cross-posted from: https://metawire.eu/post/247532

US President Donald Trump on Friday announced that he had ordered two nuclear submarines to deploy near Russia, responding to what he called "foolish and inflammatory" threats from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev.

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[–] [S] 141 points 1 year ago (1 child)

He is deploying the USS Jeffrey Epstein and the USS Distraction.

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  • [–] 67 points 1 year ago* (6 children)

    I am honored to be the president of peace!

    ~ This fucking goon

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  • [–] 49 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Also, publicly announcing your nuclear sub movements is a pretty good way to get positive ID on some of the yet unidentified algae bloom wakes, so kudos, Donny. Ta!

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Also this week:

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/leavitt-time-trump-won-nobel-225301881.html

    Leavitt: It’s time Trump won a Nobel Peace Prize

    White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said it’s “well past time” that President Donald Trump received the Nobel Peace Prize.

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    [–] 63 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 36 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    "He also did not elaborate on the locations, which are kept secret by the US military." OK who in the cabinet is going to leak the location first, anyone taking bets?

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  • [+] 31 points 1 year ago (7 children)
  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Their relationship has changed. I don't think Trump cares about Putin anymore. The pee tape being released (assuming it does exist) won't harm him, and Trump no longer relies on Putin's funding or social media manipulation for elections. Trump got most of his funding for the last election from Elon and people who know Elon, and now Trump can create other ways for foreign influence to launder money to him (such as the Trump cryptocurrency).

    Meanwhile, Trump feels directly snubbed that his "deadlines" for a Ukraine ceasefire have been ignored by Putin. That's why you see renewed funding for Ukraine.

    Narcissists can be very deferential to people they see as equal or above them on the social hierarchy, and Trump likely saw Putin that way. But not anymore.

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  • [+] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Where are the Republicans that still hate Russia? They've been very quiet for the last decade. Wherever they are, I see no reason Trump would care about them.

    Giving funding back to Ukraine is concrete action.

    Your first paragraph can be true while also having a recent falling out.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago

    Taco is pulling another Epstein distraction card?

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Now the akulas can record the sound signatures of the top secret ultra quiet american subs. It's a win-win for the ruskies.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Part of me wondered if the Akulas are even still in service because of how old they are, but then I remembered the state of the Russian Army in the Ukraine invasion and realized that of course they're still using subs from the 90s.

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  • [–] [S] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Medvedev’s comment:

    "Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country," the Russian official said.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    He talking about a hot war between Russia and the US or a US Civil War? Cause... He may have a point if it's the latter.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    As a show of force, moving nuclear submarines around doesn't seem like a great play.

    • A nuclear submarine's strongest asset relative to a surface ship is that one can't know where it is. It goes down, it doesn't come back up again for half a year, that makes it hard to identify. Why give clues that narrow things down at all?

    • Because it needs to stay hidden, you can't show it to the party you're doing the show of force to to prove that you've done the movement, which makes your words just functionally words


    the only weight here is the credibility your words hold. (Which in Trump's case may be one of, if not the, lowest credibility I'd personally assign to any historical US president.)

    I mean, I think that moving literally any military asset other than submarines doesn't have this issue. Surface vessels, aircraft, land forces, whatever.

    The article does not make it clear what type of submarine


    attack (SSN) or ballistic missile (SSBN)


    is being referred to. A "nuclear submarine" refers to both, as the term refers to the submarine's powerplant, not the armament. I am guessing, based on this response where the author says that he is not sure, that Trump never specified.

    If the submarine in question is a ballistic missile submarine, it really doesn't need to be anywhere particularly near a target to hit that target. US ballistic missile submarines fire Trident II SLBMs. WP has the Trident II range as "More than 7,500 mi (12,000 km)[8][9] (exact is classified)[10]".

    There are certain situations where you might want to fire an SLBM from less than that; you can fire it at a depressed trajectory to reduce the time until impact, which might be useful in a first-strike scenario where you want to destroy an opponent's nuclear weapons before they can get off the ground.

    https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs03gronlund.pdf

    SLBMs flown on depressed trajectories would have short flight times, comparable to escape times of bombers and launch times of ICBMs, thus raising the possibility of short time-of-flight (STOF) nuclear attacks. We assess the depressed trajectory (DT) capability of existing SLBMs by calculating the flight times, atmospheric loading on the booster, reentry heating on the reentry vehicle (RV), and degradation of accuracy for a DT SLBM. We find that current US and CIS SLBMs flown on depressed trajectories would have the capability to attack bomber bases at ranges of up to about 2,000 kilometers, and possibly at ranges up to 3,000 kilometers. To target bombers based furthest inland, a new high-velocity booster might be required, and attacking hardened targets would require a maneuvering RV (MaRY).

    However, in that case, you probably aren't going to want to hint that you are planning on doing so if you actually intend a first strike. Sure, you could try to so merely as a bargaining chip, but doing something that you probably wouldn't do in an actual attack undermines the credibility of the threat and thus devalues the bargaining chip.

    The US doesn't really need to issue nuclear threats against Russia. It has strong conventional military superiority.

    And there are some good reasons not to want to lower the bar for nuclear threats, as a convention. We don't want to nudge the world closer to a situation where a nuclear war actually starts accidentally


    not just in this scenario, but in later ones.

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  • [+] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Just for show. He’s still putin’s bitch.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    After musk opened the doors to Russia who the hell knows what Russia knows now.

    Also there is no reason to goto war with them. They don't want our land and we don't want theirs. wtf is wrong with this fucking sick world.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    They won't go to war. Trump likes to look tough and pretend he's a powerful leader. He needs an ego boost after all the negative press about him fucking underage girls and poor jobs outlooks.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Dog and pony show to look tough. We all know who he reports to.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    JFC. The President of the United States has publicly announced where he's moved the most powerful weapon platforms in all human history, whose whole raison d'etre is to be fucking covert, utterly hidden. Just so he could flex.

    Of all the crazy shit the man has done, this one rustles my jimmies.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    He could always say he did and lie, it wouldn’t be the first time, and it’s more in-character of such pathological liar con man.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Meh, maybe you're right, but flexing is equally in character.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I wouldn't even be surprised if the military was completely ignoring him in such regards, if Hegseth was stopping weapons shipments to Ukraine without the president knowing why should we believe he knows anything that is going on with them. He's probably just a racist, sexist, pedophile being used as a puppet because it appeals and upsets enough people to be used as a guise.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    The man is still an idiot but saying we have 2 nearby is useless information considering how covert they are and how much space they could be in. Foreign Nuclear subs have literally crashed into each other because they are so sneaky they couldn’t hear each other until they literally hit and “nearby” can include an area that is millions of square miles.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    Oh my god he hasn't even been in ofice a year, already feels like four. Why haven't the McDonald's cheeseburgers started doing their job already

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Medvedev's been getting a little too freaky during phone sex

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    "It is now 89 seconds to midnight"

    I think it's time to update that ....

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