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Comment by carlosjobim | Hacker News Reader

>The supreme court, the parliament, the military

Didn't you forget somebody? The people?

> I can guarantee that many countrys are rehearsing the "what we do if the US goes rouge" strategy and working on new contingency plans.

In that case, they're 70 years too late to start making those plans. If you don't have nuclear arms you simply have to mostly accept whatever the super powers do and decide.

> to touch the current leader of Venezuela would be a declaration of war on the whole planet, which is in fact lining up behind Delcy Rodriguez in her role as Venezuelas sole legitimate leader.

That sounds like something from a video game. Reality is different. If Trump whisked her away like Maduro, nothing more would come from it.

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the people have consistanly voted for some kind of socialist government for generations, and never asked for intervention. Nukes?. North Korea! The US made the first nukes with....manual fucking lathes 80 years ago, the bar is low now, edging up to utube supper enthusiast builds an atomic bomb low. we have to assume that there are several dozen...entities...that can go nuklear on very short notice, which as you point out is becoming essential in order to prevent any,missunderstandings. as to further abductions, I can guarantee further that new standards in personal security for VIP's are bieng quickly thought out and implimented, essentialy we are now looking at seeing smaller governments setting themselves up as urban guerilla organisations as the defacto deterant to bieng used as one or two cycle media distractions because as you illustrate, law, and diplomacy are officialy dead, so calibrating defences that will require a full boots on the ground occupation to break becoms the minimum. Iran survived the last attempt, and will of course be doubling down on whatever they have implimented since last summer, so all we are talking about is a revision to the play book. further "proof", turns out those oil tankers they captured and took, are Chinese, and Trump backtracked on keeping them and said "they will get there oil", China said no worrys, "we dont need it anyway", which if you speak gangster, is a hell of a statement from china

Basically anyone with access to Wikipedia can design and build a nuclear bomb given raw materials. Not to go into too much detail (both because I'm not really an expert and because it's a dangerous activity even without involving uranium), but the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima was mechanically very simple. The one dropped on Nagasaki was a bit more complex (still within reach of a skilled machinist), and modern fusion bombs more complex still. Either way, all a relatively weak (but still city-killing) bomb takes is enough uranium-235 and access to a hardware store.

The hard part is getting a sufficient quantity of pure enough uranium-235 (or a few other materials, but that's the easiest one) to support a chain reaction. This is why there's been so little proliferation since the end of the cold war: it's not about the knowledge, it's about resources. Uranium mines and processing facilities aren't exactly subtle.

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