Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "The Icarus Project" channel.

Yes, there is a significant difference. If you have 100 and your opponent has 5,000, the threat is that conceivably a first strike by the enemy could take out the 100 with few or none of them launched in response. Add in ABM systems and you might be able to shoot down the few enemy missiles that do get launched. That was the reason for the extremely large stockpiles of the later Cold War - if we have 100 or even 1000 they might be tempted to try that if things got bad enough for them, but if we have 30,000 there is no conceivable way for an enemy to take out enough of them to avoid an annihilating counterstrike and no conceivable way to shoot down all of the thousands of weapons in the counterstrike. That was also the reason for SDI, although few understood it at the time (and the press only added to the public's ignorance.) The shield wasn't supposed to protect the people - that was impossible. The shield was supposed to protect the deterrent.
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@acton2916 Those do not apply to belligerents. Blockade is and always has been a legitimate tactic of war under international law.
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@Mbeluba We are discussing what might happen if such a war broke out.
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@4T3hM4kr0n That has EVERYTHING to do with what we're talking about. The assertion is that nuclear weapons are unusable because of the threat of nuclear retaliation. When the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan, no one else on the planet had nuclear weapons, so there was no threat of retaliation.
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@stevengabalis4986 You mean the ship that belches huge clouds of black smoke and has to be accompanied everywhere by tugs so it can be towed to harbor when (not if) it breaks down? 🤣
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Maybe not world domination, but he definitely wants domination over all of the former USSR and Tsarist Empire, which includes a number of countries who really don't want to go back under Russia's thumb.
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Germany's allies were also being degraded much more severely than Germany itself. Even if Germany could have somehow held out longer on the western front it was inevitably going to have a 1,000-mile undefended border on its south when the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary collapsed.
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@fabulous_y5654 We're talking about two different scenarios there. No one, literally NO one, is saying Russia's weapons won't work so the other nuclear powers can feel safe using nuclear weapons against Russia. No one has ever proposed doing so. They're saying Russia's nuclear weapons aren't reliable enough for Putin's repeated threats of first use to be taken seriously. It's a bluff, we know it's a bluff, and he knows we know it's a bluff; the real audience for those threats is the general public, not western leaders. Putin has to maintain the illusion of strength to hold on to power.
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You didn't pay attention to the video. The question isn't whether anyone else would gamble on them failing, it's whether Putin would gamble on them working. No other country has any plans or desire to use nuclear weapons against Russia except in retaliation for a Russian nuclear attack.
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@Kwauhn. There are two different questions that are being conflated there. Question one is, does the existence of nuclear weapons benefit humanity as a whole? And the answer is of course no. Question number two is, given that nuclear weapons exist and our rivals have them and there's nothing we can do about either of those facts, does it benefit us to have them as well? And the answer for many countries is yes, because having nuclear weapons is the only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons won't be used on us. And that's been true since before the weapon actually existed. What prompted the US and UK spending prodigious sums of money and resources to develop nuclear weapons during WW2 was the knowledge that Germany was already working to develop them (there was no way for the Allies to know at the time that the German program had little chance of doing so in time to use them during the war) and the terror of what would happen if Germany had them and the Allies didn't.
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@alarmactionukalarmactionuk893 OK Putinbot.
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And the US hasn't produced a new F-4 fighter or M-60 tank in decades either. What is that supposed to prove?
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@ligmasack9038 So you're saying Russia provoked a war? But it was Russia who started the war...
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You're missing the point.
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Americans are also struggling to afford butter. LGB!
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@cattraknoff I think everyone went through all the possibilities like that in the 1980s and concluded that there was no conceivable use of nuclear weapons that did not invite retaliation. Or at least none that you could feel 100% safe that there was no threat of retaliation.
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@csuporj Do you honestly think Putin will nuke a city full of Russian civilians? Especially when Ukraine has pretty much zero chance of actually holding on to that territory, it's plainly just meant to be a bargaining chip. And a nuclear attack on a non-nuclear power in response to a very minor conventional attack by a third country would be a diplomatic catastrophe for Russia, not to mention an ecological catastrophe for all of Europe.
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Didn't India and Pakistan also do underground tests in the late 1990s?
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You missed the point.
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@Kwauhn. "We can disassemble all our nukes as a species." That would require a level of trust that history does not justify. Because we don't, and can't, make decisions collectively; human beings are not bees or ants and don't have a hive mind.
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@JORMUNREKKR Congratulated it?
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@truxton1000 October 7, 2023.
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@truxton1000 Just pointing out that invasions can take many forms. Also technically Ukraine has invaded Russia now, even if it's only a limited counterattack against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But they do have troops on Russian soil.
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The funny thing is Ukraine had zero chance of being accepted into NATO before Putin invaded. He's also caused Finland and Sweden to reverse their historic neutrality and join NATO. His war has been one of the biggest failures of all time.
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The US is corrupt, so is everyone, but MUCH less corrupt. And the US has never made any comparable threats.
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The West lasted longer than Bin Laden did, though, didn't it? What did the US in in Afghanistan was mission creep. Same as happened in Somalia.
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If anything the West massively OVERestimated Russia. When the invasion started no one gave Ukraine more than a few weeks. Russia's military has been exposed as third-rate.
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@danielkirpichnikov2007 Ludendorff, the mastermind behind the German war effort for the last half of the war, lost heart when his 1918 offensives failed to knock France out of the war and the Allied counteroffensive gained more ground than all previous Allied offensives put together, and he told the kaiser in September, 1918 that the war was lost and the government should seek whatever terms it could get from the Allies. In the same month the Balkan front collapsed and Germany's ally Bulgaria surrendered, and in the following month the Austro-Hungarian army collapsed in the face of Italy's final offensive and both Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire surrendered. To add insult to injury, the crews of the German battle fleet mutinied when the ships were ordered to sortie in a suicide mission, and the soldiers of the German army began deserting in large numbers since they knew the war was lost. So no, Kaiser Wilhelm did nothing to bring the war to an early end, and Allied armies were going to be in Berlin within a month at most no matter what the German government did or did not do. The Allies won the war decisively and the only effect of the German request for an armistice - which was sent by the civilian government that had declared Germany in effect to be a democratic constitutional monarchy - was to save lives that would have been wasted fighting for a lost cause, and to keep the Allied troops west of the Rhine and avoid an occupation of most of the country. if the end of the war was any one person's initiative , it was the US President, Woodrow Wilson. Before the US joined the war in 1917 Wilson had made repeated attempts to mediate a peace between the Allied and Central powers with no success.
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It was one of the cleanest because, for lack of a better word, they tuned it to be the cleanest by reducing the amount of U-238 in its tampers, thus reducing its overall power. The original design was twice as powerful but many times dirtier.
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He's been pretty unclear about exactly what the red lines are. It's a bluff.
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I would say Putin couldn't possibly be that stupid, but he was stupid enough to invade Ukraine - twice - so who knows?
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When the US used nuclear weapons, no one else in the world, even the UK, had them. It was a completely different world. How do thing the world would respond if Russia nuked a third, non-nuclear country that had absolutely nothing to do with the conflict? Putin would be more hated and more wanted than Hitler was in 1945. He'd be signing his own death warrant.
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@fabulous_y5654 That's not the only reason to say the Russian nuclear threat could be a hoax, though. And we know the US has thoroughly tested and updated its nuclear arsenal in every way short of detonating a warhead. Nobody knows whether the Russians have done any of that sort of testing or not.
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@bb5979 "Please tell me enlightened one, if russias nukes were useless why has no one invaded?" Because no one but Putin wants a war between Russia and the West.
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It wasn't pointless, though, because if they hadn't held out Germany would have won the war by knocking both France and Russia out of it before the British blockade caused Germany's economy to collapse.
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@Zemlja_je_ravna "that was the case with the Germany in WW1 that never lost the war, but they were forced to surrender because they run out of food and ammunition. WW2 was similar story." That is utter nonsense. Have you never heard of the battle of Stalingrad? or Operation Bagration? Or the Ruhr pocket? Germany's army was thoroughly defeated on both main fronts between 1942 and 1945. Lack of strategic resources certainly had a lot to do with why its armies were defeated, but defeated they were.
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The NYC metro area has more than 20 million people in it. London's has 15 million. Neutrons and gamma rays are unlikely to be stopped by metropolitan boundaries.
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The Russian army is getting more Asian with each passing day. The problem that brings is that Putin's appeals to Russian nationalism mean nothing to those soldiers. Eventually they're going to stop being willing to die for his dream of resurrecting the empire of Catherine the Great.
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