Comment by JasonADrury
6 days ago
Nuclear capability wouldn't necessarily rule out this kind of a decapitation strike, it's just that it's very hard to imagine this kind of an operation actually being successful in any nuclear-capable country.
The US couldn't just fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Most likely every single one of those helicopters would end up being shot down.
Nuclear capability by itself isn't a complete deterrent. It has been widely reported that the US military has made contingency plans for a decapitation strike and seizure or destruction of nuclear weapons in Pakistan in case the situation turns really bad there. Real deterrence requires a credible second-strike capability on survivable platforms such as submarines.
> the US military has made contingency plans for a decapitation strike and seizure or destruction of nuclear weapons in Pakistan in case the situation turns really bad there. Real deterrence requires a credible second-strike capability on survivable platforms such as submarines.
The existence of a plan does not equate to the feasibility of its execution. A submarine-based deterrent is indeed the "gold standard" for survivability, but it is not the only standard. There is enough pain for the US that they wouldn't actually attack Pakistan.
>There is enough pain for the US that they wouldn't actually attack Pakistan.
The US does have the advantage that the surviving Pakistani nukes might very well end up flying to India instead :)
> There is enough pain for the US that they wouldn't actually attack Pakistan
These are the states whose Senators are in play this year [1].
Let's say Trump decides it's fuck-around-with-Islamabad-o'clock. He fucks around. Pakistan nukes at India. How many of those Senate seats flip as a result? I'm going to guess none.
Let's go one step further. Pakistan nukes Al Udeid and Camp Arifjan (both theoretically within range of their Shaheen-III). American troops are killed. Does the President's party lose any seats? At that point, I'd bet on a rally-'round-the-flag effect.
The truth is there isn't political downside to the President fucking around with Pakistan. Its nuclear deterrent isn't designed to contain America. And it can't threaten us with maybe the one thing that could make Trump suffer, a refugee crisis.
[1] https://www.270towin.com/2026-senate-election/
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For nuclear deterrence to work in situations like this, it'd also be preferable to have sufficient conventional capabilities that your leadership isn't decapitated before you even notice it's happening. If the attacker is also nuclear-capable, there's little incentive for second person in the chain of command to kill themselves.
Similarly, if a head of state is killed by poison or other similar means, you could hardly expect nuclear retaliation when their successor later discovers what happened.
I think nuclear deterrence works even in such situations. The retaliatory system is structured in such a way that after decapitation, the decision to use or not use a nuclear weapon is made not by the "number two" or the "successor" but by a person specifically authorized to do so, about whom the successors and number two may know nothing.
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>It's extremely difficult to believe that the US could fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes.
Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention.
Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.
>Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention.
No. The obstacle isn't Chinese intervention, the obstacle is that such an operation would have to be significantly larger and it would take longer. There would be much more air defense assets to suppress, and some of them would be impossible to effectively defeat.
A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation by North Korea. Both countries would also certainly have better safeguarding mechanisms for their heads of state, during that bombing they would be evacuated and now you'd probably be looking at the very least at a weeks-long operation.
Assassination is a different thing, but I would suspect that for purely psychological reasons a rapid kidnapping operation like this would be far less likely to invite anything more than symbolic retaliation than a single targeted missile strike. This kind of operation would be far more confusing for the enemy than a simple assassination, and the window during which for example nuclear retaliation might make sense tends to be rather small.
>Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.
Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one. They'd have shot down every single helicopter. You don't even need fancy missiles, a bunch of .50cal machine guns will do the trick.
>A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation b
I have serious doubts they can manage anything more than a fizzle yield, but also only give them a one-in-three chance of a successful ballistic launch. It may be the case that they don't even have the preparatory work done, in which case hours isn't enough to launch, they'd need days/weeks. In any event, we're talking about one or two missiles only, and the Navy's ability to shoot those down in the midcourse/terminal phase is sufficient for such a small salvo.
If North Korea wanted to nuke us, they'd be better off handing the warhead off to some terrorist group to truck it across the Mexican border. Supposing their stuff is even small enough to smuggle.
>Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one.
But it doesn't have a China willing to rush in with 1 million PLA infantry. Which is really North Korea's only saving grace. Even if we got Kim out before they could mobilize, they'd be strutting and posturing for weeks, and there are any number of places they could fuck things up in retaliation. Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, they might even stir shit up with India. They could, one supposes, send a few divisions to Russia on loan, and enter into the Ukraine fray. And no clever strategy is going to counter that stuff. Some of this stuff they're already considering and only hesitant... a North Korea operation might goad them into working up the courage to try it.
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Didn't we just do something like that in Iran? Not helicopters, but we still secured the airspace just the same.
Securing airspace for fancy stealth bombers is rather different from securing airspace for helicopters you can shoot down with just about anything.
If you mean during the israel-iran war, israel was allegedly using non-stealth planes once the airspace was secure.
Still probably quite a bit different then helicopter inserted decapitation strike.
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Maybe Pakistan, or Israel.
Well yes, the US could certainly easily kidnap leaders of friendly countries. It'd also presumably be very unlikely to result in a nuclear response from either.
Honestly from what we learned in the earlier attacks on Iran the USA probably could take a quick trip over to Tehran and grab the Ayatollah.
I think clanky covered this pretty well, but dropping bombs from high altitude stealth bombers and fighter jets is very very far from actually delivering and extracting soldiers from a location.
The US could probably bomb even Beijing, it doesn't really tell you anything that they were able to bomb Iran also.
It's odd that Iran was able to continue launching waves of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel after they had supposedly lost so much control over their skies that it would have been possible to hover a Chinook over Tehran for 5 minutes.