Comment by killjoywashere
5 days ago
> engineers mused over whether there was anything to be done top stop a torrent of enemy missiles falling across the nation. These superweapons seemed to promise destruction on an overbearing scale, threatening the very existence of human civilization itself.
THEY STILL DO!!!!
This is what drives me nuts about our politics: so many people seem to think we can flirt with the sort of nationalism (1) that led us into WWI and WWII. But, friends, that road leads to your death in every direction. Mutually Assured Destruction is still a thing. Nuclear peace only works as long as all parties persistently work toward de-escalation, which can be measured by adherence to consensus and norms. Nationalism is antithetical to that posture. The iconoclast leaders of national populism are rooted in rulebreaking. They also tend to embrace strong foreign policy talk as a short term bolster to domestic support, again, antithetical to de-escalation.
Nationalists are not motivated by reason. Just telling them they're going to start a nuclear war isn't a deterrent. Loyalty, sacrifice, obedience, ethnicity, borders, tradition, etc are their primary motivators today. If they have to end the world with nukes to protect "their" nation, then by golly, that's what they'll do. Self-preservation isn't as important as preservation of the ethos.
Look at any white nationalist terrorist organization. These are people who risk their lives to blow up buildings (sometimes their own government's), commit assassinations. They are aware they are putting their own lives at risk, but they do so anyway because in their minds they are doing the only thing that makes sense. In a competition with belligerent nations, nationalist zealots are happy to die for the cause.
The only thing that can stop them is if the non-zealots, who are never as motivated, come out of the woodwork to stop them. As we've seen time and time again, most regular people just aren't willing to risk their own safety or standing in community to speak out against or fight against those who are doing wrong in their community. This is why nationalists win. They are way more inclined to get in people's faces than calmer, more rational folks. Easier and safer to go along with the crowd. And so goes a nation.
> Nationalists are not motivated by reason.
It's curious how nationalists, who often claim their stance is grounded in objective truths, almost always champion the nation of their birth.
From what I've gathered trying to talk to reasonable people who have different points of view from me, the main concern is preserving one's way of life. Their culture.
I've heard the phrase "the more of the third world you bring in, the more similar your country will be to the third world".
And be there no mistake - the countries that these people call "third world" don't want European or American culture infiltrating their societies either.
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There's this quip (sounds like something Ambrose Bierce would say)
Edit: It was G.B. Shaw!
'Patriotism is the conviction that the country of your birth is superior to others because you were born in it.'
Well said. I can strongly feel this happening in Finland, which became a racist country in one year.
Fomenting nativist rage was exactly why Russia created the migrant crisis by destabilizing Syria. Im guessing you have a biased corporate media environment like America, too?
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I mean how long does it take to radicalise 20 odd people.
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you have it all backward
>we can flirt with the sort of nationalism that led us into WWI and WWII
who are you speaking for? because nationalism didn't lead us, the US, into either world war; a desire on the part of our elected officials to save/preserve our democratic European allies did; that and a direct attack from the Empire of Japan.
>Mutually Assured Destruction is still a thing
yes, and thank God, because Mutually Assured Destruction is what we call that which has kept and keeps the peace. As far as nuclear weapons go, fear of being on the receiving end is what deters their use.
The Russians keep mentioning the use of nuclear weapons; it's important not to back down in the face of that, because if we do, it will only repeat and increase. Iran, well you have to decide if they are just a different ideology, or if they are a death cult. If they're just a different ideology, MAD will work there too; if they are a death cult, you should advocate that we mutually assure their destruction before they get any.
running around like a headless chicken setting the hands on a mythical clock does not achieve anything except scaring people, and people don't do their best thinking when scared.
> you have it all backward > > >we can flirt with the sort of nationalism that led us into WWI and WWII > > who are you speaking for? because nationalism didn't lead us, the US, into either world war; a desire on the part of our elected officials to save/preserve our democratic European allies did; that and a direct attack from the Empire of Japan. > There are other people than the citizens oft USA in HN.
Personally I understood "us" in this sentence as global citizen, people from Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa who had their grandfathers living during WWI and WWII.
MAD precludes total wars of national survival ala WW2. It does not at all preclude the sorts of cabinet wars that were fought between the European powers for centuries before Napoleon.
If we crossed the Yalu River today, do you think we'd be alive tomorrow to talk about it? Nuclear deterrence, as part of the taboo, prevents any nation from violating the sovereignty of a nuclear power. The only exception I know of is the Yom Kippur War, and if there is ever a person who never received a well-earned Nobel Peace Prize, it's Golda Meir.
Ukraine crossed the Russian frontier. The Russians escalated by importing cannon fodder from North Korea.
I think the better question would be if China crossed the Yalu River today and joined the North Koreans to assault South Korea, what would the response of the US, South Korea, and Japan be? The latter two can trivially develop nuclear weapons if the US security situation degrades.
I think wielding nuclear weapons requires a baseline level of competence to exploit.
Yes? North Korea's own nuclear capability is very limited, and China doesn't care enough about North Korea to use its own arsenal and risk nuclear annihilation.
I still wouldn't want to be in Seoul or Tokyo if that happens though, and yes, there's a non-zero risk somebody somewhere gets trigger happy and things spiral out of control.
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>prevents any nation from violating the sovereignty of a nuclear power.
Is Ukraine still sitting on a bunch of russian land?
China has a no first strike policy for now, so yes. Doesn't mean we'd have a good time though.
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you can’t have de-escalation from just one side. When one side has embraced facism, invades neighbors and does hybrid attacks against you the only path that does not lead to MAD is when you are so overwhelmingly stronger that they have no choice but back up or die.
The wars always start if and only if aggressor thinks that the they can “win” something over the force.
You don't oppose someone recklessly gambling mass death by recklessly gambling mass death yourself, you just call their bluffs and maintain clear no-go lines.
What do you do when those lines are crossed? Like they have been repeatedly.
What do you think maintains those no-go lines? The threat of recklessly gambling mass death if those lines are crossed
There is a wikipedia page with a list of NATO "red lines" crossed by putin, look it up
It's a catch-22 anyway. NATO still really wants to de-escalate, but by allowing Putin to cross these red lines they show weakness to a person who values strength. However if they react violently to a crossed red line, they might trigger EU-wide or worldwide war (not necessarily nuclear).
I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of NATO leaders right now
The current government is going to weaken Western alliances. China is going to take Taiwan. Japan and South Korea are going to rapidly develop nuclear weapons programs. North Korea will increase the range of its missiles to reliably hit the entire US. The entire Middle East is going to nuclearize, with Iran first and then Saudi Arabia (the Trump white house was trying to arrange this last term, I suppose they'll succeed this time.) You cannot have a world where every single nation has nuclear weapons mounted on ICBMs and not have a war in the medium term.
If the US goes untrustworthy, every non-poor country on earth will have to start a program
On other hand world where everyone does not have nuclear weapon has been absolutely proven to be utter total failure. We should try one with everyone having nuclear weapons to see if it prevents more wars. Maybe fear of death in the aggressor nations would prevent their evils.
Failure where everyone does not have nuclear weapons looks very different from failure where everyone does. A scenario where everyone has nuclear weapons can only ever fail one time, because after that humanity will not survive to try anything else to "see if it prevents more wars".
It depends on how you define success I guess. The very fact that we're alive to have the option of giving everyone nukes just to see what happens means we've already found a measure of success. If everyone has nukes and they use them it means no more humans, which means no more wars, which I guess can also be seen as a success. World peace at last.
>Japan and South Korea are going to rapidly develop nuclear weapons programs.
Japan would need to amend their constitution for that, and that is simply not happening. They have failed to amend their constitution for much more mundane objectives, let alone nukes.
So that just means that if they ever make the political decision to pursue nuclear armament, they’ll call it the Japan Strategic Self-Defense Force.
As it is, Japan probably already has nukes that are all-but-assembled. Even if they don’t, they’re at most a handful of months away from taking whatever steps remain for a highly advanced industrial economy with existing nuclear infrastructure to finish building a bomb or two.
That would absolutely happen if China invaded Taiwan and the US stood by twiddling its fingers.
Remember, Sweden and Finland were staunchly against NATO membership until Russia invaded Ukraine.
National attitudes have a remarkable ability to shift in response to neighbors getting invaded, as we learned a couple of years ago.
Japan could of course do it in secret, like others have.
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The Ukraine lesson is simple - you are not independent if you don’t have nuclear weapons. If you want to be safe you should either have nuclear weapons or be in NATO.
This is a massive fail of world’s security and it is definitely not Trump’s fault. Blame horribly incompetent policies of Merkel, Obama, and Biden who are simply afraid of putin
Hong Kong was very different than Taiwan would be. Taiwan will be a bloodbath as an armed, diehard anti-communist population fights to the death.
And if China just wants to blow it all to bits, what was the point? They want to dominate the country and its people, not own a smoldering ruin.
That notion didn't stop Russia from scorching Ukraine, can't see why it would stop China.
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Unless its existence and defiance of China was a sore point. Then an uninhabited ruin might be appealing.
I doubt there would be any meaningful resistance, TBH.
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Huh? What did the current administration do to force Russia to invade a sovereign nation? How did this administration topple Assad? Laughable that you think it’s ISIS running the show. How did the current administration convince Hamas to launch a war against Israel? Gtfo with your “liberal Pearl clutching” lmao you’re a joke
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Blatantly untrue. Russia got all it wanted: Ukraine seeked NATO membership in 2008, Russia threw a temper tantrum, the US, France and Germany bailed out of the invitation, and Russia invaded Ukraine a few years later without having to risk with getting hit with NATO nukes in retaliation.
The only ones normalising war are the ones carrying water for Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine with rampant conspiracism fed by a healthy dose of Russian propoganda.
Even Putin doesn't parrot the Russian propoganda, the only ones still eating that out of the trough are Americans. Putin when interviewed by Tucker just talked of the history of the Soviet Union, and the strength and cultural ties of that block.
NATO expansionism as a justification for Russia's annexation of Ukraine is an excuse reserved only for those dumb enough to believe Russian propoganda.
> North Korea will increase the range of its missiles to reliably hit the entire US.
Getting a ballistic missile to hit the continental US is the first of many problems they'll need to solve before I start losing any sleep.
They also need to be able to hit a location accurately.
And they need a hypersonic reentry vehicle capable of delivering a nuclear payload without disintegrating the bomb or prematurely burning up the explosives in it.
Those are incredibly difficult problems, and each one keeps getting worse.
North Korea has successfully tested multiple missile launches on a lofted trajectory that demonstrated an intercontinental range. I believe both the hwasong 17 and 18 are capable of hitting the continental United States. Rentry vehicles have been demonstrated multiple times. Accuracy is a bit more of a concern, but with a thermonuclear weapon missing a city by 10 miles is still more than enough to cause millions of casualties.
The DPRK is absolutely a totalitarian, backwards, hermit kingdom. But we underestimate them at our peril.
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> Those are incredibly difficult problems, and each one keeps getting worse.
Indeed, so hard that it took until 1957 for the US to master them....
Not trivialize the effort of making such rockets and reentry vehicles, but the North Koreans only have 6-10 countries to follow, at least two of which are semi-friendly to them and two more that they could crib tech from. Oh, and they have computers and it's not the 1950s anymore.
The whole idea that regional nuclear exchange can be avoided is bonkers. The very machine designed to keep humans progressive and peacefull ,to keep the hothouse of "peacefulness delusion " alive at full blast is the very same driving up the stakes of it happen sooner then later. Thats peters dilemma. Thats why we have to crash the trolly before it can pick up more speed after clicking mineffortmaxreward. we had 15 years of prep.
When top officials and other generally influential people transparently behave like self-centered sociopaths or psychopaths, it is difficult to see them too worried about survival and prosperity of citizens. Themselves those people are not going to have trouble surviving a nuclear winter (a thought experiment is needed to determine whether they will even suffer from it all that much on a personal level, compared to ordinary people many of whom would just perish).
Especially with MAD, but with modern technology in general, caring about survival and prosperity of your own citizens means caring about peaceful coexistence with other countries.
In this context, a degree of nationalism is not bad and may in fact be important (if another country is being hostile and you do nothing, that is not a peaceful coexistence); it’s isolationism that is actually worrying: having every mature participant depend on each other is a great way to make them usually not want to eliminate each other.
> Mutually Assured Destruction is still a thing.
My assessment is that it isn't.
The only MAD-able nation states in the 1980s were the United States and the Soviet Union.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian successor state has been unable to adequately maintain its military.
I have seen ample evidence that the entire Russian military apparatus is a fraud and no evidence that it is not. The examples are too many to list in total so here are some highlights:
1. A string of ballistic missile test failures.
2. Photographic evidence of the poor conditions of their ballistic missile submarine bases and the submarines themselves including submarines that are considered "active" but haven't left port in many years.
3. The halving in the last 30 years of the number of Rocket Armies and the reduction of Rocket Divisions within the Rocket Armies.
4. The reassignment of Rocket Army personnel, supposedly the highest-priority and most stringently-selected personnel in the Russian Armed Forces, for duty in Ukraine where they have very quickly been killed.
5. Obsolete equipment rendering their strategic bombing forces ineffective in the face of Ukrainian air defense systems to the point that no strategic bombers enter Ukrainian airspace, instead lobbing cruise missiles into Ukraine from outside the air defense envelope due to numerous airframes being lost to, quite frankly, an inadequate and patchwork Ukrainian air defense network.
I find any military that claims to have thousands of nuclear warheads ready to launch but cannot feed or clothe its infantryman to be, as the kids put it, "sus".
Finally, they seem to have shifted their rhetoric to absurd doomsday weapons because they know we know that their nukes are shit so they have to come up with "nuclear tsunami torpedoes" and "nuclear doomsday cruise missiles" which are, I'm telling you as an engineer not a poly-sci major who grew up on Cold War fetishism and is now an "analyst", impossible fantasies.
So you have the nuclear triad: submarines, bombers, and land-based ballistic missiles.
Their subs are rusting hulks that rarely leave port, and those that do are at Kursk/Moskva levels of readiness.
Their bombers can't even operate over Ukraine, a nation subsisting on single-digit percentages of obsolete NATO equipment.
Their land-based ballistic missiles keep blowing up on the ground. Even their saber-rattling launch before Biden's trip to Ukraine, something that they would want to get right, exploded on the launchpad.
Let's be very clear: they still have nuclear weapons.
But MAD is MAD. Annihilation. Extinction. Not "fuck this is bad", but "fuck we're all doomed, permanently, forever".
MAD doesn't mean NYC gets nuked, MAD means all human life on earth ends for all practical purposes with only scattered bands of irradiated survivors in the southern latitudes.
Russia is almost certainly incapable of MAD.
Is "almost certainly" a risk we should be willing to take? And even if Russia is not capable of MAD, what does that change?
>And even if Russia is not capable of MAD, what does that change?
They should be thought of and treated like North Korea with oil, not the Soviet Union 2.0.
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The west is the strongest it’s ever been in its entire history.
O, no someone claims things are failing. Look people have been saying that for thousands of years it doesn’t actually mean it’s true.
>The west is the strongest it’s ever been in its entire history.
I would argue the West was at its peak in the mid to late 20th century when we were so awesome we conquered the god damn Moon, made transcontinental, transoceanic and even space travel quick and mundane, invented the microprocessor, and then finally invented a communication system that connected the entire world.
Turn of the 21st century onwards has been a slow but steady and undeniable decline.
The world becomes more tumultuous every year, the East is clearly catching up and has in some aspects already surpassed the West, the Middle East is a bigger tinderbox than humanity has ever known, and liberal values like free speech and equal opportunity have become decisively unpopular.
A paradigm shift is coming, probably this century within most of our lifetimes, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to smell that.
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The west can't even make enough artillery shells in one year to overcome Russia's monthly production. Fucking Russia for God's sake.
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What a strange argument. Nationalism is only around around 200 years old, because it's one of the basic ideas that formed the modern era.
We might have only given it a name 200 years ago. It was the default state for all of human history, and still is in the animal kingdom.
A population of people of shared blood and history sharing a homeland in pursuit of common values and ambitions, violently defending it from foreigners whenever necessary.
Not a soulless economic zone where foreigners are treated like royalty by traitors and treasonous authorities.
I'm pretty sure people who grew up under feudalism with no loyalty to a national state still saw their child as their child and not a compatriot. What a weird take.
The virulent anti-nationalists are, themselves, often a very pro-war faction.
Can you give an example? Honestly don’t know who this is supposed to be.
Virulent anti-nationalists are generally marxist leninist communists.
The rhetoric of the anti-nationalists is generally implicitly or explicitly "internationalist". In early Communist organization names they often used the word "international" and I think they even have a toe tappin' song by that name:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDbatoAvuB4
And if you doubt the second part "are often pro-war" this is the doctrine of divide and conquer, civil war (called "class war") in which the target of their anti-nationalist colonialism is provoked into disorder before the "forces of liberation" can swoop in and expand the mother country.
This has been endlessly documented in many places. Probably one of the better ones is George Orwell's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia
>nationalism that led us into WWI and WWII.
WW1 kicked off due to a royal getting murdered in broad daylight which triggered a cascade of alliances. Nationality had nothing to do with it.
WW2 kicked off due to the victors of WW1 raping Germany so bad they had nothing but nationalism to hold on to. American nationalism also initially wanted nothing to do with WW2, begrudgingly started helping behind the curtains once the UK became endangered and then went "Yeah, fuck this noise. Y'all will be infamous." once Japan started playing funny tunes.
Nationalism is both good and bad, namely too much of it is a bad thing like everything else in the world while too little of it is also a bad thing akin to malnourishment.
> WW1 kicked off due to a royal getting murdered in broad daylight which triggered a cascade of alliances. Nationality had nothing to do with it.
The murderer Gavrilo Princip was a Serbian nationalist, who committed the murder for nationalist reasons.
That was just the excuse everyone used to have a go at eachother. Russia didn't want its pan-slavic ambitions to get embarrassed again (as they were with the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia), France wanted revenge, Austria-Hungary wanted to remind everyone that they were still around and relevant, Germany wanted to establish supremacy on the continent, the UK wanted to curtail German ambitions, and prevent the rise of a rival empire.
Everyone was itching for a fight, all for incredibly stupid, selfish reasons, and unleashed a war that butchered an entire generation of Europe's youth. Three of the five major belligerents had their governments overthrown, and that was two too few.
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So you’re saying that if we want to avoid World War 3 we have to get rid of nationalism in Serbia?
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> WW2 kicked off due to the victors of WW1 raping Germany so bad
So bad that germany was the strongest economy in interwar Europe under ten years later? If anything, the allies was nowhere near harsh enough on Germany; the state should have been systemically dismantled and remade as an inoffensive rump state.
The nationalist spirit is founded on imperial ambitions, and the pieces were in place for WWI partly due to empires and pretenders who would claim the title of "empire" both increasingly desperate to cement their legitimacy through power projection.