But we're not struggling to talk to dolphins, they're struggling to materialize Shakespeare. We understand their structures and concerns more than they understand ours, and we observe them when they're still in the original soup.

ALl this to say: if they were rising up, we'd probably be able to create a bidirectional connection. We can only make sense "nuking them all to death", like you say in america to mean "defend our freedom and way of life", if we are able to communicate and are faced with a refusal to submit. The dolphin, so far, accept american hegemony - there's no purpose to nuking them.

So it is correct what you say, but here we're talking of civilizations. Civilizations worth nuking will always have a way to understand each others, otherwise there'd be no threat worth suppressing.