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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

There would be records of the radar track in the computers of the Aegis cruisers in the task force. There may well be evidence of the launch captured by satellites.

ELINT is very powerful, and the US intelligence agencies have been at this game since before WWII. Their sneakiness boggles the mind! They were using signals bounced off of the moon to spy on Soviet equipment, and disguised the whole thing as radio astronomy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ

If you are going to go up against the US defense establishment, you'd better be damned sure you know what you're doing.

If I were the US, facing such an asymmetric threat, I'd keep most of my carrier groups around for the short term as a boondoggle, then come up with my own novel threat against my opponent's shipping.

(Sub launched cruise missiles, or mines? The advanced 21st century version, of course.)

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(Sub launched cruise missiles, or mines?)

Nukes.

If I were the US, I'd simply make it an official matter of policy that any attack from a nuclear power would result in an immediate nuclear response, the logic being that once two nuclear powers are at war it's probably going to turn nuclear eventually, so you might as well make the first strike.

Please tell me you are joking.

Some of us spent our entire youth afraid of nuclear annihilation 24/7. We've been out of that for some time now, but I don't think anyone wants to send the world back to that point.

Fear of nuclear annihilation is why there hasn't been a war. Nuclear weapons = peace. Not a happy peace, but infinitely better than either no nukes or a single side having nukes.

You know that there were more hot wars during the cold war than we have now?

Well, I guess the whole world can thank their deity of choice that you're nowhere near being in charge of anything.

If I were the US, I'd simply make it a matter of official policy to make as many official, unofficial, formal, informal, commercial and personal ties to every country in the world as possible, to the maximum extent that any ideology on either side allows.

Yes, certainly we need to maintain defensive and offensive military capabilities, but I think we should be doing much, much more to reduce the need for those capabilities.

This is, more or less, the original founding intent of the European Union. Given that the last 60 years has been free of major land wars in Europe - the longest period of peace on the continent since the fall of the Roman Empire in ~470AD, it seems to be working fairly well. (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Europaea).

I think the EU is great, but I wonder how much of that peace can be attributed to both the United States and USSR both having large armies camped through Europe for most of that time.

I had the same thought. The answer is there is no one thing that does/did it. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that Germany and France are closer to partners than combatants.

Yeah, external factors like those mentioned obviously play a part, as do internal factors, as taught to us by playing Civilisation - fat happy democracies don't like making war very much, or for very long; it's expensive and you have to get off the couch...

The others may mock you, but you are in fact correct as to why it is impossible for two nuclear-armed foes to fight directly.

There will never be a hot war between US and China for so long as nuclear weapons have no effective defense. Nuclear weapons are probably the single biggest enabler of peace on the planet.

>There will never be a hot war between US and China for so long as nuclear weapons have no effective defense.

I beg to differ. First, see India v. Pakistan as a direct counter to your "impossible" statement.

Second, as the example shows, the line you draw regarding using nukes does not extend all the way down to the rifleman. It's entirely possible to start a conventional and/or localized war with the understanding that you intend to win and therefore do not have the need to use your nukes.

You're making the major mistake though of assuming your enemy is a rational actor, a la the cold war. Russia is a rational actor. So is China. Even India.

In Pakistan however, only a minority are rational actors. Should a change in government occur that is pro-Taliban, you now have a nation of irrational actors with nuclear weapons.

MAD falls apart at this point. The fear of death means little to the Muslim extremist, and a man that isn't scared does highly irrational things, like nuke a civilian target.

All it takes is one, and then all bets are off.

So, how to fix the religious, then?

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