Comment by TrackerFF
11 hours ago
Two ways to interpret this:
1) US and Israel will throw everything they have (of conventional weapons) at Iran.
2) US will use (tactical) nuclear weapons on strategic targets.
Of the two evils, I truly hope it will be (1).
A previous post was "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day", so I'd guess it's about that. Destroying the entire power infrastructure of a large country like that would have a pretty catastrophic effect on civilians. So that seems worse enough, I seriously hope no nukes will be involved.
Remember how they claimed this war was actually about helping the Iranian People? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Pretty sure it was to get everyone to stop talking about Epstein.
You remember that video that some Democratic legislators did about refusing to obey illegal orders? This is where that becomes absolutely real.
(Targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Orders to commit war crimes are illegal by definition.)
Yup. Remember the blowback from those videos showing potential double-taps on the alleged drug smuggling vessels in the Caribbean? That’s a clear violation of “hors de combat” as outlined on page 244 of DoD’s own Law of War Manual [1] because unlike Hegseth, I actually took the time to read it.
Hegseth came completely unhinged, going after Senator Mark Kelly’s retirement, etc.
Then a few weeks ago, Hegseth gave an interview where he literally argued that the United States doesn’t have to follow international law. He called the rules of engagement “stupid” and went on with a bunch of similar remarks.
It’s pretty clear that rather than trying to defend violations of international (and U.S.) law, the regime is now just saying they don’t have to follow them in the first place.
https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-1/-1/0/DOD...
Is that US law or international law?
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I saw the observation elsewhere but the medium and long range drones seen in the Russian-Ukraine war at an industrial scale of production would be devastating. Along the lines of "Imagine 1M drones being launched in the opening salvo of a war. Every power substation, cellphone tower, gas station, water tower, oil pipeline etc. in a country could be targeted". It would indeed be civilization ending.
Apparently they came with 75 meters of bombing an nuclear power plant already. A plant with 10x the material Chernobyl had, and in vulnerable above-ground storage. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/middle-east-war-why-attacks-...
I hope it will be neither and someone reins in this buffoon.
Do you mean tactical weapons on strategic targets? Or strategical weapons?
I honestly don't know what to believe, but I feel the doomsday clock is getting closer to midnight than in a long, long time
Either way, we won't be talking about it on HN, this got flagged so hard it is on page 4. We don't do politics. By the way, here is some new nonsense built with an LLM.
Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of genocidal fascist-enablers on Hacker News. Even 10% is probably enough to flag every story into oblivion.
I know that this has been discussed several times, but I wish that the HN moderators would do more to unflag these stories. Yes, they will lead to flame wars and whatnot, but the collapse of the rule-based international order and repeated genocide by some Western nations is too big to ignore.
If WOIII happens, HN would still only be "How agents cooked my dinner" and "HN company This Is Fine raises 2B from a16z". How intellectually poor.
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A threat to destroy a civilization isn’t politics
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Whoa whoa there Jacques, We talk about politics here all the time.
'Uh, what kind of politics do you usually have here?'
'Oh we got both kinds -- Bay area zoning and Bay area homelessness.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS-zEH8YmiM
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Tactical nukes on strategic targets, if nukes will ever be used. While I think in general that the usage of nuclear weapons is "point of no return" action, I do think actual usage would be lower yield tactical nukes on strategic targes - compared to detonating Minutemen over Tehran, and similar high-casualty targets.
Only as a start. It would greenlight Russia to use them in Ukraine and would escalate from there.
Don't forget that Israel has nukes as well.
What possible advantage would using them offer Israel right now? The war is going just fine as it is for them.
Or 3, he's bluffing.
I'm not sure which of 1 and 2 is least-bad. All depends on downstream consequences, because we're already past the point where everyone's looking at Trump (not just in Iran but also, and we already had this to an extent with Putin attacking Ukraine) and thinking they need a credible deterrent. OTOH, the USA getting suckered into a drawn-out war with Iran in the same way Russia is with Ukraine may be good for almost everyone else, because an exhausted USA is a manageable threat, in a way that the current USA almost certainly isn't.
2 is almost unimaginably worse.
Nuclear explosives are good. They are very good, as in, "the invention of fire" good. Once the cat is out of the bag on First Use, militaries around the world will put them in operational planning for literally anything that can carry 100kg and needs to strike a hard or spread out target.
That's assuming this conflict doesn't immediately escalate, which is not a given by any stretch.
At the start of WW1 everyone thought that Europeans would hold themselves to proper civilized weapons to use against Proper People. Then someone brought in the weapons reserved for colonized peoples - i.e. "half-people" - and found they work real good on Proper People as well. Uncorking nuclear first use will be like the introduction of the machine gun to the world of war, except every bullet is the most powerful device made by Man.
Breaking the first use taboo - for goddamn Iran of all people - would probably be the worst decision in human history.
1 is least bad. Maybe not for Iran, but for the world. If Trump re-opens Pandora's box, there is much less to hold back other nuclear powers in similar circumstances. The US has lost some dozen troops in this war, Russia has lost hundreds of thousands in its. Why should Russia restrain themselves if the US president goes mental? Our world becomes much, much more dangerous if Trump becomes unable to control himself.
> Our world becomes much, much more dangerous if Trump becomes unable to control himself.
I think we're well past that point.
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Trump using nukes on Iran would essentially give Putin the green light to do the same in Ukraine. And then all bets are off after that.
Unfortunately, since the time you made this comment, B52s have been seen leaving the UK. I'm tired, boss.
> I'm tired, boss.
I know what you mean. I guess we'll all find out in a few hours what the payloads are, given that while B-52s are nuclear-capable, that's not the only thing they're used for.
And I guess also, when it is a pick-one dichotomy, whether the USAF obeys either their orders or their oaths.
Oh, I'm quite sure. 2 is far worse.
2 is hundreds of thousands dead at a minimum. 1, even at its worst, would not come close to that. Worse, 2 breaks the "no actual use since Nagasaki" moratorium that has held for 80 years. Once it's broken, how long until the next use? Until Russia decides it can just start nuking cities in Ukraine, say?
Option 2 is unthinkable under any circumstances. But in case the biggest mistake in human history, is done by a convicted felon and convicted rapist, that the US elected two times as supreme leader, you should know, that Pakistan stated several times, that will act as nuclear backstop for Iran.
> Option 2 is unthinkable under any circumstances.
Too many unthinkable things have come to pass in the last decade or so for me to find that reassuring.
> Pakistan stated several times, that will act as nuclear backstop for Iran.
Can you clarify what this would even mean? And could you provide a source (because I couldn't)?
I mean... the Israelis could use their nuke. I don't know how quickly they could move it from Philadelphia, though.