British Comedy
1 HN recommender · recommended in 7 months, 2025–2026
1:37 · 68K views · Sep 13, 2019
A short scene from the British sitcom Yes Prime Minister in which officials describe 'salami tactics' for invading a country slice by slice. Each small step is too minor to justify a major response.
HN uses it as shorthand for incremental aggression and escalation, in threads on geopolitics, trade and creeping encroachment.
8 comments from Hacker News
People like to imagine a big obvious threat that you respond to in kind, but what about a gradual creeping encroachment aka salami tactics? Classic scene from "Yes, Prime Minister": this video
> Those nuclear weapons are irrelevant, they'd never be used against the United States, and they'd certainly never be used in the event that the United States seized Greenland. Europe also would not go to war, and has no ability to resist the United States seizing Greenland. I don't think we should, to be clear, and I disagree with our current president's baboonish and disgusting behavior toward our allies, but any assessment to the contrary of what I wrote purely from a military point of view is just fantasy. I believe the EU would face a "fight or die" choice if the US tried it. Salami slicing, even for Greenland. Old British comedy, but same point: this video But not only the US. Simply failing to go straight to war in such a case would also tell the Russians that the EU's not a real threat. Were the EU to announce it was doing nothing, 10 minutes later Russian nukes would be in the air to Berlin, Paris, and London. It's not like the Russians would fear a response from the US at that point, given they were clearly no longer allies of NATO.
The Soviets had a "no first strike" doctrine because they perceived themselves to be the stronger force on the continent. They had a huge standing army and massive numbers of armored vehicles and expected to be able to roll through the fudla gap and across western Europe as they had done through Eastern Europe in the final stages of WWII. NATO, on the other hand, expected to be overrun by the soviets and used the threat of nuclear counterattack to keep them from trying it. The Soviets built up their own nuclear deterrent to prevent NATO from responding with nukes (the MAD). If the US/NATO nuclear threat wasn't credible and the NATO armies were no match for the soviet army, then western Europe became a pawn for the soviets, leading the western allies to also invest in conventional arms. In short: the argument for the conventional forces was that the nuclear threat wasn't really credible because nobody would choose to end the world. this video
Can't resist posting this classic video from "yes minister" that discusses the "zeno's paradox" of MAD: this video (The general idea is that in a slowly escalating conflict may be no clear logical point where it makes sense to "push the button" first).
and wars can be led in such ways that it never seems like the enemy is attacking the thing over which you would be willing to end the world. aka salami tactics this video