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.

  • JTskulk@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    4 days ago

    “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?

    • Frezik
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      edit-2
      4 days ago

      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.

      • yucandu@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        4 days ago

        Trump likes Putin because he showered him with praise and admiration for 20 years, not because of some threats of blackmail. He got invited to all the big parties in Moscow, but never got invited to any in Britain, or France, or Washington, hence why he hates them and loves Russia.

        This? This is all theater for the part of the Republicans that still don’t like Putin. This isn’t real action.

        • Frezik
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          4 days ago

          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.

  • Kurious84@lemmings.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      4 days 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.

    • yumpsuit@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      4 days ago

      There will likely be a lot of stupid conflicts over the Arctic in the oncoming decades, sad to say.

  • thyristor@lemmy.pt
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    4 days ago

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

    • thiseggowaffles@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      edit-2
      4 days ago

      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.

  • cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    4 days ago

    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.

  • tal@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    edit-2
    4 days 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.

  • VerilyFemme
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    4 days ago

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

  • HuskerNation@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    4 days 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