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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear weapons are a MAD red line that will result in total annihilation of the attacker. They are only useful in a defensive capacity.

This kind of aggression, however, does seem to make their value as a deterrent clear.

Observe how nobody is fucking with North Korea like they did with Iraq or Venezuela.

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> Nuclear weapons are a MAD red line that will result in total annihilation of the attacker. They are only useful in a defensive capacity.

Also in a "if I'm going down, everyone else is going down with me", which is Ian's strategy in this war (for good reasons). If the IRGC had nukes, and was severely threatened (like, killing the Supreme Leader and threatening to kill all of the replacements until they bend to the US/Israel will), they might have decided to go out "with style".

Isn't this exactly what the Samson Option represents?

Yes, but the whole point of having nukes as a deterrent is that the US wouldn't have arbitrarily killed their leader in the first place. "If i'm going down, everyone else is going down" is the feature, not a bug.

To be clear I don't like the idea of MAD one bit. But this is indeed how it's meant to work.

North Korea's main leverage is not the 3.5 nukes they have, it's Seoul in the sights of their very conventional arty.

Unlike NK, Iran has a leadership that declared destroying some countries their raison d'etre.

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