A few thoughts: - The affected prefixes (200.74.224.0/20 block → Dayco Telecom) hosting banks and ISPs feels significant. If you're doing pre-kinetic intelligence gathering, knowing the exact network topology and traffic patterns of critical infrastructure would be valuable. Even a few hours of passive collection through a controlled transit point could map out dependencies you'd want to understand before cutting power. - What's also notable is the transit path through Sparkle, which the author points out doesn't implement RPKI filtering. That's not an accident if you're planning something (you'd specifically choose providers with weaker validation). - The article stops short of drawing conclusions, which is the right call. BGP anomalies are common enough that correlation ≠ causation. But the timing and the specific infrastructure affected make this worth deeper analysis.

Would love to see someone with access to more complete BGP table dumps do a before/after comparison of routing stability for Venezuelan prefixes in that window.

Didn't the US use Chinooks? They're supposed to be loud. And AD didn't take even one out.

If Venezuela as corrupt as most socialist countries, I have no doubt that someone in his inner circle gave him up.

Back in the days of our version of socialism we had Indian politicians selling out for $100K, leave alone $50M.

Clearly and empirically, BGP can shut off parts of the Internet, just as Trump wanted to do in 2015.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dear-donald-trump-no-you-1322...

Our systems are designed around ICBM detection.

A tactical/suitecase nuke like the old US Army Green Light teams wouldn't trigger that. In fact, it would likely take awhile to trace. The "limited nuclear war" concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Light_teams

It's really hard to guess how retaliation would happen in practice, a large-scale nuclear war certainly isn't inevitable.

The most likely targets for nuclear strikes right now are also non-nuclear states.

It assumes ~130,000 casualties from a worst-case surprise attack on population centers by the North.

If a conflict started ramping up, evacuations would rapidly shrink this.

A significant deterrent, sure. But it rapidly becomes less and less meaningful as the DPRK builds its nuclear arsenal.

Reality is not that black and white. We may no longer have formal colonies, buy the world is still carved up by spheres of influence by the superpowers. Displease them and you'll find out how limited your sovereignty really is.

However, just because there are just war grounds for Maduro's capture per se doesn't mean the operation was justified by just war principles. It wasn't. It takes more than just the fact that the ruler is tyrannical to justify an operation like this. Operations like this can risk civil war and all sorts of horrible fallout that also need to be considered. There must be a realistic plan following the removal of the tyrannical leader. As always, justice must be upheld always. And of course there are the procedural and legal aspects that Trump totally ignored.

I agree with you. It's really bad and it's a slippery slope. It's also true that there are many scenarios where you can launch nukes without repercussions. That's the misperception I'm pointing out.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cly1x12v33jt

> One image claiming to show the tomb actually shows the aftermath of a real US strike on the nearby Cagigal Observatory. The observatory is reportedly used by the General Command of the Bolivarian Militia branch of the Venezuelan military.

> We’ve also seen a viral image claiming to show extensive damage to the mausoleum but this appears to be an an AI-manipulated version of a real picture of the building published in 2013.

> Plus, the Hugo Chavez Foundation posted its own videos on Monday to show people the tomb was intact and called on people in Venezuela not to spread speculation.The videos displayed Monday’s date on a phone before zooming in on the Cuartel de la Montaña 4F to show there was no visible damage to the building.

In 1998 neither India nor Pakistan were considered members of the nuclear warhead club.

Then India detonated 5 warhead sized kiloton and sub kiloton class thermonuclear (fusion / hydrogen) weapons .. and within 20 days Pakistan responded with six atomic tests (non fusion, larger than warhead size).

The interesting thing about that exchange is that India suprised the world intelligence community pants down with capability and execution, and Pakistan's speed of response was equally suprising.

Despite the spectacle of rapid cross fire of eleven nuclear weapons and tense international responses the small nuke treats didn't escalate into anything larger .. and likely served to keep heads a little cooler wrt both India and Pakistan.

All up there has been > 2,000 nuclear detonations across the globe, some definitely intended to intimidate or otherwise push the envelope of possibility.

In that light another small nuke that avoided civilians and had a military target is unlikely to escalate although it would certainly cause a collective intake of breath and give pause.

I said Russia dropping a nuke on a Ukranian military site will not escalate into a nuclear war. I say this because so many people assume that it would and it makes no sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Weather_Emergency_Operat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Greek_Island

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_Mountain_Complex

With the rise of solid fuel ICBM and then MIRV leading to the truly massive number of warheads pointed at the US, the US switched to airplanes for the most important continuity of government issues, figuring that the skies 30,000 above the US will largely be secure (presuming the plane is appropriately EMP shielded) due to the many US geographic advantages, and so it is the best place to ride out the initial attack and then take stock, get to somewhere safe, and figure out what to do from there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Looking_Glass

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TACAMO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-6_Mercury

But the North Koreans can have no illusion that the skies above their country will be safe: there are several major enemy airbases a few minutes from their border, their entire airspace is routinely surveilled and powers hostile to them have made large investments in stealthy air superiority fighters, so the air is not a safe place for the DPRK continuity of government plans. The DPRK does have trains but I would not consider those safe in the event of a major war, since rails are difficult to keep secret.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taeyangho_armoured_train

So bunkers are the best they can do, given their circumstances.

The US is vulnerable to that scenario as well, even though the military’s willingness to comply with literally textbook illegal orders is not encouraging.

I could tolerate a coupe but I’d prefer a sports car :-/

Erm, it's kind of demanded for people to go out and die to defend national sovereignty in nations that have a draft. For myself, I'd prefer to be vaporized than bleed out in a trench if it really comes down to it.

If you don't have the triad then you need to brandish your capability more ostentatiously, like France does with its deliberate refusal to commit to a no-first-strike policy. This is (one of the many reasons) why North Korea does so much sabre-rattling: they don't have a (publicly known) nuclear triad for deterrence.

Would your answer change if China were somehow guaranteed to not intervene? Because I'm not sure the obstacle here is North Korean defenses, so much as Chinese intervention.

Tehran? I think it'd go more or less like Caracas did.

An important part of deterrence is broadcasting that you've done this though. It all works much better if your enemies approximately understand your processes

Japan attacked the US first, and by Hiroshima the US had 110,000 dead in the Pacific theater. Imagine living through that before judging them.

I won't claim to be as much an expert on Russian doctrine, but they seem to consider their mobile missiles to be a survivable second strike weapon, while silo based missiles are obviously not. Because their boomer fleet does not offer the same assured second strike, they rely on those mobile missiles to play a greater deterrent role then the US does.

1: That is the official justification for the US silos. The real reason for silos is, if you want to build a truly insane number of strategic warheads, silos are the only way to afford it- ships and planes and even TELs are too expensive. So first the US (worried they were behind because of the Missile Gap) built a thousand Minuteman (then tripled the deployed warheads with MIRV on the Minuteman-III). Then the Soviets responded with 1000 SS-11s of their own. But if you are only building a few hundred warheads total, you don't bother with silos, they don't add as much value as other delivery mechanisms.

Why is that? Of the 6 North Korean nuclear tests, only the first one was so low-yield that it might have been a fizzle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...

1. Did Ukraine control the nukes, or did Russia?

2. Could Ukraine keep them working on its own?

3. If nukes stop invasions, why do nuclear countries still get attacked?

Russia may have just continually pushed the envelope until it became clear there wasn't a bright red line, and eventually someone would push the button.

Russia invades. Ukraine launches nukes. Every major city in Ukraine is ash. Several major cities in Russia are ash. Millions die plausibly.

That scenario is not what would happen from an invasion.

Zelensky would not have used nukes to prompt the death of millions instantly. He would have proceeded with the same defensive war.

The false premise rests on: it's better for everyone to die than live under Russian occupation. That would overwhelmingly be chosen false by the population in question that is being invaded.

All those people that lived under Soviet Russia occupation, they were better off dead in nuclear fire than living under said occupation? Obviously not what the masses would have chosen (just look at what they did choose to do while living under Russian occupation - how many gave up their lives to fight back?). It's fundamentally why nuclear weapons as deterrant is largely fraudulent. They're solely viable as a last option against total oblivion at the hands of an enemy: it entails everyone dies, which means there has to be a good enough reason for everyone to die to justify use.

If America does something to pakistan, then pakistan wouldn't bomb India but rather America

In your scenario India did literally nothing. I know the rivalry but even then India has its own nukes and if India wasn't part of the plan then case would be on America

A much more likely scenario is that Pakistan's military would take over (Pakistan has never been really stable after its independence) and their ties with china would grow and China would feel threatened as well and if things go the same as venezuela that is that Trump says that they would control pakistan for time being (similar to venezuela) then China would be genuinely pissed and a WW3 conflict can arise considering China could send their military there and the possibility of nuke could be a choice if the war really happens between America/China but the possibility of it is really really slim and depends on how the war goes.

https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2013-04-26/ims-detects-radi...

The xenon isotopes involved have short half lives so if they were not produced by a nuclear explosion, they would have had to be released simultaneously by e.g. reprocessing a "hot" fresh batch of irradiated uranium at the same time as the underground explosion. This is not impossible, but it looks increasingly convoluted compared to an actual nuclear test.

Also, contra the upthread assertion that "Yields should've been higher for plutonium cores, it's not lightweight stuff," there is nothing about plutonium that drives high yield. The United States manufactured a large number of low yield (1.7 kiloton) plutonium warheads in the late 1950s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W25_(nuclear_warhead)

If North Korea aimed to make missile-deliverable weapons from the beginning (which makes sense because they don't have heavy bombers like the Cold War powers did at the beginning of their arms race), it also makes sense that their weapons tests would be focused on validating compact/lightweight designs instead of trying for high yield.

I mean, that's objectively not true since Libya, who attacked no one, but had a NATO bombing campaign to assist their civil war.

NATO is no longer a purely defensive pact.

* The (remaining) Venezuelan government gets to point to Big Evil America to unify (or crack-down-upon) an unhappy public, and they avoid being personally tarred as unpatriotic.

* Trump et al. get to "wag the dog" as distraction from crimes and mismanagement back home.

And I don't think there were any real lessons learned. We nearly nuked ourselves during the Cold War multiple times. And today, with bombs that make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like primitive weapons, you have people acting like nuclear war isn't something 'that' fearful. We killed hundreds of thousands of people largely for the sake of trying to get a slight geopolitical edge over the USSR. And that's far better than the alternative of there being no reason at all. In no world are the arguments about it saving lives valid, even if you attach 0 value to the life of the Japanese for having audacity to be born in the wrong country.

----

Leo Szilard was a critical scientist in the story of the atomic bomb, and he's also full of just amazingly insightful quotes. [1]

- Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?

- A great power imposes the obligation of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation. I think this affected many of the scientists in a subtle sense, and it diminished their desire to continue to work on the bomb.

- Even in times of war, you can see current events in their historical perspective, provided that your passion for the truth prevails over your bias in favor of your own nation.

[1] - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3_Szil%C3%A1rd

Tactical nukes are in ambiguous territory. Russia launching a blizzard of nukes at Ukraine is difficult to distinguish from Russia nuking NATO. To turn Ukraine into glass, Russia would need to gamble that Washington and France trust it.

The previous owner was the USSR, who ceased to exist, and who Ukraine was a part of.

> Maybe you should see how good the Ukraine was at keeping their naval assets after they used the totally legal methods to obtain them. Maybe then you would have a clue on how good they could had maintained them.

Are you talking about the ships that weren't originally that Russia mostly scuttled on their way out of Sevastopal, in addition to stuff like a 70% completed nuclear powered carrier that even Russia couldn't maintain the sister to, and didn't fit in any naval doctrine that made sense for Ukraine?

The question is whether china would be capable of maintaining the equipment they created and have physical possession of, not whether they can root it without physical access.

Seventy two Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were already completely destroyed before the two atomic bombs were dropped. The two cities destroyed by atomic bombs were on a list to be destroyed regardless.

To the people killed, injured, or left in the shell of a city with no food or water it made very little real difference whether the cause was HE+incendiaries OR high burst shockwave from atomic bomb - the M&M statistics (death and injury, both immediate and following) were similar in either case.

The greatest military imperative to drop the atomic bombs were pragmatic .. they were developed at vast expanse for use on Germany but were not ready until after Germany surrended .. to close off an R&D program without a live target test on targets already targetted for destruction just seemed ... wasteful.

After the bombs were dropped, everything changed. Public awareness and perception. The need for post war PR. The start of the Cold War race with soviets over atomics. The pressing need for auto biographies and centre staging from actors late to the story, etc.

Much of the "justification" for dropping atomic bombs was retconned after the fact.

"Our" people?

That kind of moral calculus simply doesn't track with me: I'm neither from the US nor Japan, plus I think considerations of "civilization" fly out the window once you start thinking like this.

But also, it's a kind of goalpost shifting. Either the calculations were the justification, in which case it matters whether they were right, or they weren't. It's not right to argue "well, the actual numbers don't matter because...".

Good, you made a first step, now do the other two.

> but should have been otherwise compensated for that loss

It's quite amusing what you are clearly imply what some state shouldn't be compensated at all.

> Are you incapable of telling what was meant by context, or where you just looking for a reason not to address the point made?

Yes, I'm incapable of telling why you threw something completely unrelated to the question. I'm not LLM.

> Ukraine literally designed and built large portions of these systems as was capable of keeping them.

Ah, yes, the mighty Ukraine who solely done that, right? Every other nation, state and people in the USSR didn't do shit to that. I have a feeling you are thinking about that issue as some sort of video game: just a couple of factories and a bunch of special units. But the things are not like that in RL.

Gaza (what a bizarre thing to bring up anyway) has nothing to do with actions taken by any nation during World War II. It's not even a war between nations. Unless you count Iran since they're the ones causing so much pain for everyone by inciting terrorist organizations in the region and ensure there can be no peace.

> During wartime justifications for carpet bombing do matter .. see Geneva Conventions et al.

Not all wars are created equal, and not all actions taking during one war can be justified during another. For example, the United States using an atomic bomb on Iraq (regardless if the invasion was justified or not, but for the sake of argument here we can assume it's justified) would be morally wrong in any context.

Why is that the case?

Because the United States unofficially (if memory serves) declared war on Iraq, invaded Iraq, and did so with overwhelming military, economic, and political superiority. Iraq posed no existential threat to the United States. Just because it's a war doesn't mean you get to use everything in your arsenal.

When you compare that with the war against Japan, you find a very different picture.

World War II as a whole, including the war against Japan was an existential war requiring the full participation of all of society, civilian or otherwise. This was the same case on the eastern front of the war. The Nazis were exterminating people. The Soviets (and anyone else for that matter) were justified in bombing Nazi population centers, including carpet bombing, or even dropping their own atomic bomb on Berlin if that brought an end to the war.

Concepts and ideas around things like the Geneva conventions fail in these existential total war scenarios for two reasons:

  1. They are arbitrary, and applied and justified post-hoc. Specifically the Geneva conventions weren't agreed upon prior to 1949 IIRC and so applying their moral and legal justification to actions prior to that as though one group broke a treaty or acted immorally doesn't make a lot of sense except of course as a way to criticize western powers. If you want to argue about how some countries violated what were later the Geneva conventions by their military activities, the only thing you're really telling me here is that all countries were very bad because the Japanese sure as hell violated the Geneva Conventions, and you know very well the Soviets did too, as did the Nazis. So if you want to criticize the US for dropping the atomic bomb, I criticize the other countries involved in the war equally, and I'd also criticize countries who stayed neutral during the war and did not fight to liberate Europe and Asia. 

  2. They don't map correctly to wars where one or more of the participants is intent on committing genocide or otherwise exterminating the actual population of the other. And in total war scenarios the civilian population is building and funding the war efforts and thus become legitimate targets. Otherwise it would be illegal and immoral to bomb a tank factory because you kill civilians. It's not. You know that, and I know that. 

See bombings by the Soviets and mass starvation of civilians by them and the Chinese. See any number of things done by other countries not named the United States. Let's talk about those as examples going forward instead. We're well aware of all the criticisms of the United States but I don't care about those, I'm interested only in criticisms of the actions of non-western countries and how they have acted in morally bankrupt ways with the usage of their weapons.

Trump just seems the worst person in the world to play a game of telephone with on such a subject.

For example: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2025/05/16/pentagon-silent-a...

> “The F-35, we’re doing an upgrade, a simple upgrade,” Trump said. “But we’re also doing an F-55, I’m going to call it an F-55. And that’s going to be a substantial upgrade. But it’s going to be also with two engines.”

> Frank Kendall, the secretary of the Air Force during former President Joe Biden’s administration, said in an interview with Defense News that it is unclear what Trump was referring to when he discussed an “F-22 Super,” but it may have been a reference to the F-47 sixth-generation fighter jet… Kendall said it is also unclear what Trump was referring to when he discussed the alleged F-55.

Your second paragraph doesn't even make sense, but I'm thinking you just wanted to hop on the "america bad" train for a moment, so maybe it doesn't matter.

Which is why it is so important/useful to Cloudflare but of much lower utility to most nginx users.

- Soldiers on both sides wear uniforms.

- When they can, Ukraine defends from trenches away from civilians.

- When urban combat seems unavoidable, Ukraine evacuates their civilians.

- Ukraine is a vast country, with plenty of safer areas to move to.

- Other countries have also accepted large number of Ukrainian war refugees.

Gaza is the opposite: Hamas fighters disguise as civilians, they defend mostly from urban areas, they never attempt to evacuate civilians (sometimes the opposite), it's a small territory, and no countries are accepting Gazan war refugees in significant numbers.

There's no military on the planet that could fight Hamas in Gaza without causing significant civilian harm.

It's really not. Once they've launched, it's pretty clear where they're going. All NATO needs is enough time to respond, and they absolutely have that.

> Outside nuclear holocaust, Russia, on launching a strategic nuclear strike on Ukraine, would have crossed a red line Beijing, New Delhi and Tehran each value. (The last because Russia's justification for glassing Ukraine is easily copy-pasted by Israel.)

If you look, their nuclear policy is to respond overwhelmingly to a nuclear strike. India for instance has officially said they "will not be the first to initiate a nuclear first strike, but will respond with punitive retaliation should deterrence fail". https://web.archive.org/web/20091205231912/http://www.indian... That's diplomatic speak for 'we reserve the right to glass you after any nuclear strikes in our territory'.

Although I do agree, that in war only the final outcome is important. It's just that in this case it failed not necessarily because of technology, but because of humans.

I see this as a very good development and a big win for privacy. I have been running my own DNS server for years to prevent passive logging, but could basically do nothing against the SNI leak.

Until some clueless judge orders all of cloudflare to be blocked.

Mr. Trump good.

Trump derangement syndrome bad.

If Mr. Trump does what you say eventually, then it was good. (see rule #1)

I see this frequently on HN since the re-election, won't speculate as to why: only way around the downvote is to criticize policy generically, untethered to time, with some sort of micro-focus like you're sharing new information about how things work, not discussing current events.

The others have been variants of "Celebrating liberation of the Venezuelan people from the illegitimate dictator, a new dawn for democracy! (oh and everyone (not naming names) please behave and try to be mindful of international law and human rights from now on)"

Not a single word about the dead, for one.

While the NYTimes headline names France as critical, here's Macron (still only posting) on Twitter: https://xcancel.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/200752538697719404...

Meanwhile POTUS is over there talking literally and openly about how US are "going to run things" and motivating it with taking the oil and how they don't really care about democracy one way or other.

These actions by Trump are only reinforcing that we will see even more of a push for everybody to get their own nukes, even in Europe.

People do not need to yell "bad trump", to have his actions result in decisions being pushed forward like this.

Theodore: "speak softly and carry a big stick"... and nuke(s) is a BIG stick.

It's over for the EU. They rested on their laurels for too long and cowardice rotted them from the inside.

I don't think Denmark will put even a smidge of resistance up. Trump is going to bark some orders, boots are going to hit the ground and it's fait accompli.

I'm having trouble thinking how power outages can be deadly.

But we are talking about World War II, and a war in which the United States and Japan fought, with millions of casualties. Pardon me if I'm not particularly interested in what someone from South America thinks about saving American lives by using a weapon we had to stop a war that we didn't start.

> Either the numbers matter or they don't; and if they do matter, it matters that they are well justified and accurate.

I don't think the numbers matter and shifting around from 50,000 to 5 million or anywhere in proximity to those numbers doesn't change the categorical argument. But if someone such as yourself wants to claim the numbers matter, my number is 1. It only takes 1 American life to have been saved in that needless war to justify the usage of any* weapon to stop the war.

* I'm using any here but there are obviously limits like, using a weapon that destroys the entire world or something fantastical that would very unlikely be justified.

> This is fundamentally wrong and doesn't support the argument from "civilization" which, again, was the argument I was responding to.

> US planners wanted to use the Bomb because they had it and had spent a lot of effort developing it. They were primed to use it. They wanted to test it on a real city, with real humans, and they wanted to send a message to the Soviets, too. All excuses -- Operation Downfall, American vs Japanese lives, etc -- were a posteriori, retroactively deployed to not be portrayed as cold hearted

Japan could have surrendered and then it wouldn't have been used. Even if we just wanted to test it, it was justified. There's a lot of revisionist history that goes into these conversations with the goal of "USA BAD" and in the context of World War II I reject any and all of those assertions. It's the same lame crap that gets thrown around with respect to the Soviets and the Eastern Front.

"The US didn't do anything"

"The Soviets were the good guys fighting the good fight against the Nazis".

Both are untrue and are derived from Russian/Chinese propaganda schemes to sow self-doubt and defeatism for their own benefit.

For example, a lot of folks will claim things like the Soviets bore the brunt of the war in a moralist context in contrast with the western allies who didn't see as many lives expended. Of course that's true from a numeric context. 40 million deaths or something crazy from the Soviet side. But let's not forget, it was the Soviets who helped Germany kick this thing off by illegally invading and partitioning Poland. So... maybe those 40 million deaths were deserved. Just like the Nazis deserved to be destroyed?

> how would you feel if I told you they are less worth preserving?

I wouldn't care what you thought? In wartime, as an American, our soldier's lives are worth more than any enemy lives. This seems pretty straightforward to me. But if you want to insist you think your countrymen's lives are worth the same or less than some enemy that invaded you or that you are at war with, good luck fighting that war.

And yes, of course, it can sometimes be hard to enforce international law, just like it can be very hard to enforce national laws. It is illegal to murder people in most countries, yet people murder each other and some people get away with it.

they're not deleted, just hidden. you can toggle "showdead" in your profile settings.

For example France could gift or sell Denmark some nukes, possibly with a Rafale as a launch platform. Denmark would be an instant nuclear nation-state.

I'm not sure there is the political will though.

Nah, I disagree here.

Tasers do indeed offer an alternative to guns. But they allow more force in other situations, where officers would previously have had to deescalate because "just shoot them" wasn't justified.

Cops now use a taser where zero force might previously have been used.

I am always shocked by how controversial this take can be.

Generally speaking, a bunch of Russian silos lighting up would put us at DEFCON 1. We’re not waiting until it passes Ukraine. It we want to engage any boost-phase ABM, we’re not going to let it. (Which leads to its own issues.)

> you'd be able to tell if a launch made sense to attack NK from the US or not

At some point. But waiting will cost you precious minutes, and you don’t know what else is in position e.g. off your coast.

> Europe and Turkey have no silo based weapons left

I was unclear. I meant conventional forces that would be targets in a first strike.

> "Punitive" retaliation is all of their strategy. This has already been normalized

Strategic retaliation for tactical nukes has not been normalized. This is still entirely ambiguous and hotly debated.

Again, flip it around. If you knew China and Russia would stand down if they thought you were just nuking North Korea, you could use that to gain material advantage in a first strike.

In WW2 partisans would intentionally induce brutal retaliations precisely because they thought it would expose the character of the occupier, garner support for themselves, radicalize the population, and generally further their interests. And they were right. It's paradoxical because those retaliations were intended to enforce control, yet they invariably achieve the exact opposite - a recurring theme throughout history. Again getting back to the point I'm making - the reason to behave good in war is because it's in your own best interest.

My opinion, with all the caveats that come with an opinion, is that states do organise into over-arching organisations in the context of international laws, such as EU, UN, etc.

Such over-arching organisations do not have the same degree of power that a state has over its citizens, sure, but I think it still qualifies. You can theoretically also "disregard" state law, regional law, etc. The problem with that is that the power disparity is such that you can't hope to get away with it (in a perfect world and in a vacuum, that is, as many people do disregard national law and get away with it :D But thats beside the point, I think you'd agree?)

For ECH, China can just require you turn it off. Or distribute their own blessed distribution. It’s the more marginal censorship regimes that will be in an interesting spot. Especially ones where the ISPs are mostly responsible for developing the technical measures.

Ssetting aside the whole non-proliferation thing, or expense (see NK), etc.

Let's get serious, please.

Yes you do. I explained it multiple times already. If you don't, I suggest you pay more attention instead of replying to comments you admit you don't understand.

> You keep replying.

You claimed you didn't care about my opinion, yet here you are. Why? Sport?

> I reject the calculation of the numbers of lives saved.

Thanks for the straight answer. However, the person I was replying to didn't reject the calculation, which is why they mentioned it, and this is what I challenged. Clearer now?

> Nope, not puzzling. It's just a common theme. It's always "question the United States actions", "talk about the United States", "the United States is bad and does bad things all the time"

That's your own baggage. Argue with the things I actually said, not with "common themes". You seem to be upset about things I haven't argued, at least not here. I cannot be held responsible for whatever irks you on the internet, much like I cannot be upset at you for whatever BS Trump or the alt-right spews.

> Soviets good, West worked with Nazis, West didn't do anything, bombing Japan to end the war is immoral, blah blah blah

I don't know your internet circles, but most of what I hear is "America won WW2", "Soviets are as evil as Hitler", etc.

> Both are untrue and are derived from Russian/Chinese propaganda schemes to sow self-doubt and defeatism for their own benefit.

No... I suggest you read "The Myth of the Eastern Front" (2008) by American historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies, which is a scholarly work (well regarded and widely referenced and cited) that describes among other things American shifting views on WW2's Eastern Front (as well as documenting the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth, and others). These are not Russian/Chinese infiltrators, but well regarded American scholars.

What you identify as "revisionism" is actually a shift away from German-dictated histories of WW2, and towards a more balanced view.

> Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. I'd encourage you to read up more on the Soviet - Nazi alliance.

I expected you to extend me the courtesy of assuming I knew about Molotov-Ribbentrop. Like I said, there were nuances to the situation, even mentioned "there's a lot to read on the subject". I assume you don't care -- or you think anyone who disagrees with any action of the US is simply ill-informed or Russian/Chinese influenced -- but there are nuances on this topic (e.g. how the USSR foresaw war with Nazi Germany, how it sought an anti-German pact with the UK and France which was rejected). But I won't be dragged into defending the Soviets or whatever when it has very little to do with the original topic.

> You are implying that the Japanese were civilized at this time.

Well, they were in some sense and they were barbaric in others (ironically this is what the OP claimed of the Bombs!). But let's take it for granted that the Japanese were pretty savage towards the people they invaded: even then, your own civilization doesn't depend on your foe's. It's an inherent trait.

I know this may be hard to grasp when following your "us vs them" logic.

> I know how I sound

Apparently not; you don't seem aware of how jingoistic you sound. Or that when you say "our", this being a relative word, it pays to know your audience who may or may not be "yours".

Nope. That's specifically guarded against, so double good news. 1) You get to learn something new about an important network protocol and 2) I get to tell you a story I enjoy telling

Here's the clever trick which is specified in RFC 8446 (the TLS 1.3 RFC)

In TLS we always have this "Random" field in both Client Hello and Server Hello, it's 32 bytes of random noise. At least, that's what it usually is. When a server implements TLS 1.3 but it receives a connection (in your scenario this is from a middlebox, but it might equally be somebody's long obsolete phone) which asks for TLS 1.2 then when it fills out the Random for this connection the last eight bytes aren't actually random, they spell "DOWNGRD" in ASCII and then a 01 byte. If the client seems to ask for any older version of TLS which is supported then the server writes DOWNGRD and then a 00 byte instead.

As you hopefully realise this signals to a client that a MITM is attempting to downgrade them and so they reject the failed attack. You very likely have never seen your web browser's diagnostic for this scenario, but it's very much a failure not some sort of "Danger, Chinese government is spying on you" interstitial, because we know that warning users of danger they can't fix is pointless. So we just fail, the Chinese government could choose to annoy its citizens with this message but, why bother? Just drop the packets entirely, it's cheaper.

You might wonder, why Random ? Or, can't the MITM just replace this value and carry on anyway ? Or if you've got a bit more insight you might guess that these questions answer each other.

In TLS the Client and Server both need to be sure that each connection is different from any others, if they didn't assure themselves of this they'd be subject to trivial replay attacks. They can't trust each other, so to achieve this both parties inject Random data into the stream early, which means they don't care if the other party really used random numbers or just (stupidly) didn't bother. Shortly after this, during setup, the parties agree on a transcript of their whole conversation so far.

So, if the Random value you saw is different from the Random number your conversation partner expected, that transcript won't match, connection fails, nothing is achieved. But if the Random value isn't changed but somehow we ended up with TLS 1.2 it says DOWNGRD and a TLS 1.3 capable client knows that means it is under attack and rejects the connection, same outcome.

Now, I said there was an anecdote. It's about terrible middle boxes, because of course it is. TLS 1.3 was developed to get past terrible middle boxes and it was mostly successful, however shortly after TLS 1.3 non-draft launch (when the anti-downgrade mechanism was enabled, it would not be OK to have anti-downgrade in a draft protocol for reasons that ought to be obvious) Google began to see a significant number of downgrade failures, connected to particular brands of middlebox.

It turns out that these particular brands of middlebox were so crap that although they were proxying the HTTP connection, they were too cheap to generate their own Random data. So your TLS 1.3 capable browser calls their proxy, the proxy calls the TLS 1.3 capable server, and the proxy tells both parties it only speaks TLS 1.2, but it passes this bogus anti-downgrade "Random" value back as if it had made this itself, thus triggering the alarm.

Obviously on the "Last to change gets the blame" basis Google had customers blaming them for an issue caused ultimately by using a crap middlebox. So they actually added a Chrome feature to "switch off" this feature. Why do I mention this? Well, Chrome added that feature for 12 months. In 2018. So, unless it is still 2019 where you are, they in fact have long since removed that switch and all browsers enforce this rule. That 12 months grace gave vendors the chance to fix the bug or, if they were able to, persuade customers to buy a newer crap middlebox without this particular bug, and it gave customers 12 months to buy somebody else's middlebox or (if they were thus enlightened) stop using a middlebox.

Nope. I prefer to read not so close and just reply anyway.

> Understood. Unfortunately, you got confused about who you were replying to; it wasn't me who argued the calculation mattered. I actually argued the calculation was a retroactive justification, not the actual one. I can see you got lost here. Maybe for the benefit of, you know, your "broader audience" you could have replied to that other commenter.

I'm saying that it doesn't need to be retroactively justified, and even if the numbers are high or low it doesn't matter. The action was justified until Japan formally surrendered and ended the war. What you're trying to debate it seems to me is around agreements or disagreements about the justification of using the bomb, my criteria is that we were still at war with Japan, and so the justifications, either accurate at the time or retroactive, are irrelevant. It's possible that what you are suggesting around the number of lives saved was a revision, which I don't agree or disagree with, but you are later implying a moral failure because of that revision, and I am rejecting that there was ever a moral failure by using the bomb provided we were still formally at war.

If you want to reject a moral claim about the revision of the justification, I don't really have much to debate here. Whatever the facts are, are the facts. But if you are making a moral claim about the usage of the bomb, that's different.

> This thing you're doing is really bizarre, claiming to know my thoughts. I find it fascinating. Do you always debate like this?

I debate and discuss things depending on various contexts.

In this context you're engaging in a group of common debate tactics (for example, you're afraid to say what country you are from, yet you're happy to speak English and criticize the United States and only the United States) that are a well-known pattern of anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. I just noted the patterns and identified your discussion points as being among them.

For example, let's change the subject and talk about the evils of the Soviet Union. And no we don't have to stay on topic, nobody is reading our nonsense anyway.

I know you won't do that though, because you don't know much about Soviet atrocities, and you won't be able to engage in a strict criticism of Soviet actions unless you introduce nuance (excuses) and find ways to make Soviet atrocities the fault of western countries.

If that's not true, prove me wrong. Let's spend some time now talking about the awful things the Soviets did.

> Nope. I was explaining the nuances of a situation which had more angles than what you implied. You were asking me to read on Molotov-Ribbentrop, yet you don't seem much well read on the subject if you ignore these nuances...

> Both matter: broader actions and nuance. Being aghast at someone who claims 40 million people deserved to die has nothing to do with Molotov-Ribbentrop or any pact. Again... I'm aghast but not in defense of the Soviets, just at your callousness.

Actions matter more than nuance, the nuance is just an excuse to justify the actions of the side you want to support. It sucks that so many Soviet Union, uh, members I guess? I'm not sure how to best describe that hellish autocratic government, but at the end of the day the Soviet Union colluded with the Nazis, and so I'm not really shedding a tear for them losing soldiers or civilians fighting the same maniacs they colluded with.

> Ok, this is a straightforward, honest position. You think dropping the Bomb was ok because it won the war. Also you make some non sequitur about the Bomb turning Japan into a peaceful democracy (completely bizarre logic, it doesn't follow that it was the bomb).

Well I said we bombed Japan, not necessarily it was because of the atomic bomb. But I acknowledge of course that specific context could be interpreted differently than my intention.

I'm suggesting that dropping the bomb, or any other action was just another action that our civilized country took and the end result was that we took over influence of Japan and civilized it and made it a peaceful democracy.

(besides obvious stuff like just raping people or whatever)

> You've repeatedly ignored arguments by me, and others here, that argued that it wasn't necessarily the Bomb that won the war, but whatever. I understand this is your position; I think it's wrong.

I think it's very much up for debate whether the bomb was actually what got the Japanese to surrender. It's possible and debatable that we could have just continued to bomb Japan without the atomic bomb and we would have seen a surrender anyway.

But it is not up for debate that the Japanese military were very much divided on whether or not to continue to hold out against the United States up until the usage of the atomic bomb and some were still holding out (if my memory serves correctly) even after the reports of the first bomb. You're suggesting that I'm ignoring your arguments, but I'm not, I'm disagreeing with them.

> Do you understand the expression "let's take for granted"? It seems you're hell-bent on arguing where there's no argument.

The specific language used matters. When you introduce the term "let's take for granted" you are implying that there is another option to be considered, such as that the Japanese weren't rampaging, murdering lunatics at the time. It's not an assumption to be taken for granted that the Japanese were as I described, it's simply a fact.

Another way to look at it is you can replace "let's take for granted" with "let's suppose" or "let's pretend". That term or variation of those terms, in my view, aren't valid to be used here because we don't suppose that the Japanese were rampaging murderous lunatics from around 1938, they were as a matter of fact.

> My opinion doesn't change because you don't like it either. But, I posit, by sounding jingoistic you're not doing yourself any favors.

I'll posit by sounding anti-western and anti-American you're not doing yourself any favors.

> Why does it matter?

Why are you afraid to say where you're from?

Goodbye.