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Comment by xxxtentachyon | Hacker News Reader

What do you suggest people do? Get on the phone with their congressperson and have them send in a bomber squadron? As far as immediate impact, reporting this in the hopes that it gets taken down seems about as good as anything feasible at the moment.

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The congress wants Ukranians to die fighting and weaken Russia by sending them lethal weapons. They don't want to involve themselves directly

The "congress", or rather the military and civilian executives (Congress hasn't really weighed in yet) don't want to be in a position of having two large nuclear forces in direct conflict. For very good reasons.

2 large nuclear forces are in conflict already. Ukraine is nuclear country.

Nothing nuclear happened during the war with soviets in Vietnam, Korea, etc., or with Russians in Syria. RF is much weaker than USSR.

> Ukraine is nuclear country.

It is not.

> Nothing nuclear happened during the war with soviets in Vietnam, Korea, etc., or with Russians in Syria. RF is much weaker than USSR.

You don’t need much power to fuck up the planet. A single thermonuclear bomb would suffice and Russia, however weak, has thousands of those.

Can you explain what you mean by "Ukraine is nuclear country"?

Ukraine had nuclear weapons. Ukraine has weapon grade nuclear reactors, which produces plutonium. Ukrainian engineers developed equipment and rockets to produce nuclear weapons for USSR. Tactics of using nuclear weapons was part of my education.

Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons. They inherited some when the USSR fell apart, but they returned them to Russia to be dismantled in return for guarantees from the west and Russia.

The Chinese did not have nuclear weapons when the US fought them in the Korean War. Neither the Chinese nor the Soviets were (officially) involved in the Vietnam War. The US and Russia have danced around very carefully in Syria; the only direct conflict I know of involved Russian "mercenaries". In none of those cases did the Soviets or the Russians signal that they would use nuclear weapons; likewise, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was given covert military support by the US, but there was no direct conflict.

NATO operations in Ukraine carry a very large risk of accidental escalation, in addition to Putin's threats.

Ukraine had no nuclear weapons 8 years ago. Ukraine has all required equipment and nuclear materials (weapon grade Uranium, Plutonium) to create nuclear weapons at will. Are you sure that Ukraine has no will to defend itself?

> The US and Russia have danced around very carefully in Syria; the only direct conflict I know of involved Russian "mercenaries".

Turkey shot Russian airplane.

> NATO operations in Ukraine carry a very large risk of accidental escalation, in addition to Putin's threats.

I'm sorry to inform you, but war between two nuclear nations has much larger risk of escalation when NATO will play the role of coward.

According to what I've read and watched on YouTube (such as the interesting, if inevitably biased series "Russian Roulette" by ViceNews that I recommend you watch with your brain on and Wikipedia ready to look up every mentioned character), the Ukrainian army had such difficulties with basic supplies that I can't imagine them developing actionable weaponry at all, conventional or nuclear.

Even if some scientists could technically build a bomb, the hard part with nuclear arsenal is not the bomb itself but the launching device.

i already made my suggestion and it wasn’t “throw up your hands and say there’s nothing more we can do”

“…perhaps discussing real solutions would be more beneficial?”

Maybe we come up with nothing but tens of thousands of lives could be saved if we think of something.

A week from now the world is going to wish it had done more.

"Discussing real solutions" sounds about as substantial a suggestion as "throw your hands up and say there's nothing more we can do". People are already talking. It's not suggesting anything more concrete than what's already being done in this conversation.

we turned this into a childish discussion on the internet.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians will be dead within a week.

Who, exactly, do you think the “we” is in this scenario?

You’re the one that came in complaining about how nothing is being done and offering a suggestion of… talking, which is what is already happening.

When people rightfully pointed this out to you, you suddenly involved “we”. You’re the one that has instigated this meta-discussion, and you just don’t like that people called you out on it.

Nah, i’ve got a thick skin. I’ve been on the Internet for over three decades. I’ve been doing this since the Usenet days.

I’ll let you guys get back to saying how bad the Russians are for using Google maps. Forget I even brought up the brainstorming idea.

Quite honestly I should have know people would go with “you first”. But when I go with “me first” people spend the entire time talking about how it’s a bad idea, missing the point completely

A lot of people here probably don’t even remember the Cold War.

It’s all about to get pretty real.

Considering all the people who are going to die, I had to try.

"Trying" is actually brainstorming. Telling people that they're not helping and that they should brainstorm instead is not "trying".

At best, it's yelling from the sidelines that nothing is getting done and everyone should feel bad.

I mean this conversation could go somewhere. I'm sure someone here can get access to the maps backend and redirect a few missiles if the rumors are true. This crowd is probably 99th percentile in working out the details.

(That is to say, probably not competent at it, which is better than "definitely not")

Also, you can bet concrete actionable suggestions made here will bubble up to silicon valley execs by the morning.

So your suggestion is to just…. Talk about something else?

Cool, can’t wait to see the thread you start discussing these important things.

Your answer is to talk about. So, talk about it.

Or are you saying someone else should solve this for you?

Literally all you're doing is meta-complaining, you're not offering any solutions either. Now you've forced me to meta-meta-complain.

Fine, you start. What is your first idea for discussion?

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