I don't think they would drop a nuke completely unannounced. We would see news about new weapons capabilities, a new precision tactical bomb, possibly not even called a nuclear weapon. It's the old suitcase nuke from Cold War fiction made real. It would be stressed that the bomb is highly contained, tactical, precise, and controllable. This to front run any panic it may cause once detonated. Of course it's a lie. It's just a standard low yield nuke with a brand and marketing. It would be deployed the same as any other bomb. The idea would be to set off a baby nuke, minimizing fallout, and then sending some robots in to assess, followed by troops. This was pretty much the RAND strategy when they were advocating for usage of nukes in common warfare, minus the robots and concern for radiation.
Chapotraphouse
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
As others have said, there's little to be gained by such an action. That being said, the same could also have been said about going to war with Iran in the first place.
I think it's a meaningful, if largely unlikely, possibility that is worth discussing.
The US is in the process of being, for the first time in western media, roundly and thoroughly humiliated. If they start flinging nukes, it won't be to achieve a strategic objective, it will be to protect their notoriety as the dominant thugs of the world. And that objective does seem to be a priority lately.
There was little to be gained by starting this war completely unprepared for it, yet they did. They are now looking for a way out, a nuke seems like an obvious way out.
I think we will see ground troops first though. At this point our best hope is that this thing outlasts trump. On the other hand maybe it's the Israelis who are fucking crazy and also nuclear equipped we need to worry about.
best hope is that this thing outlasts trump.
I don't want to lathe something into existence, but a democrat in office would see libs go back to brunch when the US drops a nuke anyway. They will even cheer it on if someone like Harris or Buttigieg pulls the trigger, rationalizing it with "having to make the hard choices to protect democracy." The dem president will do it for domestic reasons the way Obama postured drone strikes on hospitals as looking tough in front of Republicans.
there's doubt in my mind but an alarmingly small amount of doubt and I do think we need a plan
Remember when they dropped the MOAB on that abandoned airfield in Syria during term 1? reportedly to placate the burning desire in all men for nuclear hellfire with which trump was becoming too entranced?
I'm at about 50/50 odds on someone doing a nuke and suspect I'm probably overly generously allowing an extra margin of optimism, allowing for unknown unknowns.
I also unironically don't believe in MAD doctrine because I don't believe the current regime would adhere to or respect MAD doctrine, so the logic of it all sort of falls apart and it's hard to know where the predictions made by those cold war theorists will break down in practice along an escalation ladder. But I think we are going to learn that nukes can be deployed and "life will go on" and that will be the end of MAD and we won't replace it.
Unless autonomous weapons platforms just do MAD because some idiot plugged an LLM into them and we've written the script for global annihilation so many times that it maybe have become a natural law in the logic of text prediction. 
They already functionally dropped a dirty bomb on Tehran by blowing up the oil refinery and heavily exposing 10 million people to otherwise still toxic carcinogens, didn't they?
They don't give a fuck about striking nuclear facilities and there is one 10 miles from the South Pars Gas Complex they just bombed. Millions of people exposed to dangerous chemicals...
The lib environmentalist NGOs of course never say shit about imperialist wars.
Imagine having to smell that everywhere you go.
The US and Israel are deeply sick nations, they practice the vulture capitalism form of imperialism only surpassed in brutality by Leopold of Belgium or some shit.
And what’s worse is that the populace tacitly approves of it, in the age of the internet and unlimited information. How much did the average Belgian even know?
I live among some of the worst people to exist in history, and I am one of them. This supposed guilt should have driven me to do a lot more but it did not.
Comrade, don't beat yourself up over this. I don't say this only out of compassion, though that much is true, as I've often struggled with guilt much like yours, but also because it is strategically important to know who the enemy is: it is not you, who wields no capital, but the ruling class who chooses to direct its power and capital towards its imperialist aims. It is not us who are destroying the planet; they are. It is our historic mission to fight back and end class oppression, so turn your unfounded guilt into righteous anger and look for ways to mobilize it against the evil you described
doesn't the lionshare of the responsibility fall on us for the collective silent consent for the ruling classes' actions?
What we all should do can't be discussed on a public website
No use in talking about what a bad person you are for not doing something instead of doing something.
Yeah but that's a dirty bomb that takes thinking to understand the ramifications of and that doesn't satisfy bloodthirst for the 
administration
I don't think even the US is stupid enough to pop the cork on that bottle. It carries only downsides and doesn't accomplish anything that other bombs can't do in large quantities.
Israel is absolutely that stupid, especially if shit starts looking existential
The current situation doesn’t seem remotely existential for Israel though. Iran can fling missiles but as we know that alone won't end a regime.
Settlers are cowards and a lot of them have somewhere else they can go. If Iran were to, say, take out their desalinization, the place gets pretty uninhabitable pretty quick
in our lifetime comrade! 
If Iran destroys power plants and desalination plants, it is absolutely existential. They could do it anytime they want and Israel is steadily climbing the escalation ladder
The US maybe not, Israel absolutely is insane enough, they're a death cult
Let's hope the yanki government doesn't go full on with evangelical zionism's apocalyptic predictions. Those literally believe on the second coming of Christ after a nuclear war on Pissrahell, as in Ezekiel chapter 39.
if by some miracle that terrific heap of hubris doesn't cause immediate global thermonuclear war (recite the shahada in this eventuality), Russia, China, DPRK and France will take care of the dissolution of US empire. If that doesn't yield a flailing apocalypse from the US's death bed (recite the shahada in that eventuality), we get world communism. it's elementary dialectics.
Russian, China, DPRK and France
what is 
doing here?
France's nuclear weapon's policy is incredibly unhinged. Their plan for not letting West Germany fall to the Soviets was to completely glass West Germany with nukes.
Posadism with Morgenthau characteristics
France is probably the only country more eager to use nukes than the United States. I believe they're the only current UN-official nuclear power with an explicit first-strike doctrine. I also recall an anecdote shared somewhere about a French general or official's disbelief at the extent of the US's nuclear stockpile and nuclear retaliation/escalation planning, with the reason given being "it doesn't take that many to remove Moscow from the map".
during the cold war their doctrine was also to saturate west germany with a heap of nukes to prevent a breakthrough in the Fulda Gap. (LMAO)
European nations will be put under France's 'nuclear umbrella' or Russia's. this is not a statement of France's rectitude, they're simply the european nation with a nuclear triad that is not the US, and will have to be rallied around if the US plunges the world into nuclear realpolitik.
it would be funny to see Napoleon's dream over the heap of Europe finally achieved 200 years later tho low key
Talking out my ass, byt imo the only way its possible is if Israel uses just one on a sparsely populated area as a show of force, maybe to clear the way for an actual landing of us troops
nukes have never been used in an offensive capacity where there weren't also alternative diplomatic off-ramps available
you dont drop nukes to get shit done, you drop nukes to drop nukes.
lotta people don't understand the nuclear grindset and are trying to analyse this materially.
you dont drop nukes to get shit done, you drop nukes to drop nukes.
Exactly…
nukes have never been used in an offensive capacity where there weren't also alternative diplomatic off-ramps available
The Japanese were actively trying to surrender to the Allies when the bombs fell on them.
You're getting caught up in the double negative, the post you're responding to is ironclad.
it is my bad for constructing such an atrocious sentence though
I do it all the time. It's obviously a sign of unbounded genius.
me 
you
[--- bell curve ---]
and to that end, nuking two cities is better than one, right? really make sure the whole world knows who the mad dog boss is.
make sure the whole world knows who the mad dog boss is
Well that was always the impression that I got. It was the way that the Burgerlanders signalled to the rest of the world (especially the USSR) that they were the new game in town and not to fuck with them.
They wanted to do bomb blast damage studies on virgin targets. No cap.
They'll need more than one to defeat Iran and more than one leads to Russia and China declaring war on the US
If the US wants to trigger the apocalypse on behalf of Israel, then oh well, capitalism will die with them, the Earth will endure
i don't see what we'd accomplish on the back of a nuke that we can't do before it. maybe more people would be willing to make a one-way trip for 
but that would just be revenge