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Aren't they holding the entire world at a gunpoint? They have bases everywhere.

I don't know how I'd otherwise describe post-1945 history. Japan was nuked to intimidate the Soviets, nukes were threatened from the 1950s onward in Vietnam, they were almost used in Korea against China, and the Cold War was a nuclear threat against non-white self-determination globally. American nukes exist to enforce American hegemony. Any other country is given the choice to accept/support military invasion or face nuclear annihilation.

the soviet union

nothing, and they already are, lmao

They are doing anything exactly that

That's the imperialism playbook. It's what the US has always done. Give us your resources or we'll fuck you up and take them.

What do you mean, stopping?

The reality of nukes is that for as many genocidal hands and intents have been on them, even the most despicable people are terrified of using them. even against people they're 100% sure don't have them. once a bomb goes off, anywhere, every nuclear state in the world is on a razor's edge deciding if they're under attack and need to retaliate, and small mistakes and provocations can cascade into global destruction.

They already are

"Comply with us, or we will kidnap your leader, bomb and occupy your land. Resist further and we will use nuclear weapons."

The US enjoys such a large advantage over most nations conventionally that nukes don't matter at that stage. The nuclear weapons are about war with China or Russia, in military terms "peer or near peer conflict".

And by far the scariest thing here, is that US decision makers absolutely believe nuclear war can be "won". In a sense that the US eliminates the adversaries ability to retaliate to the fullest extent it can, and takes less losses than the adversary. Nuclear war planning is nothing like the movies or TV. The book "On Thermonuclear War" by Herman Kahn is the most infamous and public argument for such logic.

There is plenty of things countries and people, even singular humans, can do, if they are willing to operate on entirely different level of spite.

But despite all propaganda, even hezbollah and hamas were not going after civilians specifically, even it were advantageous to do so.

Like plausibly, and i keep mentioning this, with clean lab, diy dna sequence synthesizer and couple of gpus you can make novel viruses to your hearts content, it costs like 500k all in all + 2-3 ideologically committed people. Instead of making bombs, poisoning water supply chains is wildly cheap, even if more complicated to pull off.

The simple matter is, the countries don’t want to go full tilt on spite, even as insurance policy and rather make deals to enrich local compradors.

Say every invaded country releases some virus costing 20 million cows infected with prions, or whatever, simple, costly, impossible to detect and harder avoid, direct hit to treatlerism. Or you can spend 200 millions on conventional weapons which you don’t even turn on.

Nuke is same as other options, their (chemical and biological) barbarity is the western construct, in any plausible nuke deterrence use, you threaten to nuke population centers just the same as less sophisticated brethren in response to attack, the level of barbarity and disregard for human life is the same.

What makes you think they aren't?

Iraq gave up their chemical weapons, and Hussein got overthrown. Libya gave up their chemical weapons, and Gaddafi got overthrown. Ukraine have up its chemicals weapons, and is being overthrown. North Korea got a nuke, and Trump met with, and praised Kim Jong Un.

Thank you everyone for sharing your perspectives. Yes, I was already aware of the U.S. holding the world at regular gunpoint, my reason for writing this post was mostly because of my own anxieties of a looming nuclear catastrophe. I've had many nightmares ending with a mushroom cloud on the horizon. It was also a long winded way to express my morbid curiosity about how far the U.S. will be willing to go in the future.

Thank you all for grounding my perspective, I conclude that a nuclear gun just isn't as effective as a regular one. I also conclude that even if the leadership of the U.S. is evil incarnate and their country is a modern bandit kingdom they still wouldn't dare push the button when Russian and Chinese nukes exist.

This is also a mentality barrier. As long as we allow them to wield that threat over the world, they will never stop. The nukes aren't going away, and at some point "death to Amerikkka... unless they have nukes in which case Amerikkka can do whatever they want to anyone anywhere" will have to become "no, really, just death to Amerikkka."

There is this idea that we just accept that any kind of nuclear confrontation will result in a chain reaction that destroys the world. That's possible, yes, and terrifying. But is it the only possible outcome? Could an existential threat wake the US the fuck up and remind it that it can die just like everyone else? It seems like that's what's missing right now. The US sees itself as untouchable because it is, no one is willing to try to fight back, and as long as it continues to believe that, it will continue to bully and subjugate the entire world.

Would Pete Hegseth and the other devils behave this way if there was a real, serious risk of them and their families being vaporised in an instant? Would their billionaire masters risk it? I think they might think twice, but no one actually has the guts and they know it and it emboldens them.

The US has ~80,000 special operators within its military.

The military brag about needing roughly 1,000 special operators to topple a country.

We just saw Trump do it.

The United States has become a hydra. So its nuclear arsenal is not the tip of its spear.

Nothing