When I saw that headline, I assumed that there were already nuclear-armed subs in the relevant areas, because the entire point of those subs is to always be in position to retaliate to an attack. That would imply that the media announcement that Trump had deployed those subs was entirely performative; any such order would simply involve telling the relevant subs to keep doing what they were already doing. So, the headline would be technically true, but in practice a no-op, and therefore perfectly suited to feed the media without accidentally signalling anything substantive to anyone who knows how things actually work. Epistemic status: best guess on my world model, but not an area I’ve paid much attention to.
When I saw that headline, I assumed that there were already nuclear-armed subs in the relevant areas, because the entire point of those subs is to always be in position to retaliate to an attack. That would imply that the media announcement that Trump had deployed those subs was entirely performative; any such order would simply involve telling the relevant subs to keep doing what they were already doing. So, the headline would be technically true, but in practice a no-op, and therefore perfectly suited to feed the media without accidentally signalling anything substantive to anyone who knows how things actually work. Epistemic status: best guess on my world model, but not an area I’ve paid much attention to.
Part of what the question is asking is how do we know (decide?) the difference between performative and true existential threat.