this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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This isn't something we will be able to act on retroactively. What I mean is that if nobody in our government or military stops Trump from going nuclear in Iran there is no going back. If he isn't stopped until after it happens, nobody in the entire world will trust Americans ever again and we will all be hated (even more than we already are). This is the single biggest avoidable threat to national security that has ever existed. It's already the case that nobody outside the US cares if you are one of the "good ones" or not. If this fuck-face does what we all think he wants to do, the US and its citizens will be internationally considered a threat to everyone elses national security and will be cut off from the rest of the world indefinitely.
Nobody will give a shit who you voted for or which protests you went to or not, everyone will hate us and rightfully so. If Trump goes nuclear in Iran it'll be the end of the American Empire basically overnight.
Bro there won't be a world left to worry about. You trust everyone that has nukes to not mistake it for an attack on them and trigger mad?
Eh. That's really not a realistic fear here. The US already has nuclear weapons assets within striking distance of Iran. Sure, ICBMS launched from North Dakota would have to fly over Russia and risk triggering a false retaliation. That's why the US simply wouldn't use those launchers. Nukes launched against Iran would be launched from submarines in the Indian Ocean or Mediterranean or be delivered via cruise missiles and other stand-off munitions. They wouldn't fly over any nuclear armed state, except maybe Israel. And Israel isn't particularly worried about being nuked by the US.
And no, this wouldn't trigger a retaliatory attack from the other nuclear powers. The launches would not be falsely read as nuclear strikes. The best example of this? Consider the Tomahawk missiles. The US has already launched hundreds of these things against Iran, and it didn't cause Russia or China to press the button. And the Tomahawks can carry both conventional or nuclear warheads. They could destroy all of Iran's cities using nuclear-tipped Tomahawks, and the launches would look no different than the hundreds of launches the US has already used against Iran.
This is still a horrible idea, and horrible doesn't even begin to describe it. We're talking about an act of mass murder that exceeds the Holocaust. That's reason enough to consider the idea completely unthinkable. But it should be opposed for the sake of the Iranian people, not out of some unrealistic fear that it would trigger a global thermonuclear war.
Yep this right here, if he nukes Iran we're all dead, even if the other nuclear states somehow don't retaliate, which they wouldn't but for the sake of argument, that would still completely destroy society. That would make an absurd amount of oil and natural gas unusable cutting the global supply by a margin that would be unsustainable.
One real danger is that this would legitimize the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states. Nukes haven't been used since WW2. And the small nukes used then really weren't of much greater scale than the firebombing runs already done en masse in that horrible war. But this would be different. A precedent would be set that a nuclear power, if faced in a drawn out quagmire against a non-nuclear power, could use a nuke to end the conflict. The US nukes Tehran to cut the heart out of Iranian resistance. Russia nukes Kyiv to break the back of Ukraine. China nukes Taipei as the opening move to invading the island.
The US nuking Japan never really established the precedent that such an act is OK. Everyone has just accepted that WW2 was a unique situation, and that using nukes at the end of the worst conflict in human history, one that saw the Holocaust, isn't really out of scale for that conflict. Plus the nukes then were relatively small. But if you lob a hydrogen bomb ten or a hundred times the weapon used to destroy Hiroshima? At a time when your nation is absolutely not in a epochal fight for its survival? That's a completely different situation, a solution to a quagmire of the type that the major nuclear powers have frequently encountered.
You have a much more optimistic view than I about the nature of the American character. If he incinerates 50 million people overnight, will you still go into work tomorrow? I probably would, cause really, what else you gonna do?
Yes. They're not Americans, they don't "fear for their life" and start blasting. The US needs to be taken down carefully, like a hostage taker with their knife to the world's throat. If the US nukes Iran, I think that's the point where the EU and UK start treating the US as the single biggest threat rather than just one of many, but it makes no sense to attack the US openly and guarantee MAD.
What we need is a revolution in the US that is homegrown enough that nuclear command accepts their call to not launch nukes over the presidency's call to launch them. A military coup would probably be safest.
I said this about a year ago, but I have a strong feeling someone, somewhere will get a one nuke freebie. Everyone will be completely floored and there will be sanctions out the wazoo but that will be it, because no one really wants to trigger MAD.
For those who don't know - almost everyone knows where most major missile silos ARE, in most nuclear-capable countries. From the time the rocket is fired, you, no matter which country, have about 5-10 minutes to decide whether it's aimed at you, and whether to fire back.