The point parent is in making is that this strike against Iran demonstrates, that yes indeed you do need nukes to be safe and that's one of the major risks of this action.

Going with your analogy, this would be the same as if police basically ignored all home invasion/trespassing laws such that the only houses that criminals entered were in fact those of undefended home owners. In this scenario, it would be demonstrated, by this policy, that yes home owners need to own guns to be safe.

To your point, if you don't want a world where it's safer for home owners to own guns, than you need to ensure there are policies in place to create a world where that was true. The lesson of Ukraine and Iran is that, if you don't have nuclear weapons, your sovereignty is always at the mercy of nations that do.

A world where every country needs nuclear weapons to remain sovereign is similarly undesirable (on a larger scale) to a country where every home needs to have guns to be safe. However we're on a path with nuclear weapons where that is unfortunately not the reality we are creating.

Except that police exists. We willingly relinquish the monopoly of violence to the state that protects us. The world nation stage is anarchic instead, there is no world police, and the strong dominate

Please note ICE is doing operations in blue cities against law abiding immigrants at hearings because to go after either actual criminals or the gun infested red areas would be a danger to life and limb.

Turns out, making yourself a more dangerous target works to an extent.

6 months ago I woildnt have disagreed. Be ause law enforcement had guns for you.

But if law enforcement is not only not doing their job but actively threatening you: well, I guess 2A won this time.

It's an interesting analogy. I'm opposed to guns in every household because we have the police which is meant to give security to people. There, we allow gun use, but under stricter conditions. The majority agrees that this is right, so the system works.

What is "the police" on the level of countries? There is no majority that agrees that, e. g., the NATO can serve as the police. It feels like on this level, we live in an anarchy with only very few actors who don't really want to live together. So maybe nukes are an option, although I don't like it.

Kinda sorta in some ways, vastly different in others.

The differences are so extreme it's a waste of time to discuss the analogy further.

That analogy fails due to the sheer power of nuclear weapons. A comparable analogy would be that every household should have an Abrams tank.

In properly safe countries this is of course not true. But sadly the world stage still seems to be on the development level of ”lawless neighborhood” so there’s some merit to the idea (not that it is necessarily the best way forward though).

If someone knows you are heavily armed will they be more or less likely to attack you?

Attacking North Korea would result in millions of refugees pouring into South Korea and China. Nobody wants that

I'm not sure that's entirely true. We naturally always try to paint the "enemy" as an unhinged maniac ready to unless destruction on the entire world at a whim, but in reality I don't think this is pretty much ever the case. A population with the industrial and intellectual capability to develop a nuke in the first place is going to have grander ambitions than going out in a blaze of glory. I think even ultra-fundamentalists like the Taliban mostly just want to build up their own little vision of a utopia.

I think a part of the reason North Korea plays crazy is because they have to. If the US didn't think they'd push the big red button, then we'd invade them in a heart-beat. Mutually assured destruction only works when you believe the other guy will push the button. So you need the bomb and then you also need to make sure everybody thinks you're willing to actually use it.

I think GP is right, sadly. The logical conclusion from Ukraine, Iran and North Korea is, get nukes. UN designations of illegal wars turned out to be BS, the only thing that may work is nukes.

Let's hope NATO doesn't get compromised, else I see 30 new nuclear programs starting soon.

We all hooray (well, some of us) the "good" countries having nukes, to bring peace and stability. But it only takes one funky election to get a crazy person in charge of such "good" nukes. And if you 10x the number of nuclear powers, that's 10x more shots at that.

Rockets?

Seoul is in artillery range of the border.

Why would they hit the front line?

The only nuclear weapons Ukraine would need is enough to reliably ensure Moscow and St Petersburg cease existing.

Do you really think the US would trade Washington and New York for a chunk of Mexico?

They always immediately stop their conflicts once the building opposite of the one with the nuclear command center blows up. So... it seems to work for them

with the lack of a war happening between them? neither side invaded or killed 800 of the other's citizens and US/china didnt step in to back their horse with bombs

both have nukes and that acts as a strong deterrent for both of them not to escalate (which they didnt). the countries not having nukes are still in much worse situation

I mean israel gets attacked even though they have nukes, but some rockets are not the same as a regime-changing war

The DMZ is 35 miles north of Seoul and there are enough NK artillery pieces aimed at Seoul to level it.

> Iran has been attacking Israel for the last 30 years

Please give dates, locations, and number of casualties. Iran has made many aggressive statements and funded and armed Palestinian resistance organizations, but actual conflict between Israel and Iran has been mostly clandestine and not officially acknowledged, with a few exceptions where Israel and the US unilaterally attack Iran.

It's the prisoners dilemma: best scenario is nobody has nukes. But if your enemy get nukes, you better get them ASAP. A Nash equilibrium is set where everybody should either have nukes or be strongly allied with someone with nukes.

Regarding guns: if you have easy access to weapons, everyone also has access, so the Nash equilibrium is "get a weapon". If weapons circulation is restricted, the Nash equilibrium is "don't waste your money on weapons".

In a reasonable world, the first step would be reforming NATO so that it becomes more neutral and focused on preventing wars rather than countering Russia. I'm saying this as a Pole, so definitely this isn't self-serving, since Poles are second most hated by Russians after Ukraine. This step should, however, happen in parallel with the EU developing its European army, to defend itself from Russia if that's needed, which is another challenging and non-obvious step, but we're closer to this now than we were before Trump.

However, we don't live in a reasonable world, so I suspect the first step will be, as much as I don't want it, World War III.

>The entire "rules based order" is, I think, part of what caused the world to go to chaos. Because there were never any rules besides might makes right, just as always.

I recommend this book:

https://www.amazon.com/United-Nations-History-Stanley-Meisle...

The UN isn't working very well right now, but it's worked considerably better in the past. In the wake of WW2, I think there was a genuine sentiment that war was really horrible and it should be avoided at all costs. Sadly most of the people who saw WW2 have passed away by this point.

In terms of populations "making better decisions on the sorts of foreign policy views to support" -- I think international law is, if anything, helpful in this regard. Foreign policy is complex, and human nature is such that people are always predisposed to see their own interests as just, or at least cloak their interests in the language of justice. On the other hand, total pacifism is also ideologically unworkable for various reasons. (Even most leftists are against "America First" style isolationism for WW2 or Ukraine.) So international law is valuable in the sense that, at least in principle, it helps you figure out who the bad guy is: Who is breaking international law? That may sound rather academic, but in practice it seems to carry more weight than you might expect.

To state my position another way: I think having some sort of international law is a good idea, even if the current scheme needs to be reworked. A better scheme might be: Have some ritualized, non-lethal way for nations to test strength against each other, e.g. through athletic competitions or wargames, as a binding method of resolving disagreements. This could be game-theoretically stable, if success at the "ritual test of strength" is thought to correlate strongly with real-world war performance. Furthermore, any state which initiates lethal, kinetic confrontation after losing the "ritual test of strength" (sore losers who refuse to abide by the outcome) should become international pariahs subject to secondary sanctions.

But it's not their terror web that is being attacked. Hezbollah and the Houti are fine, today anyway.

I'd love to see a UN resolution calling for the dismantling for this terrorist network. Or if not that, at least some kind of multilateral, or even hell, unilateral declaration on this - "end this or else". But no, it's a western style drive-by shooting. It just so happens the guy who got shot is a baddie.

This is nonsense. Iran spent decades funding proxies to specifically isolate their region economic competitor: Saudi Arabia. Israel just happened to be there and frequently get in the way when not directly intervening.

There was at least a façade. That's the thing: today you don't even need to pretend to care.

I don't think that's sustainable, because it leads to injustice, i.e., countries with nuclear weapons abusing their power, which in the end encourages all countries to get nuclear weapons to protect their own safety and interests.

As challenging as it sounds, we need to develop a strong impartial international institution whose the only mission would be maintaining peace and preventing wars on the planet. This should be the only entity that's approved to have nuclear weapons.

The irony of this entire situation is that it actually all but guarantees large scale nuclear proliferation.

It’s not that people were just too dumb or too scared to do something about it.

> There is no justice nor glory to be had in nuclear weapons, but they exist, and need to be contained to as few entities that can use them as possible.

Agreed. Let's start with US and Russia first.

> So I've made peace with mafia boss power politics keeping the number of countries with nuclear weapons on the low end of the spectrum, and for that matter I'd support a much more aggressive approach to that end than we have seen these last 30 years.

The contradiction is that by relying on militarism instead of diplomacy we keep demonstrating that countries are safer from aggression once they have the bomb. You think the situation you’ve described provides a negative incentive for nuclear development, but it does not.