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[Sergarr]

Gods above and below help him (only rhetorically, not literally please, ye nonexistent deities) if he tries to address such a situation by invading some country, because almost nobody in the U.S. wants another war.

'Course, the worry isn't us invading someone, exactly. It's that someone of trump's character, who has openly asked (to paraphrase _{gods, I hope I'm paraphrasing and not actually remembering the wording}) "Why not nukes?", and has a political support base that has spoken with favorable-ish response of glassing deserts and carpet bombing cities, would do something significantly more immediate than calling for troops on the ground. And given the GOP's track record so far as appropriate target acquisition goes, well...

See, there's the thing. I can see Trump ordering a nuclear strike, but I can't see the U.S. military carrying it out under anything resembling these circumstances. Coinflip between someone shooting him and immediate movement towards impeachment if he tries to nuke a country on impulse or in response to a stateless terrorist attack.

President's nuclear launch authority is immediate and unquestionable, requiring only his Secretary of Defence, which cannot refuse the order without being fired on the spot and immediately replaced with someone else at President's discretion, like Bannon, for example. And he can launch it at any moment, at any place, via the nuclear football. The chain of command is very short in nuclear case, because it is necessary to react very fast in case of enemy nuclear strike.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That's just the way it's written on paper, man.

The authority requires only the two of them (though as much as I question Mattis I think he's also the most likely to tell them they're all unfit to fulfill their duties and bring out the guns), but it also has to be disseminated to the launch crew. Who would be aware that we are not retaliating to anything or that we're striking an unarmed nation.

Suffice it to say you'd have some issues, and history backs up the "near misses" suddenly bringing out rebellion in people. For instance. Nobody in this sort of thing except maybe Trump doesn't understand the severity of what a nuclear launch means, and even Trump is probably only speaking of it in the idiot jingoist way that lots of people talk about glassing the Middle East, which is to say as a signal that they hate the whole region and its people instead of a literal desire.

Oh, and every President since Carter has had a bad tendency to lose the football, the code card, and the code for extended periods of time.

[Frumple]

Again, as both Lord Shonus and I have said, we're past the point culturally where an attack on U.S. soil could provide the popular support for extreme action, and likely won't be back to that state for decades to come.

Annnddd again, the GOP -- which has majority or near to it control of a good chunk of our government, and particularly strong support from our military -- has seen a non-negligible support for what anyone sane would call extreme action; i.e. more or less indiscriminate bombing, significant military belligerence, and so on. Like I've kinda' been saying, I'm not really concerned about a ground invasion. That's not terribly likely. Trump getting pissed off and ordering bombing runs or artillery strikes on a civilian target, just because whatever pissed him off is in, near, or was mistaken to be one of the two, to said target, that, is something that's a hell of a lot closer to likely than I'd like. It's shit that doesn't even need an attack on US soil to happen, really.

Put it a different way, I'm pretty damn sure what I consider extreme action, and what the GOP and its support base considers extreme action, are two very different things, and I'm not terribly sure that what checks we have in place are currently positioned in such a way to keep that difference from manifesting. I'd like to think a particularly fucked up order would be refused by the military. There's been quite a lot in the last few decades (at the least) that makes a refusal of that sort a hell of a lot less certain than I'm comfortable with.

And even beyond that, there's a very wide gap between limited conventional warfare in a third-world shithole and first-striking with NBC weapons. The cultural taboo is fucking massive there. If there's one thing that would unify the post-Cold War world against a particular state, that would be it.

... which is why I have repeatedly stated that I'm not particularly talking about NBC weapons, yes. It doesn't take a bloody nuke to put several hundred or thousand people in the dirt. The actually plausible problem -- as we've actually already half-way been seeing -- is that "limited" conventional warfare becoming notably less limited and less focused, particularly in regards to exactly who and how many gets killed in the process.

[Max™]

Saying that a 10-kiloton backpack nuke would kill fewer people than the 9/11 attacks seems strange. Even not airbursted, 10,000 tons of TNT-force is a big fucking explosion that would basically level a hundred-meter circle and kill tens of thousands outside that by setting the whole city centre on fire.
Imagine Hiroshima going off in Times Square on New Years. That's the ultimate fear of antiterrorist organisations. It would be to 9/11 what 9/11 was to the Paris attacks.

The only people on the planet who would ever have access to that sort of compact nuclear device, is us.

We'd pretty much have to deliberately set it up, have everyone conveniently ignore the big barrel sitting in Times Square, and then set it off, which isn't going to happen.

Assuming someone managed to get one and was smart enough to try to obscure it somewhere, that means it's now in or behind or under a building, 10 kt is a good sized blast, but you're assuming a lot shooting for that high of an effect, even the nuclear demolition plans were more along the 1~5 kt range, and the actual smallest designs from extremely advanced nuclear powers are something like 45 kg and the only actual test of one was Redwing Yuma which fizzled and put out 190 t, though the artillery shell designs were a similar size and the prototype was shooting for 2 kt. Hardtack II had a 6 kt test of around a 23 kg device.

So, you see a bodybuilder hefting around a big suitcase with an oddly high moment of inertia in Times Square, tell someone?

Look at the chart down the page here: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/12/23/kilotons-per-kilogram/

Notice how the far right diagonal is 6 kt/kg? That sounds like you could make one hell of a briefcase nuke huh, but if you notice all the weapons in that range are the high yield thermonuclear weapons, and they only get that high a yield/weight ratio due to EXTREMELY high yields, as they are all huge weapons.

The W54 and such are over along the 0.01 kt/kg line, the weapon dropped on Hiroshima weighed about as much as the big armored mercedes Hitler rode in (4,400 kg) and generally you'd be doing pretty good as a terrorist group to get even a big SUV sized weapon capable of kt yields.

[alway]

Trump is probably only speaking of it in the idiot jingoist way that lots of people talk about glassing the Middle East, which is to say as a signal that they hate the whole region and its people instead of a literal desire.

This has literally been said about every single policy Trump enacted within 2 weeks of being in office. "Seriously but not literally" has been the battlecry of dumbasses like Peter Thiel for months leading up to the election. "He doesn't mean an *actual* wall, that would be stupid." "He doesn't mean an *actual* muslim ban."

Trump doesn't have the subtly required to lie about the stupid shit he wants to actually do.

The only time this hasn't been the case was his 'drain the swamp' thing, which I fully suspect he would have gone through with if not for the immediate realization days after the inauguration that the 15 people he knows personally are insufficient for running the entire federal government; at which point the most predatory people in the room were ready to step in.


And for the record, the first to be nuked will be Australia, because he hates liberals.

[Max™]

...wonder if he confused Austria and Australia.

Wait, no, there's no chance he knows what Austria is.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Trump is probably only speaking of it in the idiot jingoist way that lots of people talk about glassing the Middle East, which is to say as a signal that they hate the whole region and its people instead of a literal desire.

This has literally been said about every single policy Trump enacted within 2 weeks of being in office. "Seriously but not literally" has been the battlecry of dumbasses like Peter Thiel for months leading up to the election. "He doesn't mean an *actual* wall, that would be stupid." "He doesn't mean an *actual* muslim ban."

Trump doesn't have the subtly required to lie about the stupid shit he wants to actually do.

I anticipated someone would say this, and my response is that those were actual reiterated policy positions, which is different from what are essentially political memes. I should know, I was surrounded for years by people who's concept of a dinner joke was "glass the ragheads hur hur hur". And Trump has lied about his policies, on both Clinton prosecution and Obamacare. Not to mention that the alleged nuke comment is both not recorded and was made idly at a briefing.

Now stop making me do something that is a roundabout defense of Donald Trump.

[Egan_BW]

What if it was a nuclear terrorist attack?

I'm nuclear, I'm wild...

[wierd]

It's only a nuclear terrorist attack, when there is a mommy terrorist, a daddy terrorist, and a child terrorist involved!

[Reelya]

Yeah, while there's a lot to worry about, there is always the confirmation bias risk of saying "he said X and did X" while ignoring times he flip-flopped. Probably from both his fans and his detractors. So we should point out the worst that could happened if he did one thing or another (like those of us pointing out the potential disasters of his Mexican deportation scheme), but neither should we say "this will definitely happen" or "that won't definitely happen".

However, before an election, you need to be selective skeptical. Assume each candidate will do the bad things they are promising, and be skeptical about them doing the good things they are promising. I'm not going to give some candidate a free pass on a "Gas The Jews" promise on the off-chance that they don't mean it, nor going to throw my vote at someone because of some freebies or treats they're promising.

[Egan_BW]

So basically, minmax your opinion for maximum pessimism.

[PTTG??]

This is more of a rant about an IRL conversation, but it bugs me when people say that "both sides are getting so polarized lately."

The left doesn't have a radical agenda. The right does. Yes, the distance between the two has been growing since the 70s, but if the left had been moving the same way the right has, then they'd already be at the Radical Green De-industrialization stage.

There is a hypothetical "insane left" that simply doesn't exist in practice, unlike the extant and terrifying insane right. The leftward equivalent of a border wall is not "no wall," it would be "no borders." The extreme left alternative to tax cuts isn't moderate tax increases, it's seizing the wealth of the corporate plutocrats and distributing it to the people.

Until a president gets elected with a campaign promise of unilateral nuclear disarmament and shutting down the military, liberals aren't remotely extreme compared to the right.

[wierd]

Sorry there PTTG, but there *ARE* radical elements on the left.

Take for instance, the "environmental activist attorney" seen in the science thread a few days ago, who's main objection to eradicating an invasive species in an environment they are not indigenous to by ensuring there are no females via the addition of a gene-drive that forces the issue--- is that "Targeting females is never a good thing!"

Nevermind all the very solid science about how reducing the number of fertile females is the most efficient and effective method of population reduction-- No, none of that matters. The feminist mantra trumps everything.

That is only just one little tiny finger of the left. There are others as well, and all equally radical, and purposefully ignorant of objective reality or scientific reasoning. 

It happens every time ideology is put before reason or data.  Arrogantly asserting that the left is blameless is a flat out lie.

[Egan_BW]

Now show me how many of those people are running for office. Or, say, the current president of the united states of america?

[wierd]

Look at that goal post move! Golly!