Tuesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, April 7, 2026
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16 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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BlueSky.
Fatso is weirdly obsessed with Biden and, well, he’s f’ing delusional.
https://x.com/HQNewsNow/status/2041184238788133211?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2041184238788133211%7Ctwgr%5Ec65a9a1815df4e884445c7d0ef40b0cb88485fc5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffpost.com%2Fentry%2Ftrump-easter-kids-autopen-biden-what_n_69d4174be4b05047ac8f6ebd
https://x.com/atrupar/status/2041169784876749254?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2041169784876749254%7Ctwgr%5E5b60bf975d7d08ffb6099d6e6bb7873ab605bbef%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffpost.com%2Fentry%2Ftrump-bunny-white-house-easter-egg-roll_n_69d3dacbe4b0d214cc7208e1
Is anyone here afraid that Trump & Hegsteth might be stupid enough for use tactical Nukes on Iran tonight?
Part of me thinks it might be a distinct possibility as both of them seem overly up for a impressive display of force and are both too self-involved to realize what a monumental can of worms that would open up. Trump seems like the kind of guy who would think it a great idea. He has been itching to do something dramatic and after all he would be the first president since WWII to “make the hard decision”.
I hope this is just a paranoid thought. But at this point it wouldn’t surprise me.
Fatso wants to destroy Iran.
Because, if you remember, he had a “feeling.”
So presidential.
@Rick DeMent: I wouldn’t be surprised.
On the faux intellectualism of the Trumpists minions around T:
“Drezner”
@Daryl:
Some history. A lot of cautionary tales. Times 10.
@Rick DeMent:
I’ve been mulling over the possibility of his use of nukes, tactical or otherwise. There’s no one in his inner circle that will argue against it, Vance and Rubio are trying to put as much distance between this fiasco and themselves as possible. It may come down to as @James put it. “If an actual Go order is given along these lines, a whole lot of people are going to have to make some very hard decisions.”
I’ve also been considering whether ordering nukes would be the straw that drives enough R’s to impeach him, but that is still a bridge too far.
So, it’s not regime change, no no, that would be a step too far. So instead we’re going with the more moderate route, sure to make the Iranian people happy: annihilation. Failed state! You’re welcome! And I see no way a failed state of 90 million people with a martyrdom-friendly religion and a vicious regime could ever come bite us in the ass.
Curious: How many bridges do we have to blow up before the enriched uranium disappears?
Meantime, Adolf plans to reserve a good chink of his ISP’s IPO for retail investors, aka commoners.
I’m far from having even a casual understanding of high finance, but my suspicion is that this might be a ply to just extract money from regular people, and that the finance pros don’t see anywhere near the multi-trillion value the nazi wants to pay off his Xitter investors with.
On a lighter note, Human skull discovered during Easter egg hunt near Los Angeles
Alas, it does not appear to have been colorfully painted.
Mean while in Hungary:
J D Vance has popped up at a Fidesz rally, lauding Orban and blasting the evils of the EU.
I wonder if this little stunt will actually harm Orban at the vote?
At any rate, the opposition Tisza party are at 52% in the latest opinion polling, Fidesz at 38%.
This should be enough to overcome the gerrymandering.
“Poll of polls” is a bit tighter at 49% to 39%.
Also, I wonder if daer JD has caught the German AfD blowing a raspberry at the US?
And Meloni nopeing out on US use of Italian bases?
And Frage quietly shuffling way from the US over Iran?
Memo to MAGA: European nationalists are often tricky to woo, and tend to put their own partisan and national interests first.
And this war is about a popular as a swarm of stinging jellyfish at a bathing beach
Seen on Xitter today:
Q: “How does Donald Trump resemble British foreign policy?”
A: “Both avoided fighting in Vietnam!”
@Rick DeMent:
@Sleeping Dog:
re nukes.
If have a nagging worry that Trump might just be despearate enough and stupid enough to consider it.
I still think the probability low; but not low enough.
@JohnSF:
In the popular imagination, all it takes to end any war is one nuke, as happened at the end of World War 2.
Spoiler Alert: this took two nuclear bombs. It came after a very long sustained bombing campaign of , military losses all over the Pacific, the loss of Admiral Yamamoto, the threat of Russian troops deploying in Manchuria, and other things.
Since then, several high ranking, mostly American, military officials, have claimed the US would have prevailed in Korea and Vietnam, had they made use of nukes (I’ve never come across an explanation on how nukes would have been used in these conflicts).
Since Korea ended close to status quo ante, and Vietnam ended with the communist takeover of South Vietnam, and no nukes were used, the simplistic mind can decide that, yes, these wars would have been decisively won had nukes been used.
El Taco might not want to be categorized like this.
@Kathy: @Kathy:
I have a suspicion about why TRINITY was regarded as vital.
The US already had a uranium bomb (of very diffrent design) that was guaranteed to work, and never even tested, because it was known it would
And was already being shipped to the Pacific before TRINITY.
The thing was, that type of (rather crude) uranuim bombs relied upon isotopic separation; which was slow.
iirc the US had one more nearly ready, and another likely in a month or so.
A plutonium bomb was a lot more techniclly finicky, hence the need for TRINITY; but if proven allowed chemical separation NOT isotopic from the Hanford piles.
Thus upping the bomb core production rate to about one every 12 days.
Even faster, if more piles were built.
That meant the US would have sufficient for multiple city strikes, AND for a stock for “tactical” use to support an invasion of Japan.
Which use the Joint Chiefs were planning.
Operation DOWNFALL
As I’ve said before, WW2 could easily have turned to have an even nastier ending than it did.
Re Vietnam I’m not aware of serious use-cases. Apart from some propsals to get the French out to their doomed position at Dien Bien Phu by “tactical” strikes, which the Joint Chiefs were dubious about and Eisenhower even more so.
And of course the periodic daftness of SAC commanders.
In re Korea, iirc MacArthur had proposed nuclear use against the Chinese main logisitc centres near the Yalu River.
There are also indications Eisenhower hinted to China that unless they got serious about peace talks, nuclear use was an option. How seriously China took this is unclear; other indications are that Eisenhower ramping the conventional forces worried China even more; that they might not be able to hold a full-on US dive north.
@JohnSF:
I’ve read about proposed uses for nukes in the battlefield. in the early 50s, nukes seemed to be the answer for everything. Nuclear shells to use against Soviet tanks formations, nuclear missiles to attack Soviet naval bases, nuclear missiles to take out Soviet bombers, etc. I get an impression of 10-15 KT for such things. Never mind poisoning the land with massive fallout, quite apart from who knows how much collateral destruction.
Strategically it’s a different matter. But more as a deterrent than a serious weapon. For starters, a massive “exchange”, to use the sanitized term, of nuclear broadsides, would wipe out human civilization for at least decades.
@Kathy:
I knew BAOR offices in the late 1970’s.
And RAF ones from the 1960’s
It was in those decades expectecd that a full-on engagement in Germany would rapidly involve large scale “tactical” nuclear use and chemical weapons.
Germany, it was expected, would effectively cease to exist in short order.
The question would have been of the Soviets struck the UK and France with nukes. In which cases the UK and France would hit the USSR, regardless of the US (that is still the core case re Russia today).
The 1980’s brought changes: NATO began to assume that its air and munitions power, plus the sheer size of the Budeswehr at that point, could halt a Soviet offensive, and leave the Soviets having to chose to go nuclear or back off.
It is still the case today that France and the UK plan to respond to any Russian BM strike on themselves with an annihilatory response against Russia.
Not on the US scale, obvs, but 600-odd thermonuclear warheads are judged adequate to get the job done.
Of course, the UK and France would be obliterated in the counter-strike, but such is death.