Yes, and try and live close to the center of where you think the nuke would be targeted. If it comes, you’ll be vaporized instantly with no awareness. Depending on the size of the nuke, if you’re outside of that radius, you get shockwave, firestorm and fallout depending on distance, and while you will almost certainly die, it may not be quick and painless.

Yeah I don’t think NATO would definitely nuke respond intentionally. I just worry that there are a lot of countries with nukes, and a lot of early warning systems of varying degrees of sophistication. If something gets misread, the timeframe in which nuclear decisions are made is tiny by design, you can imagine a scenario where with bad luck, things spiral out of control .

I realize the tactical nuclear weapons are much smaller, so maybe they’re not as risky as I’m thinking in terms of tripping early warning systems and such.

Yeah that makes sense—we send them a bunch of our stockpile (don’t we also keep a stockpile in Israel anyway, is that like the summer camp store?) and bonus! We get to get that newly made jdams and shells!

But hey, things are tough, and belts need to be tightened; really need to get a handle on entitlement reform. I’m guessing one of the few agencies the DOGE thing won’t try and streamline will be DOD budgets.

I still don’t really see how tactical nukes can be a usable thing on the battlefield. There are so many ways that systems or protocols could get tripped which basically then mainline into total nuclear destruction no matter what. I really don’t think there’s such a thing as a limited or small-scale nuclear war—the systems that support it almost guarantee all-out nuclear escalation.

I’d mostly say ok this is more nuclear Sabre-rattling like they’ve done over and over again. But a small part of me always wonders, if you have powerful, narcissistic old men in control, is there really a guarantee they wouldn’t just say fuck it and end the world? Particularly if they were near death and pissed off? Dunno. hope we never find out.

Per the article the prototype was flow at around 20,000m and they’re specifically going up there for the efficiency reason. The design also has a “high lift-to-drag ratio” that is apparently helping out.

This one has some more detail, no way to confirm its veracity however. https://theasialive.com/chinas-yunxing-jet-completes-test-flight-eyes-supersonic-commercial-travel-by-2027/2024/10/29

It could all be marketing hype, but there are a couple other companies in US and UK working on similar projects.

I don’t disagree per se, but the article says that the plane operates at 20,000 meters ceiling, Wikipedia says SR-71 had 26,000m operational ceiling, so this thing is high up, but not as high as the blackbird. Not sure how much of a difference that makes for the air and heat issues.

The company that makes this thing is making ballistic super sonic rockets for China, so I think the implication in the article is that this thing is basically a rocket with wings.

like the other comment said, it’s a fluid situation. It was bombed/shelled earlier, but was still operational. I think it’s now been physically raided by troops, and majority of the staff has been forcibly expelled or arrested. per a news program I saw an hour ago, the hospital was turning away casualties from the overnight bombing that killed 100 people in one building, since they have no capacity to do anything at this point. I suspect the couple of staff still left are doing what they can for any patients they still have, though I know the kids that were on ventilators died when they shelled the hospital earlier, so who even knows. I unwisely watched this news program over lunch, and they had images of the children loaded into body bags 2-3 per bag, open. Those photos should be plastered all over billboards across America: this is where the bombs go.

Is leaving one doctor like some vicious troll move? Or did they just miss him on his lunch break? (dark joke, because, what lunch, what break?) What is the 1 doc and 2.5 nurses left supposed to do with human wave of casualties that Israel creating with each high rise they level.

hello!

yeah I think I follow. So basically Israel is just viewed as such a crucial and intrinsic part of US strategy/power projection/dominance in ME, that it’s simply not even thinkable to conceive for most of the system to be in conflict with it, even when it continues to veer into deeper and deeper levels of genocide and impunity. And perhaps the bureaucratic and temporal nature of administrations and US officials (moving in and out of office, new staffs, etc) allows for the humiliation to be less damaging than it would to a more directly strongman/authoritarian system, like say Putin and Russian Federation?

yes, that’s correct. I don’t mean to suggest there are actually pocket nukes in sweetgreens, and good US politicians are just “trying to save the world”. I’m just trying to understand how they can allow Israel to humiliate them so much. I buy it that they might be willing to just take the PR L and look like dipshits in order to deflect the blame for the nastier stuff to the client state, but the uniformity and lockstepness of it, plus the very real loss of face it represents seems to run counter to what I understand to be typical neocon tendencies.

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look, if you read my post, you’d note that I accept this position in my first paragraph. And I’m not interested in taking blame off of America–I’m just curious about an aspect of the behavior that never quite makes full sense to me. Regardless, I note that you’re a staunch support of option a.

Is this fairly unprecedented? What I mean is sure many leaders in last 20 years have threatened conflict and stuff, but like directly posting on social media that they’ll utterly destroy a country and murder civilians as punishment if they don’t get what they want?

I’m sure Bush said some stuff in the 9/11 GWOT years and Russia does its veiled threat thing here and there, Iran talks vaguely of destroying great satans once and a while but this is like a specific threat of annihilation to a civilian population.

Like usually the threats are couched in metaphors, I guess, and this is clearly non-metaphorical.

Yeah this whole “give RFK secret service detail” made me wonder, are there just like cadres of reserve/on-call secret service protection details chillin in office cubicles ready to go out and take bullets for weirdos? I mean they must have some depth, but like wouldn’t it definitely mean some mild deduction to back for the existing details?