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Comment by lingrush4

6 days ago

If having nuclear weapons did anything at all to prevent cyber attacks, the US would not be getting constantly victimized by cyber attacks.

9 comments

lingrush4

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ceejayoz  6 days ago

I think "this kind of operation" refers to the entire "we bombed your capital and stole your President" thing, not just the cyber component of it.

It seems extraordinarily unlikely we'd have attempted such a thing if Venezuela had nukes.

  • bawolff  6 days ago

    Probably, but there is also some speculation usa had help on the inside, so it probably depends on the nature and pervasiveness of that help.

    • ceejayoz  6 days ago

      I agree with that speculation, but if you keep your launch chain of command short enough (as the US does), nukes can also be a deterrent to a palace coup; doubly so for a foreign-backed one.

    • monocasa  6 days ago

      There's still a lot of information coming out, a lot of it conflicting, so that's hard to say.

      And frankly, the Venezuelan military is absolutely tiny and has been facing the same economic issues as the rest of the country. They have 24 F-16s, but rumor is none of them work anymore, maybe some SU-30s, but those would be shot down pretty much as soon as they were scrambled. There was pretty heavy bombing before hand to knock out AA. And they bombed Chavez's tomb, which is quite a dick move of there wasn't any AA there; blowing up a graveyard for shits and giggles on an op is some shit even cartels have a little bit more respect than to do.

      IDK, the whole thing seems like equally could have been mostly what it says on the tin, with no more than the normal intelligence HUMINT/SIGINT/*INT cloak and dagger crap to have the right intelligence.

      2 replies →

slyn  6 days ago

I think by "this kind of operation" he means extrajudicially removing a sitting president (legitimate or not) of another country for trial elsewhere. Not cyber attack or espionage.

  • lingrush4  6 days ago

    Oh, so the commenter is not actually talking about the BGP anomalies at all? He's just hijacking the comment section to advocate for nuclear proliferation?