> 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. The CANTV AS8048 being prepended to the AS path 10 times means there the traffic would not prioritize this route through AS8048, perhaps that was the goal?
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.
I guess one of the interesting things I learnt off this article(1) was that 7% of DNS query types served by 1.1.1.1 are HTTPS and started wondering what HTTPS query type was as I had only heard of A, MX, AAAA, SPF etc...
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.
It’s also how browsers detect a website supports HTTP3. Browsers will request it just to check if they should connect to an https:// URL via HTTP3 (though they generally don’t block on it - they fallback to HTTP1/2 if it takes too long).
> It’s also how browsers detect a website supports HTTP3
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.
Every browser requires H2 connections to be encrypted so I don't think a MITM downgrading to it would reveal anything. Downgrading to H1 might do since encryption is optional there, but the proper way to prevent that is to submit your domains to the HSTS preload list so that browsers will always require encryption, regardless of protocol, no exceptions.
There’s an odd skew in that data which is saying the *third* most popular TLD is ‘.st’ which is… unexpected. The biggest service I can find using that TLD is `play.st` so maybe PlayStation clients are early adopters of DNS-over-HTTPS via 1.1.1.1.
Encrypted DNS has existed for quite a while now through DNS over HTTPS, the missing link was that to connect to a website, you first had to send the server the hostname in plaintext to get the right public key for the site. So someone listening on the wire could not see your DNS requests but would effectively still get the site you connected to anyway.
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.
> 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.
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...
Western governments just send a court order to the hosting provider to shut the site down / revoke their domain name. Site blocking is more of a problem for small counties trying to block sites the rest of the world allows to be hosted.
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.
In principle, it means you could run multiple sites from the same IP and someone intercepting traffic to that IP (but not the client’s DNS path) couldn’t tell what site each connection was to. It mostly makes sense for CDNs, where the same IP will be used for many sites.
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.
Even for China so-called "overblocking" where to censor a small thing you have to block a much larger thing, is a real concern with these technologies. There's a real trade here, you have to expend effort and destroy potential and in some cases the reward isn't worth it. You can interpret ECH as an effort to move the ratio, maybe China was willing to spend $5000 and annoy a thousand people to block a cartoon site criticising their internal policies, but is it willing to sped $50 000 and annoy a ten thousand people? How about half a million and 100K people ?
That requires the client to only emit ECH, even if the ISP-provided (and therefore government controlled) DNS blocks HTTPS/SVCB records. China can easily make the default for a browser in China be to never even try to use ECH as well. Then they'll only annoy people trying to actively circumvent their system. They already do TCP sessionization to extract the SNI domain. Detecting ECH and then just dropping the connection at L3 is functionally equivalent.
In theory, sites could eventually require ECH to serve anything at all. But we're very far from that.
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.
The great firewall was updated to support inspection of TLS 1.3. They didn’t just decide it was whatever and let everything through. It was easier to just update their parsing than to force everyone to turn it off, so they did that instead. Perfect forward secrecy was a thing before TLS 1.3, and they’ve found other methodology to accomplish what they want.
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.
> The great firewall was updated to support inspection of TLS 1.3.
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.
I don’t understand what your point about TLS 1.3 is. It’s only relevant if you’re doing a downgrade attack (or equivalently, using an active middleware box). TLS 1.3 itself is not vulnerable to this because it (a) doesn’t have non-PFS suites to downgrade to and (b) protects the cipher suites by including them in the key exchange material. But if the server supports TLS 1.2, an active MITM can still downgrade to it if the client doesn’t demand TLS 1.3 specifically (which browsers do not by default). It won’t matter to China until there are lots of TLS 1.3-only websites (which hasn’t happened yet).
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.
> if the server supports TLS 1.2, an active MITM can still downgrade to it
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.
> 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.
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)
Cloudflare provides a very large haystack for this, but even for an nginx server with no CDN, it's still useful to prevent the hostname from being sent in the clear before the TLS connection is negotiated. This still hides the hostname from casual eavesdroppers, who now only know what IP you're connecting to, and would need need out-of-band information to map the IP back to a hostname. And they couldn't ever be 100% sure of that, because they wouldn't know for certain whether there are additional vhosts running on a given server.
I think you might be surprised at how heavily SNI is leveraged at places like GoDaddy, Bluehost, and other similar providers to host sites from hundreds of completely unrelated businesses on the same IP address.
This doesn't look like anything malicious, 8048 is just prepending these announcements to 52320.. If anything, it looks like 269832(MDS) had a couple hits to their tier 1 peers which caused these prepended announcements to become more visible to collectors.
Was the OSRS economy affected by the strikes? I'm assuming they didn't disrupt internet access for most Venezuelan citizens but I have not looked into it yet.
I run an OSRS market analysis/flipping site, and have been keeping an eye on the effects.
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.
My clanmates and I noticed that some of the more popular goldfarming hotspots were much less populated that day. Rev caves, Zalcano, etc. Not sure about impacts for the broader economy though. Maybe FlippingOldSchool will release a video analyzing the economic trends over the course of that week? Would be interesting for sure.
There were reports they had considered Christmas Day and New Year's Day. I wonder if it was far enough along that you could see similar BGP anomalies around those times.
Yeah, I was thinking it definitely needs to be correlated to geopolitical tensions in some way. Polymarket data might be helpful in this case- and provides incentives for putting this kind of data together.
>or even by normal load from someone deciding to split a /8 prefix into /24's
If that kind of happening directly from load of added 25 routes it's quite hard to believe it.
# 10/8 prefix here only to show how to get number of new routes added.
$ sipcalc -n 24 10.0.0.0/8 | grep -c Network
25
$
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.
Oh, my bad. How didn't I notice my mistake right away. That 25 is grossly wrong, I should have checked before using that. The correct line to get subnets is
Which increases significantly global routing table size of course. I apologise my mistake on that matter that I should have noticed before posting.
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.
Most BGP peers have router filters in place. It's not 1996 anymore. I remember the days of logging into a Cisco connected to a Sprint T1 and seeing a coworker had fat fingered a spammer's route, sending it to null0. Oops. How did that happen?
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.
Many v4 prefixes in the ARIN region are legacy and don't support RPKI unless you sign the registration agreement. I have a legacy prefix and may eventually be forced to sign up.
Let’s be honest, that was a crazy operation. I wonder whether they really secured all chances of success, or just winged it with chances of not depositing the leader, and him being able to summon his diplomatic relations into 50 countries declaring war to the USA.
While on their way out, if the USA could set everything back to IPv6, that would be nice.
The outcome is less-crazy if one views it as assisting a palace-coup, partnering with a bunch of Venezuelan government and military insiders already seeking to depose Maduro, able to subtly clear the path and provide intel.
I personally think it is both. I think CBS article disclosed that CIA had someone in the inner circle. That, however, does not really take away from how well coordinated it actually was. That does not mean it was a good idea to do it. Just because I can run around naked does not mean I should..
P.S.: In that scenario, it's quite possible for both groups of conspirators to benefit from denying it and saber-rattling:
* 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.
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.
So if you wanted to attack the US you wouldn’t do a conventional “red dawn” style attack. You’d attack like bin laden. And then keep quiet.
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.
That probably wouldn't work. Even if you tried, there are more privately owned guns than there are citizens in the US; every inch would be a nightmare.
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.
we don't really have a way to tell if it was even real, it would actually be a rather trivial operation for the government during those times and the entire thing could have just been overplayed and/or involved collaboration from all sides.
none of those documents exist since it was probably never documented to begin with so we will never know I guess.
No one would lift a finger for him. Russia just watched. The Chinese too. They may be allies in words but in the end each dictator just care about themselves. Just like how Trump wouldn’t help any ally unless he got something out of it.
There is something by that name, but it doesn't mean much. On the international level, it's all voluntary. States can choose to be part of the international courts. The US (and many other high profile countries) famously are not participating, which is why they can effectively just commit war crimes left and right.
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.
Why stop at international law? It's no different than a lot of civil, financial, criminal law. You just get big enough and now there's nothing the system can do about you. It's become increasingly apparent that having the right friends and enough money is the only 'law' that matters at any level of society, and people will be too disengaged or selfish to do anything about it besides reap the rewards if they're in the right place. Laws only work on the disempowered, and in that sense international law is exactly as powerful as the law of the land in whatever country you live in.
>Why stop at international law? It's no different than a lot of civil, financial, criminal law. You just get big enough and now there's nothing the system can do about you.
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.
Not in any real sense because states are sovereign.
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.
Yes. More specifically I would say international law is law in name only. It's not really law at all. It's akin to a child asserting rules on a playground with their peers. There is no enforcement mechanism. In reality what we call international law is more like a mutually agreed upon policy, which can also just not be agreed upon at any moment. In fact many countries do not agree to them. There is no government agency or enforcement mechanism over states - that is what makes them states by definition.
I am always shocked by how controversial this take can be.
It’s complicated. While it’s true that there is no direct enforcement, systems of sanctions and embargos have been used to indirectly enforce these agreements. Whether this is ultimately effective is not obvious, but I think “international law does not exist” is a simplistic take, with all due respect for your opinion (which I understand and partially share)
Of course they didn't. While I can't imagine Russia is exactly happy that it lost an ally in the Western Hemisphere, this kind of action is very much aligned with Putin's multi-polar worldview where the great powers leave each other to play empire in their respective spheres of influence. It helps justify things like invading Ukraine. I can imagine some in the Chinese military are over the moon right now, taking notes on how to force regime change in Taiwan.
This is not unusual, CANTV has notoriously slow, expensive links, most ISPs in Venezuela would have it as a "backup" provider. If there is an outage of GlobeNet or TIM, it would cause those routes to disappear, leaving the CANTV routes up, which are heavily prepended to avoid routing through them on "normal" operations.
Fascinating find and investigation. While there isn't a solid conclusion from it, glad it was written up, perhaps someone will be able to connect more dots with it.
If you were not already entirely reliant on American tech before, this ought to convince you to put jump in with both feet. What could possibly go wrong?
There is not really any reason to conclude that "american tech" was responsible for this attack. If anything, given all the sanctions Venezuela was under and how friendly they are with china, i would be surprised if they were using american tech in their infrastructure.
[Of course i agree with the broader point of dont become dependent on the technology of your geopolitical enemies]
There are other attack vectors beyond infrastructure though when the population all have Android Smart Phones running Play Services and communicate using WhatsApp.
I am not sure why you are being downvoted where nothing you said is inaccurate. This practice of reflexively downvoting when disagreeing really is starting to irk me. Argue with OP damn it. How is he wrong?
After eighty years of collaboration, I’m not surprised people don’t take lightly when the USA do a 180 on their entire history of diplomacy and turn to autocratic regimes like Russia instead of liberal democracies.
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.
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.
What would be the result of this? I think it would route data through Sparkle as a way of potentially spying on internet traffic without having compromised the network equipment within Venezuela, but I'm not familiar enough with network architecture to really understand what happened.
Maybe there would be some benefit in just dropping some packets. For example to WhatsApp, Telegram, Gmail servers. Could add a communication delay that could be critical and denies people a fairly reliable fallback communication method.
> The newsletter suggests “BGP shenanigans” and posits that such a leak could be exploited to collect intelligence useful to government entities.
>
> While we can’t say with certainty what caused this route leak, our data suggests that its likely cause was more mundane.
What I mean is that cause and effect here could be different then the author thinks. We see some route changes, but those changes make no sense on their own since they wouldn't capture any traffic. That makes it more probable that BGP was not the attack, but that some other action caused this BGP anomalie as a side effect.
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.
I think what the other commenter is saying is that the BGP changes happened 12 hours before any of the power loss/bomb drop, so that eliminates your primary cause.
For a length-15 ASpath to show up on the internet, a whole bunch of better routes need to disappear first, which seems to have happened here. But that disappearance is very likely unrelated to CANTV.
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.
Cyber-warfare capabilities on this level seem pretty horrific. What if you could simply turn off the power grid of Kyiv or Moscow in anticipation of a strike? That seems extremely disorientating. What if you could simply turn off the power grid indefinitely?
Russia attacks Ukrainian power grid on a weekly basis. Not only with cyber-attacks but with actual bombs. Over Christmas 750k homes in Kyiv were without power or heating. This is not a hypothetical it's daily reality for millions of people in Ukraine.
Something like this more or less happened during the initial Israeli strike on Iran ?
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.
> 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,
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.
Not really. Ferrari is a great car, but with punctured tires or bad driver, it won't win any race.
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.
A Ferrari with punctured tires isn’t a great car, it can’t drive. It’s an immobile, useless hunk of metal with a great engine and transmission, similar to disabled air defense systems: really expensive, useless hunks of metal.
> 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.
General Caine specifically said they utilized CYBERCOM (which is the US inter-branch hacking command) to pave the way for the special ops helicopters. I personally have no doubt that any (whether or not they all were) lights being out was due to a US hack. Some of the stuff that got blown up may well have been to prevent forensic recover of US tools and techniques.
> “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.
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.
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.
> 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.
There are way worse things you could do, you could hide explosives in consumer electronics and infiltrate the supply lines to replace them. Then you could detonate them all simultaneously, indiscriminately murdering everyone around them as well. But of course only fascist barbarians would ever do or support that sort of thing.
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.
IMHO the rest of the world isn't asleep. Denmark's prime minister said the same as you, for example. US just got roasted at UN by inter alia, France, with ~20 countries either speaking the same or asking to speak on it. That's just from 30s with front page of nytimes.com.
In EU, so far I believe only the PM of Spain had the backbone to speak properly with anything that could be considered "strongly worded", proving that it's possible.
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)"
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 has happened because the party that rules Spain has ties to the dictatorship.
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.
It’s really dumb I’m sitting at -2 and the top reply is about a Macron tweet from 2 days ago, lying and saying no one else from Europe has said anything, and lying and saying anything besides the King of Spain was actually celebrating. You’re making stuff up. Full stop. You could easily have googled either thing I mentioned. You didn’t, choosing to free associate instead. May you reap what you sow.
Given that the nukes topic came up ... Will the US/Trump be so aggressive if Denmark has a few nukes that can hit the US? Or at minimum sink a invading fleet?
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.
That just sounds like more 'strongly worded letters' which never go anywhere and they never do anything about.
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.
What does action (i.e. not-strongly-worded-letters, i.e. not words) look like?
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.
One non military but economical retaliation that would affect our industry is to stop respecting American’s intellectual property. Some variation of the trade bazooka. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument
> What does action (i.e. not-strongly-worded-letters, i.e. not words) look like?
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.
Isn't this comment just confirming GP's sentiment that the EU is a toothless sitting duck that's begging to be plundered? Yes, when another country threatens your sovereignty you're supposed to vigorously defend it through shows of force, prepare for war and possibly impose economic penalties on the aggressor. The most the EU can do is put out some mild condemnations on Twitter (without mentioning Daddy).
Why set aside expense? You do it anyway by whatever means necessary, like the DRPK. And if you’re a “western democracy” (also known as capitalist dictatorship) and you’re part of the ruling class, you still have the incentive to protect your assets, things you exploit in your country, land, natural resources, etc, that the US won’t be sharing or that they want to decrease supply when they take over through puppets or multinationals, and you can always force the public to pay for such a project, like all the times western peoples had to bail out or spend their taxes to benefit private corporations, but now it would look like it’s to protect sovereignty, which is a bonus of course, it would be to protect the local ruling class’s interests, but anyway. It’s clear the Americans will stop at nothing to acquire whatever it is they want, including indirectly violent means like ordering their financial institutions and tech giants to destroy whoever is on the way. The monster was always there since the Cold War and just now it dropped any pretenses.
Any sort of pushback at all would be an improvement.
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.
Canada has a strong army and can defend itself. Greenland on the other hand is not well defended and I doubt Denmark really cares (e.g., if they’re willing to send tens of thousands of troops to die for it) if it was occupied by China or Russia in the event of a war.
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).
Frankly, the right move (before Trump did as Trump does, and fucked up our foreign relations) would have been to straight-up buy Greenland. The people of Greenland have the right under Danish law to vote for independence, and there's not that many of them. Paying individual people for the votes probably would have cost the US $10 billion, and then we could give them Puerto Rico-esque status.
Not sure why this got downvoted; we're threatening it again, credibly enough that the Danish PM is telling them to shut up.
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!"
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.
It's not only downvoted, it was flagged, and dead. (flag accepted by moderator, no one else will see this comment thread without expanding)
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.
Ill speculate as to why, paid astroturfers are posting it. Look at Twitter, most accounts that post that insane trump loving crap are in third world countries.
wait whose a16z. Can you provide me more context about it?
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.
I'm curious. Are you saying that tech bros on this site will just downvote/flag stuff like that's against their "heroes", that would be pretty standard I guess. Or are you implying a conspiracy where somehow they exert influence on the moderators to kill the posts/comments?
Solid OSINT methodology here. The 10x AS path prepending is the most interesting detail to me b/c typically you'd see prepending used to de-prioritize a route, which raises the question: was this about making traffic avoid CANTV, or was it a side effect of something else?
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.
Sure, but there must always be a fear that the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty. And may tolerate a coupe instead. Which then reduces the madness and the deterrent effect. The extra step the Dprk have taken is to try and build bunkers so that the regime could survive the destruction of the country. A step further into madness that goes beyond what western countries have been willing to accept.
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.
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.
There are something like 20,000 airports and heliports across the US. While not all of them can handle 747s probably there are several thousand fields that can take one of them, especially if there is no need for it to fly again.
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.
Given the extent of planning that went into these types of doomsday survival scenarios, I wouldn't be surprised to find there are pre-prepared discreet runways in obscure locations unlikely to be targeted. Not full concrete runways, just a strip of prepared land that would see a 747 land without exploding into a ball of fire.
Dry lake beds abound in the US West. See Edwards AFB (big dry lake bed on which nearly everything, including the Space Shuttle, has landed). See also Groom Lake. These are enormous and couldn't be wrecked by conventional runway denial weapons.
I'd always been told this was planned into the implementation of the US Interstate Highway System. There are dead straight and level sections ever so many linear miles or per some gridsquare measure to serve as ad hoc landing strips in a national crisis. That's been 35+ years ago that I heard it and I haven't sought any supporting documentation since the dawn of the Internet. Any insight would be appreciated.
even a small country like Switzerland uses its highways to land fighterjets[0], wouldn't be weird to me if the US with their humongous highways uses them for the same reason. difference is that the swiss have to remove the middle crash barriers before landing, so less spontaneous.
The high end of the range of death estimates by the two atomic bombs is around 246,000. The estimated range of US military deaths from an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) was 250,000 to 1,000,000, and another 5 to 10 million Japanese. Dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option. Oppenheimer et al. deserve their acclaim.
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.
> Dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option.
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:
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.
The US had already secretly intercepted cables from Japan with it looking to "terminate the war because of the pressing situation which confronts Japan" as far back as July 12th 1945 in which they also expressed a willingness to relinquish all claimed territories. [1] The only condition they were seeking is that the Emperor be able to remain as a figurehead.
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.
Pro tip: if your enemy is really about to surrender, nuking them once will suffice. Even after the second bomb was dropped, the Emperor faced assassination threats from the military high command for running up the white flag.
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.
Like you're indirectly acknowledging, the nukes had no real impact on their decision. Half their way cabinet wanted to fight to the last Japanese, half wanted to surrender. This was both before and after the nukes. The Emperor wasn't like a super-politician - he was seen as a [literally] living deity who was above politics. So the cabinet called upon him to make the final decision, which he had made long before the nukes - which was to surrender. There was no danger to him. Even the plots to undermine his decision involved destroying his announcement of surrender and leaving him under house arrest. And that plot was stopped by a speech from another officer, leading to most of the plotters to commit suicide for their dishonor.
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.
You're right, in that there's no reason to assume the bombs were entirely decisive by themselves. The truth is that from the target's POV, there was nothing particularly special or interesting about the atomic bombs of the day, except that they were dropped from a single plane.
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?
I don't think war is at all about doing the worst stuff you can to the other guy. Different countries approach it in radically different ways. The war in Ukraine is one of the deadliest wars in modern times, but civilians have made up an extremely small percent of all casualties. On the other extreme, Israel's war against Gaza is just a complete slaughter of civilians. And I don't think we should simply lower ourselves to lowest common denominator regardless of whether or not Japan would have done the same. This isn't even necessarily about morality either - it's simply in our self interest. The era when the US was something to look up to was also the time when we behaved in a principled fashion, or at least were perceived to be doing so.
The history of Korea is another example of this stuff, and nothing like people think. After the Korean war South Korea was ruled by a series of US backed brutal dictators. When the first was overthrown, he lived out his final years in Hawaii, just to be replaced by another, and so on. South Korea only started to become what you think of today in the 6th Republic, which began in the late 80s. The only difference between North and South Korea is that we aimed to economically attack North Korea and economically support South Korea. And given South Korea is now having an extinction level fertility crisis, the final page of how things turned out is still yet to be written.
The Ukraine war has a better civilian casualty ratio for a bunch of reasons that are not "Israel is evil and trying to slaughter civilians":
- Soldiers on both sides wear uniforms.
- When they can, Ukraine defends from trenches away from civilians.
- When urban combat seems unavoidable, Ukraine evacuates their civilians.
- Ukraine is a vast country, with plenty of safer areas to move to.
- Other countries have also accepted large number of Ukrainian war refugees.
Gaza is the opposite: Hamas fighters disguise as civilians, they defend mostly from urban areas, they never attempt to evacuate civilians (sometimes the opposite), it's a small territory, and no countries are accepting Gazan war refugees in significant numbers.
There's no military on the planet that could fight Hamas in Gaza without causing significant civilian harm.
Third party observers have observed endless bad behavior from Ukrainian forces. Amnesty International even called them out, in spite of the inevitable blow back it would (and did) receive, for actively locating their military forces in residential areas, launching strikes from civilian areas, turning schools and hospitals into military bases, and more. [1] Ukraine's response was tantamount to saying that rules don't matter for them, because they're the defender and not the aggressor.
Given these behaviors Russian forces would be justified in just carpet bombing these sort of areas that Ukrainian forces are entrenching, but they have chosen not to. By contrast that is precisely what Israel does, and also what the US does not only in WW2 but e.g. in Iraq and Afghanistan where killing dozens of civilians to get somebody who might be an enemy is considered a justifiable engagement.
And again this gets back to what I just said about this not even necessarily being about morality or ethics. Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023, and it's unlikely things will be improving for them in the foreseeable future. Behaving good in war is simply in one's own best interest on any sort of timescale beyond the immediate.
I disagree with this premise. There are many examples of Russia striking civilian gatherings or infrastructure.
For example their Hroza village strike killed 59. If we're trying to be charitable to Russia, it's possible they knew of some important off-duty officer present in Hroza. But with our limited public info, there were no signs of any valid military targets. Can you name any IDF strike that looks worse than that?
> Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023
There was no way Israel could have fought Hamas without significant civilian harm and bad PR. The choice was to fight a very messy war against an enemy that disguises as civilians, or leave them alone to plan the next Oct 7.
As Golda Meir put it: "If we have to choose between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image."
Exceptions don't define the rule, the rule does. Israeli estimates put the military wing of Hamas at having up to 17,000 members before the war. They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now.
In WW2 partisans would intentionally induce brutal retaliations precisely because they thought it would expose the character of the occupier, garner support for themselves, radicalize the population, and generally further their interests. And they were right. It's paradoxical because those retaliations were intended to enforce control, yet they invariably achieve the exact opposite - a recurring theme throughout history. Again getting back to the point I'm making - the reason to behave good in war is because it's in your own best interest.
The reason nuclear bombs are "uncivilized" isn't directly related to the number of deaths due to use of a single one. The reason is that the by using nuclear bombs, the US created the precedent for the usage of the only weapon humans have created that, if used by all sides, can result in effectively billions dead at extremely low cost.
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.
> The estimated range of US military deaths from an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) was 250,000 to 1,000,000, and another 5 to 10 million Japanese.
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.
On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how off the estimates were because they’re our people and their lives matter more.
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.
The history on this is pretty sound ... a major bombing campaign was started much earlier to avoid any invasion or boots on the ground.
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.
If the war wasn't over the justification doesn't matter. I think that's the point you are broadly missing.
Were we at war with Japan? Yes. Therefore any action we take to end that war was justified, including continuing to bomb Japanese cities, industrial areas, and civilian centers until the war is concluded and they surrendered. Testing weapons even would be acceptable. Japan was still fighting us. Nations test weapons during war all the time which is partially how weapons development occurs.
During wartime justifications for carpet bombing do matter .. see Geneva Conventions et al.
Not that these things are enforced, of course, see bombings throughout SE Asia during Vietnam and the international punishment dealt out to Kissinger.
> I think that's the point you are broadly missing.
Did I?
Let me be clearer. There was no particular examination of the justifications for killing civilains specifically in the cases of the two cities destroyed by atomic weapons.
Why?
Because any such moral examination had already taken place many many months before; broadly in the case of heavy bombing campaigns in Europe and more specifically at the start of the Japanese bombing campaign that most appear to have forgotten.
Before H & N were bombed with the first atomic weapons 72 other cities had already been destroyed, including Tokyo. H & N were 'just' two targets on a list more than a hundred cities in length.
> Therefore any action we take to end that war was justified
Yeah, maybe take some moral and ethics classes, look into why there's pushback over actions in Gaza, etc.
> On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how off the estimates were because they’re our people and their lives matter more.
"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...".
I am not following this rationale at all. Because you're not Japanese or American, Americans are uncivilized for using a weapon that caused lots of Japanese people to die after Japanese people attacked the United States (and Australia, China, the Philippines, and more) and wouldn't stop?
> 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!
> 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.
But we are talking about World War II, and a war in which the United States and Japan fought, with millions of casualties. Pardon me if I'm not particularly interested in what someone from South America thinks about saving American lives by using a weapon we had to stop a war that we didn't start.
> Either the numbers matter or they don't; and if they do matter, it matters that they are well justified and accurate.
I don't think the numbers matter and shifting around from 50,000 to 5 million or anywhere in proximity to those numbers doesn't change the categorical argument. But if someone such as yourself wants to claim the numbers matter, my number is 1. It only takes 1 American life to have been saved in that needless war to justify the usage of any* weapon to stop the war.
* I'm using any here but there are obviously limits like, using a weapon that destroys the entire world or something fantastical that would very unlikely be justified.
> This is fundamentally wrong and doesn't support the argument from "civilization" which, again, was the argument I was responding to.
> 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
Japan could have surrendered and then it wouldn't have been used. Even if we just wanted to test it, it was justified. There's a lot of revisionist history that goes into these conversations with the goal of "USA BAD" and in the context of World War II I reject any and all of those assertions. It's the same lame crap that gets thrown around with respect to the Soviets and the Eastern Front.
"The US didn't do anything"
"The Soviets were the good guys fighting the good fight against the Nazis".
Both are untrue and are derived from Russian/Chinese propaganda schemes to sow self-doubt and defeatism for their own benefit.
For example, a lot of folks will claim things like the Soviets bore the brunt of the war in a moralist context in contrast with the western allies who didn't see as many lives expended. Of course that's true from a numeric context. 40 million deaths or something crazy from the Soviet side. But let's not forget, it was the Soviets who helped Germany kick this thing off by illegally invading and partitioning Poland. So... maybe those 40 million deaths were deserved. Just like the Nazis deserved to be destroyed?
> how would you feel if I told you they are less worth preserving?
I wouldn't care what you thought? In wartime, as an American, our soldier's lives are worth more than any enemy lives. This seems pretty straightforward to me. But if you want to insist you think your countrymen's lives are worth the same or less than some enemy that invaded you or that you are at war with, good luck fighting that war.
> But we are talking about World War II, and a war in which the United States and Japan fought, with millions of casualties. Pardon me if I'm not particularly interested in what someone from South America thinks about saving American lives by using a weapon we had to stop a war that we didn't start.
This is not an argument for "civilization", so it's very hard to follow your point.
If you don't care what I think, why bother debating with me at all?
> I don't think the numbers matter and shifting around from 50,000 to 5 million or anywhere in proximity to those numbers doesn't change the categorical argument.
On the contrary, it does change the categorical debate because the original argument ("it also saved Japanese lives") depended on those numbers. You seem to want to argue about something unrelated to what I said?
> Japan could have surrendered and then it wouldn't have been used.
It has been argued quite convincingly, multiple times already, that the Bomb would have been used nonetheless. The effort to develop it had been made, now they wanted to use it on real population centers. They were biased and primed to action. Also, it was done to send a message to the Soviets (the Japanese to this day maintain this, and while you could convincingly argue their opinion is self-serving, so is the US's).
None of this has much to do with Operation Downfall or whether Japan wanted to surrender (there were a pro and anti surrender factions, and the hardliners could maybe have been appeased. Or not. It's not self-evident there was no other way.)
More importantly, this is not a valid argument if we're going to argue about civilization. If you want to make a separate argument, go ahead, but that's not what I was reacting to.
Also, preempting your likely "I don't care about civilization": if you don't, why are you arguing in a thread precisely about this?
> "The US didn't do anything [in WW2]"
Puzzling strawman. Did I say this?
> "The Soviets were the good guys fighting the good fight against the Nazis".
I'm struggling to see the connection here. Was it because I mentioned the Bomb was also signalling to the Soviets? But that'd be true regardless.
> For example, a lot of folks will claim things like the Soviets bore the brunt of the war
They did.
> it was the Soviets who helped Germany kick this thing off by illegally invading and partitioning Poland
That's a very simplistic take, but I suspect you aren't interested in more nuanced takes. There's a lot to read on this matter.
> So... maybe those 40 million deaths were deserved
Wow. Just wow.
> I wouldn't care what you thought? In wartime, as an American, our soldier's lives are worth more than any enemy lives.
Why argue with me? You obviously care. Also, "our soldier's lives are worth more" is an argument, but not one out of civilization, which is what we were debating. As in "dropping the Bomb was a civilized option because [...]".
> But if you want to insist you think your countrymen's lives
I was just telling you how you sound when you say "our lives matter more..." as if everyone here was US American.
> This is not an argument for "civilization", so it's very hard to follow your point.
I don't know what you're talking about anymore with this. Can you elaborate?
> If you don't care what I think, why bother debating with me at all?
You keep replying.
> On the contrary, it does change the categorical debate because the original argument ("it also saved Japanese lives") depended on those numbers. You seem to want to argue about something unrelated to what I said?
If it saved Japanese lives that just makes it all the better, if it didn't, it doesn't matter. I think you're just not understanding the point. You're trying to make this calculation about how many lives equivalent to a moral choice made by the United States and Japan in the conduct of their war. I reject the calculation of the numbers of lives saved.
> On the contrary, it does change the categorical debate because the original argument ("it also saved Japanese lives") depended on those numbers. You seem to want to argue about something unrelated to what I said?
That's not convincing at all. If Japan had formally surrendered the United States would have not then, post-surrender gone and dropped an atomic bomb on a Japanese city. You're crazy if you think that is the case. There is no room for debate here and nothing you can say, including showing me letters, papers, whatever will change my mind. I'm close-minded to that idea.
> Puzzling strawman. Did I say this?
> I'm struggling to see the connection here. Was it because I mentioned the Bomb was also signalling to the Soviets? But that'd be true regardless.
Nope, not puzzling. It's just a common theme. It's always "question the United States actions", "talk about the United States", "the United States is bad and does bad things all the time" and saying things like the US would have dropped an atomic bomb on Japan after it formally surrendered is aligned with the same kinds of things people say about the Soviets or whatever. It's just the same playbook of anti-Americanism propaganda that serves just one purpose which is to make people in the United States (and honestly the west in general) want to withdraw from the world and let autocrats and their toads take over.
The common themes are:
US bad for dropping atomic bomb on Japan, all the calculations about lives saved are wrong
The US didn't do anything of consequence in Europe it was all the Soviets because they lost the most people, despite the fact that they started the damn war alongside Germany and are the bad guys too
The western front was only full of old Germans, if the rest of the allies had to face the real German army like the Soviets did they wouldn't have done XYZ
You hear this all the time on the Internet. It's just recycling of effective propaganda campaigns leveraged against the west. Soviets good, West worked with Nazis, West didn't do anything, bombing Japan to end the war is immoral, blah blah blah
> That's a very simplistic take, but I suspect you aren't interested in more nuanced takes.
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. I'd encourage you to read up more on the Soviet - Nazi alliance. Both governments were evil. The Soviets got what they asked for by trusting the Nazis and invading and annexing another country. While there is undoubtedly nuance to that arrangement, at a high level the Communists and Nazis got together and decided to start partitioning Europe.
Rejecting this is like the whole "clean Wehrmacht" thing or how Rommel was a "good general" since he wasn't in Europe. No, both groups were just as bad as the Nazi regime they fought for.
> Also, "our soldier's lives are worth more" is an argument, but not one out of civilization, which is what we were debating. As in "dropping the Bomb was a civilized option because [...]".
You are implying that the Japanese were civilized at this time.
> I was just telling you how you sound when you say "our lives matter more..." as if everyone here was US American.
I know how I sound. Our soldiers lives do matter more than the lives of enemy soldiers. In the case of the war against Japan they mattered much more than Japanese lives, soldiers or otherwise. I know you think this is some sort of controversial thing to say, but this seems rather routine to me.
> I don't know what you're talking about anymore with this. Can you elaborate?
Yes you do. I explained it multiple times already. If you don't, I suggest you pay more attention instead of replying to comments you admit you don't understand.
> You keep replying.
You claimed you didn't care about my opinion, yet here you are. Why? Sport?
> I reject the calculation of the numbers of lives saved.
Thanks for the straight answer. However, the person I was replying to didn't reject the calculation, which is why they mentioned it, and this is what I challenged. Clearer now?
> Nope, not puzzling. It's just a common theme. It's always "question the United States actions", "talk about the United States", "the United States is bad and does bad things all the time"
That's your own baggage. Argue with the things I actually said, not with "common themes". You seem to be upset about things I haven't argued, at least not here. I cannot be held responsible for whatever irks you on the internet, much like I cannot be upset at you for whatever BS Trump or the alt-right spews.
> Soviets good, West worked with Nazis, West didn't do anything, bombing Japan to end the war is immoral, blah blah blah
I don't know your internet circles, but most of what I hear is "America won WW2", "Soviets are as evil as Hitler", etc.
> Both are untrue and are derived from Russian/Chinese propaganda schemes to sow self-doubt and defeatism for their own benefit.
No... I suggest you read "The Myth of the Eastern Front" (2008) by American historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, which is a scholarly work (well regarded and widely referenced and cited) that describes among other things American shifting views on WW2's Eastern Front (as well as documenting the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth, and others). These are not Russian/Chinese infiltrators, but well regarded American scholars.
What you identify as "revisionism" is actually a shift away from German-dictated histories of WW2, and towards a more balanced view.
> Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. I'd encourage you to read up more on the Soviet - Nazi alliance.
I expected you to extend me the courtesy of assuming I knew about Molotov-Ribbentrop. Like I said, there were nuances to the situation, even mentioned "there's a lot to read on the subject". I assume you don't care -- or you think anyone who disagrees with any action of the US is simply ill-informed or Russian/Chinese influenced -- but there are nuances on this topic (e.g. how the USSR foresaw war with Nazi Germany, how it sought an anti-German pact with the UK and France which was rejected). But I won't be dragged into defending the Soviets or whatever when it has very little to do with the original topic.
> You are implying that the Japanese were civilized at this time.
Well, they were in some sense and they were barbaric in others (ironically this is what the OP claimed of the Bombs!). But let's take it for granted that the Japanese were pretty savage towards the people they invaded: even then, your own civilization doesn't depend on your foe's. It's an inherent trait.
I know this may be hard to grasp when following your "us vs them" logic.
> I know how I sound
Apparently not; you don't seem aware of how jingoistic you sound. Or that when you say "our", this being a relative word, it pays to know your audience who may or may not be "yours".
> Yes you do. I explained it multiple times already. If you don't, I suggest you pay more attention instead of replying to comments you admit you don't understand.
Ok. I don't understand I guess. Whatever :)
> You claimed you didn't care about my opinion, yet here you are. Why? Sport?
I'm here for a broader audience to read. Do you care about my opinion?
> Thanks for the straight answer. However, the person I was replying to didn't reject the calculation, which is why they mentioned it, and this is what I challenged. Clearer now?
But I was replying and rejecting the calculation because the calculation doesn't matter, at least in my opinion. Again if 1 American life was saved it was worth it and Civilized so it isn't relevant whether 50,000 lives were saved (Japanese, American, otherwise) or 5,000,000.
> That's your own baggage. Argue with the things I actually said, not with "common themes". You seem to be upset about things I haven't argued, at least not here.
Nope. I know what you're doing because it's a common pattern and the same tropes are repeated. Even in this very article you're defending the Soviets illegally partitioning and invading Poland alongside the Nazis as "nuanced".
> I don't know your internet circles, but most of what I hear is "America won WW2", "Soviets are as evil as Hitler", etc.
Well the Soviets were quite evil. That's a simple fact and we can state that up front.They were arguably more evil than the Nazis over the long term but still categorically evil so it doesn't quite matter just who is winning the evil Olympics.
I don't know where you hear America "won" World War II. Vast majority of Americans accept and understand that the Soviets fought the Germans in the east which was hugely important for defeating the Nazis. While the United States fought Japan in the Pacific which was also incredibly important. There's a common phrase here in the United States that the war was won with Soviet Blood, British Intelligence, and American Steel.
> I expected you to extend me the courtesy of assuming I knew about Molotov-Ribbentrop. Like I said, there were nuances to the situation, even mentioned "there's a lot to read on the subject".
But at the end of the day, the broader actions are what matter, not the nuance. I can't tell if you are familiar with Molotov-Ribbentrop because your previous comments seem to be aghast that I suggested the Soviets, who helped kick off the war, deserved what happened to them.
> I assume you don't care -- or you think anyone who disagrees with any action of the US is simply ill-informed -- but there are nuances on this topic (e.g. how the USSR foresaw war with Nazi Germany,
I think people who repeat obviously untrue things, like suggesting the US would have dropped atomic bombs on Japan just to test them after Japan surrendered, don't debate in good faith and are also ill-informed.
> how it sought an anti-German pact with the UK and France which was rejected).
Nuance right? Or does that only count when it's the Soviets?
> Well, they were in some sense and they were barbaric in others. But let's take it for granted that the Japanese were pretty savage towards the people they invaded: your own civilization doesn't depend on your foe's. It's an inherent trait.
> I know this may be hard to grasp when following your "us vs them" logic.
Sure. I declare we are civilized because we bombed Japan and turned them into a peaceful democracy. During a war, it is us versus them. This is basic stuff. There's nothing we need to take for granted about the Japanese. They were rampaging, murdering lunatics. Korea, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and more suffered under their brutal regime of violence and repression.
> Apparently not; you don't seem aware of how jingoistic you sound. Or that when you say "our", this being a relative word, it pays to know your audience who may or may not be "yours".
Nope, I'm pretty aware. My audience isn't you, it's other readers who happen to stumble upon your argument. If they think I sound overly-Patriotic because I reject your claims, so be it. My opinion doesn't change because you don't like it.
By the way, you said you're not American. What country are you from?
Well, better read more closely then before replying :)
> I'm here for a broader audience to read. Do you care about my opinion?
If I didn't care about your opinion, I wouldn't answer -- I'm using human logic, not ET-logic.
> But I was replying and rejecting the calculation because the calculation doesn't matter, at least in my opinion.
Understood. Unfortunately, you got confused about who you were replying to; it wasn't me who argued the calculation mattered. I actually argued the calculation was a retroactive justification, not the actual one. I can see you got lost here. Maybe for the benefit of, you know, your "broader audience" you could have replied to that other commenter.
> Nope. I know what you're doing because it's a common pattern and the same tropes are repeated.
This thing you're doing is really bizarre, claiming to know my thoughts. I find it fascinating. Do you always debate like this?
> Even in this very article you're defending the Soviets illegally partitioning and invading Poland alongside the Nazis as "nuanced".
Nope. I was explaining the nuances of a situation which had more angles than what you implied. You were asking me to read on Molotov-Ribbentrop, yet you don't seem much well read on the subject if you ignore these nuances...
Have you read the Smelser & Davies book I mentioned?
> I don't know where you hear America "won" World War II.
I don't know how you can ignore this widespread take.
> I think people who repeat obviously untrue things, like suggesting the US would have dropped atomic bombs on Japan just to test them after Japan surrendered, don't debate in good faith and are also ill-informed.
"Obviously untrue" is begging the question; I mean, it's precisely what we're debating! In your adult life you'll sometimes face people who will argue that something you believe in is false or untrue, and this doesn't automatically make them bad faith arguers or ill-informed.
I consider someone to be arguing in bad faith when they feign ignorance, put words in other people's mouths, argue against strawmen, or consistently use cheap rhetorical tricks. Not by mistake, or a one-off, but consistently. Like you're doing now.
> But at the end of the day, the broader actions are what matter, not the nuance. I can't tell if you are familiar with Molotov-Ribbentrop because your previous comments seem to be aghast that I suggested the Soviets, who helped kick off the war, deserved what happened to them.
Both matter: broader actions and nuance. Being aghast at someone who claims 40 million people deserved to die has nothing to do with Molotov-Ribbentrop or any pact. Again... I'm aghast but not in defense of the Soviets, just at your callousness.
> Nuance right? Or does that only count when it's the Soviets?
No, nuances also apply here as well. It doesn't count only when it's the Soviets. There were nuances to the reasons for dropping the Bomb as well. Is this another of your "common tropes" you're constantly fighting against? Please, I urge you to engage with the positions that are actually stated, not with some imaginary enemy you've constructed.
> Sure. I declare we are civilized because we bombed Japan and turned them into a peaceful democracy.
Ok, this is a straightforward, honest position. You think dropping the Bomb was ok because it won the war. Also you make some non sequitur about the Bomb turning Japan into a peaceful democracy (completely bizarre logic, it doesn't follow that it was the bomb). You've repeatedly ignored arguments by me, and others here, that argued that it wasn't necessarily the Bomb that won the war, but whatever. I understand this is your position; I think it's wrong.
> There's nothing we need to take for granted about the Japanese. They were rampaging, murdering lunatics. Korea, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and more suffered under their brutal regime of violence and repression.
Do you understand the expression "let's take for granted"? It seems you're hell-bent on arguing where there's no argument.
> Nope, I'm pretty aware. My audience isn't you, it's other readers who happen to stumble upon your argument. If they think I sound overly-Patriotic because I reject your claims, so be it. My opinion doesn't change because you don't like it.
My opinion doesn't change because you don't like it either. But, I posit, by sounding jingoistic you're not doing yourself any favors.
> By the way, you said you're not American. What country are you from?
Why does it matter? I'm South American. I'm not from: Russia, China, Japan, Venezuela, North Korea or any country deemed a rogue state or hostile actor by the US. I don't believe in American exceptionalism or their Manifest Destiny. People are entitled to dissenting opinions about the US, right? (I hope, at least!)
It wasn't the a civilised option. Japan would have lost and surrendered with or without nukes. The USA nuked two cities just to demonstrate their nuclear capabilities to the Soviets.
I think that lesson from World War Two is that civilization is all the things we do to prevent another World War Two from happening. And that what we owe to all the people in Hiroshima, Tokyo, Nanjing, the Warsaw Ghetto, Katyn, Bengal, Manzanar, and a thousand other places is to prevent anything like that from happening again.
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.
According to some deep dives into the budget figures for the East Wing Ballroom .. there are new bunkers going in as we type .. and likely being networked underground.
> the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty
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.
Realistically speaking you'll die of an infected and untreated burn wound though, the severe blast and burn area is just much much bigger than the fancy "everything just goes poof" core.
Realistically speaking you're going to die of starvation or get shot by marauding gangs, or die of cancer a few decades later from radiation in the food change. NukeMap [1] has good visualizations of the relative fireball vs. blast vs. thermal radiation vs. fallout radiuses. One thing that stands out: most of the suburbs is going to survive the initial nuclear exchange. At worst, they'll have a few broken windows.
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.
Not only 20% of the population, but wiping out cities is going to make everything grind to a halt. Best case, tiny pockets of social order is going to remain in very hard to reach, remote rural areas which also has local access to food. We are talking about maybe thousands of people in a population of hundreds of millions. The rest are in for a decade of pure hell.
Yah, but you could enter the ruins of some shop, get some booze there, and walk straight into ground zero. Feeling the buzz. Getting tired...drifting away...
Note that MAD only works when there are a small number of players. Once it gets up past around 12, a.) it becomes too easy to detonate a nuclear weapon and then blame somebody else to take the fall and b.) the chance of somebody doing something crazy and irrational becomes high. Same reason that oligopolies can have steady profit but once you have ~10-12 market players you enter perfect competition and inevitably get a price war.
There are 9 nuclear-armed states today. Likely this has set us on a path where nuclear war is inevitable.
People massively simplify the dynamics of launching a nuke. If Russia launched a nuke on a Ukrainian military target away from civilians there is virtually 0 chance of nuclear retaliation. Ukraine doesn't have them. Does anyone think the US, France, etc. would nuke Russia? Of course not.
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.
The problem is the precedent that sets. Russia launches a nuke on Ukraine, and there are no repercussions. That will teach every nuclear-armed state that they can freely nuke non-nuclear-armed states without consequence. But then what happens when somebody makes a mistake? China nukes Japan, but maybe Japan had a secret nuclear program and actually does have a retaliatory capability and nukes China back? Or China invades Taiwan (doesn't even have to nuke it), but the U.S. decides that the loss of Taiwanese semiconductor is actually an unacceptable red line and nukes the invasion fleet? Pakistan nukes India, but China misjudges the trajectory of the nuke and thinks it's actually under attack. Israel nukes Iran, but winds carry the fallout over Pakistan and India.
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.
>The problem is the precedent that sets. Russia launches a nuke on Ukraine, and there are no repercussions. That will teach every nuclear-armed state that they can freely nuke non-nuclear-armed states without consequence. But then what happens when somebody makes a mistake?
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's happened before, although with no loss of civilian life.
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.
Ukraine might have some possible retaliatory options in that case though. Far from ideal, but they could for example load a big ship full of explosives and blow up much of St Petersburg.
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.
The nukes are to deter the US. They have been steadily increasing their missile range to first reach regional bases like Guam and now the all the way to the continental USA, and are now even launching a nuclear powered and nuclear armed ballistic missile submarine https://www.hisutton.com/DPRK-SSN-Update.html
The nukes are a bargaining chip (disarmament). Basically, if your country has the human and tech capital to develop a nuke, you probably should because it's free money.
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.
The nukes have many roles perhaps but I think the fully developed weapons are for retaliatory strike.
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
Yes that's the orthodox doctrine of nuclear deterrent. To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems so that your second-strike capability remains intact through any decapitation attempts.
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.
Just a note that the importance of the triad is a very American perspective on deterrence and most other countries don't seem to approach this the same way the US does.
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.
I don't think they fill the same strategic purposes, though. The value of silo based missiles to the US is as a missile-sponge, taking most of the warheads from a Russian first strike and keeping them from American cities (forcing any Russian first-strike to be counter-force instead of counter-value). This is not particularly valuable, honestly, which is why only the USSR during the height of the Cold War (largely in reaction to Minuteman) and China very recently have also made the investment into large numbers of ICBM silos.(1)
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
Yeah, I guess I mentally slot road mobile missiles as more like "less effective SLBM on the cheap," at least for a country the size of Russia (not sure that is as true for someone like North Korea where I speculate there is a larger use-it-or-lose-it penalty). There is definitely more of a continuum here between "missile-soak" and "survivable deterrent"- e.g. at the limit you could, in theory, vaporize all of the oceans with nuclear weapons to kill all the boomers, which turns them into missile soaks, but at a truly insane level.
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."
> To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems
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.
Strategic bombers are just as important because MAD itself is fundamentally a political and diplomatic tool. The reason you have strategic bombers is, as you correctly said, so that you can signal your posture and intent by stationing them, dispersing them, launching them, and (most critically) recalling them.
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.
Maduro may have been aligned with them, but that is a completely different thing than being protected by them. The DPRK is actually protected by the PRC, in the sense that the PRC is willing to and historically did deploy millions of soldiers to push back Americans from North Korean territory.
But note that happened in rhe 1950s, when Mao was in power and the PRC was an upstart separatist regime with very limited recognition. Now China may want to act very differently.
The reason Mao helped Pyongyang still applies: namely, it would make China less secure to have on its border a regime allied to a great power other than China.
They already have a border with Pakistan and got exactly zero problems from it (if anything, China is the one to stir up shit on that border). You seem to be repeating Putin-style propaganda points. Stalin and Mao were never threatened by the West really, that was part of the Marx-mandated global commie land grab.
Saying "The West is no threat to anyone" at the same time you're advocating for an invasion and abduction of a country's leader is certainly a position to hold. Not a very internally consistent or convincing one, though. And I suppose Vietnam never happened in your constructed reality.
China, Cuba and Russia sent him air defences and some personal guards. What would China's millions do if Kim was kidnapped? Invade Seoul that had no say in it?
Us has these nifty things called aircraft carriers, which were used to capture Maduro as well. They can be in international waters, the choppers fly quite far. China would not retaliate against the US.
That is a bold assertion to make considering China literally did retaliate against the US in North Korea once already, to the tune of war. Kidnapping heads of states is an act of war. Venezuela can't defend itself, but China certainly will do whatever is necessary to secure its vassal if the alternative is NK collapsing and having US military bases on its border.
You also rule out the possibility of an invasion of Seoul, as though it would be "unfair" -- when you're advocating for and actively in the process of tearing whatever remains of the concept of international law to shreds, what makes you think PRC would be inclined to play nice?
Other than by launching nukes (and getting 10x on themselves) China has no capability to attack the US. I don't think attacking SK is unlikely because it's "unfair", but rather because there's no incentive to do so. The concept of "if you attack Cuba we'll attack Europe" is an old playbook for the commies, and I think was always a bluff.
My point is that since in this scenario SK would likely be involved in some capacity (granting safe passage, harboring US planes, etc) they would suffer retaliation by NK and possibly China.
I don't see what's unlikely about this, it's basically NK's defense strategy.
> Us has these nifty things called aircraft carriers, which were used to capture Maduro as well.
It wasn't just carriers in Maduro's case. The operation was carried from multiple places, including out of Caribbean countries aligned with the US. The US was literally signing deals with those countries months in advance.
Who would those countries be in an hypothetical NK strike? Because those countries would suffer retaliation.
China knows about carriers, and tracks them carefully. They have built a variety of weapons to sink them, too, but I don’t think they’d need to use them: note how the raid on Maduro went so quietly that people have been looking for evidence that some of the Venezuelan military were in on it? North Korea has built up a lot more paranoia and China wouldn’t need to sink a carrier, simply ensuring that the NK military knows what’s coming as soon as planes take off and communicates that in a way which makes it impossible for any potentially disloyal faction to act short of declaring a coup (you can’t “accidentally” miss something the entire chain of command knows about). I detest the NK government but I’d expect that to be a much bloodier fight, especially after a huge warning.
China's primary concern is resource extraction from Venezuela, which is why Trump immediately clarified that they'd make sure China still got their oil deliveries.
Russia is stretched way too thin right now to do anything meaningful about it.
Venezuela was basically being run by Cuba. Maduro was really only a figurehead. The military and government was functionally run by imported Cubans which is why a coup wasn't possible.
Nuclear capability wouldn't necessarily rule out this kind of a decapitation strike, it's just that it's very hard to imagine this kind of an operation actually being successful in any nuclear-capable country.
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.
Nuclear capability by itself isn't a complete deterrent. It has been widely reported that the US military has made contingency plans for a decapitation strike and seizure or destruction of nuclear weapons in Pakistan in case the situation turns really bad there. Real deterrence requires a credible second-strike capability on survivable platforms such as submarines.
> the US military has made contingency plans for a decapitation strike and seizure or destruction of nuclear weapons in Pakistan in case the situation turns really bad there. Real deterrence requires a credible second-strike capability on survivable platforms such as submarines.
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.
> There is enough pain for the US that they wouldn't actually attack Pakistan
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.
> 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.
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.
>If America does something to pakistan, then pakistan wouldn't bomb India but rather America
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.
> then pakistan wouldn't bomb India but rather America
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.
Huh? How would Pakistan do that exactly? They have zero capability to strike the US homeland. In theory they might be able to hit a US military base in the region but even doing that successfully would require an extraordinary level of luck.
>but even doing that successfully would require an extraordinary level of luck.
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.
For nuclear deterrence to work in situations like this, it'd also be preferable to have sufficient conventional capabilities that your leadership isn't decapitated before you even notice it's happening. If the attacker is also nuclear-capable, there's little incentive for second person in the chain of command to kill themselves.
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.
I think nuclear deterrence works even in such situations. The retaliatory system is structured in such a way that after decapitation, the decision to use or not use a nuclear weapon is made not by the "number two" or the "successor" but by a person specifically authorized to do so, about whom the successors and number two may know nothing.
It might, it might not. Of course, you could for example also implant a trigger with a dead man's switch inside your head of state which they could use to launch a strike at any point.
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
>It's extremely difficult to believe that the US could fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes.
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.
>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.
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.
>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 b
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.
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.
I don't know if the seismic signature from a 10 kiloton nuclear explosion underground is different from 10,000 tons of actual TNT exploded underground, but there was also radioactive gas evidence of North Korean testing:
The xenon isotopes involved have short half lives so if they were not produced by a nuclear explosion, they would have had to be released simultaneously by e.g. reprocessing a "hot" fresh batch of irradiated uranium at the same time as the underground explosion. This is not impossible, but it looks increasingly convoluted compared to an actual nuclear test.
Also, contra the upthread assertion that "Yields should've been higher for plutonium cores, it's not lightweight stuff," there is nothing about plutonium that drives high yield. The United States manufactured a large number of low yield (1.7 kiloton) plutonium warheads in the late 1950s:
If North Korea aimed to make missile-deliverable weapons from the beginning (which makes sense because they don't have heavy bombers like the Cold War powers did at the beginning of their arms race), it also makes sense that their weapons tests would be focused on validating compact/lightweight designs instead of trying for high yield.
Well yes, the US could certainly easily kidnap leaders of friendly countries. It'd also presumably be very unlikely to result in a nuclear response from either.
I think clanky covered this pretty well, but dropping bombs from high altitude stealth bombers and fighter jets is very very far from actually delivering and extracting soldiers from a location.
The US could probably bomb even Beijing, it doesn't really tell you anything that they were able to bomb Iran also.
It's odd that Iran was able to continue launching waves of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel after they had supposedly lost so much control over their skies that it would have been possible to hover a Chinook over Tehran for 5 minutes.
Counterpoint is that Ukraine, Qaddafi, and Assad already demonstrated the significance of maintaining certain capabilities. Vzla didn't have those capabilities before, much less publicly depreciate them.
1) It's complex. Formally, Moscow controlled the launch codes. However Ukraine designed and built the ICBMs, and are near the top of nations with the highest nuclear physicist per capita ratio.
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.
> Your computer is designed and built in China therefore your computer belongs to Chinese and China. Right?
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?
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.
> Your computer is designed and built in China therefore your computer belongs to Chinese and China. Right?
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.
Alternatively, we might have entered either a limited or a worst-case nuclear war scenario.
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.
To be the devil's advocate, I don't think Russia foresaw a situation that had Ukraine looking to join NATO right after NATO had been used offensively for the first time ever to put its thumb on the scale of a civil war that didn't involve NATO countries.
If Putin didn't want NATO getting involved if he started a war there's one special trick he could have played! He could have not started a war ...
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.
Sure, but I think these discussions are more enlightening when we model superpowers as rational actors within their ideological system rather than just whatever propaganda is locally convenient.
> when we model superpowers as rational actors within their ideological system
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.
No no no, some random American diplomat told a random Soviet diplomat during the East Germany negotiations that NATO wouldn't extend east at all.
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)
Even setting aside that Ukraine never had the technical means or infrastructure to operate/maintain those weapons, I don't think they would have dissuaded Russia or actually been used. Russia could turn them into a wasteland in response and 6 million people (including hundreds of thousands of men of military age) weren't even willing to stay in Ukraine, much less fight for the country. If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.
You don't think that Ukraine, the country that designed and built those ICBMs, and had one of the highest per capita counts of nuclear physicists could handle at least a few decades of upkeep on those nukes?
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.
> the country that designed and built those ICBMs, and had one of the highest per capita counts of nuclear physicists could handle at least a few decades of upkeep on those nukes?
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.
The idea that a nation state could not make use of the hundreds of nuclear weapons in its territory is just absurd. It's sillier than the people that think disk encryption will spare them the crowbar to the face. Beyond the whole chauvinistic idea that it was "Russians" that built them in the first place.
> If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.
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.
This isn’t how nukes would get used. They wouldn’t just fire them at cities to start with. It would most likely be something tactical, but perhaps end up escalating to insanity anyway
You don't leave room to escalate beyond use if nukes anymore. Russia's response to a tactical nuke would be to turn Ukraine into glass. All leaving additional escalation on the table does is make sure that you don't make good on your word to make everyone lose too.
> You don't leave room to escalate beyond use if nukes anymore. Russia's response to a tactical nuke would be to turn Ukraine into glass
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.
Sure, but that practically looks like Russia telling NATO what it's going to do, then most of NATO sitting at DEFCON 1 and being ready to respond the instant any Russian missiles look like they're not going towards Ukraine. NATO has no reason to inject themselves into a nuclear exchange more than diplomatically, and has the ability to respond well after they know where Russian missiles are going to land.
> that practically looks like Russia telling NATO what it's going to do
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.)
> Which is indistinguishable from a Russian first strike.
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'.
> It's really not. Once they've launched, it's pretty clear where they're going
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.)
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.
Your comment highlights some tensions in deterrence theory, but it also oversimplifies over a few things.
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.
>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.
Well, Russian occupation usually means your town slowly undergoes mass extermination and genocide....
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.
The reporting suggests there was some kind of deal struck between the US and elements of the VZ administration, and even nuclear capability doesn't prevent that
It will increase the desire for nukes, but also increase the hesitation to seek them now that credibility and capability (particularly what modern intelligence is capable of) are demonstrated. Hard to say how this nets off.
>I assume that nuclear capability would rule out a target from this kind of snatch operation
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.
Yeah but those people read the popularity polls as well. If you kill or capture the leader, there isn’t much upside in retaliation against a massively more powerful enemy. The best move is to cozy up to whomever is in power next.
> The best move is to cozy up to whomever is in power next.
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?
Nuclear weapons aren’t automated enough for one person to launch them. “The button” is generally just sending orders to other people to launch them.
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.
You pick people for that job that aren't that concerned with the popularity polls, and who's main value add is a willingness to turn the key when told to. Either directly or because they were previously told to follow the process.
There’s no process to pick people that will reliably follow through with a suicide pact.
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.
I agree with that speculation, but if you keep your launch chain of command short enough (as the US does), nukes can also be a deterrent to a palace coup; doubly so for a foreign-backed one.
There's still a lot of information coming out, a lot of it conflicting, so that's hard to say.
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.
> And they bombed Chavez's tomb, which is quite a dick move of there wasn't any AA there
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
> 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.
I think by "this kind of operation" he means extrajudicially removing a sitting president (legitimate or not) of another country for trial elsewhere. Not cyber attack or espionage.
Oh, so the commenter is not actually talking about the BGP anomalies at all? He's just hijacking the comment section to advocate for nuclear proliferation?
the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money (at least couple hundreds of millions), and after completing the time will end up with his money in Russia/Belarussia.
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.
It strikes me as completely possible that the exit was negotiated. The fact that they knew his exact location and "luckily" nabbed him right before he went into some kind of panic room / bunker is certainly... something.
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.
I think it is kind of both - the exit was ultimately negotiated because most of the VZ government/military either sold him or at least abandoned him and showed no interest in any further support of him.
> the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money
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.
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.
> So what's the scenario then? Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela launches its nukes, everyone dies on both sides.
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.
Are you trying to argue that M.A.D. hasn't been an effective deterrent to violence for decades?
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?
That's like arguing against the police arresting criminals because it will incentivize them to acquire weapons.
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.
Terrible take in the 2nd premise of your argument. Is Venezuela a sovereign nation or a colony? Can similar logic be applied against Russia or even the US?
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.
The sovereignty of Venezuela is not the right argument here, because practical sovereignty is not absolute and there are just war grounds for Maduro's capture. The man was an awful tyrant.
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.
There are all sorts of factors motivating it. Crony capitalism (w.r.t. oil, for example) is another one of them. But that doesn't mean they justify the operation. At this point, it is a fait accompli. I pray that things don't get worse for Venezuela (the unfortunate side effect is that it will give supporters of this operation greater false confidence that they did the right thing; "Look! Nothing bad happened afterward!").
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.
Of course it can, and it is. Such logic is behind the argument in favor of arresting Putin. Many have argued that should happen if he were to step on their nations' soil. The reason no one thinks seriously about going into Russia and enforcing open arrest warrants is that they fear the consequences, though maybe in light of Russia's revealed impotence that fear is unjustified.
> 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. The CANTV AS8048 being prepended to the AS path 10 times means there the traffic would not prioritize this route through AS8048, perhaps that was the goal?
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.
CANTV (AS8048) is a correct upstream transit provider for Dayco (AS21980) as seen in both https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as21980#connectivity and https://bgp.tools/as/21980#upstreams
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.
A closer look at the leak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46518731
The "closer" look is more blurry than the one presented here though.
Most providers enforce rpki but unless you peer with tier1 networks you can't influence a network you don't peer with.
Agreed the author here just dumps data but nothing that seems to be designed to disrupt comms in Venezuela is really mentioned.
I guess one of the interesting things I learnt off this article(1) was that 7% of DNS query types served by 1.1.1.1 are HTTPS and started wondering what HTTPS query type was as I had only heard of A, MX, AAAA, SPF etc...
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...
It’s also how browsers detect a website supports HTTP3. Browsers will request it just to check if they should connect to an https:// URL via HTTP3 (though they generally don’t block on it - they fallback to HTTP1/2 if it takes too long).
> It’s also how browsers detect a website supports HTTP3
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.
Would that help against a man in the middle that blocks the H3 traffic to snoop the URL when the client falls back to H2?
Every browser requires H2 connections to be encrypted so I don't think a MITM downgrading to it would reveal anything. Downgrading to H1 might do since encryption is optional there, but the proper way to prevent that is to submit your domains to the HSTS preload list so that browsers will always require encryption, regardless of protocol, no exceptions.
Caddy supports it, and has quite a bit written about it: https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https#encrypted-clien...
There’s an odd skew in that data which is saying the *third* most popular TLD is ‘.st’ which is… unexpected. The biggest service I can find using that TLD is `play.st` so maybe PlayStation clients are early adopters of DNS-over-HTTPS via 1.1.1.1.
The biggest .st "service" is Aisuru botnet.
Weird. Or maybe someone looking up `te.st` a lot?
Wait, so you do not leak the host through DNS with this? I have not checked it out yet.
Encrypted DNS has existed for quite a while now through DNS over HTTPS, the missing link was that to connect to a website, you first had to send the server the hostname in plaintext to get the right public key for the site. So someone listening on the wire could not see your DNS requests but would effectively still get the site you connected to anyway.
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.
> 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.
> This will make blocking websites very difficult if they use shared services like cloudflare or cloud VPS hosting.
Until some clueless judge orders all of cloudflare to be blocked.
True!
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...
Western governments just send a court order to the hosting provider to shut the site down / revoke their domain name. Site blocking is more of a problem for small counties trying to block sites the rest of the world allows to be hosted.
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.
In principle, it means you could run multiple sites from the same IP and someone intercepting traffic to that IP (but not the client’s DNS path) couldn’t tell what site each connection was to. It mostly makes sense for CDNs, where the same IP will be used for many sites.
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.
Even for China so-called "overblocking" where to censor a small thing you have to block a much larger thing, is a real concern with these technologies. There's a real trade here, you have to expend effort and destroy potential and in some cases the reward isn't worth it. You can interpret ECH as an effort to move the ratio, maybe China was willing to spend $5000 and annoy a thousand people to block a cartoon site criticising their internal policies, but is it willing to sped $50 000 and annoy a ten thousand people? How about half a million and 100K people ?
That requires the client to only emit ECH, even if the ISP-provided (and therefore government controlled) DNS blocks HTTPS/SVCB records. China can easily make the default for a browser in China be to never even try to use ECH as well. Then they'll only annoy people trying to actively circumvent their system. They already do TCP sessionization to extract the SNI domain. Detecting ECH and then just dropping the connection at L3 is functionally equivalent.
In theory, sites could eventually require ECH to serve anything at all. But we're very far from that.
> That requires the client to only emit ECH
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.
The great firewall was updated to support inspection of TLS 1.3. They didn’t just decide it was whatever and let everything through. It was easier to just update their parsing than to force everyone to turn it off, so they did that instead. Perfect forward secrecy was a thing before TLS 1.3, and they’ve found other methodology to accomplish what they want.
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.
> The great firewall was updated to support inspection of TLS 1.3.
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.
I don’t understand what your point about TLS 1.3 is. It’s only relevant if you’re doing a downgrade attack (or equivalently, using an active middleware box). TLS 1.3 itself is not vulnerable to this because it (a) doesn’t have non-PFS suites to downgrade to and (b) protects the cipher suites by including them in the key exchange material. But if the server supports TLS 1.2, an active MITM can still downgrade to it if the client doesn’t demand TLS 1.3 specifically (which browsers do not by default). It won’t matter to China until there are lots of TLS 1.3-only websites (which hasn’t happened yet).
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.
> if the server supports TLS 1.2, an active MITM can still downgrade to it
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.
> 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.
This is so you do not leak the host through TLS. Using DNS to serve an encryption key.
It’s not just encrypted server name indication (ESNI), it is the whole hello now (ECH)! So you don’t leak anything.
My read is you still leak the host with DNS. This only prevents leaking the host with SNI. A useful piece but not at all the holy grail.
Caddy has supported it for several months now, although I do agree most the requests are in fact Cloudflare.
iPhones regularly do these queries before / in addition to to A/AAAA. They’re used for more than ECH.
Adguard Home and others can be configured to complete your DNS requests over HTTPS (using, for example, https://dns.cloudflare.com/dns-query).
That's not what this is about.
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)
> so if many people share the same endpoints then eavesdropper can't tell which site you were visiting.
Which is why it is so important/useful to Cloudflare but of much lower utility to most nginx users.
Cloudflare provides a very large haystack for this, but even for an nginx server with no CDN, it's still useful to prevent the hostname from being sent in the clear before the TLS connection is negotiated. This still hides the hostname from casual eavesdroppers, who now only know what IP you're connecting to, and would need need out-of-band information to map the IP back to a hostname. And they couldn't ever be 100% sure of that, because they wouldn't know for certain whether there are additional vhosts running on a given server.
I think you might be surprised at how heavily SNI is leveraged at places like GoDaddy, Bluehost, and other similar providers to host sites from hundreds of completely unrelated businesses on the same IP address.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS
This doesn't look like anything malicious, 8048 is just prepending these announcements to 52320.. If anything, it looks like 269832(MDS) had a couple hits to their tier 1 peers which caused these prepended announcements to become more visible to collectors.
Was the OSRS economy affected by the strikes? I'm assuming they didn't disrupt internet access for most Venezuelan citizens but I have not looked into it yet.
I'd say that an OSRS outage would be more likely to measurably affect the Venezuelan economy than the reverse.
I run an OSRS market analysis/flipping site, and have been keeping an eye on the effects.
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.
My clanmates and I noticed that some of the more popular goldfarming hotspots were much less populated that day. Rev caves, Zalcano, etc. Not sure about impacts for the broader economy though. Maybe FlippingOldSchool will release a video analyzing the economic trends over the course of that week? Would be interesting for sure.
Maybe they were out celebrating.
Any osrs Venezuelan clans you’re looking to contact about this?
Yes, it looks like it definitely was: https://x.com/eslischn/status/1104542595806609408
Unless I'm missing an update, it appears that this post is from 2019?
that's in 2019
There were reports they had considered Christmas Day and New Year's Day. I wonder if it was far enough along that you could see similar BGP anomalies around those times.
Not from the cloudflare dashboard, you can zoom out. The night of the attack doesnt even really stand out as abnormal when zooming out that far.
So you're saying I can't set an alert for these conditions and use the timing to place a quick bet on the geopolitical polymarket du-jour?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-polymarket-user-made-more...
Yeah, I was thinking it definitely needs to be correlated to geopolitical tensions in some way. Polymarket data might be helpful in this case- and provides incentives for putting this kind of data together.
I wonder what kind of capabilities the US army didn't use during this operation.
BGP is so unsecure that almost anyone can create chaos.
Even by accident!
or even by normal load from someone deciding to split a /8 prefix into /24's
>or even by normal load from someone deciding to split a /8 prefix into /24's
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.
Oh, my bad. How didn't I notice my mistake right away. That 25 is grossly wrong, I should have checked before using that. The correct line to get subnets is
Which increases significantly global routing table size of course. I apologise my mistake on that matter that I should have noticed before posting.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.
Most BGP peers have router filters in place. It's not 1996 anymore. I remember the days of logging into a Cisco connected to a Sprint T1 and seeing a coworker had fat fingered a spammer's route, sending it to null0. Oops. How did that happen?
Also RPKI has been available long time already.
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...
Many v4 prefixes in the ARIN region are legacy and don't support RPKI unless you sign the registration agreement. I have a legacy prefix and may eventually be forced to sign up.
I worked as a contractor for a IoT gig that sold sim cards services for buses, trains et cetera.
The radio towers we used to access to obtain the accounting data (CDRs) all had the same very weak password.
Let’s be honest, that was a crazy operation. I wonder whether they really secured all chances of success, or just winged it with chances of not depositing the leader, and him being able to summon his diplomatic relations into 50 countries declaring war to the USA.
While on their way out, if the USA could set everything back to IPv6, that would be nice.
The outcome is less-crazy if one views it as assisting a palace-coup, partnering with a bunch of Venezuelan government and military insiders already seeking to depose Maduro, able to subtly clear the path and provide intel.
I personally think it is both. I think CBS article disclosed that CIA had someone in the inner circle. That, however, does not really take away from how well coordinated it actually was. That does not mean it was a good idea to do it. Just because I can run around naked does not mean I should..
If they did that then they did a bad job considering Maduros vp assumed power while also saying Maduro remains the actual president.
P.S.: In that scenario, it's quite possible for both groups of conspirators to benefit from denying it and saber-rattling:
* 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.
> him being able to summon his diplomatic relations into 50 countries declaring war to the USA.
As if. Dictators only do things that benefit themselves, and deciding to attack the US is suicide and/or world ending.
Took a long time to catch up with Bin Laden after he attacked the US.
Let’s be realistic.
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.
So if you wanted to attack the US you wouldn’t do a conventional “red dawn” style attack. You’d attack like bin laden. And then keep quiet.
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.
That probably wouldn't work. Even if you tried, there are more privately owned guns than there are citizens in the US; every inch would be a nightmare.
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.
That was moreso about taking down the ORG before cutting its head. Unfortunately their radical ideology spreads with or without Bin Laden.
we don't really have a way to tell if it was even real, it would actually be a rather trivial operation for the government during those times and the entire thing could have just been overplayed and/or involved collaboration from all sides.
none of those documents exist since it was probably never documented to begin with so we will never know I guess.
They almost had him early in afghanistan but let him go.
No one would lift a finger for him. Russia just watched. The Chinese too. They may be allies in words but in the end each dictator just care about themselves. Just like how Trump wouldn’t help any ally unless he got something out of it.
Power wins in anarchy. International relations are anarchy. There is no actual international law.
> There is no actual international law.
There is, of course, both private and public international law. You don't know what you're talking about.
There is something by that name, but it doesn't mean much. On the international level, it's all voluntary. States can choose to be part of the international courts. The US (and many other high profile countries) famously are not participating, which is why they can effectively just commit war crimes left and right.
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.
Why stop at international law? It's no different than a lot of civil, financial, criminal law. You just get big enough and now there's nothing the system can do about you. It's become increasingly apparent that having the right friends and enough money is the only 'law' that matters at any level of society, and people will be too disengaged or selfish to do anything about it besides reap the rewards if they're in the right place. Laws only work on the disempowered, and in that sense international law is exactly as powerful as the law of the land in whatever country you live in.
>Why stop at international law? It's no different than a lot of civil, financial, criminal law. You just get big enough and now there's nothing the system can do about you.
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.
Not in any real sense because states are sovereign.
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.
I think it was meant in a "international law is a farce" sort of rhetoric
Yes. More specifically I would say international law is law in name only. It's not really law at all. It's akin to a child asserting rules on a playground with their peers. There is no enforcement mechanism. In reality what we call international law is more like a mutually agreed upon policy, which can also just not be agreed upon at any moment. In fact many countries do not agree to them. There is no government agency or enforcement mechanism over states - that is what makes them states by definition.
I am always shocked by how controversial this take can be.
It’s complicated. While it’s true that there is no direct enforcement, systems of sanctions and embargos have been used to indirectly enforce these agreements. Whether this is ultimately effective is not obvious, but I think “international law does not exist” is a simplistic take, with all due respect for your opinion (which I understand and partially share)
I doubt we are about to see those mechanisms being used to penalise the US for this latest behaviour though.
I don’t think other UN or NATO states are strong enough to play this game with the US yet.
Of course they didn't. While I can't imagine Russia is exactly happy that it lost an ally in the Western Hemisphere, this kind of action is very much aligned with Putin's multi-polar worldview where the great powers leave each other to play empire in their respective spheres of influence. It helps justify things like invading Ukraine. I can imagine some in the Chinese military are over the moon right now, taking notes on how to force regime change in Taiwan.
More importantly, Putin didn't really have an option to help.
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?
> While on their way out, if the USA could set everything back to IPv6, that would be nice.
You actually think the US would leave things better than they found them?
Only when it's oil infrastructure.
They never ‘leave’ that.
Does it mean that countries must not buy American telecom equipments? Snowden already revealed the intromission of the government in Cisco routers.
Only the ones run by dictators.
Dictators the US doesn't support (so Sisi, MBS, MBZ, etc. are fine)
This is not unusual, CANTV has notoriously slow, expensive links, most ISPs in Venezuela would have it as a "backup" provider. If there is an outage of GlobeNet or TIM, it would cause those routes to disappear, leaving the CANTV routes up, which are heavily prepended to avoid routing through them on "normal" operations.
Fascinating find and investigation. While there isn't a solid conclusion from it, glad it was written up, perhaps someone will be able to connect more dots with it.
If you were not already entirely reliant on American tech before, this ought to convince you to put jump in with both feet. What could possibly go wrong?
There is not really any reason to conclude that "american tech" was responsible for this attack. If anything, given all the sanctions Venezuela was under and how friendly they are with china, i would be surprised if they were using american tech in their infrastructure.
[Of course i agree with the broader point of dont become dependent on the technology of your geopolitical enemies]
There are other attack vectors beyond infrastructure though when the population all have Android Smart Phones running Play Services and communicate using WhatsApp.
I am not sure why you are being downvoted where nothing you said is inaccurate. This practice of reflexively downvoting when disagreeing really is starting to irk me. Argue with OP damn it. How is he wrong?
It’s for sure another alarm signal for the EU to further reduce dependencies on our newest geopolitical enemy… the United States of America.
It is insane that some people need more signals. It was clearly stated by US in February 2025 and several times after that.
After eighty years of collaboration, I’m not surprised people don’t take lightly when the USA do a 180 on their entire history of diplomacy and turn to autocratic regimes like Russia instead of liberal democracies.
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.
> and turn to autocratic regimes like Russia instead of liberal democracies
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".
Are they doing also something that is not aligned with business interests?
Sorry, I can't tell how you're refuting the idea that applying very painful sanctions to Russia is the opposite of "turning to Russia".
It's pick-your-poison, really.
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.
Most everyone in the world has a Google or Apple phone in their pocket. I'm not sure how much more reliant you can get.
What would be the result of this? I think it would route data through Sparkle as a way of potentially spying on internet traffic without having compromised the network equipment within Venezuela, but I'm not familiar enough with network architecture to really understand what happened.
Maybe there would be some benefit in just dropping some packets. For example to WhatsApp, Telegram, Gmail servers. Could add a communication delay that could be critical and denies people a fairly reliable fallback communication method.
The effect of this would be traffic from GlobeNet destined for Dayco would transit over CANTV's network for a period.
I'm not sure why the author singled out Telecom Italia Sparkle.
Alternative theory: Part of the operation caused power outages or disrupted some connections, the BGP anomalies were a result of that.
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.
As a follow-up, Cloudflare came to the same conclusion: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bgp-route-leak-venezuela/
> The newsletter suggests “BGP shenanigans” and posits that such a leak could be exploited to collect intelligence useful to government entities. > > While we can’t say with certainty what caused this route leak, our data suggests that its likely cause was more mundane.
The BGP anomalies were 24-hours~ before the power outage, so I'm not sure I follow what you're arguing.
What I mean is that cause and effect here could be different then the author thinks. We see some route changes, but those changes make no sense on their own since they wouldn't capture any traffic. That makes it more probable that BGP was not the attack, but that some other action caused this BGP anomalie as a side effect.
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.
I think what the other commenter is saying is that the BGP changes happened 12 hours before any of the power loss/bomb drop, so that eliminates your primary cause.
At that earlier time, some preparatory action was likely already on its way.
For a length-15 ASpath to show up on the internet, a whole bunch of better routes need to disappear first, which seems to have happened here. But that disappearance is very likely unrelated to CANTV.
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.
https://isbgpsafeyet.com
There are two things that it's very important normies never learn much about: BGP and fractional reserve banking
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Is there a term for the distance between an acronym's first use and its definition?
There are BGP anomalies every day.
Cyber-warfare capabilities on this level seem pretty horrific. What if you could simply turn off the power grid of Kyiv or Moscow in anticipation of a strike? That seems extremely disorientating. What if you could simply turn off the power grid indefinitely?
Russia attacks Ukrainian power grid on a weekly basis. Not only with cyber-attacks but with actual bombs. Over Christmas 750k homes in Kyiv were without power or heating. This is not a hypothetical it's daily reality for millions of people in Ukraine.
Something like this more or less happened during the initial Israeli strike on Iran ?
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.
> 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,
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.
Not really. Ferrari is a great car, but with punctured tires or bad driver, it won't win any race.
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.
A Ferrari with punctured tires isn’t a great car, it can’t drive. It’s an immobile, useless hunk of metal with a great engine and transmission, similar to disabled air defense systems: really expensive, useless hunks of metal.
See the remotely operated Spike missiles: https://www.twz.com/news-features/spike-missiles-that-destro...
The unquestioning logistical and intelligence support from the US military is truly formidable, and probably expensive.
> What if you could simply turn off the power grid of Kyiv or Moscow in anticipation of a strike?
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.
General Caine specifically said they utilized CYBERCOM (which is the US inter-branch hacking command) to pave the way for the special ops helicopters. I personally have no doubt that any (whether or not they all were) lights being out was due to a US hack. Some of the stuff that got blown up may well have been to prevent forensic recover of US tools and techniques.
I have no doubt they used cyberattacks and electronic warfare.
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.
Also: “Everything’s computer!”
On the other hand, Trump has a track record of leaking capabilities.
Read about Stuxnet
It's been well known to be a major part of world power war plans for like 20 years now. Yes, it's a terrifying concept.
I don't think calling shutting down the internet horrific is appropriate at all in the context of bombings.
Ridiculous post. Power outages would kill a lot of people if sustained. A Carrington event would devastate modern society.
You mean in hospital contexts?
I'm having trouble thinking how power outages can be deadly.
If it's hot/cold, elderly/vulnerable people tend to die pretty quick.
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 feels like a stretch.
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.
> 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.
Russia tried. They haven’t managed to do anything very serious.
There are way worse things you could do, you could hide explosives in consumer electronics and infiltrate the supply lines to replace them. Then you could detonate them all simultaneously, indiscriminately murdering everyone around them as well. But of course only fascist barbarians would ever do or support that sort of thing.
Symbolic link to the Cloudflare RPKI status for CANTV.
[1]:https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as8048ref=loworbitsecur...
missing a question mark https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as8048?ref=loworbitsecu...
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46499419
I wonder if this can be monitored on a global scale as a sort of predictor of “something gonna happen at country X”.
ELI5 for people not familiar in this domain?
From the article:
Look for the same with Greenland or Canada next :/
the rest of the world is weirdly too passive, there's a smell of shock
I don't think anybody cares any bit about Maduro.
understandably, it's more about the acceleration in aggressiveness from Trump clan and the precedent of crossing the usual international red lines
Almost every country made some repudiation note. But I don't think we'll see anybody doing any actual thing because of that.
IMHO the rest of the world isn't asleep. Denmark's prime minister said the same as you, for example. US just got roasted at UN by inter alia, France, with ~20 countries either speaking the same or asking to speak on it. That's just from 30s with front page of nytimes.com.
In EU, so far I believe only the PM of Spain had the backbone to speak properly with anything that could be considered "strongly worded", proving that it's possible.
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 has happened because the party that rules Spain has ties to the dictatorship.
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.
It’s really dumb I’m sitting at -2 and the top reply is about a Macron tweet from 2 days ago, lying and saying no one else from Europe has said anything, and lying and saying anything besides the King of Spain was actually celebrating. You’re making stuff up. Full stop. You could easily have googled either thing I mentioned. You didn’t, choosing to free associate instead. May you reap what you sow.
Given that the nukes topic came up ... Will the US/Trump be so aggressive if Denmark has a few nukes that can hit the US? Or at minimum sink a invading fleet?
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.
That just sounds like more 'strongly worded letters' which never go anywhere and they never do anything about.
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.
What does action (i.e. not-strongly-worded-letters, i.e. not words) look like?
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.
One non military but economical retaliation that would affect our industry is to stop respecting American’s intellectual property. Some variation of the trade bazooka. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument
> What does action (i.e. not-strongly-worded-letters, i.e. not words) look like?
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.)
There are much faster responses available.
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.
Isn't this comment just confirming GP's sentiment that the EU is a toothless sitting duck that's begging to be plundered? Yes, when another country threatens your sovereignty you're supposed to vigorously defend it through shows of force, prepare for war and possibly impose economic penalties on the aggressor. The most the EU can do is put out some mild condemnations on Twitter (without mentioning Daddy).
Action probably looks like crash-starting multiple nuclear weapons programs. With or without the help of the british/french. Probably with.
I'd imagine programs from: the Nordics and Poland+Baltics. Maybe Germany, probably not.
What happens when you start making nukes and the US doesn't want you to?
Ssetting aside the whole non-proliferation thing, or expense (see NK), etc.
Let's get serious, please.
Sanctions come to my mind.
We would then hack you.
Why set aside expense? You do it anyway by whatever means necessary, like the DRPK. And if you’re a “western democracy” (also known as capitalist dictatorship) and you’re part of the ruling class, you still have the incentive to protect your assets, things you exploit in your country, land, natural resources, etc, that the US won’t be sharing or that they want to decrease supply when they take over through puppets or multinationals, and you can always force the public to pay for such a project, like all the times western peoples had to bail out or spend their taxes to benefit private corporations, but now it would look like it’s to protect sovereignty, which is a bonus of course, it would be to protect the local ruling class’s interests, but anyway. It’s clear the Americans will stop at nothing to acquire whatever it is they want, including indirectly violent means like ordering their financial institutions and tech giants to destroy whoever is on the way. The monster was always there since the Cold War and just now it dropped any pretenses.
Any sort of pushback at all would be an improvement.
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.
The EU aren't a member of NATO, so that's simply not true.
Canada has a strong army and can defend itself. Greenland on the other hand is not well defended and I doubt Denmark really cares (e.g., if they’re willing to send tens of thousands of troops to die for it) if it was occupied by China or Russia in the event of a war.
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).
Frankly, the right move (before Trump did as Trump does, and fucked up our foreign relations) would have been to straight-up buy Greenland. The people of Greenland have the right under Danish law to vote for independence, and there's not that many of them. Paying individual people for the votes probably would have cost the US $10 billion, and then we could give them Puerto Rico-esque status.
Not sure why this got downvoted; we're threatening it again, credibly enough that the Danish PM is telling them to shut up.
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...
> Not sure why this got downvoted
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.
It's not only downvoted, it was flagged, and dead. (flag accepted by moderator, no one else will see this comment thread without expanding)
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.
Ill speculate as to why, paid astroturfers are posting it. Look at Twitter, most accounts that post that insane trump loving crap are in third world countries.
Probably just a coincidence that Garry Tan and Marc Andreseen have so publicly aligned themselves with a cabal of pedophiles.
Of course, because this site is control of Mark Eggman Andrreesen.
> this site is control of Mark Eggman Andrreesen
You're mixing up your VCs?
Whose egos?
a16z.
Same reason this post got flagged and died.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356858
wait whose a16z. Can you provide me more context about it?
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.
>is there no storage of flag/died posts on hackernews?
they're not deleted, just hidden. you can toggle "showdead" in your profile settings.
I'm curious. Are you saying that tech bros on this site will just downvote/flag stuff like that's against their "heroes", that would be pretty standard I guess. Or are you implying a conspiracy where somehow they exert influence on the moderators to kill the posts/comments?
Solid OSINT methodology here. The 10x AS path prepending is the most interesting detail to me b/c typically you'd see prepending used to de-prioritize a route, which raises the question: was this about making traffic avoid CANTV, or was it a side effect of something else?
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.
really?
?
The only anomaly was military. As far as I can tell, Venezuela's AD was shut down, or told to shut down.
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.
Some pretty spooky comments in this thread from accounts with pretty low comment histories too…
If the system eats its own analysts, the doctrine question becomes moot.
Typical cyber warfare techniques.
I assume that nuclear capability would rule out a target from this kind of snatch operation, and that this event will add pressure to proliferate.
Indeed. The DPRK was right from the start. They always were.
For the longest time I thought they'd gone too far, but now we're the clowns putting on a show.
Sure, but there must always be a fear that the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty. And may tolerate a coupe instead. Which then reduces the madness and the deterrent effect. The extra step the Dprk have taken is to try and build bunkers so that the regime could survive the destruction of the country. A step further into madness that goes beyond what western countries have been willing to accept.
The US built a lot of bunkers like this back in the 1950's.
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.
Where will the planes land?
There are something like 20,000 airports and heliports across the US. While not all of them can handle 747s probably there are several thousand fields that can take one of them, especially if there is no need for it to fly again.
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.
Given the extent of planning that went into these types of doomsday survival scenarios, I wouldn't be surprised to find there are pre-prepared discreet runways in obscure locations unlikely to be targeted. Not full concrete runways, just a strip of prepared land that would see a 747 land without exploding into a ball of fire.
Dry lake beds abound in the US West. See Edwards AFB (big dry lake bed on which nearly everything, including the Space Shuttle, has landed). See also Groom Lake. These are enormous and couldn't be wrecked by conventional runway denial weapons.
Those interstate highways are starting to look pretty good as the fuel guage drops
I'd always been told this was planned into the implementation of the US Interstate Highway System. There are dead straight and level sections ever so many linear miles or per some gridsquare measure to serve as ad hoc landing strips in a national crisis. That's been 35+ years ago that I heard it and I haven't sought any supporting documentation since the dawn of the Internet. Any insight would be appreciated.
even a small country like Switzerland uses its highways to land fighterjets[0], wouldn't be weird to me if the US with their humongous highways uses them for the same reason. difference is that the swiss have to remove the middle crash barriers before landing, so less spontaneous.
[0]https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-air-force-lands-fighter-p...
Watching a civilized nation drop a nuclear bomb on an enemy really got into peoples heads.
What's worse is.. it worked.
there's a fair argument to make that a nation that drops a nuclear bomb on a city isn't "civilized"
The high end of the range of death estimates by the two atomic bombs is around 246,000. The estimated range of US military deaths from an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) was 250,000 to 1,000,000, and another 5 to 10 million Japanese. Dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option. Oppenheimer et al. deserve their acclaim.
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.
> Dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option.
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.
The US had already secretly intercepted cables from Japan with it looking to "terminate the war because of the pressing situation which confronts Japan" as far back as July 12th 1945 in which they also expressed a willingness to relinquish all claimed territories. [1] The only condition they were seeking is that the Emperor be able to remain as a figurehead.
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-...
Pro tip: if your enemy is really about to surrender, nuking them once will suffice. Even after the second bomb was dropped, the Emperor faced assassination threats from the military high command for running up the white flag.
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.
Like you're indirectly acknowledging, the nukes had no real impact on their decision. Half their way cabinet wanted to fight to the last Japanese, half wanted to surrender. This was both before and after the nukes. The Emperor wasn't like a super-politician - he was seen as a [literally] living deity who was above politics. So the cabinet called upon him to make the final decision, which he had made long before the nukes - which was to surrender. There was no danger to him. Even the plots to undermine his decision involved destroying his announcement of surrender and leaving him under house arrest. And that plot was stopped by a speech from another officer, leading to most of the plotters to commit suicide for their dishonor.
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.
[1] - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3_Szil%C3%A1rd
You're right, in that there's no reason to assume the bombs were entirely decisive by themselves. The truth is that from the target's POV, there was nothing particularly special or interesting about the atomic bombs of the day, except that they were dropped from a single plane.
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?
I don't think war is at all about doing the worst stuff you can to the other guy. Different countries approach it in radically different ways. The war in Ukraine is one of the deadliest wars in modern times, but civilians have made up an extremely small percent of all casualties. On the other extreme, Israel's war against Gaza is just a complete slaughter of civilians. And I don't think we should simply lower ourselves to lowest common denominator regardless of whether or not Japan would have done the same. This isn't even necessarily about morality either - it's simply in our self interest. The era when the US was something to look up to was also the time when we behaved in a principled fashion, or at least were perceived to be doing so.
The history of Korea is another example of this stuff, and nothing like people think. After the Korean war South Korea was ruled by a series of US backed brutal dictators. When the first was overthrown, he lived out his final years in Hawaii, just to be replaced by another, and so on. South Korea only started to become what you think of today in the 6th Republic, which began in the late 80s. The only difference between North and South Korea is that we aimed to economically attack North Korea and economically support South Korea. And given South Korea is now having an extinction level fertility crisis, the final page of how things turned out is still yet to be written.
The Ukraine war has a better civilian casualty ratio for a bunch of reasons that are not "Israel is evil and trying to slaughter civilians":
- Soldiers on both sides wear uniforms.
- When they can, Ukraine defends from trenches away from civilians.
- When urban combat seems unavoidable, Ukraine evacuates their civilians.
- Ukraine is a vast country, with plenty of safer areas to move to.
- Other countries have also accepted large number of Ukrainian war refugees.
Gaza is the opposite: Hamas fighters disguise as civilians, they defend mostly from urban areas, they never attempt to evacuate civilians (sometimes the opposite), it's a small territory, and no countries are accepting Gazan war refugees in significant numbers.
There's no military on the planet that could fight Hamas in Gaza without causing significant civilian harm.
Third party observers have observed endless bad behavior from Ukrainian forces. Amnesty International even called them out, in spite of the inevitable blow back it would (and did) receive, for actively locating their military forces in residential areas, launching strikes from civilian areas, turning schools and hospitals into military bases, and more. [1] Ukraine's response was tantamount to saying that rules don't matter for them, because they're the defender and not the aggressor.
Given these behaviors Russian forces would be justified in just carpet bombing these sort of areas that Ukrainian forces are entrenching, but they have chosen not to. By contrast that is precisely what Israel does, and also what the US does not only in WW2 but e.g. in Iraq and Afghanistan where killing dozens of civilians to get somebody who might be an enemy is considered a justifiable engagement.
And again this gets back to what I just said about this not even necessarily being about morality or ethics. Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023, and it's unlikely things will be improving for them in the foreseeable future. Behaving good in war is simply in one's own best interest on any sort of timescale beyond the immediate.
[1] - https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/ukraine-military-e...
> but they have chosen not to
I disagree with this premise. There are many examples of Russia striking civilian gatherings or infrastructure.
For example their Hroza village strike killed 59. If we're trying to be charitable to Russia, it's possible they knew of some important off-duty officer present in Hroza. But with our limited public info, there were no signs of any valid military targets. Can you name any IDF strike that looks worse than that?
> Israel is in a vastly worse place now than it was on October 8th 2023
There was no way Israel could have fought Hamas without significant civilian harm and bad PR. The choice was to fight a very messy war against an enemy that disguises as civilians, or leave them alone to plan the next Oct 7.
As Golda Meir put it: "If we have to choose between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image."
Exceptions don't define the rule, the rule does. Israeli estimates put the military wing of Hamas at having up to 17,000 members before the war. They've killed people in the hundreds of thousands in Gaza now.
In WW2 partisans would intentionally induce brutal retaliations precisely because they thought it would expose the character of the occupier, garner support for themselves, radicalize the population, and generally further their interests. And they were right. It's paradoxical because those retaliations were intended to enforce control, yet they invariably achieve the exact opposite - a recurring theme throughout history. Again getting back to the point I'm making - the reason to behave good in war is because it's in your own best interest.
The reason nuclear bombs are "uncivilized" isn't directly related to the number of deaths due to use of a single one. The reason is that the by using nuclear bombs, the US created the precedent for the usage of the only weapon humans have created that, if used by all sides, can result in effectively billions dead at extremely low cost.
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.
> The estimated range of US military deaths from an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) was 250,000 to 1,000,000, and another 5 to 10 million Japanese.
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.
On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how off the estimates were because they’re our people and their lives matter more.
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.
The history on this is pretty sound ... a major bombing campaign was started much earlier to avoid any invasion or boots on the ground.
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.
If the war wasn't over the justification doesn't matter. I think that's the point you are broadly missing.
Were we at war with Japan? Yes. Therefore any action we take to end that war was justified, including continuing to bomb Japanese cities, industrial areas, and civilian centers until the war is concluded and they surrendered. Testing weapons even would be acceptable. Japan was still fighting us. Nations test weapons during war all the time which is partially how weapons development occurs.
During wartime justifications for carpet bombing do matter .. see Geneva Conventions et al.
Not that these things are enforced, of course, see bombings throughout SE Asia during Vietnam and the international punishment dealt out to Kissinger.
> I think that's the point you are broadly missing.
Did I?
Let me be clearer. There was no particular examination of the justifications for killing civilains specifically in the cases of the two cities destroyed by atomic weapons.
Why?
Because any such moral examination had already taken place many many months before; broadly in the case of heavy bombing campaigns in Europe and more specifically at the start of the Japanese bombing campaign that most appear to have forgotten.
Before H & N were bombed with the first atomic weapons 72 other cities had already been destroyed, including Tokyo. H & N were 'just' two targets on a list more than a hundred cities in length.
> Therefore any action we take to end that war was justified
Yeah, maybe take some moral and ethics classes, look into why there's pushback over actions in Gaza, etc.
There's no simple 'therefore' here.
> On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how off the estimates were because they’re our people and their lives matter more.
"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...".
I am not following this rationale at all. Because you're not Japanese or American, Americans are uncivilized for using a weapon that caused lots of Japanese people to die after Japanese people attacked the United States (and Australia, China, the Philippines, and more) and wouldn't stop?
> 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.
> I am not following this rationale at all.
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!
> 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.
But we are talking about World War II, and a war in which the United States and Japan fought, with millions of casualties. Pardon me if I'm not particularly interested in what someone from South America thinks about saving American lives by using a weapon we had to stop a war that we didn't start.
> Either the numbers matter or they don't; and if they do matter, it matters that they are well justified and accurate.
I don't think the numbers matter and shifting around from 50,000 to 5 million or anywhere in proximity to those numbers doesn't change the categorical argument. But if someone such as yourself wants to claim the numbers matter, my number is 1. It only takes 1 American life to have been saved in that needless war to justify the usage of any* weapon to stop the war.
* I'm using any here but there are obviously limits like, using a weapon that destroys the entire world or something fantastical that would very unlikely be justified.
> This is fundamentally wrong and doesn't support the argument from "civilization" which, again, was the argument I was responding to.
> 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
Japan could have surrendered and then it wouldn't have been used. Even if we just wanted to test it, it was justified. There's a lot of revisionist history that goes into these conversations with the goal of "USA BAD" and in the context of World War II I reject any and all of those assertions. It's the same lame crap that gets thrown around with respect to the Soviets and the Eastern Front.
"The US didn't do anything"
"The Soviets were the good guys fighting the good fight against the Nazis".
Both are untrue and are derived from Russian/Chinese propaganda schemes to sow self-doubt and defeatism for their own benefit.
For example, a lot of folks will claim things like the Soviets bore the brunt of the war in a moralist context in contrast with the western allies who didn't see as many lives expended. Of course that's true from a numeric context. 40 million deaths or something crazy from the Soviet side. But let's not forget, it was the Soviets who helped Germany kick this thing off by illegally invading and partitioning Poland. So... maybe those 40 million deaths were deserved. Just like the Nazis deserved to be destroyed?
> how would you feel if I told you they are less worth preserving?
I wouldn't care what you thought? In wartime, as an American, our soldier's lives are worth more than any enemy lives. This seems pretty straightforward to me. But if you want to insist you think your countrymen's lives are worth the same or less than some enemy that invaded you or that you are at war with, good luck fighting that war.
> But we are talking about World War II, and a war in which the United States and Japan fought, with millions of casualties. Pardon me if I'm not particularly interested in what someone from South America thinks about saving American lives by using a weapon we had to stop a war that we didn't start.
This is not an argument for "civilization", so it's very hard to follow your point.
If you don't care what I think, why bother debating with me at all?
> I don't think the numbers matter and shifting around from 50,000 to 5 million or anywhere in proximity to those numbers doesn't change the categorical argument.
On the contrary, it does change the categorical debate because the original argument ("it also saved Japanese lives") depended on those numbers. You seem to want to argue about something unrelated to what I said?
> Japan could have surrendered and then it wouldn't have been used.
It has been argued quite convincingly, multiple times already, that the Bomb would have been used nonetheless. The effort to develop it had been made, now they wanted to use it on real population centers. They were biased and primed to action. Also, it was done to send a message to the Soviets (the Japanese to this day maintain this, and while you could convincingly argue their opinion is self-serving, so is the US's).
None of this has much to do with Operation Downfall or whether Japan wanted to surrender (there were a pro and anti surrender factions, and the hardliners could maybe have been appeased. Or not. It's not self-evident there was no other way.)
More importantly, this is not a valid argument if we're going to argue about civilization. If you want to make a separate argument, go ahead, but that's not what I was reacting to.
Also, preempting your likely "I don't care about civilization": if you don't, why are you arguing in a thread precisely about this?
> "The US didn't do anything [in WW2]"
Puzzling strawman. Did I say this?
> "The Soviets were the good guys fighting the good fight against the Nazis".
I'm struggling to see the connection here. Was it because I mentioned the Bomb was also signalling to the Soviets? But that'd be true regardless.
> For example, a lot of folks will claim things like the Soviets bore the brunt of the war
They did.
> it was the Soviets who helped Germany kick this thing off by illegally invading and partitioning Poland
That's a very simplistic take, but I suspect you aren't interested in more nuanced takes. There's a lot to read on this matter.
> So... maybe those 40 million deaths were deserved
Wow. Just wow.
> I wouldn't care what you thought? In wartime, as an American, our soldier's lives are worth more than any enemy lives.
Why argue with me? You obviously care. Also, "our soldier's lives are worth more" is an argument, but not one out of civilization, which is what we were debating. As in "dropping the Bomb was a civilized option because [...]".
> But if you want to insist you think your countrymen's lives
I was just telling you how you sound when you say "our lives matter more..." as if everyone here was US American.
> This is not an argument for "civilization", so it's very hard to follow your point.
I don't know what you're talking about anymore with this. Can you elaborate?
> If you don't care what I think, why bother debating with me at all?
You keep replying.
> On the contrary, it does change the categorical debate because the original argument ("it also saved Japanese lives") depended on those numbers. You seem to want to argue about something unrelated to what I said?
If it saved Japanese lives that just makes it all the better, if it didn't, it doesn't matter. I think you're just not understanding the point. You're trying to make this calculation about how many lives equivalent to a moral choice made by the United States and Japan in the conduct of their war. I reject the calculation of the numbers of lives saved.
> On the contrary, it does change the categorical debate because the original argument ("it also saved Japanese lives") depended on those numbers. You seem to want to argue about something unrelated to what I said?
That's not convincing at all. If Japan had formally surrendered the United States would have not then, post-surrender gone and dropped an atomic bomb on a Japanese city. You're crazy if you think that is the case. There is no room for debate here and nothing you can say, including showing me letters, papers, whatever will change my mind. I'm close-minded to that idea.
> Puzzling strawman. Did I say this?
> I'm struggling to see the connection here. Was it because I mentioned the Bomb was also signalling to the Soviets? But that'd be true regardless.
Nope, not puzzling. It's just a common theme. It's always "question the United States actions", "talk about the United States", "the United States is bad and does bad things all the time" and saying things like the US would have dropped an atomic bomb on Japan after it formally surrendered is aligned with the same kinds of things people say about the Soviets or whatever. It's just the same playbook of anti-Americanism propaganda that serves just one purpose which is to make people in the United States (and honestly the west in general) want to withdraw from the world and let autocrats and their toads take over.
The common themes are:
You hear this all the time on the Internet. It's just recycling of effective propaganda campaigns leveraged against the west. Soviets good, West worked with Nazis, West didn't do anything, bombing Japan to end the war is immoral, blah blah blah> That's a very simplistic take, but I suspect you aren't interested in more nuanced takes.
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. I'd encourage you to read up more on the Soviet - Nazi alliance. Both governments were evil. The Soviets got what they asked for by trusting the Nazis and invading and annexing another country. While there is undoubtedly nuance to that arrangement, at a high level the Communists and Nazis got together and decided to start partitioning Europe.
Rejecting this is like the whole "clean Wehrmacht" thing or how Rommel was a "good general" since he wasn't in Europe. No, both groups were just as bad as the Nazi regime they fought for.
> Also, "our soldier's lives are worth more" is an argument, but not one out of civilization, which is what we were debating. As in "dropping the Bomb was a civilized option because [...]".
You are implying that the Japanese were civilized at this time.
> I was just telling you how you sound when you say "our lives matter more..." as if everyone here was US American.
I know how I sound. Our soldiers lives do matter more than the lives of enemy soldiers. In the case of the war against Japan they mattered much more than Japanese lives, soldiers or otherwise. I know you think this is some sort of controversial thing to say, but this seems rather routine to me.
> I don't know what you're talking about anymore with this. Can you elaborate?
Yes you do. I explained it multiple times already. If you don't, I suggest you pay more attention instead of replying to comments you admit you don't understand.
> You keep replying.
You claimed you didn't care about my opinion, yet here you are. Why? Sport?
> I reject the calculation of the numbers of lives saved.
Thanks for the straight answer. However, the person I was replying to didn't reject the calculation, which is why they mentioned it, and this is what I challenged. Clearer now?
> Nope, not puzzling. It's just a common theme. It's always "question the United States actions", "talk about the United States", "the United States is bad and does bad things all the time"
That's your own baggage. Argue with the things I actually said, not with "common themes". You seem to be upset about things I haven't argued, at least not here. I cannot be held responsible for whatever irks you on the internet, much like I cannot be upset at you for whatever BS Trump or the alt-right spews.
> Soviets good, West worked with Nazis, West didn't do anything, bombing Japan to end the war is immoral, blah blah blah
I don't know your internet circles, but most of what I hear is "America won WW2", "Soviets are as evil as Hitler", etc.
> Both are untrue and are derived from Russian/Chinese propaganda schemes to sow self-doubt and defeatism for their own benefit.
No... I suggest you read "The Myth of the Eastern Front" (2008) by American historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, which is a scholarly work (well regarded and widely referenced and cited) that describes among other things American shifting views on WW2's Eastern Front (as well as documenting the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth, and others). These are not Russian/Chinese infiltrators, but well regarded American scholars.
What you identify as "revisionism" is actually a shift away from German-dictated histories of WW2, and towards a more balanced view.
> Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. I'd encourage you to read up more on the Soviet - Nazi alliance.
I expected you to extend me the courtesy of assuming I knew about Molotov-Ribbentrop. Like I said, there were nuances to the situation, even mentioned "there's a lot to read on the subject". I assume you don't care -- or you think anyone who disagrees with any action of the US is simply ill-informed or Russian/Chinese influenced -- but there are nuances on this topic (e.g. how the USSR foresaw war with Nazi Germany, how it sought an anti-German pact with the UK and France which was rejected). But I won't be dragged into defending the Soviets or whatever when it has very little to do with the original topic.
> You are implying that the Japanese were civilized at this time.
Well, they were in some sense and they were barbaric in others (ironically this is what the OP claimed of the Bombs!). But let's take it for granted that the Japanese were pretty savage towards the people they invaded: even then, your own civilization doesn't depend on your foe's. It's an inherent trait.
I know this may be hard to grasp when following your "us vs them" logic.
> I know how I sound
Apparently not; you don't seem aware of how jingoistic you sound. Or that when you say "our", this being a relative word, it pays to know your audience who may or may not be "yours".
> Yes you do. I explained it multiple times already. If you don't, I suggest you pay more attention instead of replying to comments you admit you don't understand.
Ok. I don't understand I guess. Whatever :)
> You claimed you didn't care about my opinion, yet here you are. Why? Sport?
I'm here for a broader audience to read. Do you care about my opinion?
> Thanks for the straight answer. However, the person I was replying to didn't reject the calculation, which is why they mentioned it, and this is what I challenged. Clearer now?
But I was replying and rejecting the calculation because the calculation doesn't matter, at least in my opinion. Again if 1 American life was saved it was worth it and Civilized so it isn't relevant whether 50,000 lives were saved (Japanese, American, otherwise) or 5,000,000.
> That's your own baggage. Argue with the things I actually said, not with "common themes". You seem to be upset about things I haven't argued, at least not here.
Nope. I know what you're doing because it's a common pattern and the same tropes are repeated. Even in this very article you're defending the Soviets illegally partitioning and invading Poland alongside the Nazis as "nuanced".
> I don't know your internet circles, but most of what I hear is "America won WW2", "Soviets are as evil as Hitler", etc.
Well the Soviets were quite evil. That's a simple fact and we can state that up front.They were arguably more evil than the Nazis over the long term but still categorically evil so it doesn't quite matter just who is winning the evil Olympics.
I don't know where you hear America "won" World War II. Vast majority of Americans accept and understand that the Soviets fought the Germans in the east which was hugely important for defeating the Nazis. While the United States fought Japan in the Pacific which was also incredibly important. There's a common phrase here in the United States that the war was won with Soviet Blood, British Intelligence, and American Steel.
> I expected you to extend me the courtesy of assuming I knew about Molotov-Ribbentrop. Like I said, there were nuances to the situation, even mentioned "there's a lot to read on the subject".
But at the end of the day, the broader actions are what matter, not the nuance. I can't tell if you are familiar with Molotov-Ribbentrop because your previous comments seem to be aghast that I suggested the Soviets, who helped kick off the war, deserved what happened to them.
> I assume you don't care -- or you think anyone who disagrees with any action of the US is simply ill-informed -- but there are nuances on this topic (e.g. how the USSR foresaw war with Nazi Germany,
I think people who repeat obviously untrue things, like suggesting the US would have dropped atomic bombs on Japan just to test them after Japan surrendered, don't debate in good faith and are also ill-informed.
> how it sought an anti-German pact with the UK and France which was rejected).
Nuance right? Or does that only count when it's the Soviets?
> Well, they were in some sense and they were barbaric in others. But let's take it for granted that the Japanese were pretty savage towards the people they invaded: your own civilization doesn't depend on your foe's. It's an inherent trait.
> I know this may be hard to grasp when following your "us vs them" logic.
Sure. I declare we are civilized because we bombed Japan and turned them into a peaceful democracy. During a war, it is us versus them. This is basic stuff. There's nothing we need to take for granted about the Japanese. They were rampaging, murdering lunatics. Korea, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and more suffered under their brutal regime of violence and repression.
> Apparently not; you don't seem aware of how jingoistic you sound. Or that when you say "our", this being a relative word, it pays to know your audience who may or may not be "yours".
Nope, I'm pretty aware. My audience isn't you, it's other readers who happen to stumble upon your argument. If they think I sound overly-Patriotic because I reject your claims, so be it. My opinion doesn't change because you don't like it.
By the way, you said you're not American. What country are you from?
> Ok. I don't understand I guess. Whatever :)
Well, better read more closely then before replying :)
> I'm here for a broader audience to read. Do you care about my opinion?
If I didn't care about your opinion, I wouldn't answer -- I'm using human logic, not ET-logic.
> But I was replying and rejecting the calculation because the calculation doesn't matter, at least in my opinion.
Understood. Unfortunately, you got confused about who you were replying to; it wasn't me who argued the calculation mattered. I actually argued the calculation was a retroactive justification, not the actual one. I can see you got lost here. Maybe for the benefit of, you know, your "broader audience" you could have replied to that other commenter.
> Nope. I know what you're doing because it's a common pattern and the same tropes are repeated.
This thing you're doing is really bizarre, claiming to know my thoughts. I find it fascinating. Do you always debate like this?
> Even in this very article you're defending the Soviets illegally partitioning and invading Poland alongside the Nazis as "nuanced".
Nope. I was explaining the nuances of a situation which had more angles than what you implied. You were asking me to read on Molotov-Ribbentrop, yet you don't seem much well read on the subject if you ignore these nuances...
Have you read the Smelser & Davies book I mentioned?
> I don't know where you hear America "won" World War II.
I don't know how you can ignore this widespread take.
> I think people who repeat obviously untrue things, like suggesting the US would have dropped atomic bombs on Japan just to test them after Japan surrendered, don't debate in good faith and are also ill-informed.
"Obviously untrue" is begging the question; I mean, it's precisely what we're debating! In your adult life you'll sometimes face people who will argue that something you believe in is false or untrue, and this doesn't automatically make them bad faith arguers or ill-informed.
I consider someone to be arguing in bad faith when they feign ignorance, put words in other people's mouths, argue against strawmen, or consistently use cheap rhetorical tricks. Not by mistake, or a one-off, but consistently. Like you're doing now.
> But at the end of the day, the broader actions are what matter, not the nuance. I can't tell if you are familiar with Molotov-Ribbentrop because your previous comments seem to be aghast that I suggested the Soviets, who helped kick off the war, deserved what happened to them.
Both matter: broader actions and nuance. Being aghast at someone who claims 40 million people deserved to die has nothing to do with Molotov-Ribbentrop or any pact. Again... I'm aghast but not in defense of the Soviets, just at your callousness.
> Nuance right? Or does that only count when it's the Soviets?
No, nuances also apply here as well. It doesn't count only when it's the Soviets. There were nuances to the reasons for dropping the Bomb as well. Is this another of your "common tropes" you're constantly fighting against? Please, I urge you to engage with the positions that are actually stated, not with some imaginary enemy you've constructed.
> Sure. I declare we are civilized because we bombed Japan and turned them into a peaceful democracy.
Ok, this is a straightforward, honest position. You think dropping the Bomb was ok because it won the war. Also you make some non sequitur about the Bomb turning Japan into a peaceful democracy (completely bizarre logic, it doesn't follow that it was the bomb). You've repeatedly ignored arguments by me, and others here, that argued that it wasn't necessarily the Bomb that won the war, but whatever. I understand this is your position; I think it's wrong.
> There's nothing we need to take for granted about the Japanese. They were rampaging, murdering lunatics. Korea, China, the Philippines, Malaysia, and more suffered under their brutal regime of violence and repression.
Do you understand the expression "let's take for granted"? It seems you're hell-bent on arguing where there's no argument.
> Nope, I'm pretty aware. My audience isn't you, it's other readers who happen to stumble upon your argument. If they think I sound overly-Patriotic because I reject your claims, so be it. My opinion doesn't change because you don't like it.
My opinion doesn't change because you don't like it either. But, I posit, by sounding jingoistic you're not doing yourself any favors.
> By the way, you said you're not American. What country are you from?
Why does it matter? I'm South American. I'm not from: Russia, China, Japan, Venezuela, North Korea or any country deemed a rogue state or hostile actor by the US. I don't believe in American exceptionalism or their Manifest Destiny. People are entitled to dissenting opinions about the US, right? (I hope, at least!)
It wasn't the a civilised option. Japan would have lost and surrendered with or without nukes. The USA nuked two cities just to demonstrate their nuclear capabilities to the Soviets.
One wonders if Stalin would have stuck to his agreement and turned back from Manchuria if we hadn't given them that little demo.
I think that lesson from World War Two is that civilization is all the things we do to prevent another World War Two from happening. And that what we owe to all the people in Hiroshima, Tokyo, Nanjing, the Warsaw Ghetto, Katyn, Bengal, Manzanar, and a thousand other places is to prevent anything like that from happening again.
Exactly... and frankly, we're starting to fall asleep on the job.
There's a fair argument to make that, by that standard, a civilized civilization has never existed. Atrocity has ever been our giddy companion.
Bomb somebody else's harbor next time, kthxbai
You should read Blood Meridian.
> And may tolerate a coupe instead
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.
Aren't there bunkers near dc for that reason though?
According to some deep dives into the budget figures for the East Wing Ballroom .. there are new bunkers going in as we type .. and likely being networked underground.
Feels like our politicians and MIC higher ups are preparing themselves for nuclear war but not building the rest of us any bunkers
It's felt like that for more than half a century: https://youtu.be/zZct-itCwPE
Why would anyone build bunkers for cattle?
Not to mention the bunkers being built by various Silicon Valley billionaires, who by rights should be considered appendages of the U.S. state.
“And may tolerate a coupe instead.”
I could tolerate a coupe but I’d prefer a sports car :-/
> the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty
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.
Realistically speaking you'll die of an infected and untreated burn wound though, the severe blast and burn area is just much much bigger than the fancy "everything just goes poof" core.
Realistically speaking you're going to die of starvation or get shot by marauding gangs, or die of cancer a few decades later from radiation in the food change. NukeMap [1] has good visualizations of the relative fireball vs. blast vs. thermal radiation vs. fallout radiuses. One thing that stands out: most of the suburbs is going to survive the initial nuclear exchange. At worst, they'll have a few broken windows.
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.
[1] https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Not only 20% of the population, but wiping out cities is going to make everything grind to a halt. Best case, tiny pockets of social order is going to remain in very hard to reach, remote rural areas which also has local access to food. We are talking about maybe thousands of people in a population of hundreds of millions. The rest are in for a decade of pure hell.
Yah, but you could enter the ruins of some shop, get some booze there, and walk straight into ground zero. Feeling the buzz. Getting tired...drifting away...
Vaporized is good with me. Not so keen to have my body melt over several days due to acute radiation exposure though...
Giving up is really very common in war.
coup
Note that MAD only works when there are a small number of players. Once it gets up past around 12, a.) it becomes too easy to detonate a nuclear weapon and then blame somebody else to take the fall and b.) the chance of somebody doing something crazy and irrational becomes high. Same reason that oligopolies can have steady profit but once you have ~10-12 market players you enter perfect competition and inevitably get a price war.
There are 9 nuclear-armed states today. Likely this has set us on a path where nuclear war is inevitable.
>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.
People massively simplify the dynamics of launching a nuke. If Russia launched a nuke on a Ukrainian military target away from civilians there is virtually 0 chance of nuclear retaliation. Ukraine doesn't have them. Does anyone think the US, France, etc. would nuke Russia? Of course not.
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.
The problem is the precedent that sets. Russia launches a nuke on Ukraine, and there are no repercussions. That will teach every nuclear-armed state that they can freely nuke non-nuclear-armed states without consequence. But then what happens when somebody makes a mistake? China nukes Japan, but maybe Japan had a secret nuclear program and actually does have a retaliatory capability and nukes China back? Or China invades Taiwan (doesn't even have to nuke it), but the U.S. decides that the loss of Taiwanese semiconductor is actually an unacceptable red line and nukes the invasion fleet? Pakistan nukes India, but China misjudges the trajectory of the nuke and thinks it's actually under attack. Israel nukes Iran, but winds carry the fallout over Pakistan and India.
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.
>The problem is the precedent that sets. Russia launches a nuke on Ukraine, and there are no repercussions. That will teach every nuclear-armed state that they can freely nuke non-nuclear-armed states without consequence. But then what happens when somebody makes a mistake?
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.
Yeah yeah yeah, this is the new narrative that I keep seeing. "A small nuke, as a treat."
It's scary, but it's fine!
It's happened before, although with no loss of civilian life.
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.
Where did I characterize it as a treat or fine?
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.
Ukraine might have some possible retaliatory options in that case though. Far from ideal, but they could for example load a big ship full of explosives and blow up much of St Petersburg.
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.
Yeah I imagine we’ll see a cottage industry of small countries with nukes in ten-fifteen years.
Plenty of places have uranium and unless they are being watched like Iran they can just set up clandestine enrichment operations.
I think have thousands of artillery shells aimed at Seoul is the larger deterrent.
The nukes are to deter the US. They have been steadily increasing their missile range to first reach regional bases like Guam and now the all the way to the continental USA, and are now even launching a nuclear powered and nuclear armed ballistic missile submarine https://www.hisutton.com/DPRK-SSN-Update.html
The nukes are a bargaining chip (disarmament). Basically, if your country has the human and tech capital to develop a nuke, you probably should because it's free money.
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.
The nukes have many roles perhaps but I think the fully developed weapons are for retaliatory strike.
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
Yes that's the orthodox doctrine of nuclear deterrent. To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems so that your second-strike capability remains intact through any decapitation attempts.
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.
Just a note that the importance of the triad is a very American perspective on deterrence and most other countries don't seem to approach this the same way the US does.
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.
I don't agree regarding a quad vs a triad.
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 don't think they fill the same strategic purposes, though. The value of silo based missiles to the US is as a missile-sponge, taking most of the warheads from a Russian first strike and keeping them from American cities (forcing any Russian first-strike to be counter-force instead of counter-value). This is not particularly valuable, honestly, which is why only the USSR during the height of the Cold War (largely in reaction to Minuteman) and China very recently have also made the investment into large numbers of ICBM silos.(1)
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 think we're talking past eachother.
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.
Yeah, I guess I mentally slot road mobile missiles as more like "less effective SLBM on the cheap," at least for a country the size of Russia (not sure that is as true for someone like North Korea where I speculate there is a larger use-it-or-lose-it penalty). There is definitely more of a continuum here between "missile-soak" and "survivable deterrent"- e.g. at the limit you could, in theory, vaporize all of the oceans with nuclear weapons to kill all the boomers, which turns them into missile soaks, but at a truly insane level.
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."
> To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems
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.
Strategic bombers are just as important because MAD itself is fundamentally a political and diplomatic tool. The reason you have strategic bombers is, as you correctly said, so that you can signal your posture and intent by stationing them, dispersing them, launching them, and (most critically) recalling them.
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.
P5 by triad capability:
Looks like IN ought to get Airstrip One's seat?Guess the US's mistake was not decapitating NK earlier then. Too late for NK, not too late for other regimes.
Guess you missed why NK wasn’t decapitated earlier.
Why are you guessing that?
> Artillery on Seoul doesn't matter. The US would just ask SK to evacuate it.
How do you evacuate 10 to 15 million(counting Incheon in) of people, fast? Where to?
Proportionally that's about evacuating all of California. Completely ridiculous, which is exactly why DPRK has installed all that artillery.
The importance of this is often exaggerated. It's significant, but it's not that significant. RAND Corporation modeled this, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA619-1.html
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.
They're safe, but at what cost?
They drive old cars, have slow internet and can't visit the coliseum. They're not invited to the cool parties.
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NK is protected by China, a very credible force.
Maduro was protected by both China and Russia.
Maduro may have been aligned with them, but that is a completely different thing than being protected by them. The DPRK is actually protected by the PRC, in the sense that the PRC is willing to and historically did deploy millions of soldiers to push back Americans from North Korean territory.
But note that happened in rhe 1950s, when Mao was in power and the PRC was an upstart separatist regime with very limited recognition. Now China may want to act very differently.
The reason Mao helped Pyongyang still applies: namely, it would make China less secure to have on its border a regime allied to a great power other than China.
They already have a border with Pakistan and got exactly zero problems from it (if anything, China is the one to stir up shit on that border). You seem to be repeating Putin-style propaganda points. Stalin and Mao were never threatened by the West really, that was part of the Marx-mandated global commie land grab.
Saying "The West is no threat to anyone" at the same time you're advocating for an invasion and abduction of a country's leader is certainly a position to hold. Not a very internally consistent or convincing one, though. And I suppose Vietnam never happened in your constructed reality.
>Stalin and Mao were never threatened by the West really
Before he became General Secretary, but while Stalin was a high government official, the US, Britain, France and Japan literally invaded Russia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Rus...
China, Cuba and Russia sent him air defences and some personal guards. What would China's millions do if Kim was kidnapped? Invade Seoul that had no say in it?
From where would an hypothetical operation to kidnap Kim be launched? Likely from SK or Japan, right? So yes, China could retaliate.
The operation against Maduro was launched from countries in the region aligned with the US.
Us has these nifty things called aircraft carriers, which were used to capture Maduro as well. They can be in international waters, the choppers fly quite far. China would not retaliate against the US.
That is a bold assertion to make considering China literally did retaliate against the US in North Korea once already, to the tune of war. Kidnapping heads of states is an act of war. Venezuela can't defend itself, but China certainly will do whatever is necessary to secure its vassal if the alternative is NK collapsing and having US military bases on its border.
You also rule out the possibility of an invasion of Seoul, as though it would be "unfair" -- when you're advocating for and actively in the process of tearing whatever remains of the concept of international law to shreds, what makes you think PRC would be inclined to play nice?
Other than by launching nukes (and getting 10x on themselves) China has no capability to attack the US. I don't think attacking SK is unlikely because it's "unfair", but rather because there's no incentive to do so. The concept of "if you attack Cuba we'll attack Europe" is an old playbook for the commies, and I think was always a bluff.
My point is that since in this scenario SK would likely be involved in some capacity (granting safe passage, harboring US planes, etc) they would suffer retaliation by NK and possibly China.
I don't see what's unlikely about this, it's basically NK's defense strategy.
> Us has these nifty things called aircraft carriers, which were used to capture Maduro as well.
It wasn't just carriers in Maduro's case. The operation was carried from multiple places, including out of Caribbean countries aligned with the US. The US was literally signing deals with those countries months in advance.
Who would those countries be in an hypothetical NK strike? Because those countries would suffer retaliation.
China knows about carriers, and tracks them carefully. They have built a variety of weapons to sink them, too, but I don’t think they’d need to use them: note how the raid on Maduro went so quietly that people have been looking for evidence that some of the Venezuelan military were in on it? North Korea has built up a lot more paranoia and China wouldn’t need to sink a carrier, simply ensuring that the NK military knows what’s coming as soon as planes take off and communicates that in a way which makes it impossible for any potentially disloyal faction to act short of declaring a coup (you can’t “accidentally” miss something the entire chain of command knows about). I detest the NK government but I’d expect that to be a much bloodier fight, especially after a huge warning.
This is only partially true.
China's primary concern is resource extraction from Venezuela, which is why Trump immediately clarified that they'd make sure China still got their oil deliveries.
Russia is stretched way too thin right now to do anything meaningful about it.
Venezuela was basically being run by Cuba. Maduro was really only a figurehead. The military and government was functionally run by imported Cubans which is why a coup wasn't possible.
What's Trump's kill count at, just to move media focus away from the Trump-Epstein files.
Nowhere near Maduro's by any reasonable threshold or metric. Not even the most hardcore TDS in-patients claim otherwise.
Well, that's fine then, as long as the dictator you support murdered fewer people.
Well, really any leader who dissatisfies the president of the US, really
From bgp hijacking? Almost certainly not.
It would probably rule out the type of decapitation strike the US did, but bgp hijacking is way way below on the escalation ladder.
Nuclear capability wouldn't necessarily rule out this kind of a decapitation strike, it's just that it's very hard to imagine this kind of an operation actually being successful in any nuclear-capable country.
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.
Nuclear capability by itself isn't a complete deterrent. It has been widely reported that the US military has made contingency plans for a decapitation strike and seizure or destruction of nuclear weapons in Pakistan in case the situation turns really bad there. Real deterrence requires a credible second-strike capability on survivable platforms such as submarines.
> the US military has made contingency plans for a decapitation strike and seizure or destruction of nuclear weapons in Pakistan in case the situation turns really bad there. Real deterrence requires a credible second-strike capability on survivable platforms such as submarines.
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.
>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 :)
> There is enough pain for the US that they wouldn't actually attack Pakistan
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.
[1] https://www.270towin.com/2026-senate-election/
> 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.
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.
>If America does something to pakistan, then pakistan wouldn't bomb India but rather America
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.
> then pakistan wouldn't bomb India but rather America
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.
> Pakistan's nuclear deterrent doesn't actually deter America
It does, US cannot disregard the consequences of a strike on India regardless of their relationship with India.
Huh? How would Pakistan do that exactly? They have zero capability to strike the US homeland. In theory they might be able to hit a US military base in the region but even doing that successfully would require an extraordinary level of luck.
>but even doing that successfully would require an extraordinary level of luck.
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.
For nuclear deterrence to work in situations like this, it'd also be preferable to have sufficient conventional capabilities that your leadership isn't decapitated before you even notice it's happening. If the attacker is also nuclear-capable, there's little incentive for second person in the chain of command to kill themselves.
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.
I think nuclear deterrence works even in such situations. The retaliatory system is structured in such a way that after decapitation, the decision to use or not use a nuclear weapon is made not by the "number two" or the "successor" but by a person specifically authorized to do so, about whom the successors and number two may know nothing.
It might, it might not. Of course, you could for example also implant a trigger with a dead man's switch inside your head of state which they could use to launch a strike at any point.
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
>It's extremely difficult to believe that the US could fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes.
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.
>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.
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.
>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 b
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.
I have serious doubts they can manage anything more than a fizzle yield
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_...
>Why is that?
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.
> though stockpiling thousands of tons of high explosives fake a successful nuclear test seems beyond farcical
Would that even work? I'd expect there to be obvious spectral differences, making such deception unrealistic.
I don't know if the seismic signature from a 10 kiloton nuclear explosion underground is different from 10,000 tons of actual TNT exploded underground, but there was also radioactive gas evidence of North Korean testing:
https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2013-04-26/ims-detects-radi...
The xenon isotopes involved have short half lives so if they were not produced by a nuclear explosion, they would have had to be released simultaneously by e.g. reprocessing a "hot" fresh batch of irradiated uranium at the same time as the underground explosion. This is not impossible, but it looks increasingly convoluted compared to an actual nuclear test.
Also, contra the upthread assertion that "Yields should've been higher for plutonium cores, it's not lightweight stuff," there is nothing about plutonium that drives high yield. The United States manufactured a large number of low yield (1.7 kiloton) plutonium warheads in the late 1950s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W25_(nuclear_warhead)
If North Korea aimed to make missile-deliverable weapons from the beginning (which makes sense because they don't have heavy bombers like the Cold War powers did at the beginning of their arms race), it also makes sense that their weapons tests would be focused on validating compact/lightweight designs instead of trying for high yield.
Didn't we just do something like that in Iran? Not helicopters, but we still secured the airspace just the same.
Securing airspace for fancy stealth bombers is rather different from securing airspace for helicopters you can shoot down with just about anything.
If you mean during the israel-iran war, israel was allegedly using non-stealth planes once the airspace was secure.
Still probably quite a bit different then helicopter inserted decapitation strike.
I think the non-stealth planes used by Israel were unmanned drones
Maybe Pakistan, or Israel.
Well yes, the US could certainly easily kidnap leaders of friendly countries. It'd also presumably be very unlikely to result in a nuclear response from either.
Honestly from what we learned in the earlier attacks on Iran the USA probably could take a quick trip over to Tehran and grab the Ayatollah.
I think clanky covered this pretty well, but dropping bombs from high altitude stealth bombers and fighter jets is very very far from actually delivering and extracting soldiers from a location.
The US could probably bomb even Beijing, it doesn't really tell you anything that they were able to bomb Iran also.
It's odd that Iran was able to continue launching waves of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel after they had supposedly lost so much control over their skies that it would have been possible to hover a Chinook over Tehran for 5 minutes.
Counterpoint is that Ukraine, Qaddafi, and Assad already demonstrated the significance of maintaining certain capabilities. Vzla didn't have those capabilities before, much less publicly depreciate them.
Ukraine wouldn’t have been invaded if they hadn’t given up their nuclear weapons.
I have a few questions about that:
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?
1) It's complex. Formally, Moscow controlled the launch codes. However Ukraine designed and built the ICBMs, and are near the top of nations with the highest nuclear physicist per capita ratio.
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.
> However Ukraine designed and built the ICBMs
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.
> Your computer is designed and built in China therefore your computer belongs to Chinese and China. Right?
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?
> The previous owner was the USSR
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.
> I know you degraded to just throwing words with your blanket knowledge
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?
> Not quite.
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?
> of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces
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.
> Your computer is designed and built in China therefore your computer belongs to Chinese and China. Right?
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.
Has any nuclear state had their leader kidnapped? Or seen significant incursions?
Most non-nuclear heads of state have never had their leader kidnapped, either.
Alternatively, we might have entered either a limited or a worst-case nuclear war scenario.
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.
The psychopaths in charge of Russia still like living comfortably.
Russia promised not to invade if Ukraine gave up the nukes.
To be the devil's advocate, I don't think Russia foresaw a situation that had Ukraine looking to join NATO right after NATO had been used offensively for the first time ever to put its thumb on the scale of a civil war that didn't involve NATO countries.
If Putin didn't want NATO getting involved if he started a war there's one special trick he could have played! He could have not started a war ...
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.
> The only reason Ukraine joining NATO is a problem is if Putin/Russia (or someone else) wants to attack them.
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.
s/devil/putin/
Sure, but I think these discussions are more enlightening when we model superpowers as rational actors within their ideological system rather than just whatever propaganda is locally convenient.
> when we model superpowers as rational actors within their ideological system
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.
They absolutely are.
Not much of a change, TBF.
No no no, some random American diplomat told a random Soviet diplomat during the East Germany negotiations that NATO wouldn't extend east at all.
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)
Even setting aside that Ukraine never had the technical means or infrastructure to operate/maintain those weapons, I don't think they would have dissuaded Russia or actually been used. Russia could turn them into a wasteland in response and 6 million people (including hundreds of thousands of men of military age) weren't even willing to stay in Ukraine, much less fight for the country. If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.
You don't think that Ukraine, the country that designed and built those ICBMs, and had one of the highest per capita counts of nuclear physicists could handle at least a few decades of upkeep on those nukes?
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.
> the country that designed and built those ICBMs, and had one of the highest per capita counts of nuclear physicists could handle at least a few decades of upkeep on those nukes?
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.
The idea that a nation state could not make use of the hundreds of nuclear weapons in its territory is just absurd. It's sillier than the people that think disk encryption will spare them the crowbar to the face. Beyond the whole chauvinistic idea that it was "Russians" that built them in the first place.
> If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.
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.
Zelensky is far too concerned with the human costs of war to use nukes, even if he could. He doesn’t have a napoleon complex.
Human costs of war is precisely the reason to use nukes.
Why not?
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.
> All those people that lived under Soviet Russia occupation, they were better off dead in nuclear fire than living under said occupation?
As someone from a country that used to be under russia n boot - the fireball is preferable.
This isn’t how nukes would get used. They wouldn’t just fire them at cities to start with. It would most likely be something tactical, but perhaps end up escalating to insanity anyway
You don't leave room to escalate beyond use if nukes anymore. Russia's response to a tactical nuke would be to turn Ukraine into glass. All leaving additional escalation on the table does is make sure that you don't make good on your word to make everyone lose too.
> You don't leave room to escalate beyond use if nukes anymore. Russia's response to a tactical nuke would be to turn Ukraine into glass
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.
Sure, but that practically looks like Russia telling NATO what it's going to do, then most of NATO sitting at DEFCON 1 and being ready to respond the instant any Russian missiles look like they're not going towards Ukraine. NATO has no reason to inject themselves into a nuclear exchange more than diplomatically, and has the ability to respond well after they know where Russian missiles are going to land.
> that practically looks like Russia telling NATO what it's going to do
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.)
> Which is indistinguishable from a Russian first strike.
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'.
> It's really not. Once they've launched, it's pretty clear where they're going
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.)
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.
Or, MAD means that neither a nuke launch or an invasion happen in the first place.
Your comment highlights some tensions in deterrence theory, but it also oversimplifies over a few things.
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.
> Ambiguity in nuclear policy invites miscalculation
Most nuclear doctrines are ambiguous by design. ("Reserve the right," et cetera.)
>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.
Well, Russian occupation usually means your town slowly undergoes mass extermination and genocide....
so yes? nuclear fireball is potentially preferred
You still have to be willing to use the nukes. The threat has to be real or it doesn't work as a deterrent.
I think this is a situation where even if Venezuela had nukes, this still would have happened.
The choice is basically:
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.
Not exactly true.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Light_teams
The reporting suggests there was some kind of deal struck between the US and elements of the VZ administration, and even nuclear capability doesn't prevent that
It will increase the desire for nukes, but also increase the hesitation to seek them now that credibility and capability (particularly what modern intelligence is capable of) are demonstrated. Hard to say how this nets off.
>I assume that nuclear capability would rule out a target from this kind of snatch operation
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.
> an unpopular Head of State
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.
Yeah but those people read the popularity polls as well. If you kill or capture the leader, there isn’t much upside in retaliation against a massively more powerful enemy. The best move is to cozy up to whomever is in power next.
> The best move is to cozy up to whomever is in power next.
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?
Nuclear weapons aren’t automated enough for one person to launch them. “The button” is generally just sending orders to other people to launch them.
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.
You pick people for that job that aren't that concerned with the popularity polls, and who's main value add is a willingness to turn the key when told to. Either directly or because they were previously told to follow the process.
There’s no process to pick people that will reliably follow through with a suicide pact.
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.
If having nuclear weapons did anything at all to prevent cyber attacks, the US would not be getting constantly victimized by cyber attacks.
I think "this kind of operation" refers to the entire "we bombed your capital and stole your President" thing, not just the cyber component of it.
It seems extraordinarily unlikely we'd have attempted such a thing if Venezuela had nukes.
Probably, but there is also some speculation usa had help on the inside, so it probably depends on the nature and pervasiveness of that help.
I agree with that speculation, but if you keep your launch chain of command short enough (as the US does), nukes can also be a deterrent to a palace coup; doubly so for a foreign-backed one.
There's still a lot of information coming out, a lot of it conflicting, so that's hard to say.
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.
> And they bombed Chavez's tomb, which is quite a dick move of there wasn't any AA there
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
BBC says the Chavez tomb thing was AI slop.
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.
I think by "this kind of operation" he means extrajudicially removing a sitting president (legitimate or not) of another country for trial elsewhere. Not cyber attack or espionage.
Oh, so the commenter is not actually talking about the BGP anomalies at all? He's just hijacking the comment section to advocate for nuclear proliferation?
What? That is awful logic.
Cool, but outside the scope of the TFA.
Try, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46473348.
the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money (at least couple hundreds of millions), and after completing the time will end up with his money in Russia/Belarussia.
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.
It strikes me as completely possible that the exit was negotiated. The fact that they knew his exact location and "luckily" nabbed him right before he went into some kind of panic room / bunker is certainly... something.
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.
I think it is kind of both - the exit was ultimately negotiated because most of the VZ government/military either sold him or at least abandoned him and showed no interest in any further support of him.
80 of their guys died? Not just venuzuelans. If it was negotiated then maduro negotiated his own closest security forces to be killed as a cover.
Not impossible but certainly in the tinfoil hat range of possibilities.
> the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money
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.
Nuclear deterrent is absurd.
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.
> So what's the scenario then? Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela launches its nukes, everyone dies on both sides.
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.
Your tone is unnecessarily condescending and confrontational, but your point is reasonable with respect to Venezuela and Maduro.
With Iran, North Korea, or Ukraine, the calculus is different.
Are you trying to argue that M.A.D. hasn't been an effective deterrent to violence for decades?
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?
> remaining leadership of Venezuela does not in fact want to die for Maduro
Now do this same exercise for Taiwan.
There is something in between 0 nuclear weapons used and all nuclear weapons used.
That's like arguing against the police arresting criminals because it will incentivize them to acquire weapons.
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.
And replace him with the just as illegitimate VP? What world is that consistent in?
Terrible take in the 2nd premise of your argument. Is Venezuela a sovereign nation or a colony? Can similar logic be applied against Russia or even the US?
> Is Venezuela a sovereign nation or a colony?
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.
The sovereignty of Venezuela is not the right argument here, because practical sovereignty is not absolute and there are just war grounds for Maduro's capture. The man was an awful tyrant.
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.
I agree with you for the most part. The subtext to all of this is Maduro's close relationships with China and Russia of course.
There are all sorts of factors motivating it. Crony capitalism (w.r.t. oil, for example) is another one of them. But that doesn't mean they justify the operation. At this point, it is a fait accompli. I pray that things don't get worse for Venezuela (the unfortunate side effect is that it will give supporters of this operation greater false confidence that they did the right thing; "Look! Nothing bad happened afterward!").
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.
Of course it can, and it is. Such logic is behind the argument in favor of arresting Putin. Many have argued that should happen if he were to step on their nations' soil. The reason no one thinks seriously about going into Russia and enforcing open arrest warrants is that they fear the consequences, though maybe in light of Russia's revealed impotence that fear is unjustified.
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No thanks.
""" Balanced and civil engagement with occasional mild suggestions — mostly neutral and constructive. """
I never understood the (now decade old) argument of 'parts of the Internet cannot be shut down'
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...
Time for every country at threat from the US to invest in their own independent nuclear arsenal....