Consider how people say, for example, that it’s impossible to revolt against the government using just personal firearms, given that the government has nukes, fighter jets etc.
People do say that kind of thing. Counterarguments:
Successful revolts don’t need to be capable of defeating the army in a fair fight. All you need to do is make it sufficiently painful for them to keep fighting that they give up. I think the Middle East has modern examples of this.
A revolt may have some portion of the army on its side, and another portion might refuse to fight their own people. Nukes in particular—I would be extremely astonished if any government used a large nuke, killing a bunch of civilians, when putting down a rebellion. (Maybe they’d use very small tactical nukes—equivalent to large conventional bombs—in situations where there’d be no civilian casualties, but I suspect (and hope) that there’d still be strong resistance to breaking the nuclear taboo. And would there even be an advantage to doing so? Are the tactical nukes cheaper than the equivalents? Heh, someone has looked into it: probably not.)
People do say that kind of thing. Counterarguments:
Successful revolts don’t need to be capable of defeating the army in a fair fight. All you need to do is make it sufficiently painful for them to keep fighting that they give up. I think the Middle East has modern examples of this.
A revolt may have some portion of the army on its side, and another portion might refuse to fight their own people. Nukes in particular—I would be extremely astonished if any government used a large nuke, killing a bunch of civilians, when putting down a rebellion. (Maybe they’d use very small tactical nukes—equivalent to large conventional bombs—in situations where there’d be no civilian casualties, but I suspect (and hope) that there’d still be strong resistance to breaking the nuclear taboo. And would there even be an advantage to doing so? Are the tactical nukes cheaper than the equivalents? Heh, someone has looked into it: probably not.)