Europe
News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)
Rules (2024-08-30)
- This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don't overly distort the content.
- No links to misinformation or commercial advertising. When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
- Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don't post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don't troll nor incite hatred. Don't look for novel argumentation strategies at Wikipedia's List of fallacies.
- No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism. We follow German law; don't question the statehood of Israel.
- Be the signal, not the noise: Strive to post insightful comments. Add "/s" when you're being sarcastic (and don't use it to break rule no. 3).
- If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
- Light-hearted content, memes, and posts about your European everyday belong in other communities.
- Don't evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
- No posts linking to speculative reporting about ongoing events with unclear backgrounds. Please wait at least 12 hours. (E.g., do not post breathless reporting on an ongoing terror attack.)
- Always provide context with posts: Don't post uncontextualized images or videos, and don't start discussions without giving some context first.
(This list may get expanded as necessary.)
Posts that link to the following sources will be removed
- on any topic: Al Mayadeen, brusselssignal:eu, citjourno:com, europesays:com, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Fox, GB News, geo-trends:eu, news-pravda:com, OAN, RT, sociable:co, any AI slop sites (when in doubt please look for a credible imprint/about page), change:org (for privacy reasons), archive:is,ph,today (their JS DDoS websites)
- on Middle-East topics: Al Jazeera
- on Hungary: Euronews
Unless they're the only sources, please also avoid The Sun, Daily Mail, any "thinktank" type organization, and non-Lemmy social media (incl. Substack). Don't link to Twitter directly, instead use xcancel.com. For Reddit, use old:reddit:com
(Lists may get expanded as necessary.)
Ban lengths, etc.
We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.
If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 7 or 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.
If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the primary mod account @EuroMod@feddit.org
view the rest of the comments
there's no reason to think the extremely difficult problem of intercepting nuclear ICBMs with the kind of reliability required has or will be solved anytime soon. The thing about nukes it that you don't really want to let even one through because of the devastating results and you can look at the current events in the middle east to see that while there are interceptors they don't have anything close to 100% reliability.
But you don't really mind either.
People have risked more for less.
I don't know that people have ever risked millions of lives like that as would be the case here.
Nobody knew if the atmosphere would burn when the first bomb was tested.
The US did some maneuvers, including the Cuba crisis, that could have triggered nuclear war.
Global warming puts humanity and nature as we know it at an existential risk.
The housing crisis could have led to the collapse of the world economy which would have risked huge famines.
WW2
Keeping the risks of smoking or soft drinks secret.
Outsourcing pharmaceutical production lines to China.
Yeah sorry I don't think any of these are comparable to knowing that as a direct consequence within hours of your decision it is likely that a major city will get hit and that will kill millions instantly. The first one is also false in all but the weakest possible sense of it never being possible to really know whether anything at all including pink elephants bursting out won't happen before you've done something new.
I believe the actual picture also is a lot more bleak when it comes to successful defense. Interceptor success rate is fairly low, time is limited and no major breakthroughs are predicted for future versions. They're not presented as ever being useful for defending against a near-peer adversary launching a full scale attack.
How is the USA going to contain China? The way they behave suggests to me that they plan on withstanding a nuclear attack.
How many reactors does the EU have to breed plutonium?
How many uranium sources do exist that the US cannot convince to sanction the EU?
How many years does it take to create the nukes for a full scale attack?
Nukes are a nice idea but for the coming years they won't be there to solve any problem. The EU has to focus on resolving the conflicts with reason.
I've seen nothing that suggests USA plans to withstand a nuclear attack from China. I wouldn't expect them be either because they can't.
How exactly the capability can be developed when adversaries don't want you to is certainly something that needs to be thought about. One part of the puzzle is France that has been signaling they are willing to provide a nuclear umbrella for Europe and just announced some partner countries as well as the expansion of their stockpiles.
I of course don't disagree that conflicts need to be resolved with reason if possible but developing a nuclear deterrence doesn't exclude doing that.