https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1506095895577870341?s=21
The fear is that if Mr. Putin feels cornered in the conflict, he might choose to detonate one of his lesser nuclear arms — breaking the taboo set 76 years ago after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
How convenient that the taboo was set after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I suppose NYT would also say that the taboo against murder and fratricide was set only after Cain killed Abel, right?
It's not taboo it's the instinct for self preservation. The US can't launch nukes anymore because guess what? We'd get nuked too. The NYT is my least favorite newspaper full of the most pathetic morons who write drivel for the capitalists
The US can’t launch nukes anymore because guess what? We’d get nuked too.
It's worth noting here that America has NOT ruled out a nuclear first strike and neither has Russia - in fact the only nuclear powers that have a clear "no first strike" policy are China and India. America has unofficially hinted at not first-striking another nuclear power, which is a diplomat's way of saying "we absolutely would first strike a country that DOESN'T have nukes"
Isn't this kinda meaningless? I feel like if you're in a position where you make the decision to drop a nuclear bomb then a "policy" won't stop you
sure, these declarations never stop anybody and it's good that you bring that up. people tend to put too much faith in these. i'm not an idealist who believes that institutions and contracts are the most important thing in geopolitics. but such declarations can still matter a lot in diplomacy and in how other geopolitical actors perceive a nation state. it makes a difference if you've been sitting on a comparatively tiny stockpile for decades, declaring a "no first strike" policy or if you're basically the geopolitical equivalent to somebody who constantly open-carries their dual .50 BMG hand cannons with compensators, reflex sights and underbarrel counterweights while wearing an "An Armed Society Is A Polite Society" shirt, a :fuck-around: pin and a "Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes" hat.
that totally changes how the rest of the world sees you and reacts to you. There's policies of de-escalation and being non-confrontational and limiting arms expenses and preventing arms races and standoffs. and there's policies of constantly telling the world you're ready to snap at any moment and end human civilization as we know it to cause maximum deterrence.
especially important in this regard is Mearsheimer's concept of the power-security dilemma, where increased arms spending and other measures that are supposed to make your position more secure lead to you being perceived as a threat. which leads to those seeing you as a threat to join in on the arms race. which leads to you feeling more threatened and so on and so on. we're in an age of armament spirals and escalating threat displays again and when we want to have other options than fully nukepilled posadism, we need political actors to get back to disarmament treaties, declarations of no first strike etc. etc..
i also think that the MIC will do everything it can to prevent such a change. and given that our next generation of natsec ghoul PMCs is intent on cancelling Mearsheimer and other neo-realist hawks because they do not share their idealist brainworms, we may simultaneously arrive at a point where the basic tools of realpolitik have been replaced with jingoist rage not only among the propagandized populace, but among the propagandizers themselves.
it does make a difference because it's also their policy on who can authorise a launch under what conditions and how primed the things are for launch. American first strike policy has resulted in near misses where downed phone lines meant that they have gone so far as to load bambers with nukes and fly them off to drop them before recalling once they realised it was a mistake
One of the reasons I despise libs is because of people like Sam Harris who envisions a future where America would try to stop a Middle Eastern country from getting nuclear weapons....with nuclear weapons. Never mind that America has extremely powerful conventional weaponry, this guy goes to the genocide option first. He makes sure to tell us about how he sees it as being a tragedy, but that he sees it as a necessity.
One of the few things making libs only marginally better than reactionary chuds is that chuds would go for the nuclear option sans any threat, merely as punishment for the attacks of unaffiliated terrorists.
I also enjoy how we have been brainwashed to rationalize the US firebombing and nuking civilian cities after an attack on a non-mainland military base.
The US bombing campaign of Japan in WW2 killed many times the number of people that both atomic bombs killed. No one even talks about it.
Yeah its wild. Thats why I included firebombs. Like imagine if the double standard didnt exist. US takes out a military installation in Iraq, they reapond by dropping two nukes on NYC and LA. Unimaginable because how does that make america save the world again like superman.
Yeah. Without mad, nukes are just another kind of bomb. There wasn't anything uniquely evil about Hiroshima versus conventional saturation bombing
It wasn't even set after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were discussions apparently about using nukes in Vietnam (apparently against both the North and the South), and Curtis LeMay (an air force general) had been pushing for nuking Russia before they could develop nuclear weapons and found concerns about civilian casualties a joke.
There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.
---Curtis LeMay
Good ol' Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay, genuinely one of the most ghoulish Am*ricans to ever live.
spoiler
“If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.” - Curtis LeMay
“If we maintain our faith in God, love of freedom, and superior global air power, the future looks good.” - Curtis LeMay
“If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” - Curtis LeMay
“We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too.... Over a period of three years or so, we killed off - what - twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?” - Curtis LeMay
“Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had aquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb - and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.” - Curtis LeMay
“I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that's been fed to them.” - Curtis LeMay
In the Korean war some us general wanted to nuke the entire border between China and dprk so they could not send troops through
Wait a minute, this is just recycled tactical nukes rhetoric.
Someone make this make sense. If the USA (and arguably Russia) already has weapons like MOAB, why would they need "smaller" nuclear weapons? You either want to level a fucking a city with one blast, or several smaller ones, and, ideally, you want either one of those choices to cost as least as possible.
How is this not massive propagandizing to neuter any objection to a nuclear countermeasure?
and, ideally, you want either one of those choices to cost as least as possible.
Why would they want that? They want to shovel as much money as possible into MIC contractors
small "tactical" nukes have been around for generations, they're just talking about them again because they know the public is uneducated, and they're an easy way to make nukes seem "sensible."
Destroying enforced military positions would be the political answer besides normalization of their use.
Call of Duty and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
“war isn’t what it used to be, there’s too much talking and sanctions and other sissy stuff.”
tell that guy to be the change he wants to see in the world, there's a whole-ass conflict in ukraine where he could get blown up by artillery or a missile and never be expected to do any sanctions or other sissy shit like surviving
But what if being near artillery strikes is what unlocks his psychic powers? He's doing himself a disservice by not finding out, I say
Can we get those guys to stand in the middle of the Niger-desert when France does its nuclear testing / waste-dumping? Just so they can see how cool the bombs are.
It’s real weird to me, all this horniness in the press for nuclear escalation. Is there any evidence anyone in Russia is even discussing nukes other than “Putin crazy?”
Americans want to invade. America and Russia at war means nukes. Therefore, Americans want nuclear war
Is there any evidence anyone in Russia is even discussing nukes other than “Putin crazy?”
Politicians throughout history love to do the "I'm just saying, the other guy might try it!" approach to signal the threat of escalation without taking credit said escalation. Its the old Khrushchev gambit of threatening to put nukes in Cuba if Americans don't pull their nukes out of Turkey. Nixon and Reagan also both loved to talk big on nuclear escalation in order to cow the opposition, and their efforts did irreconcilable damage to Detente during their respective terms.
You can argue forever over "who started it", but the intent of the message is clear. Lavrov is indicating that his country is ready and willing to embark in a nuclear war if it suspects NATO wants to do the same.
US Media might spin it as "crazy", but the bottom line is that its just the old MAD message Cold Warriors have been sending each other since Truman bombed Nagasaki.
Oh just fucking perfect they're dusting off the old 'European theater' bullshit that's even more bullshit due to advances in missile tech.
Going to irradiate some of the most fertile cropland in the intersecting three continents just a little bit, what could go wrong?
IT DOESN'T MATTER! THIS ISN'T FUCKING TIC TAC TOE! IT'S NOT "I LAUNCHED ONE NOW YOU GET TO LAUNCH ONE" TAKING IT IN TURNS SHIT. IT'S THE ALL-IN, LAUNCH IT ALL, END OF WORLD YOU FUCKING MORONS! :matt:
alright time to lob little 0.02 to 0.1 kiloton micronukes out of recoiless rifles and maybe even attached to the nosecones of drones back and forth across a radiation soaked no mans land in our new atompunk future
So would all the "bad" nukes just magically disappear and never be used ever by anyone after that?
