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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily disagree as IMHO a diverse world that more accurately reflects the desires of local populations is a good thing, but I'd be curious to know why you would like the EU to seek independency from the US. What do you mean by that? Economic or more? Do you mean more home-grown tech companies for example?

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Not the person you responded to, but I agree that the EU needs a bit more independence from the US.

To me, it's mostly about being able to stand up for ourselves on a world stage - ideally through a common EU military that is strong enough to deter adversaries even without US support.

My main reason is the instability of the American political climate and the way every four years there's an election between a centrist and an extremist. Trump has already threatened to invite Putin to invade other NATO countries [0]. We can't risk being dependent on this madman.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68266447

I think many in the US would also be happy with a stronger Europe. A friendly peer competitor to call us out if we decided to go to war to ostensibly “spread democracy” would probably be good, for example.

Isn't that how we got "freedom fries" and "with us or against us"?

We temporarily renamed some fast food that wasn’t even correctly named after them, and made a bunch of juvenile jokes about their performance in WW2 for a couple decades. I dunno, I was just a kid at the time, but I didn’t get the impression that we were taking their complaints very seriously.

I was a little bit older, and I do remember the hostility we had towards them (I was studying French at the time). But yeah, it was more like the way you'd boo the opposing sports team, not like we are at risk at war with them or anything...

Speaking as an American I want this for the EU as well. I liked the prior world order, but I think the dream of keeping it alive died when our current dumbass-in-chief pulled out of Afghanistan in the stupidest way possible. The previous dumbass-in-chief who may well be the next dumbass-in-chief if the current one loses also abandoned our Kurdish allies and is promising to do worse than that.

Also, I like Europe. I don’t want to see it falter.

To be fair, abandoning our Kurdish allies (and before them, our Hmong allies) is an ongoing American theme.

I had a good Kurdish friend who came over on a US carrier after we abandoned them after the Gulf War...

Isn't Kurdistan still currently the largest stateless state (so to speak) ?

That's probably a complicated slicing of "stateless state". Racial? Ethnic? Linguistic? Religious?

I'm guessing it would be something approaching "associated peoples who are part of a state, but who have collectively demonstrated a desire for an independent state"?

There are ~40M Kurds.

Off the top of my head, Palestinians, Uyghurs, Basques, but I'm sure I'm missing a ton.

There are 70M+ Tamils.

Not the OP, but in context, the US is a huge part of NATO's overall defense (and offense/force projection) capabilities. The EU on its own would have a harder time defending itself against aggression.

It's effectively impossible to invade a country that has nuclear weapons. There might be small scale border skirmishes, but large scale organized invasions are essentially a nonstarter. The main purpose of conventional weaponry, for nuclear nations, is to invade non-nuclear nations, or to engage in proxy skirmishes to try to expand one's geopolitical power.

We're rapidly approaching a century with 0 major and unrestrained wars between two nuclear powers. That's completely unprecedented in the entirety of our history, and it's not a coincidence.

This could be a good place to Post a reminder that in 1995, Ukraine agreed to hand over all its nuclear weapons to Russia in return of a promise to not threaten or use military force against Ukraine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

Ukraine had the weapons but no means to use them. Russia had the keys.

Then why did Russia feel the need to enter into the agreement if holding the keys was sufficient?

Maybe because these were radically different times, and the "we've always been at war with X or Y" is just a narrative? No, of course not, what a nonsense.

Sure, the Ukrainians would have needed some months to refit those weapons.

Do you think UK or France would use nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear Russian attack on other NATO members (e.g. Germany)? Are they obligated to do so?

>> Article 5

>> The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

>> such action as it seems necessary, including the use of armed force

There's no mandatory requirement to deploy specific weapons, but I believe all NATO forces would be subordinate to CMC (rotating) and SACEUR (has always been a US leader)? Inasmuch as multinational command structures work.

Right but OP said it’s “effectively impossible to invade a country that has nuclear weapons” and I’m curious how that is relevant to non nuclear NATO members like Germany.

I don’t see how it helps Germany (or Finland, Poland etc etc) that France and UK have nuclear weapons, apart from deterrence against specifically nuclear Russian attacks. A conventional land invasion against a non nuclear NATO power would likely be very difficult to stop without US support, at current defense levels, or without UK or France threatening a universal nuclear defense of other nato members.

It's ambiguous (or I haven't seen it written) under what conditions NATO would retaliate with NATO-controlled nuclear weapons to an attack on a NATO member.

But it's definitely shy of 'never'

I know during the 80s there were detailed plans to tactically nuke the larg(er) Soviet armored formations in eastern Germany et al. in the event of hostilities. I believe even before Soviet nuclear escalation.

I'm unaware of those, but I do know that US nuclear targets from the 50s were relatively recently declassified [1], and they were far more macabre.

We focused on taking out Soviet air forces (to eliminate their ability to deliver nukes of their own - as this was before the USSR had developed ICBMs), but also focused on targets marked simply as "population" as well as medical production facilities. The goal was not to just defeat the military, but to literally destroy the nation. And I'm certain the USSR had, more or less, identical plans. And I suspect those still remain the plans for both sides to this day.

Nukes aren't going to falling out in the middle of nowhere trying to take out military bases, they're going to be falling in NYC, San Francisco, Moscow, and St. Petersburg - to try to completely take out the other country's population and economy. Nuclear war is do or die. The goal is going to be to eliminate the enemy's country from the face of this Earth, so that they can't just recover to become a threat 10 years down the line.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/us/politics/1950s-us-nucl...

There are always a menu of pre-built reaction plans, because even in the days of strategic bombers over the arctic there wouldn't have been enough reaction time for anything custom + dissemination to combat commands.

Much less once ICBMs become common.

And at that point, the only requirement for a total war / civilian+industry apocalypse plan is that your potential opponent might also have such a plan.

It's tremendously unlikely to be used except in a "like for like" response scenario (absent an insane president), but if the US saw the Soviets throwing everything they had up with population centers targeted... there'd better be a ready to go plan to respond similarly.

And, as Dr Strangelove memorably quips, indeed the most effective deterrence effect of such a plan is to loudly tell everyone you have such a plan -- so they will have to consider that's one of your response options, and thus be disincentivized from starting a nuclear exchange.

By which it makes a lot of sense that even if the US didn't have such a plan, they fabricated one and announced they did!

(Not that I think they didn't. The Cold War was way too real to bet on a 0% chance that superpowers weren't going to escalate to total war)

That was not a reaction plan, it was an offensive plan. That's why they even bothered with targeting Soviet airfields. At the time the USSR had not yet developed an ICBM and so nukes would have been delivered by air. If it was a response plan, then targeting those airfields would have been wastes of nukes. The idea was to destroy their entire country and nuclear capability, before they could do anything.

Remember, there's only one country that's ever nuked another country.

That's interesting, I could see how even a vague possibility of that sort of response could be a deterrent.

I think the most likely scenario is that they would transfer control of a number of nuclear weapons to Germany in such a scenario. And that would be more than enough to end the war, or to end the world.

Which is why everyone bordering any empire currently looks for nukes or nuke eqivalents,as the American reliability falls apart. Must be fun to work at the iaa nowadays.

I’m not sure we’d have these new NATO members if American reliability were actually so bad.

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