301–310 of 476 posts
Solid OSINT methodology here. The 10x AS path prepending is the most interesting detail to me b/c typically you'd see prepending used to de-prioritize a route, which raises the question: was this about making traffic avoid CANTV, or was it a side effect of something else? A few thoughts: - The affected prefixes (200.74.224.0/20 block → Dayco Telecom) hosting banks and ISPs feels significant. If you're doing pre-kinet…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I assume that nuclear capability would rule out a target from this kind of snatch operation Why would it? 1. "Nuclear capability" is not binary. The available delivery mechanisms and the defensive capabilities of your adversary matter a lot. 2. MAD constrains both sides. It's unlikely that an unpopular Head of State getting kidnapped would warrant a nuclear first strike especially against a country like (Trump's) Am…
> an unpopular Head of State Heads of state are generally pretty good at delegating the C&C of their nukes to people they are pretty popular with. That's orthogonal to popularity polls of the populace.
> When BGP traffic is being sent from point A to point B, it can be rerouted through a point C. If you control point C, even for a few hours, you can theoretically collect vast amounts of intelligence that would be very useful for government entities. The CANTV AS8048 being prepended to the AS path 10 times means there the traffic would not prioritize this route through AS8048, perhaps that was the goal? AS prependin…
What most likely happened, instead of a purposeful attempt to leak routes and MITM traffic, is CANTV had too loose of a routing export policy facing their upstream AS52320 neighbor, and accidentally redistributed the Dayco prefixes that they learned indirectly from Sparkle (AS6762) when the direct Dayco routes became unavailable to them.
This is a pretty common mistake and would explain the leak events that were written about here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be the devil's advocate, I don't think Russia foresaw a situation that had Ukraine looking to join NATO right after NATO had been used offensively for the first time ever to put its thumb on the scale of a civil war that didn't involve NATO countries.
If Putin didn't want NATO getting involved if he started a war there's one special trick he could have played! He could have not started a war ... The only reason Ukraine joining NATO is a problem is if Putin/Russia (or someone else) wants to attack them. I know there's a real risk of peaceful trade, mutual alliance, humanity, and democracy from breaking out in such circumstances but somehow I think the risk might be…
I mean, that's objectively not true since Libya, who attacked no one, but had a NATO bombing campaign to assist their civil war.
NATO is no longer a purely defensive pact.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's a fair argument to make that a nation that drops a nuclear bomb on a city isn't "civilized"
The high end of the range of death estimates by the two atomic bombs is around 246,000. The estimated range of US military deaths from an invasion of Japan (Operation Downfall) was 250,000 to 1,000,000, and another 5 to 10 million Japanese. Dropping nukes was both barbaric and the more civilized option. Oppenheimer et al. deserve their acclaim. Japan attacked the US first, and by Hiroshima the US had 110,000 dead in…
To kill a billion people by conventional bombs would require years of sustained effort costing trillions of dollars, and I imagine the army doing that killing would collapse under the moral horror of its own actions far before that number is reached. On that other hand, thousands of nuclear weapons can be deployed by a very small group of amoral people with instantaneous destructive effects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Which is indistinguishable from a Russian first strike. It's really not. Once they've launched, it's pretty clear where they're going. All NATO needs is enough time to respond, and they absolutely have that. > Outside nuclear holocaust, Russia, on launching a strategic nuclear strike on Ukraine, would have crossed a red line Beijing, New Delhi and Tehran each value. (The last because Russia's justification for glas…
> It's really not. Once they've launched, it's pretty clear where they're going What are you basing this on? Even back when warheads were strictly ballistic we couldn't do that. Russia's arsenal, today, contains maneuverable warheads. Flip it around: if we committed to a first strike on Russia and China, is there a world in which we wouldn't say it's to glass North Korea? > All NATO needs is enough time to respond Th…
> Flip it around: if we committed to a first strike on Russia and China, is there a world in which we wouldn't say it's to glass North Korea?
Because while you can't tell how far a missile is going to go, you can tell how far it has gone. We're more than capable of tracking that a missile has gone past what would make sense for a Russian strike on Ukraine.
And you'd be able to tell if a launch made sense to attack NK from the US or not. Orbital mechanics and the burn patterns of ICBMs don't really let you redirect at the last minute, and the trajectory wouldn't really make sense.
> This is not how strategic nuclear exchanges are ever modeled. Because it's now how strategic war plans are ever written.
> Use it or lose it. Silo-based missiles are sitting ducks. By the time nukes are landing in Ukraine they could be landing across a good chunk of Europe and Turkey.
Europe and Turkey have no silo based weapons left. It's all either airborne or submarine delivery these days.
In this scenario the weapons are all already in the air, or on submarines where they've been as safe as they always are.
> I'm not saying India will nuke Russia. I'm saying India and China would both exact a price from Russia for normalizing nuclear war in the modern context. This has been repeatedly messaged by both in respect of the Ukraine invasion.
Once again, the context here is a Ukrainian nuclear (even if tactical) first strike, and the subsequent Russian retaliation. "Punitive" retaliation is all of their strategy. This has already been normalized. Which is why a "tactical" nuclear strike would never make sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't we just do something like that in Iran? Not helicopters, but we still secured the airspace just the same.
Securing airspace for fancy stealth bombers is rather different from securing airspace for helicopters you can shoot down with just about anything.
Still probably quite a bit different then helicopter inserted decapitation strike.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that MAD only works when there are a small number of players. Once it gets up past around 12, a.) it becomes too easy to detonate a nuclear weapon and then blame somebody else to take the fall and b.) the chance of somebody doing something crazy and irrational becomes high. Same reason that oligopolies can have steady profit but once you have ~10-12 market players you enter perfect competition and inevitably get…
>There are 9 nuclear-armed states today. Likely this has set us on a path where nuclear war is inevitable. It's really hard to guess how retaliation would happen in practice, a large-scale nuclear war certainly isn't inevitable . The most likely targets for nuclear strikes right now are also non-nuclear states.
It's scary, but in some scenarios one nation can absolutely nuke another nation without threat of getting nuked themselves. In reality, the cat coming out of the bag looks more like that than nuclear armageddon.
I assume that nuclear capability would rule out a target from this kind of snatch operation, and that this event will add pressure to proliferate.
I assume that nuclear capability would rule out a target from this kind of snatch operation, and that this event will add pressure to proliferate.