read News about Chickens? Too bad, Hat Jail for you) or they can accept that actually they don't know what people are reading (if this seems crazy, keep in mind that's how US Post worked for many years after Comstock failed, if you get a brown paper package posted to you, well, it's your business what is in there, and your state wasn't allowed to insist on ripping open the packaging to see whether it is pornography or communist propaganda)
Which is why it is so important/useful to Cloudflare but of much lower utility to most nginx users.
It's one way, but a H1/H2 connection can also be promoted to H3 via the alt-svc header. The DNS method is slightly better though since it potentially allows a client to utilize H3 immediately from the first request.
AS prepending is a relatively common method of traffic engineering to reduce traffic from a peer/provider. Looking at CANTV's (AS8048) announcements from outside that period shows they do this a lot.
Since this was detected as a BGP route leak, it looks like CANTV (AS8048) propagated routes from Telecom Italia Sparkle (AS6762) to GlobeNet Cabos Sumarinos Columbia (AS52320). This could have simply been a misconfiguration.
Nothing nefarious immediately jumps out to me here. I don't see any obvious attempts to hijack routes to Dayco Telecom (AS21980), which was the actual destination. The prepending would have made traffic less likely to transit over CANTV assuming there was any other route available.
The prepending done by CANTV does make it slightly easier to hijack traffic destined to it (though not really to Dayco), but that just appears to be something they just normally do.
This could be CANTV trying to force some users of GlobeNet to transit over them to Dayco I suppose, but leaving the prepending in would be an odd way of going about it. I suppose if you absolutely knew you were the shortest path length, there's no reason to remove the prepending, but a misconfiguration is usually the cause of these things.
What most likely happened, instead of a purposeful attempt to leak routes and MITM traffic, is CANTV had too loose of a routing export policy facing their upstream AS52320 neighbor, and accidentally redistributed the Dayco prefixes that they learned indirectly from Sparkle (AS6762) when the direct Dayco routes became unavailable to them.
This is a pretty common mistake and would explain the leak events that were written about here.
Furthermore, BGP routes can get "stuck", if some device doesn't handle a withdrawal correctly… this can lead to odd routes like the ones seen here. Especially combined with the long path length and disappearance of better routes.
Clearly and empirically, BGP can shut off parts of the Internet, just as Trump wanted to do in 2015.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dear-donald-trump-no-you-1322...
Didn't the US use Chinooks? They're supposed to be loud. And AD didn't take even one out.
If Venezuela as corrupt as most socialist countries, I have no doubt that someone in his inner circle gave him up.
Back in the days of our version of socialism we had Indian politicians selling out for $100K, leave alone $50M.
A few thoughts: - The affected prefixes (200.74.224.0/20 block → Dayco Telecom) hosting banks and ISPs feels significant. If you're doing pre-kinetic intelligence gathering, knowing the exact network topology and traffic patterns of critical infrastructure would be valuable. Even a few hours of passive collection through a controlled transit point could map out dependencies you'd want to understand before cutting power. - What's also notable is the transit path through Sparkle, which the author points out doesn't implement RPKI filtering. That's not an accident if you're planning something (you'd specifically choose providers with weaker validation). - The article stops short of drawing conclusions, which is the right call. BGP anomalies are common enough that correlation ≠ causation. But the timing and the specific infrastructure affected make this worth deeper analysis.
Would love to see someone with access to more complete BGP table dumps do a before/after comparison of routing stability for Venezuelan prefixes in that window.
When BGP traffic is being sent from point A to point B, it can be rerouted through a point C. If you control point C, even for a few hours, you can theoretically collect vast amounts of intelligence that would be very useful for government entities.
kachapopopow•1d ago
Thaxll•1d ago
ronsor•1d ago
kachapopopow•1d ago
icedchai•1d ago
doublerabbit•1d ago
The radio towers we used to access to obtain the accounting data (CDRs) all had the same very weak password.
mesrik•20h ago
Considering the routing table size has been increasing and IPv6 need anyone shouldn't be running global routing with gear not supporting RPKI any more, the routing polices and announcing those RIR they operate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Public_Key_Infrastruc...
icedchai•17h ago
mesrik•20h ago
If that kind of happening directly from load of added 25 routes it's quite hard to believe it.
BGP peering routing policies have then been for the good reason constructed in way that they expect advertisements "exact accept" with a prefix-list with that /8 prefix, because that's is expected when peering is agreed even when not explicitly stated by many. This expected best practice following goal to manage and prevent internet routing table being filled with superfluous routes.But anyway, sudden change from /8 to 25 x /24 without first noticing your peers and giving them time to change that "exact accept;" to "orlonger accept;" is quite sure footgun if you don't know common principles of network management. But usually that kind of screwup blast radius is local mostly local only to that /8 prefix.
Not sure though how that could be technically avoided in BGP protocol or router control-plane (router OS config) design. Policy filters and best practices how to use them have been set for good reason. Not just to irritate and make things harder than they need to be. We certainly did not do that while I was still working.
Right, something else what could happen with that kind of sudden change is. If that peered had also other peers which had instead "orlonger" in place traffic would then switch to that, what could have some side effects like saturated links, slowness or even increased costs. Too bad, and may happen. But principle is that communicate your routing changes in good time before you actually make the changes. That will prevent most of this kind of problems ever happening to you.
mesrik•5h ago
Anything else I wrote about changing prefix advertisement is correct. You should and need to communicate your advertisement changes in good time to your peers and let them time to make changes.
eastbound•1d ago
While on their way out, if the USA could set everything back to IPv6, that would be nice.
hsbauauvhabzb•1d ago
You actually think the US would leave things better than they found them?
bakies•1d ago
hsbauauvhabzb•1d ago
Terr_•1d ago
Terr_•1d ago
* The (remaining) Venezuelan government gets to point to Big Evil America to unify (or crack-down-upon) an unhappy public, and they avoid being personally tarred as unpatriotic.
* Trump et al. get to "wag the dog" as distraction from crimes and mismanagement back home.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•1d ago
kjkjadksj•19h ago
literalAardvark•1d ago
As if. Dictators only do things that benefit themselves, and deciding to attack the US is suicide and/or world ending.
hdgvhicv•1d ago
kachapopopow•1d ago
none of those documents exist since it was probably never documented to begin with so we will never know I guess.
kulahan•1d ago
Not easy to find one man in a haystack. Guerrilla warfare has always been insanely overpowered as a defense tactic anyways, as are terrorist attacks.
The US can realistically only be challenged militarily by Europe or Asia, assuming a unified continent, and the US is on the offensive. If it’s defensive, the US might put up a good fight against the rest of the planet.
hdgvhicv•14h ago
Normally I’d say the most effective way to attack a western country would be to target kids in school playgrounds, but the US seems that regularly anyway so it would be lost in noise. Perhaps target Amazon delivery centres with drones will strike fear into the true heart of America.
kulahan•10h ago
Your second paragraph doesn't even make sense, but I'm thinking you just wanted to hop on the "america bad" train for a moment, so maybe it doesn't matter.
giancarlostoro•22h ago
kjkjadksj•19h ago
victorbjorklund•1d ago
brendoelfrendo•1d ago
mrguyorama•17h ago
They sent over like, maybe a couple Anti Air systems? But they really couldn't spare that many in the first place!
It's not like Russia can sustain serious power off the coast of the US.
The most he can do is complain. What's Russia going to do, sanction the US?
nonethewiser•1d ago
KPGv2•1d ago
There is, of course, both private and public international law. You don't know what you're talking about.
Dansvidania•1d ago
nonethewiser•23h ago
I am always shocked by how controversial this take can be.
Dansvidania•10h ago
Dansvidania•10h ago
I don’t think other UN or NATO states are strong enough to play this game with the US yet.
teiferer•1d ago
In contrast, if you go rob a grocery store, you can't just opt out of punishment. "I'm not a member of this court system" does not work as a viable defense strategy, even if some souvreign citizen types sometimes try (and always fail).
International treaties are really just statements of intent and can be withdrawn at any point. Worst that happens is that next time you try to make a treaty, your counterpart may not trust that you uphold your side of the deal. There is no higher authority to effecticely appeal to, in contrast to the grocery store case.
ozmodiar•1d ago
nonethewiser•23h ago
It stops at international law because thats the only level without a governance system over it.
There is no governance system over the USA, UK, etc.
There is a governance system over Ohio, New Mexico, etc.
You are only right if you get big enough that you are a peer of the USA, UK, etc. AKA sovereign.
nonethewiser•23h ago
There are things like the UN which some states, not all, agree to uphold the policies of. But they are also free not to agree to uphold the policies of the UN.
So ultimately it's a bunch of peers in an an anarchic system that do the best for themselves to persist. Cooperation, war, etc.