There Were Bgp Anomalies During the Venezuela Blackout

It stops at international law because thats the only level without a governance system over it.

There is no governance system over the USA, UK, etc.

There is a governance system over Ohio, New Mexico, etc.

You are only right if you get big enough that you are a peer of the USA, UK, etc. Sovereign.

The Russians really have a quad (they also have mobile, truck mounted ICBM's that form a significant part of their deterrent, offering some of the guaranteed second-strike advantages that the US gets from SSBN's- and which their SSBN program does not provide nearly as well as the USN does). The Chinese only recently added a manned aircraft leg of their triad with the JL-1. The Indians technically have a triad- just no silo based systems, all of their land based missiles are from TELs, and they only have two SSBN's and do not do alternate crews so more than 1/3 of the time they don't have any deterrent at sea. The Israeli's are not believed to have any sea-based ballistic missiles, their sea-based deterrent would be Popeye cruise missiles and so vulnerable to interception. The Pakistanis are still building their first sea-based deterrent. The French and the UK have no land-based missiles, they are only sea-based and airplanes. The South Africans invested in the Jericho missile more for its space launched capabilities than its warhead delivery abilities, and never really looked at anything sea-based, so far as is publicly known.

The core parts for MAD land-based missile silos (to soak up the enemy's missiles) and submarines (to ensure a second strike). Planes are largely a diplomatic deterrent inasmuch as they're easy to send out and easy to recall.

But Pyongyang isn't playing MAD. It's playing credible threat. And for a credible threat, you just need missiles. (On land or on subs.) The point is that you raise the stakes of e.g. a Maduro operation to risking Los Angeles.

  CN 3
  FR 2
  RU 3
  UK 1/2
  US 3

I've read convincing arguments (sorry, I cannot find them now) that this reasoning is mostly bogus.

One, the decision of dropping the bombs wasn't coordinated with planners of Operation Downfall, so casualties weren't a consideration. As such, it cannot be "civilized" (because the intent to be civilized just wasn't there).

Two, those casualty numbers rest on arbitrary assumptions about what the Japanese would or wouldn't do that don't hold up to real scrutiny, and ignore a host of options other than "full scale invasion" or "nuke".

Three, you cannot discount the flex towards the USSR, an argument many Japanese to this day maintain was a major reason. Which wasn't a civilized reason either.

That urgency and willingness to surrender was before Japan knew that the USSR had already agreed with the allies to declare war on them at the Yalta conference in February. The USSR committed to declaring war on Japan "two or three" months after Germany fell, which happened on May 8th. They declared war on Japan on August 8th.

We did not forward any of this information onto the other allies. Instead we chose to nuke Japan on August 6th. The Emperor was allowed to remain as a figurehead.

[1] - https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/28458-document-39b-magic-...

Also perhaps worth noting that after the first bomb the Japanese government was not planning to surrender. The second dropping moved things to a deadlock where half of the ministers wanted to the surrender and the other half did not.

The Emperor had to be called in—an almost unprecedented action—to break the tie. Then even after the Emperor had made his decision there was a coup attempt to prevent the "surrender" (a word not actually used) broadcast:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident

I do not know how anyone can think that Japan would have stopped fighting without the bombings when two bombings barely got things over the line.

The book 140 days to Hiroshima by David Dean Barrett goes over the meeting minutes / deliberations and interviews to outline the timeline, and it was not a sure thing that the surrender was going to happen: the hardliners really wanted to keep fighting, and they were ready to go to great lengths to get their way (see Kyūjō above).

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.

[0]https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-air-force-lands-fighter-p...