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Comment by fooey | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me, all the countries capable of taking out US carriers are powerful enough that if a war actually broke out, it's the sort of end of the world scenario where losing a few boats will be the least of our worries. When the nukes start flying, who cares how many knights each side had?

The carriers are for suppressing the parts of the world who are incapable of threatening them. Most of the military is completely irrelevant if there's ever another world scale conflict.

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Ah, but there's the rub. If you have nukes and your opponent has nukes, and your opponent tells you they will use their nukes if you use yours, when do you use your nukes?

Probably to prevent core territorial incursion to the extent it would dissolve you as a viable entity. But to protect / secure the South China Sea? To win a proxy war in the Middle East? Where's the line?

Because it's certainly not "as soon as hostilities break out."

If there ever was a major war between civilized nuclear powers, and it didn't immediately go nuclear, we might end up with a weird sort of gentleman's agreement where it's accepted to fire nukes into your own country (at invading enemy forces) but not at another country.

I can see that being an evolutionarily stable strategy.

I would think that a cold war situation is far more likely. No reason to use nukes in your own territory, many very good reasons to not use nukes at all. So long as the early warning systems (i.e. satellites) are still in place we will probably assume that the other side would rather avoid irradiating their own territory and prefer other aggressive tactics.

My extremely boiled down version of the MAD calculus was that one was only required to use nuclear weapons if one's capability to use sufficient nuclear weapons at some future point in time were being lost.

Hence the Cuban missile crisis being such a big deal.

> we might end up with a weird sort of gentleman's agreement where it's accepted to fire nukes into your own country (at invading enemy forces)

There was exactly this type of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_artillery

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