The Sanders nuclear option: How would it play out?

[IceSpear]

I think the whole "damage to the party" aspect of this is way overhyped. The Democratic Party is not going to tear itself apart if Sanders doesn't formally drop out and insists on a roll call vote at the convention. Heck, I think someone whose garnered ~45% + of the delegates is entitled to have their votes counted at the convention. That won't happen though because Sanders knows that the result would be embarrassing for him, not for Hillary.

Not formally dropping out and insisting on a roll call vote is fine.  The issue is more if he tries to stop the DNC from handing convention planning over to the Clinton campaign.  Every major party national convention for the past few decades has been conducted as a giant commercial for the presumptive nominee, because the presumptive nominee's campaign got to plan it, decide who could speak in primetime, what they could say, etc.  If Clinton declares victory, but Sanders says "No, the race isn't over yet.  We need to have an open convention, because the super delegates might change their minds.", that's a problem.

If that happened, 600+ superdelegates would just sign a letter stating they are going with the winner of the most delegates/votes, and have zero intention of switching their votes, and therefore hand over all control to the Clinton campaign.

It's not going to happen anyway though. He'd gain nothing from it, and could very well face repurcussions in the Senate if he tried.

[IceSpear]

This is annoying.

In what sense?

This is not the route the Sanders campaign should be taking. It only makes things more complicated. In reality he has so much more control over the long term future of the party than Clinton does if he plays his cards right, but going about it this way will make that almost impossible.

He should drop this foolish strategy, drop the attacks on Clinton, refocus on his issues/message, and make his goal to push the party leftward and radically transform the process in which future nominees will be chosen in the future.

That's true. If he plays his cards right, he could have a lot of influence. But if he goes scorched earth, he'll burn all his bridges. Senate Democrats would not tolerate him going on a crusade to overturn the election results throughout the summer. He'd be facing possible repercussions in the Senate similar to Lieberman. Many of the activist progressive groups like MoveOn and DFA would turn against him on principle. His movement would go up in smoke and leave only Reddit fanboys left. It would be an utter disaster for him.

But that's all hypothetical. This is clearly just more bluster and talking out his ass from Weaver. As far as I can tell, nothing Sanders himself has said has signaled he'd want to do this, and one of his other top strategists didn't seem keen on the idea either.