from MicroWave@lemmy.world to world@lemmy.world on 10 Mar 11:28
https://lemmy.world/post/44072782
As speculation mounts that Kim Jong-un and Trump could meet this month, analysts say Pyongyang will continue to see nuclear weapons as a matter of survival
North Korea’s launch last week of a missile from a naval destroyer elicited an uncharacteristically prosaic analysis from the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. The launch was proof, he said, that arming ships with nuclear weapons was “making satisfactory progress”.
But the test, and Kim’s mildly upbeat appraisal, were designed to reverberate well beyond the deck of the 5,000-tonne destroyer-class vessel the Choe Hyon – the biggest warship in the North Korean fleet.
His pointed reference to nuclear weapons was made as the US and Israel continued their air bombardment of Iran – a regime Donald Trump had warned, without offering evidence, was only weeks away from having a nuclear weapon.
#world
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I wonder how long it will take the EU to understand this
УНТИЛ ЩЕ АЛЛ СПЕАК РУССИАН
Oh damn, “fake” cyrillic that actually uses the letters right 😀 well, except for Щ, heh. I might have gone for a more phonetic transliteration myself:
Антил уй ол спик ращан
Ukraine found that out in 2022.
France knows, Poland knows and will probably be the first new nuclear power in the EU.
2014*
How on earth would a nuclear arsenal have benefited the Maiden Revolutionaries?
If anything, a nuclear armed Ukraine would have been invaded by Russia that much sooner.
That’s generally not how nuclear deterrence works.
Also, 2014 was when Russia invaded Crimea
The nukes aren’t a deterrent if they’re manned by the colonizing entity.
And Russia invaded Crimea in response to the Maiden Revolution, which ousted a friendly government that was giving Russia easy access to the Crimean ports. Crimea hosts the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Imagine the US response if The Philippines or Japan installed a pro-China government.
Why did Russia not invade Poland then?
They also switched to a pro-west government and resulted in loss of naval facilities. They were also part of the Russian empire and the USSR.
Same thing happened to China, with multiple pro-west governments in their neigbours.
Also, we do know what happens in the case of the US. It happened with Cuba.
Powerful empires always seek to puppet their neigbours. There are only 2 things that effectively prevent that. Mutual Economic entanglement of open democracies and the threat of nuclear weapons.
Russia doesn’t border Poland
Do you even map?
And unfortunately, North Korea is very correct in this assessment :(
shit, i’m in canada and we are having a new conversation about acquiring nukes. USA is making the world a very dangerous place, and it’s all because grossly rich turds like trump want more.
when you type USA, do you mean the divided states between Canada and Mexico?
Ununited states of amerikkka
Anyone who didn’t learn that lesson from Ukraine is a fucking idiot
They had nukes, and gave them away after assurances if Russia invaded they’d be defended.
Instead we left them out to dry and started another war instead
They had nukes under a Moscow-aligned government. They surrendered those nukes to win trade concessions from their Western partners.
Had they keep their weapons, they’d have had a much larger contingent of Russian military personal in the country for the next 30 years.
We’ve sent them hundreds of billions of dollars in military hardware, mercenary staff, and logistical support.
They’re losing the war because NATO underestimated the offensive capability of the Russian military, especially over an enormous front line. Not because they lack raw firepower.
What do you think would have happened after Russia crossed into the Donbas over cross border shelling? Would Zelensky have responded by… nuking half the Oblast? Or are you suggesting everyone should start flinging nukes at each other’s capital cities?
I still think they’re loosing because Elon musk is a piece of shit. He hobbled their counter offensive that might have given them the breathing room to end the war. War is a collection of key moments and he stuck his dick in the gears during one of them when he shut down starlink
He extended state-of-the-art telecommunications on contract from the US, then yanked it back because he wanted more money. Which is what private industry always does, the moment they see an opportunity to squeeze someone for extra juice.
I’m personally of the opinion that the NATO block doesn’t want this war to end, because they see it as a way to bleed both Ukraine and Russia until they’re weak enough to re-colonize. This is part of a much broader pattern of NATO fumbled support for Ukraine, such that Russians can pursue a minimal advance while Ukrainians keep jumping into the meat grinder trying to slow it down.
The most glaring moment, for me, was the Prigozhin lightning raid on Moscow. Russian high command was in chaos. The front line was depleted of reinforcements. Ukraine… didn’t advance an inch.
After that, I was convinced Ukraine was never intended to win this fight.
Surplus 90s equipment and lack of 21st century AMRAAMs is not a serious effort to back Ukraine.
They didn’t even give the F-16s until it was literally too late to make a difference.
I still remember a horrendous reddit article post of everyone championing Ukraine receiving a measly couple hundred ATGMs fom the UK as if that was going to do anything against Russia.
If the US was serious about their offer, they would have provided several squadrons of aircraft, training, the new AIM-260, muntions, etc etc.
While Ukraine was drowning in technology transfer blocks, they shipped all of that stuff to Israel no questions asked.
And for money mind you. Ukraine was still able to fund those purchases at the time.
As of early 2026, the U.S. has allocated approximately $175 billion to $188 billion in total, covering military, financial, and humanitarian aid related to the war in Ukraine. Of this, roughly $66.9 billion to $69 billion has been specifically dedicated to security assistance and military aid.
That’s more than the entire GDP of Ukraine when the war broke out.
We did send them aid. And then the administration changed. My point is, I agree. You should never trust someone else with your own protection. Ukraine got a major economic boon from disarming. And soft protection but donating to the local police force doesn’t really help in when someone decides to walk into your house anyway.
We pledged armies…
30 years ago Ukraine was the 3rd largest nuclear superpower in the world.
They didn’t trade that for a couple crates of old ARs and malfunctioning body armor
Completely wiped out by the multiple Russian invasions…
They traded real security for comfort, and comfort always can be taken away.
It’s almost impossible to get real.security, look at Iran.
Like, there’s no rational reason for a sovereign country not to be developing their own nukes these days. And that’s dangerous
Yeah, I don’t disagree. That’s what happened. They confused economic power with defense. Maybe if it wasn’t putin they were trying to stop it would have been better for them.
They essentially traded a gun for a job and a restraining order. But also consider that the economic ties they gained by giving up their nukes. Bought them time and capital to build up their own military power enough to fight off Russia decades years later. They may not win this, but at the time the only thing they had were nukes.
Ukraine made the choice to try to build itself up more. I don’t fault them for that. Geopolitics is a messy 4-D chess game.
You just can’t really predict individual elements. When they declared independence putin was just a little shit stain and the billionaires in Russia were still fighting among each other to secure wealth and power.
At the time, Ukraine giving up it’s nukes fast tracked it to the 1st world. Yeah, it sucks that it played out this way. But it wasn’t on its face a bad plan.
If they had a 40 year old nuclear arsenal and matching tech they might not be at war right now, but they also probably wouldn’t be Ukraine either.
Wildly incorrect…
Like just look at any map, Ukraine was the front line to Europe, think about how much military is built up in Texas because it’s a border. Ukraine had a shit ton of all types of weaponry when the USSR dissolved
Weapony that the former USSR had claim to and would have been a justification for intervention. I’m not going to sit here and pretend I know the nuances of the fall of the USSR. I was 3. But I can see enough to know that at the time, Ukraine made the smart play for the foreseeable future. In 1994. In hindsight, it should have held its nukes. In the moment, throwing down that sword gave it a seat at the world table.
Hate to break it to ya…
But after the dissolution of the USSR, there wasn’t anymore USSR.
Russia had claim to those weapons, just like the nukes.
Ukraine kept the conventional equipment, and gave up the nukes back to Russia instead.
This isn’t a hypothetical, this is what happened, and if you don’t know what happened, it’s hard to trust you on hypotheticals. Youre making them without all the facts
Look, I’m not really into how hot you’re being about this. Little nitpicking like that doesn’t strike me as good faith discussion. Especially when I haven’t exactly been adverse to a few of your points. If you want to talk, cool, if you want to argue, scroll on.
Thank you.
“It’s only nuclear war, why is everyone getting all worked up!?”
Budapest Ignorandum
And Libya before Ukraine. Gaddafi complied with the West’s demands to dismantle his country’s nuclear program. In return for his cooperation, the US and NATO later backed rebel groups and had his government overthrown. This ultimately resulted in him being raped in the ass with a bayonet.
Exactly, Trump’s brain has shrunk to the point of nonexistence.
That’s because nukes ARE the only path to security lmao. As soon as the first one was tested, and then fuck me used against civilians everyone watching jnmed understood this.
It sucks, and I would much prefer a world without nuclear weapons, but this is reality unfortunately. If you have nukes, you have leverage without ever having to use them
Uhhhh…
I don’t quite know how to break it to you but:
There’s no other way to use a nuke, they cover too wide an area.
Killing civilians was the norm in WW2, every war before that, and the vast majority of every war since.
Like, if the nukes on Japan wouldn’t have been dropped, it would have had to be more firebombing and then a ground invasion.
Firebombings which still had a higher kill count in Japan than both nukes combined.
The entire point of a nuke, is that all it takes is a single one to wipe out entire square miles of a city. There’s no way to do that without civilian casualties, and it’s only a matter of time until one gets thru defenses.
However if you compare the nukes used in Japan to current nukes, they now cover a lot more than 1 city…
Yeah, and conventional attacks have also evolved past just dumping napalm from a balloon…
Or attaching small moltovs to bats and releasing them.
Like, nukes getting bigger is better as a dettertent.
That’s the entire point of a deterrent.
Where we fucked up, is who we entrusted the buttons to.
You don’t know me so you would have no way of knowing this about me, but yes I am very familiar with all the tradeoffs and decision making in this part of WW2 around ground assault vs nukes and continued bombing etc 🙌
You clearly believe so…
But that’s not the impression one gets from the words you type.
✌️
I’d better not express what impression I’m getting from your words, dude.
I get paid a lot to be right and say it in ways powerful idiots understand.
Not having to be polite is a relief valve, but it doesn’t mean the information is incorrect.
The smallest “tactical nuke” is orders of magnitude bigger than what was used in Japan and even at their lowest settings would snowball into environmental catastrophe.
You can’t contain an atomic blast. Even what’s left is irradiated and now nuclear waste. Especially any kind of metal, which is probably going to be whatever you nuke.
Being smaller just means idiots are more likely to use them.
Whoa you must be like so rich. How much do you make
Weird…
I thought the peace sign emoji meant you were done.
Another Godzilla connoisseur, I see.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_nuclear_weapon
geopoliticaleconomy.com/…/atomic-bombing-japan-no…
They could be dialed down lower, but even a “small” tactical nuke is bigger than what got dropped on Japan.
It is not a “bunker buster” type of munition.
And I have no idea what you’re second rambling source is trying to say.
It’s not about size, it’s how you use it. For example, a tactical nuke could potentially be used at sea to destroy a fleet. Depending on where the fleet is, this could potentially be done with no direct civilian casualties.
Really? It’s pretty clear cut: the Americans dropped the nuke to primarily rule out Soviet influence as opposed to being a decisive means to end the war. This isn’t even a fringe opinion among historians these days - I’m surprised you haven’t heard this take.
historyextra.com/…/atomic-bomb-hiroshima-nagasaki…
And huge environmental damage leading to indirect death and suffering at a wide scale…
No, that’s from an opinion on a random website it doesn’t prove anything, just tells you the authors opinion…
Your new one agrees with me at least:
But I didn’t bother reading more than you quoted.
Genuine question: before today, had you ever heard of the take that the US didnt need to nuke Japan - given Soviet advancements and Japan’s military crumbling?
Yep, anytime it comes up a shit ton of .ml accounts all keep insisting it wasn’t necessary even tho the alternative would have caused more deaths and a shit ton more human suffering while ignoring that it fucking worked even when the Japanese government considered imprisoning the emperor to prevent him from surrending before the bombs were used.
That’s what people don’t get, Japan wasn’t going to surrender. The military had seized control and would 100% continue fighting to the last person, the only thing that stopped them was showing that continuing to fight would leave all of Japan a barren rock.
The complete destruction of their island was the only thing that would have worked.
But as sure as I just said that, it’s all hypotheticals and guesses, no one really knows how much it would have taken without nukes, but every indication is it would have taken a lot.
Even if used “correctly”, it can still cause significant collateral damage. I wouldn’t normalize even the use of tactical nuclear weapons, as it’s only one degree of separation away from use on civilian centers. I can see the justification now…“(insert group) terrorists have set up tunnels underneath the civilian population center! We must nuke the city!”
Ah yes the Soviets were right about to checks notes start building an invasion fleet and beat the US in the race to Tokyo, thus checks notes again singlehandedly defeat fascism around the globe
That’s some interesting alternative history you’re reading there
Not sure what youre talking about, or how any of that follows.
The simple fact is that the notion that the US did not need to nuke Japan is a well-respected position among historians.
wagingpeace.org/were-the-atomic-bombings-necessar…
historyonthenet.com/reasons-against-dropping-the-…
jacobin.com/…/atomic-nuclear-bomb-world-war-ii-so…
Of course, they could have chosen to spend several hundred thousand soldiers instead.
But I’m laughing harder at your other notion that the soviet ubermenschen were right about to swim across the Sea ofJapan and the US had to cheat to beat them there
Again, not sure what youre talking about, or how this follows. The only person bringing this idea is you.
Perhaps you need to check your le epic notes again.
Yeah must have been some other you that posted that the USSR was about to invade Japan
Uh, yeah. It was. You realize that imperial Japan expanded beyond the island, right?
en.wikipedia.org/…/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria
Original claim:
Your rebuttal:
What are you even talking about?
Ah yes, first your source was claiming they’d “liberate Tokyo” but of course you only meant ‘mainland China’
edit: to be more precise, it read like you’re choking on 1945 USSR dick so much that it’s hampering you from correctly understanding the equation for the 1945 US. It’s gone so far that it’s tickling your brain
How directly civilians are targeted and how formally varies quite a bit, actually, even in ancient wars.
This is the plot of metal gear
Metal gear?!
!
I heared this.
we were working toward a way for a world without nukes. building an economy so interconnected that going to war with another country destroys your economy too. but that shit is fragile. i didn’t think it was this fragile tho.
It just needs someone with power and without any fucking knowledge of economics but thinking the opposite.
The economy in the USA can still get a lot worse!
<img alt="I am asking Everyone to try harder" src="https://frinkiac.com/video/S03E11/jqL8D0SCiF-ig59jwBoTBmLwZaE=.gif">
Too bad that ideology drove wealth inequality which empowered populism which empowered fascism which destroyed the interconnected economy. Neoliberalism was never a solution to peace.
who said an interconnected economy needs to be neoliberal?
…The great project you were referring to was a neoliberal one…
Well nuclear weapons or being a Western lapdog, but yeah pretty much.
Am I missing something here?
How nuclear weapons can be a safe path, or a matter of survival?
Do these so called “leaders” have in mind the catastrophic effects of launching nuclear missiles?
All they want to have nuclear weapons so they can bully their neighbours or enemies, until someone launches a nuclear attack and then everyone retaliates.
But they have any idea about the after effects? Isn’t Chernobyl a hard lesson for these people?
Seriously, the world is being run by selfish lunatics with too much power in their hands.
Countries with nuclear weapons aren’t subjected to as much US imperialism because of the threat of retaliation.
Ok, I get it.
And what about the consequences?
Have they thought about that?
The consequences of having nukes?
MAD dictates that the US doesn’t fuck with nuclear-armed nations. That’s the consequence. You don’t need to actually launch it, just be able to.
I mean the consequences of actually using the nukes…
I understand having nukes as a deterrent, but think about the consequences of an actual launch, in either side.
We know who always pay the death price, and they are not the ones in power.
I don’t get why I’m being downvoted when pointing out the bad consequences of a nuclear strike, in fact, I don’t care. My point still stands.
Because you’re asking the wrong people. You don’t ask the people about to be attacked if they understand, you ask the people doing the attacking. Do they understand the repercussions of using a nuclear weapon. Because if they attack that country they’re going to cause it. Get it? That’s the whole point.
But I am asking to the people doing the attacking, but also asking to anyone who has and is capable of launching a nuclear weapon.
I’m not judging or disregarding who has nukes as form of deterrence, but the “technical” consequences of a nuke.
We learnt about Hiroshima and Chernobyl (although Chernobyl was a nuclear accident and not a launch).
Yeah I think maybe sentences like this are why you come off as vague and unclear. Because you just said two different things in two halves of that sentence.
Do you understand deterrence or not? You say you do but your entire line of questioning seems to make me think that you do not. The entire point of deterrence is it’s up to the attacker to understand consequences. They’re the ones making the choice. They can either not attack and not be nuked or attack and be nuked. That’s the choice they’re making. That’s the point of deterrence.
If you read my very first comment on this, I didn’t even talked about deterrence.
I mentioned the consequences that if someone (attacked or attacker) uses a nuclear weapon.
The actual nasty effects, like radiation.
I don’t care about deterrence at this point. I care about people. People that will die if this is carried out.
Sure if someone says “I have nuclear weapons so you will obey me.”, of course others will also have nuclear weapons so they don’t get bullied.
But my point is way past that.
The point of having nukes is to threaten destruction of an enemy even at the cost of one’s own destruction. Analysts understand that actually using nuclear weapons benefits no one. Nukes don’t benefit the party that launches nukes upon event X taking place, the party that causes event X, or most bystanders. Saying that any party responsible for event X will be nuked is intended to ensure that event X doesn’t occur. Threats are not reality: threatening retaliation is not the same as actually retaliating.
Some facts have been simplified in this reply. Reality is more complicated but these basic principles do seem to hold most of the time.
That’s the thing, you don’t ever have to actually launch the dang nuke. The goal is that deterrent, not annihilation.
For whatever it’s worth, I think your questions make sense. MAD is kind of madness, but its how the world has worked since the invention of the atom bomb. And anyway, I can’t see or cast downvotes on my instance.
When you are facing a nation-state level power or above that 1.- has the ability to carpet bomb and genocide multiple countries 2.- supports others doing the same and 3.- shows disregard of international law, how can nukes be not the correct, reasonable defense?
I’ve never understood the international position that Iran, of all countries, should not have a nuclear program. Its enemy is literally the US!
just North Korea? How about the rest of the free world becoming a little more cozy to owning a nuke? What is stopping the American barbarians from just coming over and taking what they want? especially with their empire crumbling? See what the zionazis did to gaza? That is potentially ALL OF US.
“North Korea’s view”
Ha, yeah, it’s a NK thing. It’s everybody’s view.
Turns out the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction was invented by Kim Jung Un, as a spec of genetic material living in his father’s sperm that was still lodged in his grandfather’s scrotum.
This is the true unlimited power of Scientific Marxism.
The thought of the Great Leader is si magnificent it reverberates backwards through time!
His official government website states, or at least used to, that the very first time he played golf, he scored 18 hole-in-ones
The biggest deterrent Iran had wasn’t nuclear. It was their proximity to the Straight of Hormuz, with the potential to shut down a fifth of global fossil fuel traffic.
Trump blew straight past that breaker. He wasn’t deterred because he did not give a shit.
That’s not to say Iran shouldn’t have developed a nuclear weapon. But there’s no reason to believe a Pete Hegseth/Israel Katz joint brain trust would have respected it
America used certain weapons to stop WW2. (Edit: Though that’s an oversimplification and ignores the efforts of the other allies and battles of WW2) So it’s not only North Korean logic. Ironically, many Western countries also have Nukes and have not given them up. Nuclear Energy is a lot cleaner than fossil fuels as well though of course it is still very controversial and unpopular.
The U.S. did not use nuclear weapons to stop WW2. That is such a load of crap, and propaganda. We used nuclear weapons to intimidate Russia and show what we were capable of.
Just as the british didnt incinerate Dresden to stop the germans from producing… optics
I did not say nuclear weapons. I said certain weapons. Obviously they are not the same thing but similar threat level.
Checks and balances.
I know that it’s an unpopular opinion, but I firmly believe that we were at least marginally safer when the USSR was still a superpower acting as a check on American fuckery.
Once the USSR fell, US went masks off on the international stage because they had no reason to pretend to be the good guys anymore.
They convinced all their allies to disarm themselves, and then went full “nice country here…shame if something happened to it” the moment they were the only big dog left.
The world can’t re-arm itself fast enough as far as I’m concerned.
Better to have it and not need it. You can only have respect when your facing someone at an equal level of power and respect. Clearly even if some administration does have love for your people the next administration might not.
For a brief time with Yeltsin at the helm.
As a completely irrelevant observer, yeah. Nukes are. If I was a leader of a people and we had one, I would never disarm.
Someone post the apology form.
That’s the overwhelming message of the 20th and 21st centuries. If you don’t have nukes then the US or Russia is gonna mess with you. Get nukes.
Secretly get nukes.
All but impossible, the major players keep an eye on all the things necessary for nuclear weapons.
Actually, Canada got in on the ground floor and we have everything we’d need. They say we’re about two months out at any given time, going the plutonium route.
Then again, we’re pretty used to the luxuries of not being an isolated pariah state.
You guys aren’t quite as turnkey as, say, Japan. They’ve got reprocessing and rocket production from JAXA and really would have to just put together an implosion device.
TIL.
Delivery would be an issue for sure. Then again, if the potential target is America “guys on quads” would work. If the target isn’t America, America will do it for us. Edit: Because they own the Western hemisphere, and we’re their bitch.
As an American I sincerely hope that’s true, though I’d wager most of the people within “guys on quads” distance are pretty sympathetic to the effects our federal government is having on old allies.
Uh, so other side of the border from me is red state Montana. Anyway, I think the idea is you load it onto something else once it’s in and take it to an actual target. It’s just a long border that’s hard to seal perfectly.
If there’s a note of disbelief in there, I’d like to point out America has nukes and uses them as a deterrent the same way. Like, whether proliferation is morally justified, of if we should just accept our fate in that scenario, is a serious question we should ask, but you don’t really have a moral highground about it.
Obviously I’m not saying killing people is cool, and we know that 2/3 of Americans didn’t ask for any of this.
How would the Canadians possibly smuggle a nuke across the border?
“Mr. President, the Canadians have called to apologize for insulting you. They’re also sending an apology gift. It’s a large, golden, 20 foot tall statue in the shape of a moose!”
“Wow, that’s amazing. Bring it to DC at once!”
It seems that’s what Iran was doing actually. They enriched uranium up to 60%. Bomb grade is 90%. But there’s really no reason to enrich that high except to make nukes. And nuclear enrichment is not a linear thing. Half the work is just to get to 5% enrichment.
It seems they designed their program to be right on the edge of nuclear breakout. In retrospect, they probably should have gone straight for the bomb.
Yeah, there’s an annoying amount of controversy over whether “Iran was trying to make a bomb”. It gets mixed answers from experts, because the literal answer is one thing, the effective answer is another, and there’s no way to explain it responsibly in a word or two.
Iran was/is trying to almost-but-not-quite get the bomb. Whether just going for it would of worked better or if the US would have stepped in sooner is an interesting question. It’s possible the Ayatollah wasn’t lying about having personal moral issues with it, though.
Just do what Pakistan did and make a publicized nuclear team and nuclear infrastructure that acts as the fall guy for the real nuclear team and real infrastructure.
Also probably maybe have a government and military that isn’t susceptible to espionage.
Am Canadian. Want nukes.
Am German. We can definitely be trusted with nukes.
I think the lesson here is no one can be trusted with nukes, which is why I want them.
I’m an American. I want nukes. Not for my country, me specifically. We should legalize the private ownership of nuclear bombs!
Wasn’t that kind of a given already considering how Russia is treating Ukraine right now?
That would be the sane assumption to make here. But remember, trump is not a rational actor. He might just invade NK just for shits and giggles. i think the only reason he hasn’t yet is because they don’t have enough oil / kim is his friend.
His admin just has to tell him the Kim dynasty bought franchise rights to McDonalds and they are threatening American supplies of Big Macs. War by tomorrow morning.
Edit: That the above sentence is not the stupidest thing ever said and has even the smallest element of truth in it speaks very poorly about the age we are living in.
He wouldnt because israel doesn’t give a shit about NK.
<img alt="" src="https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/59f795d3-9b37-4a2c-898e-6a5588200539.png">
I mean its not a wrong view its either that or be a faithful servant of the west above your own citizens.
Instead of try to renovate or upkeep nuclear sites Ukraine gave them to Russia for assurances of protection by the Russia, the U.K, and U.S. Then Russia attacked them twice since then. It isn’t a “west” thing.
The situation Ukraine and Iran reinforced that position too. Ukraine believed that the US would have its back if it gave up its nukes
And Libia before
Sadly, that’s a lesson I’ve already learned from war in Ukraine. Before it I had "hope"s and "might"s about civilization. Now I have a substantial amount less
I sincerely don’t give us 50 years. We will almost certainly destroy ourselves. Whether that’s by war, economic or environmental collapse, or otherwise, we’re speed running it on all fronts.
I used to hold so much hope for humanity. It feels so naive now.
If it makes you feel any better, we will probably survive and restart the cycle.
True. Perhaps a better way of mentally framing it might be that modern society is but one of many temporary states, not the end all be all of humanity and life on Earth in general. Still sad. We could be so much more.
North Korea doesn’t understand that you must have something worth taking like oil before you need to build nukes to protect it
The US slaughtered 20% of the country’s people. “Invasion” is putting it lightly.
They do.
Not oil but minerals.
The United States dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm in North Korea, more than what was spent on the entire Pacific Theater of WW2.
While I don’t doubt the US would drop that many bombs just to cause suffering, I don’t think it adds up financially if they didn’t want something.
what’s funny is that there’s more similarities to the Korean war and what’s happening in Iran than you might expect.
I mean, they’re not wrong, they could get away with a lot less without the nukes.
North Korea will fall to something other than invasion now. For example, things usually don’t go too well for female monarchs, because the men around them are dicks.
Fun fact: thats why Eisenhower started Iran’s nuclear program. It was the ‘Atoms for Peace’ program. It was for peaceful purposes supposedly but we all know where developing nuclear capabilities will end up at.
Never thought I’d agree with North Korea but a broken clock is right twice a day I guess.
Cool, except Trump and Putin don’t think rationally. What makes you think nukes are a deterrent from them trying to imperialize? It might stop them short term but not for long.
Aim directly at Mar-A-Lago.
Hell, you don’t even need a nuclear payload for that.
here’s the thing about narcissists. they only care about themselves. not stuff, not people, not morals or ethics or laws or anything.
as long as he’s alive, that’s all he cares about.
the only way to truly scare a narcissist is to take the most important thing from them of all.
public attention.
Nuclear weapons fall pretty solidly in the category of “things that can hurt a narcissist”. Trump is certain he can be protected from conventional attacks. If someone REALLY wants to nuke the president, however, he’d have to get EXTREMELY lucky to avoid it.
I think you underestimate the intelligence services that are dedicated to his safety.
they would see plans of a nuke months before they would see some psycho with a gun that decides on a whim that “today’s the day”.
They have nuclear resistant planes and can keep the president in the air indefinitely during a nuclear strike. The guys right trump has no deterrents. Nukes are an irrational deterrent for irrational people. You could launch 100 nukes on the USA and we’d still invade your country an hour later lmao
The point isn’t to kill him, just to destroy his golf course.
If they have a brain they will never relinquish their nukes. Not just because of the US either.
Because they’re such a good use of national resources. They sit around costing money being a clear and present danger to all. Marvelous idea.
Costs less than defending your land with conventional weapons and lives.
As long as you plan on nuking someone I guess. Have you ever seen the infographic from the Cold War when everyone launches their nukes? Mutually assured destruction ringing any bells? What kind of sovereignty do you expect to have of your nuclear wasteland?
In science, we prefer observational to speculative evidence.
OK well the USA will launch 3200 nuclear missiles at just about anything that threatens it with a nuclear missile. We will basically hit every known nuclear missile site and every related population center… so I guess when you are thinking about nuking the United States before they invade you…. Just know they will nuke the entire world and they will dump more nukes on you. Then you could create in a lifetime… that’s our actual nuclear doctrine
Works both ways, while the USA is thinking about invading another country with nuclear weapons they have to know that will lead to nukes from that country hitting their major cities which will probably make them think twice.
Then the discussion moves to pre-emptive strikes which have the same problem if the other country already has nukes. Eventually we end up in this situation where some might see even pursuing a nuclear weapons technology as justification for a war of aggression like we’re seeing in Iran so you certainly need to be careful during that phase but once you get there you’re in a much safer place than you used to.
The US is a big place, and we starve our citizens for fun. I don’t think the higher ups would care if you dropped a handful of bombs up.
A true nuclear deterrent is a combination of icbms and sub launched missles. A lot of them. I’m thinking 300 before I even start to get scared. 3,000 and I’m shitting bricks. If you build 3 nukes and think that will stop the USA from invading it’s just nonsense. They’d happily let those hit so they could glass their enemies and start the apocalypse.
You’re dealing with mad men.
They’d care because it’s not just the poor citizens you’d sacrifice to the gods of nuclear fire but also the very important ones with money and political connections. And the stock markets would really sink, the thing that gets Trump to TACO out every time.
Of course you want as strong a deterrent as possible but from estimates I’ve read North Korea’s 10 nukes with MIRVs and decoy launches would very likely still be effective enough to extract a very serious price for invading.
Obviously if you just assume there is not even the slightest bit of rational self-interest from the actors involved, you’ve already lost humanity to nukes anyway.
That’s what I’m saying we have systems in place to save the important people. The same people that will press the button.
So you’re gonna gamble on the fact that America cares about its citizens getting nuke or not. I can tell you from the ground floor of America. They do not care if we get nuked. That would certainly help them proceed with their planned goals…
I totally agree with the theory if we were all dealing with rational actors, then yes, having a few nuclear weapons as a method of deterrent probably not a terrible idea. But the reality is nuclear powers already pretty concentrated and the powers that be don’t want anyone else getting the power. The American military complex is not being run by rational actors. Nuclear weapons are best at deterring military peers. The us military has no peer. You’d need to be building nukes for 100 year to catch up and that shouldn’t be a global goal.
Russia had about 10,000 of the biggest bombs in the world. Same doctrine just splatter anything close to being considered a friend of the US. So like it’s not having a nuke. It’s having enough nukes to outnuke the next guy and an survival plan for when your whole civilization turns to glass
If you prefer observational evidence do some research on a proper nuclear counter and check out what happened to those USSR nukes.
The future comes down to one thing - management.
they exist to prevent conflict at all because everyone knows the consequences of using them.
They only prevent conflict if you have enough to annihilate your enemy. We have a full nuclear umbrella over the globe so no matter how many nukes you throw at us we are still going to be around to throw them back at you. 3 nukes won’t save you. 3,000 might?
There’s still a significant deterrent effect even if you’d “only” lose a few major cities worth while others stay around. There’s also potential for extended responses by other nuclear weapons states that further increase deterrence for such a scenario.
I’m trying to think of how Ukraine acquiring nukes would work with Russia? Do you think Ukraine having a nuke would deter Russia or would it make them an existential threat and have Russia nuke them? Let’s look at this from two different countries stand points and take the USA out of it for a second.
That would depend on the details of the hypothetical. Certainly if Ukraine was able to develop a credible threat with first strike survivability before Russia became aware I would expect Russia to be forced to move towards de-escalation and diplomacy because their major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg which Putin has tried to shield completely from all effects of the war would be in danger.
Lacking that and with a credible ability to eliminate the nuclear weapon completely with a pre-emptive strike Russia would probably do it even if it meant nuclear strikes against Ukraine.
That’s basically how I have it gamed out, although I think the situation would be wildly unpredictable. Throw some bad intel and paranoia into the mix and it gets quite messy. I’m obviously just some dude from America, but if I was Ukrainian I would be really nervous about the results of going nuclear. Personally I’d like my country to get rid of more nukes and stop encouraging the world to build more. I understand the perspective, but I think it’s short sighted and dangerous. I hope the people freely advocating for it on the Internet, have thought through it as much as you have.
As I said to the other guy, I’m pretty sure the people in charge of the United States right now would happily let their people get hit by three nukes so they could new nuke you back. It’s a win win for them.
I’m not so sure about that since it’s still possible for them to hit stuff and people they care about even though they may not care about the country or its people in general.
And no doubt the S&P500 would tank so there’s that. Seems to be the one thing Trump cares about more than anything else.
With the administrations effort to collapse the value of the US dollar, I think we may be getting to the point where they stopped caring about the stock market gains too. Which would make them irrational actors. They already own most of the stock market anyway. They can crash the market and still control the companies.
Well as soon as oil prices surged and markets dipped, Trump switched from “war could go on forever” to “almost done”. I guess it remains to be seen if it is only a rhetoric switch but if that was the case it wouldn’t help for long. The less certain thing is whether Trump can even get the strait to reopen by withdrawing at this point.
Ya I mean he’s making a lot of money moving markets with his tweets. That’s the side gig. But eventually manipulating markets, makes people get suspicious and step away. You don’t want people losing faith in your faith monetary system.
I’m not sure if it’s shortsightedness and greed or an actual plan to collapse and consolidate but I don’t think he really cares about the health of the stock market. I think it’s just being useful to siphon money away right now.
I mean, we just had the strangest situation with the oil prices and the European Union dumping its oil reserves. The whole world declared an emergency because the oil speculators managed to get the price up to 120 a barrel for 30 whole minutes. I don’t think anyone seriously cares about markets anymore.
And not just North Korea’s.
Just like Putin is the best NATO marketer, Trump is the best nuclear weapon marketer.
If they have a bigger brain they would make a bigger stockpile with more capable strike capability. Having global nuclear reach is the only way to have sovereignty in 2026.
Yes, sir, when I look around and see a deteriorating global peace, the first thing I think is nuclear proliferation. It’s like clearly humans can handle more destructive power and need to be threatening each other on a more existential scale.
Instead of using our combined resources to elect, better governments, and what not we could just make nukes. The poor will be starving still but we will have nukes.
Idealism vs Realism in International Relations:
Of course it would be preferable that we all realise just how much money and resources are being wasted on war that could do more good for eveyone when invested in constructive measures such as infrastructure and trade.
Unfortunately, enough awful people exist to make that idea (currently) unfeasible. We will have nukes, but at least we might still live.
(That’s not to endorse the status quo, and we absolutely should change it. We need to acknowledge where we stand in order to plan how we get where we want to go, but go we should.)
Ya and I don’t think getting every country a nuke is realistic. There’s a reason why we started disarming the nukes and getting rid of them. And like the reason is now they are not OK to have around unstable government. The US is an unstable government with the most advanced nukes in the world. And more of them than most countries combined. It’s just not really a sane move to be trying to arm yourself with weapons of mass destruction in the face of an unstable country willing to use them.
You’ll never build enough nukes before we come bomb you for trying to build nukes you know? That’s what’s happening in Iran. You screech about getting a nuke and bombing America for 30 years and you kind of don’t get any sympathy when the insane government comes to bomb your ass. These people would love to nuke Iran they just know they couldn’t survive it poltivally yet…
Maybe the lesson to be learned is that publicly calling for a nuclear weapon to use against a nuclear power is probably not a good political stance. You should try to keep it hush-hush.
Realism is more nukes = more chances for an all out nuclear war that wipes out 80% of humanity. Probably more like the 99% that don’t own bunkers
Realism as a framework for studying International Relations models states as rational actors in a global system without rules.
Under that framework, more nukes should mean less war because the risk of MAD raises the potential cost of aggression past the primary objective of the state: self-preservation. A rational actor won’t start a war that might see the enemy pressed to the point where they decide that the risk of using nukes is acceptable.
Of course, that framework fails to account for irrational behaviour. The problem isn’t (strictly) nukes, but unchecked megalomaniacs and growing nationalist hatred.
Yes, more nukes means that a potential devastation might be much worse, but if you wonder what less nukes means, ask Ukraine how that turned out for them.
It’s the mentality of “the other guy bad” we need to tackle. That’s the fuel that feeds populist warmongers and the glue that sustains fascism.
I agree fully. I wish we could go back to 2022 and give Ukraine the full support of the US military and honored our treaty. Wish they got let into NATO. Hate that we gotta talk about nukes. Don’t think 20 nukes would deter Russia or USA from belligerent aggression, considering the regimes in charge.
Realism = looking at your neighboring countries and wondering if it’s worth turning them into a toxic wasteland because you felt a little scared. The repercussions of nuclear armament in these psychotic times will be all consuming.
It’s just a really funny thing to see casually thrown around with the context of the last hundred years. I can’t imagine any of you guys have looked into the Cold War nuclear policies.
Realism in this case is one approach to examining international relations, which models states as self-interested actors in an anarchic global system. It assumes that there are no other rules than reasonable self-interest constraining decisions. In essence, it takes a “worst case” approach to human decency, but also a “best case” approach to rational government.
It’s not a “perfect” model, because no model is, but it can offer explanations and predictions for some decisions, which makes it a useful tool in talking about national security.
Not quite.
The objective of a defender is self-preservation. The way they achieve that is typically to make attacking them unattractive by raising the cost of the attack and eroding the will of the attacker. If they can no longer afford to keep pushing, or if their own people are rebelling against the austerity of wartime measures, they will eventually either have to negotiate or collapse.
The sooner the enemy comes to the conclusion that they won’t get a favourable result, the sooner they’ll want to cut their losses. Ideally, they will come to that conclusion even before attacking at all. That is where nuclear deterrence comes into play: Not to be used (lightly), but to communicate “A war with me may become so horribly expensive that the risk isn’t worth whatever you stand to gain.”
You don’t nuke your neighbour because you feel a little scared. You build nukes because you’re no longer sure that conventional weaponry is enough to deter a potential attacker. Your rival isn’t sure whether you’ll use them offensively, accordingly unsettled by the possibility of getting nuked and starts building their own.
And then we arrive at the principle of MAD and the cold war: if either attacks the other, they risk getting destroyed as well, but if either disarms, they risk losing that deterrence that keeps the other from attacking first.
To make all of this worse, I’ll return to my introductory note: This line of reasoning is built on the premise that all involved parties are rational. We can safely say that this doesn’t hold up to reality.
On one hand, a state is larger than its leader, and a lunatic in charge can’t launch the first strike without the cooperation of his people. If they act rationally and refuse to carry out the order, that might prevent the irrationality of individuals from fucking up everyone.
On the other, deception or error may lead to the launch of a “second” strike where no first one has taken place, fucking up everyone.
The Cuba crisis stands as an example for both of those “deviations” from the rational premise of Realism. Fortunately, one ended up compensating for the other, but the idea that it took two “wrongs” at once to make a right is scary.
There is also another premise that doesn’t entirely hold, one that can break the dilemma and led to the disarmament: having faith that the other will take the same risk to break out of the stalemate isn’t strictly self-interested, but humans aren’t all evil and paranoid. Human decency can help us build a better world.
We “just” need to get the pricks out of the way…
There’s also that pesky calculation of how many nukes can I deliver effectively. I believe you pointed out that Russia wants to protect its main cities. The scale of your arsenal would have to be able to overwhelm counter missiles for a small nation to get to MAD scale would cost a fortune.
You can look at it from an IR perspective. You can look at it by game theory we can look at the historical context. It’s all quite frightening to me.
I personally believe we should be disarming the things. I liked growing up in that period of history where there wasn’t a constant threat of nuclear extinction. Hate to see us go back in that direction.
If they have a bigger brain they would make a bigger stockpile with more capable strike capability. Having global nuclear reach is the only way to have sovereignty in 2026.
It should be the goal of all politically unstable countries to control nukes. Fuck feeding your population or dealing with internal corruption. Just do nukes!
You spend your life building a beautiful home. Right when you pay the mortgage off and finish the last detail…a drunken maniac busts in the door, shoots you, and moves into your former home. And he just gets away with it because there’s no cops in your town.
Or, more concretely, you build a magnificent culture, industry, society, and economy. You invest in your people and technological innovation. You turn your nation into an economic powerhouse. Then the neighboring country, who put all of their more limited resources into the military, storms across the border and takes over your little paradise. Now you’re still paying the tax levels of a Nordic welfare state, but all of the money just goes into the pockets of the warlords and oligarchs of the mafia state that just conquered you.
Yea the Ukraine war is a real tragedy. But I don’t think the EU in America are afraid of Russian nukes. I think they’re addicted to Russian money.
Since Putin attacked Ukraine half a dozen European countries are considering their own nuclear arsenal separate from US nuclear sharing. Sweden, Germany, Ukraine, Italy, Poland, Netherlands, Denmark.
Putin attacking Ukraine has certainly played a part here but the big and much more impactful final push for this has been NATO members losing trust in the USA and its nuclear umbrella because of Trump. After all every one of these European nations except for Ukraine which is the only non-member was happy with the NATO guarantees for a very long time before this.
Shit, Trump’s illegal Iran war convinces me pretty strongly that a nuclear weapons program is the only way to keep my fucking apartment secure from the despotic motherfucker. Kick in my door and millions go boom, bitch!
…that sounds ridiculous, and it is! But that’s the kind of world this sadistic, brain-rotted buffoon is trying to create. And for some reason Republicans seem to think that’s just great! Less than two dozen of them could end this nightmare if they cared. But they don’t. How many more are going to die for these bastards?
We live in times, when if you don’t have a weapon of mass destruction, you cannot be safe. This is like having a gun in neighborhood.
Well the UN definetly isnt guaranteeing it. Who can blame the north Koreans and others for having nukes as deterrence?
The UN was never a guarantor of peace. It was an effort to provide a forum for diplomacy to facilitate peaceful solutions, created in a time where international relations were much more fragmented.
Diplomacy can never prevent war, only ever seek to avoid it, and that’s what the UN is for. It’s not any member’s extended army to enforce their idea of peace. That’s why the great powers got veto rights: to prevent weaponising it.
This isn’t on the UN. It’s on the aggressors that start wars and prove that you cannot trust in international goodwill and a shared desire for peace.
The great powers got veto rights for them to participate at all in it and for them to be able to do as they please in the future. I don’t think “weaponising” is the correct framing because from the point of view of probably pretty much everyone else other than them (and of course even for them when it comes to the other ones) it would absolutely be a good thing if the UN was able to limit their actions too. The people who came up with the whole concept of international law certainly would not have preferred this situation where the law is not the same for everyone, it’s against the basic principles of rule of law.
Yes, of course. But what would the alternative achieve? If a great power decides to defy a (binding) resolution, how would the others enforce it? Bear in mind that client states or otherwise allied nations wouldn’t want to intervene against their masters or allies. You’d either end up splitting the UN, at which point it’s no longer United, or form alliances outside of it, like the sanctions against Russia (which not everyone implemented either).
International law (like any other law) only works if it is either respected or enforced. Criminal cartels also defy the law, and if they’re powerful enough to resist enforcement, the law might as well not apply to them.
So yes, this isn’t how law should work, but power corrupts a lot of things, the rule of law included.
I’m not saying this state of affairs is good. Reality often isn’t, and I wish it were.
yea just like joe biden confirmed it when he supplied the funds/weapons to annihilate gaza, just like obama annihilated libya, just like dubya annihilated iraq
Dude who cares about North Korea. Just let them keep stealing from china that shit is funny to me.
Yeah, they’ve already figured that out.
Not just north Korea, the whole world can see what happened to Ukrain after they gave up their nukes in exchange for a protection deal, mutually assured destruction is the only way to keep your country safe
That had to be the biggest takeaway every country had to have gotten over the last couple of years.
Proximity bias of Europoors.
What is happening in Gaza and Iran is much worse. Iran is a 3,000 years old civilization while Ukraine is a fragment of USSR, 30 years old.
As if the Ukrainians aren’t a culture and people going back thousands of years. What odd bigotries you have.
Humans have inhabited Ukraine since 32,000 BC. - Wikipedia
Ukraine, the official country, is just some lines drawn on a map. The people, the culture, the history has been around for thousands and thousands of years.
This comment should win some kind of an award. How on earth could anyone think the history of Ukrainian culture began 30 years ago when a regime that itself had only existed for around 70 years fell apart?
Your armchair must be comfy
Not even from Europe dumbass
Ukraine is far more older civilization than you think dumbass. Actually it’s older than russia.
Yes, not holding up that deal was the worst move in modern US diplomatic history. The Doomsday Clock was moved from 100 seconds to midnight up to 90 seconds to midnight because of it. The message is VERY clear: you will only be protected or respected if you can launch nukes.
I think you mean conclusively prove North Korea’s view to be correct
The Security Dilemma: Any steps a state takes to protect itself also threatens their neighbours who can’t tell if those actions are purely defensive or if they might be used for an offensive war.
In the Realism interpretation, this necessarily produces an arms race: The neighbours also need to increase their own safety, in turn threatening the first state, who then needs to…
WMDs and nuclear deterrence are the escalation of that dilemma. By raising the potential cost of an attack war to the level of annihilation, this leverages the most fundamental state objective (securing its own survival) to deter from ever attacking (at least one paper; war and diplomacy never turn out quite as the theory might imagine).
Idealism would instead trust in mutual understanding between states, that this arms race will produce pointless cost for all parties, which might be better invested in infrastructure and trade to make all parties more prosperous. Which also sounds nice on paper, but greed, ego and military industrial
corruption“lobby” are working hard to separate us.Remember, you’ve got more in common with a working-class American, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, North Korean, Israeli, Palestinian, Iranian or any other other country than you do with billionaires or the leaders working so hard to spread hate and division and turn us on each other. We do what we must to protect ourselves, but we must not forget that the guy on the other side is just as much a victim.
Until we can make that unity a reality, it unfortunately does seem that nukes are a critical component in any state’s security strategy.