In Japan and South Korea there is deepening concern over the reliability of long-time American security guarantees – whether the U.S. will come to their aid in the event of a war. This has been turbo-charged by Donald Trump’s tough treatment of traditional U.S. allies, which has some in Tokyo and Seoul calling for a reassessment of their non-nuclear policies.
As an American, I don’t trust Trump to come to America’s aid. I’d be sweeting bullets if I was Korea and Japan.
Well the US did promise to come to Ukraine’s aid if they gave up their nukes…and here we are.
Japan actually has the technology and know-how to rapidly spin up a nuclear weapons program because they were already doing it before signing up on their non-nuclear policies with the US.
The real question is which country is going to be the first to actually jump ship. I’m fairly certain like 95% of the UN is just going to wait out Trump’s term and hope the next president will undo all his insane plans, because no one wants to lose longstanding ties with the US, even as the rug pull of 70+ years of American influence going under gets closer to reality.
You know who really needs the bomb? Canada needs the bomb. It has a hostile authoritarian military superpower on its border with 10x the population, hostile trade relations, and a stated intention by national leaders to invade and conquer core Canadian territories. Canada is in the exact situation where a nuclear deterrent is most justifiable. If nukes are ever justifiable, they’re justifiable for small powers facing potential invasion by aggressive larger ones.
Canada needs the bomb.
The worst part of the Trump regime is knowing we’re in the Fallout Timeline
That’s the difference between Obama’s stance of “we won’t use the bomb if you don’t have it” and trump/Putin’s “we won’t take you seriously if you don’t have the bomb”
One encourages disarmormebt. The other armorment
Japan having nukes is gonna be PR nightmare given their imperialistic history lol.
As for South Korea and ROC/Taiwan, sure thing. UK ot France should sell them some nuclear armed submarines lol.
what if they launch them out of gundams? that seems like it wouldn’t be quite so much of a PR nightmare
I mean, not really. Barely anyone is alive who remembers these things viscerally, and people don’t pay attention to history at all, if they even know the broad strokes
There’s still alot of animosity from South Korea towards Japan. The threat from China and American unreliability has driven them together politically but the animosity still remains on an individual level.
I suppose. At the moment, most countries in East and South East Asia are wary of China because of maritime disputes. If anything, this will be a good PR opportunity for Japan to gloss its history by engaging with countries having a problem with China. Tokyo already made overtures to India and Philippines because of China.
After the UN ramble yesterday, no one should rely on Trump and the US for anything. Every country should be looking for alternatives to US guarantees.
I didn’t watch and haven’t seen anything on it. Was it Normal 2025 Trump bad, or something extra special?
Bla bla bla immigration is the root of all evil bla bla bla we should be shooting down Russian jets bla bla bla
Average mixed bag dementia patient enabled by unknown drug cocktail.
Also him whining about the building because he didn’t get the contract to renovate the place or some dumb shit. “Eeerg the escalator broke” bitch shut up they just became stairs move your bloated legs once in a while
It’s very incoherent. Either Donald has become the usual “old man yelling at the sky”, or he’s genuinely unhinged long time ago. People say Donald used to be more sane decades ago but it could’ve been an act back then. Anyway, sorry for making comparison with Hitler again but Hitler also did the same on his book Mein Kampf; a lot of it is just rambling.
Watch the videos. There are interviews in the 80s or 90s where there is a clear train of thought and a logical progression to his statements. His phone interview after 9/11 is less coherent, but not too bad from a grammatical and logical standpoint. These days, he can’t string together 2 or 3 complete sentences about a single topic. Note that none of this is related to the truth or accuracy of his statements.
Can we stop comparing Trump to Hitler please? Hitler does not deserve such comparison.
I can’t blame them for wanting to do it. Same with a whole lot of other countries right now.
I’d also like to point out that this will necessitate a new round of nuclear weapons tests. We’re giving up on a hard won success:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel#Present_day
World anthropogenic background radiation, caused by atmospheric nuclear testing, peaked at a level 0.11 mSv/yr (4%) above the natural 2.40 mSv/yr. It began to fall in 1963, when the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was enacted, and by 2008 it had decreased to only 0.005 mSv/yr above natural levels. This has made special low-background steel no longer necessary for most radiation-sensitive uses, as new steel now has a low enough radioactive signature.
Well, France or the UK could also share their technology, or even Pakistan or India. I imagine it’s easier to buy the technology from an ally than developing it from scratch.
Eh. There’s nothing too crazy about developing from scratch. The hard part is generating your first batch of enriched uranium. A physics grad student could probably design a basic nuke. The US actually ran a test to that effect decades ago; a couple of physicists with no specialization in the nuclear side of things, and using only publicly available material, were able to design an implosion-type device. The expert consensus was that it would have worked just fine.
The main technological hurdle, besides enrichment, is making sure all of the explosives trigger at the exact same moment and that can be tested inexpensively without a core being present.
Making it is actually so easy that a boy scout once did it in a shed, the difficult part is that, outside of extreme circuimstances, you require a sample in order to make more of it.
He made a neutron emitter, not a nuclear fission bomb. A great way to turn your back yard into a Superfund site, not so great as a nuclear deterrent.
Enriched Uranium is Enriched Uranium.
To get the uranium for the first bomb, you can always do what Israel did - have your spies literally steal it from US nuclear facilities.
Buying the blueprints would still remove the need for extensive testing, but you make a good point. After I posted the comment, I actually wondered about how hard it would be since there is so much information about nukes publicly available.
Eh, you would still want to test. Even buying from an ally, there’s no telling if the blueprints haven’t been sabotaged to be ineffective or maybe just inefficient. (Maybe your ally supports you having nukes, but wants to make sure their nukes are better.)
But even beyond that, when you test a nuke, you’re not just testing the design. You’re testing your materials. You’re testing your manufacturing capability. You’re testing every bit of the vast production process that went into making the weapon. And you’re testing your own technical ability to design nuclear weapons. Getting blueprints would be beneficial, but there’s no real substitute to designing your own bomb optimized to your own available materials and production processes.
If you donated some money strategically you could probably get a copy of the US nuclear secrets to accidentally fall out of Mar-a-Lago’s bathroom window.
Hey Canada…We should be thinking about this, also.
I’ve been saying that since 2008 as a teen but man was that an unpopular opinion. We’re a very naive country imo.
I wish but… Do you think they won’t invade us at the whiff of nuclear armament?
Building nukes is like unionizing; ideally you don’t go public until you already have your nukes/union
Realistically, I can’t see a situation where the UK wouldn’t agree to sell to Canada if Canada felt it was needed.
Gonna be tough to hide when all our computer systems run on Microsoft, Google, or Amazon platforms.
I don’t trust them not to invade us without that protection, anyways.
Agreed. I just think that would make it certain.
If we could get nukes secretly I’d be all up for it.
If Japan and South Korea go through with this perhaps we could purchase some from them (or elsewhere, UK, France, hell, even China) to cover us while we work on a domestic program.
Buy a loaded submarine on the hush-hush and sail it to Vancouver? I like it.
Do what isreal did and lie about it while building one
I want to joke “oh, like Iran!” but I don’t want to make razad explode
I don’t think we could realistically hide it from their agents but yeah, totally. That’ll probably be the way if our gov’t decides to do it.
it seems that only my country (iran) having nukes is bad.
I think Israel having Nukes is worse than Iran having Nukes but really any country having nukes is “bad”
Wrong Abrahamic DLC is all it takes.
jewish isis already has, so…
The funny part is they’re all wrong about reality.
That some really strong belief* you have there. Lmao
Nope just obvious conclusion drawn from lifelong study.
Apples & oranges honestly. Best would be no one resorts to that strategy. 2nd best is extreme regimes - especially vindicative and religious ones - don’t have such weapons.
Honestly, I trust Iran to behave like a rational actor a whole lot more than I trust Trump. Yes, they’re run by religious nutjobs, but they have been proven to show some restraint on international policy.
Iran as a nation has been around for millenia, I think they have their shit together more than some fresh and not so fresh upstart colonies, like Israel and the USA.
Rational? While they push for shit like virgins in the afterworld ? No thanks. But you are right that suddenly USA isn’t rational anymore either. It seems harder to deprive someone than to simply prevent access to.
“virgins in the afterworld” as an irainian the first time I heard that was from a stand up comedy from Robin Williams.
don’t believe the bullshit.
Dude, don’t act as if your government was anything short of extremism. Setting aside the people obviously. It is absolutely a theocracy which is fucking insane in 2025. Just look at it from the sky and tell me how wonderful it is the best country in the world. That’s no utopia…
sigh. Do you know what “rational actor” means?
Well, I should think so but entertain me…
It means they have motivations, and seek those motivations in a rational way.
Meaning they are religiously motivated, but that doesn’t mean they behave in unpredictable ways. They’re not going to launch a nuke just because they feel like it. On the contrary, they have shown a great deal of restraint.
I mean I am sure usa germany and japan are the most peace loving countries in the last century. unlike iran that literally didnt start a war in that last 200 years.
sorry.
from my perspective my country needs nukes the most of the “Candidates”
Actually this is a good point. 2 of them actually grew out of their initial ways. Admittedly one regressed.
But neither Germany nor Japan are fucking theocracies beheading gays or whatever.
So you gouvernement can suck dicks and hopefully gets replaced by a secural one.
You made abortions illegal, you have the right to point fingers?
I what?
So not only you keep on steering away from the point but you are hilariously wrong on all your assumptions.
My county of residence and origin is absolutely not making abortions illegal.
Also I, as a citizen, am not making anything illegal. I’m taking great care to separate country, government and citizen which you should really consider doing as well.
Governments makes things illegal. An often times a specific branch there of. Generally not citizens themselves with very odd exceptions like parts of Switzerland and such.
I’m having an opinion which I’m very much entitled to in a fucking democracy. Which might be an alien concept to you I gather.
if palestine shown anything is that the collective west didnt grow out of any of its bad habits.
whole of west got behind destroying syria so that “assad” should go because he was bad. because assa “bombed hostpitals and you wouldnt do that even to kill Al-Qaeda terrorists”
now he is replaced with Al-Qaeda commander and he gets welcomed in france and usa. and jewish isis gets to bomb every hospital and university and be the animal that they are because “khamas”.
if you think western regime goals is “saving gays” or something like that you are retarded.
if Libya Syria Afghanistan and of course the best of them saudi arabia was not enough to show you what is the most important foreign goals of eu and usa, I can’t help you.
The hell you bring Palestine into how a theocracy should be prevented to get access to nuclear dissuasion? Stay on the topic please… They are a shit regime that must not have access to more than what they have and even that is too much.
I am trying to show you some points.
all those you call secular governments in west like uk usa france germany and so on, did and continue to do invasions war crimes and atrocity world over.
so I don’t get your obsession with non-secular countries, and thinking that only non-secular countries are capable of good.
whatever my government does , doesn’t even get near to level of what Israel did for the last 80 years and especially last two years.
and all those “secular” countries supported israel completely with actions (words are useless)
israel is a secular country? if so that is news to their government which read from their religious texts when they do an genocide and war crimes. if you have not head that it is because you are ignorant. and those secular regimes is west are completely fine with them doing it.
so I don’t think west care about religious genocide if their buddies commit it.
and my country needs the nukes to survive as history has shown western regimes treaties are not worth the paper that it is written on. if jcpoa didnt show that nothing will. they bombed who they want and kill whoever they want.
be better informed and don’t be fox news level of ignorant.
I don’t think the US is secular anymore.
Again you are steering away from the discussion ; focus please. 2 wrongs never did a right.
Whatever you try to weasel about comparing other countries is absolutely irrelevant when discussing the likelihood of Iran having access to nuclear weapons being a good thing.
The rest of the world being filled to the brim with assholes is irrelevant. My county is irrelevant.
We are just looking at a shit gouvernement in Iran in a fucking vacuum.
And the possibility that THEY get nuclear weapons being is atrocious in itself.
Don’t be silly, the US will be happy to sell weapons to South Korea and Japan. Also, they will sell to whoever attacks them!
This is going to result in some really confused Akira spinoffs
Oh God(zilla)
Evangelion 2048, the Angels are Trump shaped.
Replace Lilith with Trump. Ew.
Covfefeulations!
I know I’m off-topic, but It’s crazy how AI-art makes a funny concept by @wetbeardhairs@lemmy.dbzer0.com look so stupid and lame. There’s just something so off-putting about it (even after accounting for the anatomical fuck ups like the hands being reversed).
I was thinking more like Ivanka clones from the Lilith vat like Rei
My understanding is that Japan is de facto an nuclear armed state, they simply haven’t made an warheads. They have the all the necessary technology and fuel enrichment, so they could quickly arm if they thought it would be necessary in the near future.
How’s the ICBM situation?
Probably not terribly relevant if their only requirement is to drop one on Pyongyang if necessary. Japan’s got planes. I don’t think anyone else outside of their hemisphere is saber-rattling at them at the moment.
From what I understand from sitting in the comfort of my own armchair, North Korea’s air defenses and indeed pretty much all of their traditional military is pretty rickety at this point. They rely on the nuclear threat plus the assumed support and intervention of China, along with a battery of conventional artillery pointed directly at Seoul, to dissuade any other state from just steamrolling them. North Korea’s missile game is pretty weak, too, but likewise really all they need to be able to do is hit Japan. Hell, if all they wanted to do was cause chaos in the south they’d just have to truck a bomb to the edge of the DMZ and set it off right there.
Oh ffs, we don’t need more nuclear powers.
The only options for nuclear weapons are none at all, or everyone with one.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where they exist, and as such, you cannot trust enemies or even allies to have good conscience. If the only way to guarantee your country’s safety against a country with nuclear weapons is your own, then this headline was inevitable.
The more countries that have them, the higher the chance of them being used.
War is just another game
Tailor made for the insane
But make a threat of their annihilation
And nobody wants to play
If that’s the only thing that keeps the peace
[Chorus]
Then thank God for the bomb
I agree. And I still think what I said in my previous comment.
