> When BGP traffic is being sent from point A to point B, it can be rerouted through a point C. If you control point C, even for a few hours, you can theoretically collect vast amounts of intelligence that would be very useful for government entities. The CANTV AS8048 being prepended to the AS path 10 times means there the traffic would not prioritize this route through AS8048, perhaps that was the goal?
AS prepending is a relatively common method of traffic engineering to reduce traffic from a peer/provider. Looking at CANTV's (AS8048) announcements from outside that period shows they do this a lot.
Since this was detected as a BGP route leak, it looks like CANTV (AS8048) propagated routes from Telecom Italia Sparkle (AS6762) to GlobeNet Cabos Sumarinos Columbia (AS52320). This could have simply been a misconfiguration.
Nothing nefarious immediately jumps out to me here. I don't see any obvious attempts to hijack routes to Dayco Telecom (AS21980), which was the actual destination. The prepending would have made traffic less likely to transit over CANTV assuming there was any other route available.
The prepending done by CANTV does make it slightly easier to hijack traffic destined to it (though not really to Dayco), but that just appears to be something they just normally do.
This could be CANTV trying to force some users of GlobeNet to transit over them to Dayco I suppose, but leaving the prepending in would be an odd way of going about it. I suppose if you absolutely knew you were the shortest path length, there's no reason to remove the prepending, but a misconfiguration is usually the cause of these things.
I guess one of the interesting things I learnt off this article(1) was that 7% of DNS query types served by 1.1.1.1 are HTTPS and started wondering what HTTPS query type was as I had only heard of A, MX, AAAA, SPF etc...
Apparently that is part of implementing ECH (Encrypted Client Hello) in TLS 1.3 where the DNS hosts the public key of the server to fully encrypt the server name in a HTTPS request. Since Nginx and other popular web servers don't yet support it, I suspect the 7% of requests are mostly Cloudflare itself.
(1) https://radar.cloudflare.com/?ref=loworbitsecurity.com#dns-q...
It’s also how browsers detect a website supports HTTP3. Browsers will request it just to check if they should connect to an https:// URL via HTTP3 (though they generally don’t block on it - they fallback to HTTP1/2 if it takes too long).
> It’s also how browsers detect a website supports HTTP3
It's one way, but a H1/H2 connection can also be promoted to H3 via the alt-svc header. The DNS method is slightly better though since it potentially allows a client to utilize H3 immediately from the first request.
Would that help against a man in the middle that blocks the H3 traffic to snoop the URL when the client falls back to H2?
Every browser requires H2 connections to be encrypted so I don't think a MITM downgrading to it would reveal anything. Downgrading to H1 might do since encryption is optional there, but the proper way to prevent that is to submit your domains to the HSTS preload list so that browsers will always require encryption, regardless of protocol, no exceptions.
Caddy supports it, and has quite a bit written about it: https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https#encrypted-clien...
There’s an odd skew in that data which is saying the *third* most popular TLD is ‘.st’ which is… unexpected. The biggest service I can find using that TLD is `play.st` so maybe PlayStation clients are early adopters of DNS-over-HTTPS via 1.1.1.1.
Weird. Or maybe someone looking up `te.st` a lot?
Caddy has supported it for several months now, although I do agree most the requests are in fact Cloudflare.
Wait, so you do not leak the host through DNS with this? I have not checked it out yet.
Encrypted DNS has existed for quite a while now through DNS over HTTPS, the missing link was that to connect to a website, you first had to send the server the hostname in plaintext to get the right public key for the site. So someone listening on the wire could not see your DNS requests but would effectively still get the site you connected to anyway.
The new development (encrypted client hello) is you no longer have to send the hostname. So someone listening in the middle would only see you connected to an AWS/etc IP. This will make blocking websites very difficult if they use shared services like cloudflare or cloud VPS hosting.
> blocking websites very difficult if they use shared services like cloudflare or cloud VPS hosting.
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.
> This will make blocking websites very difficult if they use shared services like cloudflare or cloud VPS hosting.
Until some clueless judge orders all of cloudflare to be blocked.
Western governments just send a court order to the hosting provider to shut the site down / revoke their domain name. Site blocking is more of a problem for small counties trying to block sites the rest of the world allows to be hosted.
In terms of privacy, your DNS history probably isn't very interesting. It's almost all going to be requests for the top social media sites. Which governments have full access to the stuff you post there.
In principle, it means you could run multiple sites from the same IP and someone intercepting traffic to that IP (but not the client’s DNS path) couldn’t tell what site each connection was to. It mostly makes sense for CDNs, where the same IP will be used for many sites.
If you don’t use a CDN at all, the destination IP leaks what site you’re trying to connect to (if the domain is well known). If you use a CDN without ECH, you send an unencrypted domain name in the HTTPS negotiation so it’s visible there. ECH+CDN is an attempt to have the best of both worlds: your traffic to the site will not advertise what site you’re connecting to, but the IP can still be shared between a variety of sites.
It’ll be interesting to see how countries with lighter censorship schemes adapt - China etc. of course will just block the connection.
Even for China so-called "overblocking" where to censor a small thing you have to block a much larger thing, is a real concern with these technologies. There's a real trade here, you have to expend effort and destroy potential and in some cases the reward isn't worth it. You can interpret ECH as an effort to move the ratio, maybe China was willing to spend $5000 and annoy a thousand people to block a cartoon site criticising their internal policies, but is it willing to sped $50 000 and annoy a ten thousand people? How about half a million and 100K people ?
> That requires the client to only emit ECH
So for example, Firefox since version 119. Or Chrome since 117
Now, for most services ECH doesn't have an encrypted target server. But the important choice in ECH was in this case it just fills that space with noise. An encrypted message also looks like noise. So you can block all the noise, in case it's secrets, or you can let through all the noise (some of which might be secrets) or I suppose you can choose randomly, but you can't do what such regimes want, which is to only forbid secrets, that's not a thing.
We've been here before. When sites starting going to TLS 1.3 lots of HN people said oh, China will just block that, easy. But the choice wasn't "Use TLS 1.3 or keep doing whatever China is happy with instead" the choice was "Use TLS 1.3 or don't connect" and turns out for a lot of the Web China wasn't OK with "don't connect" as their choice, so TLS 1.3 is deployed anyway.
> In theory, sites could eventually require ECH to serve anything at all. But we're very far from that.
I doubt the Chinese government would care about that. They don't depend on the west for their online services any more than we depend on them. All that would happen is that the internet would bifurcate to an even greater degree than it already has.
It's extremely helpful at home in the west as a countermeasure against data monetization and dragnet surveillance. It certainly isn't perfect but at least it reduces the ability of ISPs to collect data on end users as well as forcing the government to formally move against the cloud providers if they want the data. Not that I want the cloud providers having my data to begin with but that's a different rant.
This is so you do not leak the host through TLS. Using DNS to serve an encryption key.
It’s not just encrypted server name indication (ESNI), it is the whole hello now (ECH)! So you don’t leak anything.
My read is you still leak the host with DNS. This only prevents leaking the host with SNI. A useful piece but not at all the holy grail.
Adguard Home and others can be configured to complete your DNS requests over HTTPS (using, for example, https://dns.cloudflare.com/dns-query).
That's not what this is about.
HTTPS is the name of a protocol, which is mostly used to make the World Wide Web work, but we do lots of other things with it, such as DNS-over-HTTPS aka DoH.
However HTTPS is also the name of a type of DNS record, this record contains everything you need to best reach the named HTTPS (protocol) server, and this is the type of record your parent didn't previously know about
In the boring case, say, 20 years ago, when you type https://some.name/stuff/hats.html into a web browser your browser goes "Huh, HTTPS to some.name. OK, I will find out the IPv4 address of some.name, and it makes a DNS query asking A? some.name. The DNS server answers with an IPv4 address, and then as the browser connects securely to that IP address, it asks to talk to some.name, and if the remote host can prove it is some.name, the browser says it wants /stuff/hats.html
Notice we have to tell the remote server who we hope they are - and it so happens eavesdroppers can listen in on this. This means Bad Guys can see that you wanted to visit some.name. They can't see that you wanted to read the document about hats, but they might be able to guess that from context, and wouldn't you rather they didn't know more than they need to?
With the HTTPS record, your web browser asks (over secure DNS if you have it) HTTPS? some.name and, maybe it gets a positive answer. If it does, the answer tells it not only where to try to connect, but also it can choose to provide instructions for a cover name to always use, and how to encrypt the real name, this is part of Encrypted Client Hello (or ECH)
Then the web server tells the server that it wants to talk to the cover name and it provides an encrypted version of some.name. Eavesdroppers can't decrypt that, so if many people share the same endpoints then eavesdropper can't tell which site you were visiting.
Now, if the server only contains documents about hats, this doesn't stop the Secret Hat Police from concluding that everybody connecting to that server is a Hat Pervert and needs to go to Hat Jail. But if you're a bulk host then you force such organisations to choose, they can enforce their rules equally for everything (You wanted to read News about Chickens? Too bad, Hat Jail for you) or they can accept that actually they don't know what people are reading (if this seems crazy, keep in mind that's how US Post worked for many years after Comstock failed, if you get a brown paper package posted to you, well, it's your business what is in there, and your state wasn't allowed to insist on ripping open the packaging to see whether it is pornography or communist propaganda)
> so if many people share the same endpoints then eavesdropper can't tell which site you were visiting.
Which is why it is so important/useful to Cloudflare but of much lower utility to most nginx users.
Cloudflare provides a very large haystack for this, but even for an nginx server with no CDN, it's still useful to prevent the hostname from being sent in the clear before the TLS connection is negotiated. This still hides the hostname from casual eavesdroppers, who now only know what IP you're connecting to, and would need need out-of-band information to map the IP back to a hostname. And they couldn't ever be 100% sure of that, because they wouldn't know for certain whether there are additional vhosts running on a given server.
I think you might be surprised at how heavily SNI is leveraged at places like GoDaddy, Bluehost, and other similar providers to host sites from hundreds of completely unrelated businesses on the same IP address.
This doesn't look like anything malicious, 8048 is just prepending these announcements to 52320.. If anything, it looks like 269832(MDS) had a couple hits to their tier 1 peers which caused these prepended announcements to become more visible to collectors.
Does it mean that countries must not buy American telecom equipments? Snowden already revealed the intromission of the government in Cisco routers.
Only the ones run by dictators.
Dictators the US doesn't support (so Sisi, MBS, MBZ, etc. are fine)
Was the OSRS economy affected by the strikes? I'm assuming they didn't disrupt internet access for most Venezuelan citizens but I have not looked into it yet.
My clanmates and I noticed that some of the more popular goldfarming hotspots were much less populated that day. Rev caves, Zalcano, etc. Not sure about impacts for the broader economy though. Maybe FlippingOldSchool will release a video analyzing the economic trends over the course of that week? Would be interesting for sure.
Maybe they were out celebrating.
I'd say that an OSRS outage would be more likely to measurably affect the Venezuelan economy than the reverse.
Any osrs Venezuelan clans you’re looking to contact about this?
Yes, it looks like it definitely was: https://x.com/eslischn/status/1104542595806609408
Unless I'm missing an update, it appears that this post is from 2019?
that's in 2019
There were reports they had considered Christmas Day and New Year's Day. I wonder if it was far enough along that you could see similar BGP anomalies around those times.
Not from the cloudflare dashboard, you can zoom out. The night of the attack doesnt even really stand out as abnormal when zooming out that far.
So you're saying I can't set an alert for these conditions and use the timing to place a quick bet on the geopolitical polymarket du-jour?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-polymarket-user-made-more...
Yeah, I was thinking it definitely needs to be correlated to geopolitical tensions in some way. Polymarket data might be helpful in this case- and provides incentives for putting this kind of data together.
This is not unusual, CANTV has notoriously slow, expensive links, most ISPs in Venezuela would have it as a "backup" provider. If there is an outage of GlobeNet or TIM, it would cause those routes to disappear, leaving the CANTV routes up, which are heavily prepended to avoid routing through them on "normal" operations.
I wonder what kind of capabilities the US army didn't use during this operation.
BGP is so unsecure that almost anyone can create chaos.
Even by accident!
or even by normal load from someone deciding to split a /8 prefix into /24's
I worked as a contractor for a IoT gig that sold sim cards services for buses, trains et cetera.
The radio towers we used to access to obtain the accounting data (CDRs) all had the same very weak password.
Let’s be honest, that was a crazy operation. I wonder whether they really secured all chances of success, or just winged it with chances of not depositing the leader, and him being able to summon his diplomatic relations into 50 countries declaring war to the USA.
While on their way out, if the USA could set everything back to IPv6, that would be nice.
The outcome is less-crazy if one views it as assisting a palace-coup, partnering with a bunch of Venezuelan government and military insiders already seeking to depose Maduro, able to subtly clear the path and provide intel.
I personally think it is both. I think CBS article disclosed that CIA had someone in the inner circle. That, however, does not really take away from how well coordinated it actually was. That does not mean it was a good idea to do it. Just because I can run around naked does not mean I should..
P.S.: In that scenario, it's quite possible for both groups of conspirators to benefit from denying it and saber-rattling:
* 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.
> him being able to summon his diplomatic relations into 50 countries declaring war to the USA.
As if. Dictators only do things that benefit themselves, and deciding to attack the US is suicide and/or world ending.
Took a long time to catch up with Bin Laden after he attacked the US.
That was moreso about taking down the ORG before cutting its head. Unfortunately their radical ideology spreads with or without Bin Laden.
Let’s be realistic.
Not easy to find one man in a haystack. Guerrilla warfare has always been insanely overpowered as a defense tactic anyways, as are terrorist attacks.
The US can realistically only be challenged militarily by Europe or Asia, assuming a unified continent, and the US is on the offensive. If it’s defensive, the US might put up a good fight against the rest of the planet.
we don't really have a way to tell if it was even real, it would actually be a rather trivial operation for the government during those times and the entire thing could have just been overplayed and/or involved collaboration from all sides.
none of those documents exist since it was probably never documented to begin with so we will never know I guess.
No one would lift a finger for him. Russia just watched. The Chinese too. They may be allies in words but in the end each dictator just care about themselves. Just like how Trump wouldn’t help any ally unless he got something out of it.
Power wins in anarchy. International relations are anarchy. There is no actual international law.
Not in any real sense because states are sovereign.
There are things like the UN which some states, not all, agree to uphold the policies of. But they are also free not to agree to uphold the policies of the UN.
So ultimately it's a bunch of peers in an an anarchic system that do the best for themselves to persist. Cooperation, war, etc.
There is something by that name, but it doesn't mean much. On the international level, it's all voluntary. States can choose to be part of the international courts. The US (and many other high profile countries) famously are not participating, which is why they can effectively just commit war crimes left and right.
In contrast, if you go rob a grocery store, you can't just opt out of punishment. "I'm not a member of this court system" does not work as a viable defense strategy, even if some souvreign citizen types sometimes try (and always fail).
International treaties are really just statements of intent and can be withdrawn at any point. Worst that happens is that next time you try to make a treaty, your counterpart may not trust that you uphold your side of the deal. There is no higher authority to effecticely appeal to, in contrast to the grocery store case.
I think it was meant in a "international law is a farce" sort of rhetoric
Of course they didn't. While I can't imagine Russia is exactly happy that it lost an ally in the Western Hemisphere, this kind of action is very much aligned with Putin's multi-polar worldview where the great powers leave each other to play empire in their respective spheres of influence. It helps justify things like invading Ukraine. I can imagine some in the Chinese military are over the moon right now, taking notes on how to force regime change in Taiwan.
> While on their way out, if the USA could set everything back to IPv6, that would be nice.
You actually think the US would leave things better than they found them?
Only when it's oil infrastructure.
They never ‘leave’ that.
There are two things that it's very important normies never learn much about: BGP and fractional reserve banking
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Is there a term for the distance between an acronym's first use and its definition?
Fascinating find and investigation. While there isn't a solid conclusion from it, glad it was written up, perhaps someone will be able to connect more dots with it.
If you were not already entirely reliant on American tech before, this ought to convince you to put jump in with both feet. What could possibly go wrong?
There is not really any reason to conclude that "american tech" was responsible for this attack. If anything, given all the sanctions Venezuela was under and how friendly they are with china, i would be surprised if they were using american tech in their infrastructure.
[Of course i agree with the broader point of dont become dependent on the technology of your geopolitical enemies]
There are other attack vectors beyond infrastructure though when the population all have Android Smart Phones running Play Services and communicate using WhatsApp.
I am not sure why you are being downvoted where nothing you said is inaccurate. This practice of reflexively downvoting when disagreeing really is starting to irk me. Argue with OP damn it. How is he wrong?
It’s for sure another alarm signal for the EU to further reduce dependencies on our newest geopolitical enemy… the United States of America.
It is insane that some people need more signals. It was clearly stated by US in February 2025 and several times after that.
> and turn to autocratic regimes like Russia instead of liberal democracies
They're applying secondary sanctions on Russian oil so China and India stop buying it despite there being a war on. Hardly "turning to Russia".
Most everyone in the world has a Google or Apple phone in their pocket. I'm not sure how much more reliant you can get.
It's pick-your-poison, really.
Technology is notoriously expensive to develop and manufacture. One must either have native capacity (and thus, the wealth) to do so, or must get it from someone else.
Other Western/US-aligned countries might have the ability to do so, albeit at geopolitical and economic cost, because the only thing you're likely to gain from kicking the US out of your tech stack and infrastructure is a tech stack and infrastructure free of the US. Meanwhile American companies will be developing new features and ways of doing things that add economic value. So at best, a wash economically. Maybe the geopolitical implications are enticing enough.
Places like Venezuela? Nah. They'll be trading the ability of Americans to jack with their tech infrastructure for the ability of the PRC, Non-US Western nations, or Russia to jack with their tech stack.
The geopolitics of technology are a lot like a $#1+ sandwich: the more bread you have, the less of someone else's $#1+ you have to eat.
What would be the result of this? I think it would route data through Sparkle as a way of potentially spying on internet traffic without having compromised the network equipment within Venezuela, but I'm not familiar enough with network architecture to really understand what happened.
Maybe there would be some benefit in just dropping some packets. For example to WhatsApp, Telegram, Gmail servers. Could add a communication delay that could be critical and denies people a fairly reliable fallback communication method.
The effect of this would be traffic from GlobeNet destined for Dayco would transit over CANTV's network for a period.
I'm not sure why the author singled out Telecom Italia Sparkle.
Alternative theory: Part of the operation caused power outages or disrupted some connections, the BGP anomalies were a result of that.
The data would make that more likely, because deliberately adding a longer route doesn't achieve much. It's not usually going to get any traffic.
The BGP anomalies were 24-hours~ before the power outage, so I'm not sure I follow what you're arguing.
What I mean is that cause and effect here could be different then the author thinks. We see some route changes, but those changes make no sense on their own since they wouldn't capture any traffic. That makes it more probable that BGP was not the attack, but that some other action caused this BGP anomalie as a side effect.
For example, maybe some misconfiguration caused these routes to be published because another route was lost. Which could very well be the actual cyber attack, or the effect of jamming, or breaking some undersea cable, or turning off the power to some place.
I think what the other commenter is saying is that the BGP changes happened 12 hours before any of the power loss/bomb drop, so that eliminates your primary cause.
At that earlier time, some preparatory action was likely already on its way.
For a length-15 ASpath to show up on the internet, a whole bunch of better routes need to disappear first, which seems to have happened here. But that disappearance is very likely unrelated to CANTV.
Furthermore, BGP routes can get "stuck", if some device doesn't handle a withdrawal correctly… this can lead to odd routes like the ones seen here. Especially combined with the long path length and disappearance of better routes.
There are BGP anomalies every day.
ELI5 for people not familiar in this domain?
From the article:
When BGP traffic is being sent from point A to point B, it can be rerouted through a point C. If you control point C, even for a few hours, you can theoretically collect vast amounts of intelligence that would be very useful for government entities.I wonder if this can be monitored on a global scale as a sort of predictor of “something gonna happen at country X”.
The lengths they will go to to stop people talking about the Epstein files
Symbolic link to the Cloudflare RPKI status for CANTV.
[1]:https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as8048ref=loworbitsecur...
missing a question mark https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as8048?ref=loworbitsecu...
Solid OSINT methodology here. The 10x AS path prepending is the most interesting detail to me b/c typically you'd see prepending used to de-prioritize a route, which raises the question: was this about making traffic avoid CANTV, or was it a side effect of something else?
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.
really?
?
Some pretty spooky comments in this thread from accounts with pretty low comment histories too…
If the system eats its own analysts, the doctrine question becomes moot.
Cyber-warfare capabilities on this level seem pretty horrific. What if you could simply turn off the power grid of Kyiv or Moscow in anticipation of a strike? That seems extremely disorientating. What if you could simply turn off the power grid indefinitely?
Russia attacks Ukrainian power grid on a weekly basis. Not only with cyber-attacks but with actual bombs. Over Christmas 750k homes in Kyiv were without power or heating. This is not a hypothetical it's daily reality for millions of people in Ukraine.
Something like this more or less happened during the initial Israeli strike on Iran ?
From what I remember reading, they were able to gain air dominance not because Iranian air-defense was bad, but because it was put almost completely out of service for a brief period of time by people on the ground - be it through sabotage, cyber-warfare, drone attacks from inside, allowing the Israeli jets to annihilate them.
> not because Iranian air-defense was bad, but because it was put almost completely out of service for a brief period of time by people on the ground - be it through sabotage, cyber-warfare, drone attacks from inside,
Wouldn't that constitute air defense being "bad"? There are no "well technically it should have worked" in war. Failing to properly secure the air defense sites is bad air defense.
Not really. Ferrari is a great car, but with punctured tires or bad driver, it won't win any race.
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.
A Ferrari with punctured tires isn’t a great car, it can’t drive. It’s an immobile, useless hunk of metal with a great engine and transmission, similar to disabled air defense systems: really expensive, useless hunks of metal.
See the remotely operated Spike missiles: https://www.twz.com/news-features/spike-missiles-that-destro...
The unquestioning logistical and intelligence support from the US military is truly formidable, and probably expensive.
> What if you could simply turn off the power grid of Kyiv or Moscow in anticipation of a strike?
I expect every major world power has a plan to (attempt to) do precisely that to their enemies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_bomb
> The US Navy used sea-launched Tomahawk missiles with Kit-2 warheads, involving reels of carbon fibers, in Iraq as part of Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War in 1991, where it disabled about 85% of the electricity supply. The US Air Force used the CBU-94, dropped by F-117 Nighthawks, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on 2 May 1999, where it disabled more than 70% national grid electricity supply.
I would not, however, take "Trump said something" as indicative of much. "It was dark, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have, it was dark, and it was deadly" is both visibly untrue from the video evidence available, and is the precise sort of off-the-cuff low-fact statement he's prone to.
General Caine specifically said they utilized CYBERCOM (which is the US inter-branch hacking command) to pave the way for the special ops helicopters. I personally have no doubt that any (whether or not they all were) lights being out was due to a US hack. Some of the stuff that got blown up may well have been to prevent forensic recover of US tools and techniques.
I have no doubt they used cyberattacks and electronic warfare.
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.
Also: “Everything’s computer!”
On the other hand, Trump has a track record of leaking capabilities.
Read about Stuxnet
It's been well known to be a major part of world power war plans for like 20 years now. Yes, it's a terrifying concept.
Russia tried. They haven’t managed to do anything very serious.
There are way worse things you could do, you could hide explosives in consumer electronics and infiltrate the supply lines to replace them. Then you could detonate them all simultaneously, indiscriminately murdering everyone around them as well. But of course only fascist barbarians would ever do or support that sort of thing.
I don't think calling shutting down the internet horrific is appropriate at all in the context of bombings.
Ridiculous post. Power outages would kill a lot of people if sustained. A Carrington event would devastate modern society.
You mean in hospital contexts?
I'm having trouble thinking how power outages can be deadly.
If it's hot/cold, elderly/vulnerable people tend to die pretty quick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_European_heatwaves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
You'll get some food poisoning deaths from food that got too warm in fridges. People who rely on home medical equipment like oxygen concentrators. Car crashes in busy intersections that no longer have traffic lights. Fires from candles. etc. etc. etc.
Even critical infrastructure eventually craps out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/science/atomic-clock-late...
Look for the same with Greenland or Canada next :/
the rest of the world is weirdly too passive, there's a smell of shock
I don't think anybody cares any bit about Maduro.
understandably, it's more about the acceleration in aggressiveness from Trump clan and the precedent of crossing the usual international red lines
Almost every country made some repudiation note. But I don't think we'll see anybody doing any actual thing because of that.
IMHO the rest of the world isn't asleep. Denmark's prime minister said the same as you, for example. US just got roasted at UN by inter alia, France, with ~20 countries either speaking the same or asking to speak on it. That's just from 30s with front page of nytimes.com.
In EU, so far I believe only the PM of Spain had the backbone to speak properly with anything that could be considered "strongly worded", proving that it's possible.
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.
This has happened because the party that rules Spain has ties to the dictatorship.
This goes so far that one of the ministers of the government met in Spain with Delcy Rodriguez, bringing her a few briefcases of something that hasn't been explained yet, despite her being subject to a travel ban in the EU.
Of course this is a progressive government so the EU said absolutely nothing about it.
It’s really dumb I’m sitting at -2 and the top reply is about a Macron tweet from 2 days ago, lying and saying no one else from Europe has said anything, and lying and saying anything besides the King of Spain was actually celebrating. You’re making stuff up. Full stop. You could easily have googled either thing I mentioned. You didn’t, choosing to free associate instead. May you reap what you sow.
Given that the nukes topic came up ... Will the US/Trump be so aggressive if Denmark has a few nukes that can hit the US? Or at minimum sink a invading fleet?
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.
That just sounds like more 'strongly worded letters' which never go anywhere and they never do anything about.
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.
Isn't this comment just confirming GP's sentiment that the EU is a toothless sitting duck that's begging to be plundered? Yes, when another country threatens your sovereignty you're supposed to vigorously defend it through shows of force, prepare for war and possibly impose economic penalties on the aggressor. The most the EU can do is put out some mild condemnations on Twitter (without mentioning Daddy).
One non military but economical retaliation that would affect our industry is to stop respecting American’s intellectual property. Some variation of the trade bazooka. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument
> What does action (i.e. not-strongly-worded-letters, i.e. not words) look like?
Europe withdraws from the non-proliferation treaty, publicly resolves to building and maintaining a European nuclear deterrent and greenlights members who have been militarily threatened (the Baltics, Poland and Denmark) to start clandestine programmes.
The last part doesn't even have to happen. Hell, none of it has to happen. But that would be playing from strength.
Unfortunately, Europe is not politically unified enough to do this. (Same for Asia.)
Any sort of pushback at all would be an improvement.
Even now, the EU Commission is trying to 'defuse' the Greenland situation by trying to invoke NATO's fifth article, as if that's worth anything without the will of the USA behind it. You know, instead of like actually drawing out plans for a military alliance, economic retribution (remember all those sanctions against Big Tech which fell apart the moment Trump made even the slightest comment against them?) or… just about anything.
Laws are worth even less than the paper they're written on, and no amount of naïve idealism (and calling it that is me being generous!) will change that. NATO membership is worthless other than as an aesthetic signifier.
Action probably looks like crash-starting multiple nuclear weapons programs. With or without the help of the british/french. Probably with.
I'd imagine programs from: the Nordics and Poland+Baltics. Maybe Germany, probably not.
Canada has a strong army and can defend itself. Greenland on the other hand is not well defended and I doubt Denmark really cares (e.g., if they’re willing to send tens of thousands of troops to die for it) if it was occupied by China or Russia in the event of a war.
Greenland is a massive strategic liability for the US and Europe (although the EU still has its head in the sand they are starting to wake up some).
Not sure why this got downvoted; we're threatening it again, credibly enough that the Danish PM is telling them to shut up.
Yesterday:
> Adding to the alarm, Katie Miller, a right-wing podcast host and the wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, posted an image of Greenland superimposed with the American flag and the caption "SOON!"
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/greenland/trump-venezuela-atta...
> Not sure why this got downvoted
Fragile egos. Narcissists desperately need to feel good about themselves. They're caught in a cycle: feel worthless -> do bad things (feed the ego) -> feel worthless.
Whose egos?
wait whose a16z. Can you provide me more context about it?
Also what was written in that comment if you can tell and why it died?
Another quick question but is there no storage of flag/died posts on hackernews? Seems like its possible with things like https://hn.live/ or I saw some other website like this as well. Perhaps, something like this can store flag/dead posts but I am not really sure if it has any use case but I am just curious what was written in that post.
It's not only downvoted, it was flagged, and dead. (flag accepted by moderator, no one else will see this comment thread without expanding)
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.
Ill speculate as to why, paid astroturfers are posting it. Look at Twitter, most accounts that post that insane trump loving crap are in third world countries.
Probably just a coincidence that Garry Tan and Marc Andreseen have so publicly aligned themselves with a cabal of pedophiles.
> this site is control of Mark Eggman Andrreesen
You're mixing up your VCs?
Typical cyber warfare techniques.
The only anomaly was military. As far as I can tell, Venezuela's AD was shut down, or told to shut down.
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.
I assume that nuclear capability would rule out a target from this kind of snatch operation, and that this event will add pressure to proliferate.
Indeed. The DPRK was right from the start. They always were.
For the longest time I thought they'd gone too far, but now we're the clowns putting on a show.
Sure, but there must always be a fear that the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty. And may tolerate a coupe instead. Which then reduces the madness and the deterrent effect. The extra step the Dprk have taken is to try and build bunkers so that the regime could survive the destruction of the country. A step further into madness that goes beyond what western countries have been willing to accept.
The US built a lot of bunkers like this back in the 1950's.
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.
There are something like 20,000 airports and heliports across the US. While not all of them can handle 747s probably there are several thousand fields that can take one of them, especially if there is no need for it to fly again.
And even if all of those fields are destroyed in the US, the 747s modified for AF1 (VC-25s) are capable of in flight refueling, they can stay up for about three days before the oil needs to be changed on the engines and they are forced to land. So they can still reach Australia or some place far away from the US if the rest of the US is totally destroyed.
Given the extent of planning that went into these types of doomsday survival scenarios, I wouldn't be surprised to find there are pre-prepared discreet runways in obscure locations unlikely to be targeted. Not full concrete runways, just a strip of prepared land that would see a 747 land without exploding into a ball of fire.
Dry lake beds abound in the US West. See Edwards AFB (big dry lake bed on which nearly everything, including the Space Shuttle, has landed). See also Groom Lake. These are enormous and couldn't be wrecked by conventional runway denial weapons.
Those interstate highways are starting to look pretty good as the fuel guage drops
there's a fair argument to make that a nation that drops a nuclear bomb on a city isn't "civilized"
You should read Blood Meridian.
> And may tolerate a coupe instead
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.
Aren't there bunkers near dc for that reason though?
Feels like our politicians and MIC higher ups are preparing themselves for nuclear war but not building the rest of us any bunkers
Not to mention the bunkers being built by various Silicon Valley billionaires, who by rights should be considered appendages of the U.S. state.
“And may tolerate a coupe instead.”
I could tolerate a coupe but I’d prefer a sports car :-/
coup
> the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty
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.
Realistically speaking you're going to die of starvation or get shot by marauding gangs, or die of cancer a few decades later from radiation in the food change. NukeMap [1] has good visualizations of the relative fireball vs. blast vs. thermal radiation vs. fallout radiuses. One thing that stands out: most of the suburbs is going to survive the initial nuclear exchange. At worst, they'll have a few broken windows.
The problem is that if you eliminate ~20% of a nation's population, supply chains, continuity of government, and the economy aren't going to last long. Social organization breaks down much more widely than people die. The resultant pullback of all the trapping of society - reliable food supply, clean water, transportation infrastructure, electricity, heat - is going to kill many more people than the nukes will.
Yah, but you could enter the ruins of some shop, get some booze there, and walk straight into ground zero. Feeling the buzz. Getting tired...drifting away...
Vaporized is good with me. Not so keen to have my body melt over several days due to acute radiation exposure though...
Giving up is really very common in war.
Note that MAD only works when there are a small number of players. Once it gets up past around 12, a.) it becomes too easy to detonate a nuclear weapon and then blame somebody else to take the fall and b.) the chance of somebody doing something crazy and irrational becomes high. Same reason that oligopolies can have steady profit but once you have ~10-12 market players you enter perfect competition and inevitably get a price war.
There are 9 nuclear-armed states today. Likely this has set us on a path where nuclear war is inevitable.
>There are 9 nuclear-armed states today. Likely this has set us on a path where nuclear war is inevitable.
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.
The problem is the precedent that sets. Russia launches a nuke on Ukraine, and there are no repercussions. That will teach every nuclear-armed state that they can freely nuke non-nuclear-armed states without consequence. But then what happens when somebody makes a mistake? China nukes Japan, but maybe Japan had a secret nuclear program and actually does have a retaliatory capability and nukes China back? Or China invades Taiwan (doesn't even have to nuke it), but the U.S. decides that the loss of Taiwanese semiconductor is actually an unacceptable red line and nukes the invasion fleet? Pakistan nukes India, but China misjudges the trajectory of the nuke and thinks it's actually under attack. Israel nukes Iran, but winds carry the fallout over Pakistan and India.
Game theory works when players know the payout matrix. When the assumed payout matrix is shown to be false, you get very chaotic, almost random results, because you can't assume that your opponents will correctly choose the rational choice. With WMDs, the consequences of that can be deadly. That's why both nuclear proliferation and "limited" nuclear war are such fraught choices, and why the major nuclear powers have worked so hard to avoid them. They've run the game theoretic simulations and understand that it doesn't lead anywhere good.
Yeah yeah yeah, this is the new narrative that I keep seeing. "A small nuke, as a treat."
It's scary, but it's fine!
Yeah I imagine we’ll see a cottage industry of small countries with nukes in ten-fifteen years.
Plenty of places have uranium and unless they are being watched like Iran they can just set up clandestine enrichment operations.
I think have thousands of artillery shells aimed at Seoul is the larger deterrent.
The nukes are to deter the US. They have been steadily increasing their missile range to first reach regional bases like Guam and now the all the way to the continental USA, and are now even launching a nuclear powered and nuclear armed ballistic missile submarine https://www.hisutton.com/DPRK-SSN-Update.html
The nukes have many roles perhaps but I think the fully developed weapons are for retaliatory strike.
They are the North Korean leadership saying that if the US (or China or anyone really) tries to surgically decapitate them (like the US just did in Venezuela) then the nukes are used to take the attackers with them
> Artillery on Seoul doesn't matter. The US would just ask SK to evacuate it.
How do you evacuate 10 to 15 million(counting Incheon in) of people, fast? Where to?
The importance of this is often exaggerated. It's significant, but it's not that significant. RAND Corporation modeled this, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA619-1.html
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.
They're safe, but at what cost?
They drive old cars, have slow internet and can't visit the coliseum. They're not invited to the cool parties.
[flagged]
NK is protected by China, a very credible force.
Maduro may have been aligned with them, but that is a completely different thing than being protected by them. The DPRK is actually protected by the PRC, in the sense that the PRC is willing to and historically did deploy millions of soldiers to push back Americans from North Korean territory.
This is only partially true.
China's primary concern is resource extraction from Venezuela, which is why Trump immediately clarified that they'd make sure China still got their oil deliveries.
Russia is stretched way too thin right now to do anything meaningful about it.
Venezuela was basically being run by Cuba. Maduro was really only a figurehead. The military and government was functionally run by imported Cubans which is why a coup wasn't possible.
What's Trump's kill count at, just to move media focus away from the Trump-Epstein files.
Well, that's fine then, as long as the dictator you support murdered fewer people.
Well, really any leader who dissatisfies the president of the US, really
From bgp hijacking? Almost certainly not.
It would probably rule out the type of decapitation strike the US did, but bgp hijacking is way way below on the escalation ladder.
Nuclear capability wouldn't necessarily rule out this kind of a decapitation strike, it's just that it's very hard to imagine this kind of an operation actually being successful in any nuclear-capable country.
The US couldn't just fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes. Most likely every single one of those helicopters would end up being shot down.
Nuclear capability by itself isn't a complete deterrent. It has been widely reported that the US military has made contingency plans for a decapitation strike and seizure or destruction of nuclear weapons in Pakistan in case the situation turns really bad there. Real deterrence requires a credible second-strike capability on survivable platforms such as submarines.
>There is enough pain for the US that they wouldn't actually attack Pakistan.
The US does have the advantage that the surviving Pakistani nukes might very well end up flying to India instead :)
> There is enough pain for the US that they wouldn't actually attack Pakistan
These are the states whose Senators are in play this year [1].
Let's say Trump decides it's fuck-around-with-Islamabad-o'clock. He fucks around. Pakistan nukes at India. How many of those Senate seats flip as a result? I'm going to guess none.
Let's go one step further. Pakistan nukes Al Udeid and Camp Arifjan (both theoretically within range of their Shaheen-III). American troops are killed. Does the President's party lose any seats? At that point, I'd bet on a rally-'round-the-flag effect.
The truth is there isn't political downside to the President fucking around with Pakistan. Its nuclear deterrent isn't designed to contain America. And it can't threaten us with maybe the one thing that could make Trump suffer, a refugee crisis.
I think nuclear deterrence works even in such situations. The retaliatory system is structured in such a way that after decapitation, the decision to use or not use a nuclear weapon is made not by the "number two" or the "successor" but by a person specifically authorized to do so, about whom the successors and number two may know nothing.
Didn't we just do something like that in Iran? Not helicopters, but we still secured the airspace just the same.
If you mean during the israel-iran war, israel was allegedly using non-stealth planes once the airspace was secure.
Still probably quite a bit different then helicopter inserted decapitation strike.
Maybe Pakistan, or Israel.
Well yes, the US could certainly easily kidnap leaders of friendly countries. It'd also presumably be very unlikely to result in a nuclear response from either.
Honestly from what we learned in the earlier attacks on Iran the USA probably could take a quick trip over to Tehran and grab the Ayatollah.
I think clanky covered this pretty well, but dropping bombs from high altitude stealth bombers and fighter jets is very very far from actually delivering and extracting soldiers from a location.
The US could probably bomb even Beijing, it doesn't really tell you anything that they were able to bomb Iran also.
It's odd that Iran was able to continue launching waves of ballistic missiles and drones at Israel after they had supposedly lost so much control over their skies that it would have been possible to hover a Chinook over Tehran for 5 minutes.
>It's extremely difficult to believe that the US could fly a bunch of helicopters to Pyongyang or Tehran and do the same within 30 minutes.
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.
>A helicopter assault on either of those cities would in the most optimistic scenario take hours of preparatory bombing, which would give a plenty of time for nuclear retaliation b
I have serious doubts they can manage anything more than a fizzle yield, but also only give them a one-in-three chance of a successful ballistic launch. It may be the case that they don't even have the preparatory work done, in which case hours isn't enough to launch, they'd need days/weeks. In any event, we're talking about one or two missiles only, and the Navy's ability to shoot those down in the midcourse/terminal phase is sufficient for such a small salvo.
If North Korea wanted to nuke us, they'd be better off handing the warhead off to some terrorist group to truck it across the Mexican border. Supposing their stuff is even small enough to smuggle.
>Tehran doesn't have a fancy air defense network, but it does have one.
But it doesn't have a China willing to rush in with 1 million PLA infantry. Which is really North Korea's only saving grace. Even if we got Kim out before they could mobilize, they'd be strutting and posturing for weeks, and there are any number of places they could fuck things up in retaliation. Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Japan, they might even stir shit up with India. They could, one supposes, send a few divisions to Russia on loan, and enter into the Ukraine fray. And no clever strategy is going to counter that stuff. Some of this stuff they're already considering and only hesitant... a North Korea operation might goad them into working up the courage to try it.
The reporting suggests there was some kind of deal struck between the US and elements of the VZ administration, and even nuclear capability doesn't prevent that
It will increase the desire for nukes, but also increase the hesitation to seek them now that credibility and capability (particularly what modern intelligence is capable of) are demonstrated. Hard to say how this nets off.
>I assume that nuclear capability would rule out a target from this kind of snatch operation
Why would it?
1. "Nuclear capability" is not binary. The available delivery mechanisms and the defensive capabilities of your adversary matter a lot.
2. MAD constrains both sides. It's unlikely that an unpopular Head of State getting kidnapped would warrant a nuclear first strike especially against a country like (Trump's) America, which would not hesitate to glass your whole country in response.
3. It's extremely risky to "try" a nuke, because even if it's shot down, does it mean your enemy treats it as a nuclear strike and responds as if it had landed? That's a very different equation from conventional missiles. E.g. Iran sends barrages of missiles because they expect most of them to be shot down. It's probably not calculating a scenario where all of them land and Israel now wants like-for-like revenge.
> an unpopular Head of State
Heads of state are generally pretty good at delegating the C&C of their nukes to people they are pretty popular with. That's orthogonal to popularity polls of the populace.
Yeah but those people read the popularity polls as well. If you kill or capture the leader, there isn’t much upside in retaliation against a massively more powerful enemy. The best move is to cozy up to whomever is in power next.
> The best move is to cozy up to whomever is in power next.
Why care whomever is in power next? You could just do your job.
So, the solution is to press the nuclear button, get a couple hundred million dollars from an offshore account in Cyprus, and live in any country of your choice. Why care about polls in this hole, and what the US will do with this hole in response to the use of nuclear weapons?
You pick people for that job that aren't that concerned with the popularity polls, and who's main value add is a willingness to turn the key when told to. Either directly or because they were previously told to follow the process.
Counterpoint is that Ukraine, Qaddafi, and Assad already demonstrated the significance of maintaining certain capabilities. Vzla didn't have those capabilities before, much less publicly depreciate them.
Ukraine wouldn’t have been invaded if they hadn’t given up their nuclear weapons.
I have a few questions about that:
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?
> However Ukraine designed and built the ICBMs
Your computer is designed and built in China therefore your computer belongs to Chinese and China. Right?
> See above
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.
Most non-nuclear heads of state have never had their leader kidnapped, either.
Alternatively, we might have entered either a limited or a worst-case nuclear war scenario.
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.
The psychopaths in charge of Russia still like living comfortably.
Russia promised not to invade if Ukraine gave up the nukes.
If Putin didn't want NATO getting involved if he started a war there's one special trick he could have played! He could have not started a war ...
The only reason Ukraine joining NATO is a problem is if Putin/Russia (or someone else) wants to attack them.
I know there's a real risk of peaceful trade, mutual alliance, humanity, and democracy from breaking out in such circumstances but somehow I think the risk might be worth it for the billions of us who aren't completely fucked up megalomaniacs.
s/devil/putin/
No no no, some random American diplomat told a random Soviet diplomat during the East Germany negotiations that NATO wouldn't extend east at all.
No, it wasn't put on paper anywhere.
No, it wasn't mentioned (much) when the countries of eastern Europe all chomped at the bit to join NATO in the 90s.
No, it completely makes the Budapest Memorandum bunk.
No, the people of Ukraine absolutely do not have the agency to want to pivot towards the EU and become wealthy and stable like the former Warsaw Pact countries did. It must have been the CIA, so Budapest is bunk again!
(and other lies the war apologists tell themselves)
Even setting aside that Ukraine never had the technical means or infrastructure to operate/maintain those weapons, I don't think they would have dissuaded Russia or actually been used. Russia could turn them into a wasteland in response and 6 million people (including hundreds of thousands of men of military age) weren't even willing to stay in Ukraine, much less fight for the country. If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.
> the country that designed and built those ICBMs, and had one of the highest per capita counts of nuclear physicists could handle at least a few decades of upkeep on those nukes?
They don't even need that. They just needed ambiguity.
Ukraine absolutely fucked up giving up its nukes, that's abundantly clear with the benefit of hindsight.
The idea that a nation state could not make use of the hundreds of nuclear weapons in its territory is just absurd. It's sillier than the people that think disk encryption will spare them the crowbar to the face. Beyond the whole chauvinistic idea that it was "Russians" that built them in the first place.
> If Zelensky were to give an order to launch hypothetical nukes, I'd think there would have been a coup and no launch.
Do you understand that nuclear weapons don't work like that, and leaders with nuclear buttons give orders to launch nuclear weapons every few months? And only they know they're using a training launch code; everyone else finds that out when the missiles does not fly off at the end of the launch sequence.
Zelensky is far too concerned with the human costs of war to use nukes, even if he could. He doesn’t have a napoleon complex.
Human costs of war is precisely the reason to use nukes.
Why not?
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.
> All those people that lived under Soviet Russia occupation, they were better off dead in nuclear fire than living under said occupation?
As someone from a country that used to be under russia n boot - the fireball is preferable.
You don't leave room to escalate beyond use if nukes anymore. Russia's response to a tactical nuke would be to turn Ukraine into glass. All leaving additional escalation on the table does is make sure that you don't make good on your word to make everyone lose too.
Or, MAD means that neither a nuke launch or an invasion happen in the first place.
> Ambiguity in nuclear policy invites miscalculation
Most nuclear doctrines are ambiguous by design. ("Reserve the right," et cetera.)
>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.
Well, Russian occupation usually means your town slowly undergoes mass extermination and genocide....
so yes? nuclear fireball is potentially preferred
If having nuclear weapons did anything at all to prevent cyber attacks, the US would not be getting constantly victimized by cyber attacks.
I think "this kind of operation" refers to the entire "we bombed your capital and stole your President" thing, not just the cyber component of it.
It seems extraordinarily unlikely we'd have attempted such a thing if Venezuela had nukes.
Probably, but there is also some speculation usa had help on the inside, so it probably depends on the nature and pervasiveness of that help.
I agree with that speculation, but if you keep your launch chain of command short enough (as the US does), nukes can also be a deterrent to a palace coup; doubly so for a foreign-backed one.
> And they bombed Chavez's tomb, which is quite a dick move of there wasn't any AA there
Is that confirmed? because i think that would be a textbook example of a war crime.
I think people are suspicious because Maduro allegedly didnt seem to make it to a bunker in time, which if things are being bombed and helicopters are showing up on radar, one would think he would have sufficient time to get to some secure room, which in turn would delay things enough for reenforcements to arrive.
I think some of the suspicion is that we are talking about helicopters not fighter jets, which seem like they would be easy to take out even with how degraded their military is. But idk
I think by "this kind of operation" he means extrajudicially removing a sitting president (legitimate or not) of another country for trial elsewhere. Not cyber attack or espionage.
Oh, so the commenter is not actually talking about the BGP anomalies at all? He's just hijacking the comment section to advocate for nuclear proliferation?
What? That is awful logic.
You still have to be willing to use the nukes. The threat has to be real or it doesn't work as a deterrent.
I think this is a situation where even if Venezuela had nukes, this still would have happened.
The choice is basically:
a. Don’t use nukes, everyone moves one rung up the ladder. b. Use nukes. Ladder is destroyed, everyone dies horribly.
Using nukes only makes sense if everyone is going to die horribly anyway. It’s an empty threat otherwise.
Not exactly true.
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.
Cool, but outside the scope of the TFA.
the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money (at least couple hundreds of millions), and after completing the time will end up with his money in Russia/Belarussia.
We can see that nobody was going to resist the operation in Venezuela, so it doesn't really matter that Venezuela doesn't have nukes. Using nukes isn't just a matter of pressing a button, it involves a lot of people and processes - thus any significant opposition inside the force or just widespread sabotage will make it unusable.
It strikes me as completely possible that the exit was negotiated. The fact that they knew his exact location and "luckily" nabbed him right before he went into some kind of panic room / bunker is certainly... something.
But it seems equally likely to me that he was sold out by somebody in the VZ government/military. And that the paltry military resistance was because they saw direct confrontation with the US as suicidal.
I think it is kind of both - the exit was ultimately negotiated because most of the VZ government/military either sold him or at least abandoned him and showed no interest in any further support of him.
> the popular conspiracy theory among Russian opposition is that Maduro exit was negotiated, so he will do small time at a Fed club and would preserve significant amount of his money
It sounds stupid. Maduro has no way to enforce the deal, and the US has no incentive to fulfill this deal.
> We can see that nobody was going to resist the operation in Venezuela, so it doesn't really matter that Venezuela doesn't have nukes.
To use it, no resistance is matter. One person must do their job to launch a nuclear weapon. That's all.
> it involves a lot of people and processes
It doesn't matter. Nuclear deterrence exercises are conducted regularly. And their peculiarity is that no one except the person with the red button knows whether it's an exercise or whether the missiles will actually be launched this time.
So when the order to launch comes, many people will be performing a large number of complex processes which will result in the use of nuclear weapons. Because they regularly receive such orders and carry out these processes.
80 of their guys died? Not just venuzuelans. If it was negotiated then maduro negotiated his own closest security forces to be killed as a cover.
Not impossible but certainly in the tinfoil hat range of possibilities.
Nuclear deterrent is absurd.
You have to assume everyone is willing to die over every single thing short of obliteration.
So what's the scenario then? Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela launches its nukes, everyone dies on both sides. Please, explain that laughable premise. Everyone in Venezuela dies for Maduro? Go on, explain it, I'll wait.
Back in reality: Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela shakes its fists at the sky, threatens nuclear hell fire. Nothing happens. Why? The remaining leadership of Venezuela does not in fact want to die for Maduro.
> So what's the scenario then? Venezuela has nukes. The US abducts Maduro. Venezuela launches its nukes, everyone dies on both sides.
US attacks, Maduro threatens to launch nuke(s) ... then what? Do you call bluff?
Maduro was capture in a militair base (as he did a Saddam, switching sleeping locations), he almost made it into a safe room. What if he had nukes and made it to the safe room. You know the expression "Cornered rat"... For all he knew, the US was there to kill him. The US killed his 30 Cuban bodyguards so high change Maduro thought its his end.
> "Cornered rat" refers to the idiom that even weak individuals become desperate and dangerous when given no escape, often applied to intense political or military pressure.
The scenario that you called, that nobody wants to die for Maduro, is you gambling that nobody want to die for him or not follow the chain of command! Do you want to risk it? No matter how many precaution you take, are you really sure that not one or more nukes go to Texas or Miami?
This is why Nukes are so powerful, even in the hands of weaker countries. It gives a weaker country a weapon that may inflict untold dead to the more powerful country (let alone the political impact). Its a weapon that influences decision making, even in the most powerful countries.
Your tone is unnecessarily condescending and confrontational, but your point is reasonable with respect to Venezuela and Maduro.
With Iran, North Korea, or Ukraine, the calculus is different.
> remaining leadership of Venezuela does not in fact want to die for Maduro
Now do this same exercise for Taiwan.
Are you trying to argue that M.A.D. hasn't been an effective deterrent to violence for decades?
Do you think the US and EU would have hesitated to send enough arms to keep Ukraine comfortably fending off Russia if they weren't afraid of the nuclear threat that Russia kept toying with?
There is something in between 0 nuclear weapons used and all nuclear weapons used.
That's like arguing against the police arresting criminals because it will incentivize them to acquire weapons.
The only consistent action for the US to take, given they - and much of the world - do not consider Maduro the legitimate President of Venezuela, was to remove him from power.
And replace him with the just as illegitimate VP? What world is that consistent in?
Terrible take in the 2nd premise of your argument. Is Venezuela a sovereign nation or a colony? Can similar logic be applied against Russia or even the US?
> Is Venezuela a sovereign nation or a colony?
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.
Of course it can, and it is. Such logic is behind the argument in favor of arresting Putin. Many have argued that should happen if he were to step on their nations' soil. The reason no one thinks seriously about going into Russia and enforcing open arrest warrants is that they fear the consequences, though maybe in light of Russia's revealed impotence that fear is unjustified.
The sovereignty of Venezuela is not the right argument here, because practical sovereignty is not absolute and there are just war grounds for Maduro's capture. The man was an awful tyrant.
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.
There are all sorts of factors motivating it. Crony capitalism (w.r.t. oil, for example) is another one of them. But that doesn't mean they justify the operation. At this point, it is a fait accompli. I pray that things don't get worse for Venezuela (the unfortunate side effect is that it will give supporters of this operation greater false confidence that they did the right thing; "Look! Nothing bad happened afterward!").
Furthermore, Trump has revealed that once again, he's full of shit. He and his people have been chanting their opposition to regime change operations and various military involvement for years, even until a few months ago. And now, voila.
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No thanks.
""" Balanced and civil engagement with occasional mild suggestions — mostly neutral and constructive. """
I never understood the (now decade old) argument of 'parts of the Internet cannot be shut down'
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...
Time for every country at threat from the US to invest in their own independent nuclear arsenal....
CANTV (AS8048) is a correct upstream transit provider for Dayco (AS21980) as seen in both https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as21980#connectivity and https://bgp.tools/as/21980#upstreams
What most likely happened, instead of a purposeful attempt to leak routes and MITM traffic, is CANTV had too loose of a routing export policy facing their upstream AS52320 neighbor, and accidentally redistributed the Dayco prefixes that they learned indirectly from Sparkle (AS6762) when the direct Dayco routes became unavailable to them.
This is a pretty common mistake and would explain the leak events that were written about here.
Most providers enforce rpki but unless you peer with tier1 networks you can't influence a network you don't peer with.