What that response is, be it mobilizing tens of millions to be out on the streets to stage a revolution or coordinating community defense, I don’t know but we inch closer and close to this scenario.

I’m going to bring this up with my local chapter. There needs to be a global response.

Am I completely out of line here? Am I being hysterical? Probably but I’m so certain of this happening and I feel like the nuclear scare should be at a fever pitch right now.

  • SootySootySoot [any]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    As others have said, there’s little to be gained by such an action. That being said, the same could also have been said about going to war with Iran in the first place.

    I think it’s a meaningful, if largely unlikely, possibility that is worth discussing.

    The US is in the process of being, for the first time in western media, roundly and thoroughly humiliated. If they start flinging nukes, it won’t be to achieve a strategic objective, it will be to protect their notoriety as the dominant thugs of the world. And that objective does seem to be a priority lately.

    • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      I think we will see ground troops first though. At this point our best hope is that this thing outlasts trump. On the other hand maybe it’s the Israelis who are fucking crazy and also nuclear equipped we need to worry about.

      • SootySootySoot [any]@hexbear.net
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        Though Trump has arguably accelerated things a bit, pointless invasions and huge attacks of poorer countries are extremely normal for USA over the past few decades, this is not reducible to just Trump-thought. The difference this time is that the enemy has missiles, modern military tech, and a sizeable, well organised army.

      • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        best hope is that this thing outlasts trump.

        I don’t want to lathe something into existence, but a democrat in office would see libs go back to brunch when the US drops a nuke anyway. They will even cheer it on if someone like Harris or Buttigieg pulls the trigger, rationalizing it with “having to make the hard choices to protect democracy.” The dem president will do it for domestic reasons the way Obama postured drone strikes on hospitals as looking tough in front of Republicans.

  • I don’t think they would drop a nuke completely unannounced. We would see news about new weapons capabilities, a new precision tactical bomb, possibly not even called a nuclear weapon. It’s the old suitcase nuke from Cold War fiction made real. It would be stressed that the bomb is highly contained, tactical, precise, and controllable. This to front run any panic it may cause once detonated. Of course it’s a lie. It’s just a standard low yield nuke with a brand and marketing. It would be deployed the same as any other bomb. The idea would be to set off a baby nuke, minimizing fallout, and then sending some robots in to assess, followed by troops. This was pretty much the RAND strategy when they were advocating for usage of nukes in common warfare, minus the robots and concern for radiation.

  • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    They already functionally dropped a dirty bomb on Tehran by blowing up the oil refinery and heavily exposing 10 million people to otherwise still toxic carcinogens, didn’t they?

    • WasteTime [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      They don’t give a fuck about striking nuclear facilities and there is one 10 miles from the South Pars Gas Complex they just bombed. Millions of people exposed to dangerous chemicals…

      The lib environmentalist NGOs of course never say shit about imperialist wars.

    • Lussy [he/him, des/pair]@hexbear.netOP
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      Imagine having to smell that everywhere you go.

      The US and Israel are deeply sick nations, they practice the vulture capitalism form of imperialism only surpassed in brutality by Leopold of Belgium or some shit.

      And what’s worse is that the populace tacitly approves of it, in the age of the internet and unlimited information. How much did the average Belgian even know?

      I live among some of the worst people to exist in history, and I am one of them. This supposed guilt should have driven me to do a lot more but it did not.

      • Emanuel [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        Comrade, don’t beat yourself up over this. I don’t say this only out of compassion, though that much is true, as I’ve often struggled with guilt much like yours, but also because it is strategically important to know who the enemy is: it is not you, who wields no capital, but the ruling class who chooses to direct its power and capital towards its imperialist aims. It is not us who are destroying the planet; they are. It is our historic mission to fight back and end class oppression, so turn your unfounded guilt into righteous anger and look for ways to mobilize it against the evil you described

        • eldavi@lemmy.ml
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          21 hours ago

          doesn’t the lionshare of the responsibility fall on us for the collective silent consent for the ruling classes’ actions?

          • Emanuel [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            16 hours ago

            I think we should differentiate responsibility and guilt. We are not guilty, for we did not consent, or, more like, we we weren’t given the chance to consent. I didn’t choose to be born under capitalism. I was not informed of the way life is to be produced and reproduced under this system. I was, however, taught many things that, tinged with varied degrees of truth, were articulated in such a way as to make me a productive member of society, whatever that means.

            This means, as I see it, that the consent we give to the current system is, at best, very distorted. However, by studying the material reality of things, of capitalism and labor, we come to understand the machinations of our world. And therein lies our responsibility: by understanding, we come to know what must change, and thus must better ourselves in order to make that a reality.

            I think that guilt is not a productive lens under which operate revolution. Metaphysics don’t enter into material analysis, by definition, so, if we intend to change reality, we must rid ourselves of guilt, as it works mostly as non-materialist impediment to see the path ahead.

            I know what it is like to feel guilty for seeing all that is wrong in the world and not doing anything and going on with life. But in our responsibility is also the duty to understand what we can do, and doing it. I personally can’t save the world, but I can do something. Knowing that is my responsibility. And it is better than wallow in misery and guilt about not doing everything.

            This is something very personal to me, as I struggled with perfectionism my whole life. But the solution, I found, and cliché as it might sound, is by starting somewhere. Almost nothing is infinitely greater than nothing.

            Sorry if that wasn’t very clear, today was a very hard day at work and I’m not very clear headed. But I hope it was an answer to your question, rambly as it was.

  • JustSo [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 day ago

    Remember when they dropped the MOAB on that abandoned airfield in Syria during term 1? reportedly to placate the burning desire in all men for nuclear hellfire with which trump was becoming too entranced?

    • JustSo [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
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      I’m at about 50/50 odds on someone doing a nuke and suspect I’m probably overly generously allowing an extra margin of optimism, allowing for unknown unknowns.

      I also unironically don’t believe in MAD doctrine because I don’t believe the current regime would adhere to or respect MAD doctrine, so the logic of it all sort of falls apart and it’s hard to know where the predictions made by those cold war theorists will break down in practice along an escalation ladder. But I think we are going to learn that nukes can be deployed and “life will go on” and that will be the end of MAD and we won’t replace it.

      Unless autonomous weapons platforms just do MAD because some idiot plugged an LLM into them and we’ve written the script for global annihilation so many times that it may have become a natural law in the logic of text prediction. yud-rational

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    I don’t think even the US is stupid enough to pop the cork on that bottle. It carries only downsides and doesn’t accomplish anything that other bombs can’t do in large quantities.

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    if by some miracle that terrific heap of hubris doesn’t cause immediate global thermonuclear war (recite the shahada in this eventuality), Russia, China, DPRK and France will take care of the dissolution of US empire. If that doesn’t yield a flailing apocalypse from the US’s death bed (recite the shahada in that eventuality), we get world communism. it’s elementary dialectics.

      • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        France’s nuclear weapon’s policy is incredibly unhinged. Their plan for not letting West Germany fall to the Soviets was to completely glass West Germany with nukes.

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        France is probably the only country more eager to use nukes than the United States. I believe they’re the only current UN-official nuclear power with an explicit first-strike doctrine. I also recall an anecdote shared somewhere about a French general or official’s disbelief at the extent of the US’s nuclear stockpile and nuclear retaliation/escalation planning, with the reason given being “it doesn’t take that many to remove Moscow from the map”.

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        European nations will be put under France’s ‘nuclear umbrella’ or Russia’s. this is not a statement of France’s rectitude, they’re simply the european nation with a nuclear triad that is not the US, and will have to be rallied around if the US plunges the world into nuclear realpolitik.

        it would be funny to see Napoleon’s dream over the heap of Europe finally achieved 200 years later tho low key

  • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    They’ll need more than one to defeat Iran and more than one leads to Russia and China declaring war on the US

    If the US wants to trigger the apocalypse on behalf of Israel, then oh well, capitalism will die with them, the Earth will endure

  • JustSo [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
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    nukes have never been used in an offensive capacity where there weren’t also alternative diplomatic off-ramps available

    you dont drop nukes to get shit done, you drop nukes to drop nukes.

    lotta people don’t understand the nuclear grindset and are trying to analyse this materially.

    • somename [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      I see it, especially if Israel is used as the one to launch it.

      “Our bombing raids aren’t doing enough to make them surrender. A ground invasion is stalling out and infeasible. Surely turning the war crime dial higher will solve it.”

      They have no hope of solving this through conventional means. I think it’s very possible they decide to throw the board.

      • Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        sorry, when i “we” i’m never referring to the US government or its vassals/proxies/tumorous growths

        if we could influence the government the Floyd protests, or the 5051 lib shit, or the anti-ice stuff would move the needle.

  • BattleshipPokemon [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    Talking out my ass, but imo the only way its possible is if Israel uses just one on a sparsely populated area as a show of force, maybe to clear the way for an actual landing of us troops

    Imo its 20:1 against it happening at least

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        Yeah, what are the odds that some defence contractor hasn’t replaced all the gold wire witth copper plated aluminum and pocketed the difference. It would only be discovered that you used substandard machining on the bolts when it fails to fire properly. However in that scenario there is no cance of anyone being able to sue you about it. It would be un-American to not follow capitalism and make the framing out of poor quality steel.