What are the chances that somewhere in the Pentagon basement a glassy-eyed fanatical MAGAt staffer is blowing the dust off War Plan Red?
(I mean, a pre-emptive poison gas attack on Halifax is so 1930s in this age of nuclear first strike capabilities.)
I think we're more likely to see a nuclear event, something intended to galvanize support for Trump. Similar to how 9/11 turned George W Bush's disapproval ratings around, making him a popular wartime president. Trump CRAVES being a wartime president.
I hope I'm wrong.
@cstross Harper shut down Chalk River (more or less razed Chalk River) to get the time-to-domestic-nuclear-arms over a year in Canada. (This after various rumours to the effect that the very expensive and highly secretive and deeply unpopular long gun registry somehow became acceptable even to very opposed MPs after they got specific, highly classified, briefings was because it was a Chretien independent deterrent project.)
(Harper got rid of that, too, despite a Quebecois attempt to keep it.)
@cstross Chalk River was the Canadian federal nuclear research facility; contributed to Cold War weapons development, ongoing medical radioisotope production, stuff like that. PM Harper shut it down abruptly and messed up the global medical radioisotope supply; no conceivable economic motivation.
It was suggested that since he was a dominionist, the point was to get the "how long until Canada produces a nuclear weapon?" time from "under 1 year" to "about five years".
@cstross The Liberal PM a prior to Harper (I am waving aside some detail, here) was Jean Chretien; the long gun registry was an Chretien-created RCMP-run arms control thing. Very unpopular with the Canadian right; several Liberal MPs who voiced opposition to it got briefings and stopped opposing it. It cost WAY too much, like, orders of magnitude too much. Quebec tried very hard through the courts to keep it after Harper killed it.
The rumour went that it was an independent deterrent project.
@graydon Well that would make sense: it's the US dominionist riff on the circa-1995-2005 Pakistani war plan for a nuclear conflict with India—lose the heartland but retreat into the tribal territories (aka Afghanistan) and keep fighting.
The opinion of the natives about to be overrun by heavily-armed fanatics retreating from another country is never considered germane …
@sirspate @cstross There's nothing truly important in LEO. (Serious reconnaissance and nuclear early warning and even most of the weather satellites are higher.)
Deterrence is a promise of corpses in such quantity rites for the dead will be observed long post-facto in the mass, if at all.
Present-day cheap deterrence is almost surely something like pneumonic rabies.
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