Or carpet bombing? Or fire-bombing? Weren’t the immediate death tolls of the Dresden and Tokyo fire bombings comparable to the Nagasaki and Hiroshima nuclear bombings?
Fire bombing Dresden and Tokyo was just as evil as dropping the A-bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Killing civilians is always wrong.
WMD = Weapons of Mass Destruction, commonly taken to include Nuclear, Biological and Chemical (NBC) weapons.
Before China launched, would you broadcast your unwillingness to respond in kind with nukes against a superior conventional power that desires to subjugate your people and destroy your free way of life?..effectively inviting their superior conventional force (assuming they had one) to our shores?
If you were willing to broadcast your moral position, or even if you failed to make a threat of nuclear force, I believe that you would be violating a “moral imperative [for] the preservation of as much of the human race as possible.” As paradoxical as it may sound, the threat of annihilation is what saves humanity in this case.
Slavery is not always preferable to death, but even if it is, the attitude that it isn’t can save you from both.
Note, we are not now talking about Iraq, but whether there is any circumstance in which the threat of use of nuclear weapons is allowable.
I would probably keep silent on my moral position, or let others make the threats on my behalf (you raise a compelling point) but once the bombs were in the air, I could not push the button.
Diogenes, why have you been holding out? No one else has any evidence that all of Iraq’s capabilities were destroyed after the war; UNSCOM in its final report was unable to account for 1.5 tons of VX, for example.
But you apparently do have that evidence; else you would not have made the above assertion. Please, please, share your evidence with the world.
Only you can avert an attack on Iraq.
Sua
Vis-a-vis Iraq, I think we could find effective and authoritative ways to respond which would not kill civilians or permanantly poison the earth.
Iraq has issued a full and complete reort which says that all WMDs have been destroyed, and the US has absolutely no evidence to the contrary. 
The burden of proof is on the US to prove that Iraq DOES have WMDs, not on Iraq to prove they DON’T. If you have some proof that Iraq still has chemical or biological evidence then please share it with the rest of us.
That is completely untrue. The burden of proof established by the relevant UNSC resolutions is as follows:
The burden is on Iraq to demonstrate that it has destroyed the WMD it has previously admitted that it had and/or that UNSCOM uncovered. The evidence of such destruction must be in documentary and physical form.
This is a wholly reasonable burden - it does not require Iraq to prove a negative, only to prove the destruction of the WMD that has been proven to exist.
And, as Hans Blix has pointed out, governments keep track of their WMD, so if Iraq has destroyed those WMD, it will have the requisite evidence.
Sua
… following which General Pillsbury will lead in an occupation force of 10,000 doughboys. 
To be more serious, this sort of sabre-rattling is nothing new – we’ve reserved the right to use WMDs in retaliation for attacks since Truman’s day. What is new is that the attack on Iraq, if conducted singlehandedly, will be the first occasion in which U.S. troops have taken the field against an opponent who has not either: (a) attacked us first, (b) been sufficiently obnoxious to our ships at see as to be the moral equivalent of an attack, (c) attacked an ally which we were pleged to defend, or (d) is the object of a U.N. resolution requesting its members to use armed force to cease the aggression of. This preemptive proposed war goes against 226 years of U.S. foreign policy.
To go against that longstanding tradition and launch a singlehanded preemptive war may be something needed in the changed circumstances of this day and age. But I have personally not seen sufficient evidence to convince me that it is.
Psst, Polycarp - remember Grenada? Panama? The Libya bombing? Kosovo? the Bay of Pigs? the Dominican Republic? the occupation of Nicaragua and other C.A. nations in the early part of this century? The missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan during the Clinton years? None of those meet any of the four criteria you set out.
The preemptive proposed war goes against about 2 years of U.S. foreign policy - counting from the end of the Kosovo campaign.
Sua
Agreed on the silence. Also, I personally am very glad that there are others who “stand on the wall” to make these hard decisions for me, and I certainly will not feel morally superior to those who make necessary threats on my behalf.
Deterrence is all about convincing the other side you will pull the trigger (whether you will or not), so when one of our statesmen (and I use the term loosely in this modern age) makes a nuclear threat, I do not criticize him for it. I do think that it is very difficult to have a credible nuclear threat when you don’t in fact have the willingness to carry it through. The second the other side even begins to think you won’t do it, all that defense spending was for naught.
Regarding Iraq, the threat has been made. If WMD’s are used, “overwhelming retaliation” must be applied, whatever that means, or our threats/promises will carry no weight in the future, and many more lives will be lost on both sides. A destroyed credibility means people will die later.
We must analyze the moral curve over all future time, not just over the next month.
This may be news for you, but if hypothetical enemy could simultaneously nuke all 50 of the US’ biggest cities, there would still be many millions of people left who would perhaps like to be defended.
What I understand you to say is that while you might be willing to defend yourself from a conventional attack, you would not be willing to engage in a war using WMD.
Ergo, I go to war with you, and so long as I use nukes I will have an advantage. Thus by taking the nuke option off the table, you have created MORE of a threat, not less of one.
Military deterrence policies such as MAD are only effective between adversaries who are reasonable and have something to lose. When an unpredictable madman like Saddam believes he is cornered by the US invasion, it would be naive to assume he wouldn’t use his WMD’s before he lost the capability to do so. Threats of nuclear retaliation are meaningless chest-thumping in this instance, and will not deter the use of WMD’s by Saddam. He has nothing to lose, least of all the lives of common Iraqis.
I disagree with this, according to news reports in NPR iraqi generals have said that the threat of “overwhelming retaliation” by Bush I kept them from using any WMD during Gulf I. This may have been reported elsewhere too, but I heard it on NPR this morning.
—This may be news for you, but if hypothetical enemy could simultaneously nuke all 50 of the US’ biggest cities, there would still be many millions of people left who would perhaps like to be defended.—
Against what, exactly? Cancer? Who would want to invade an irradiated Mad Max wasteland?
I sort of see DtC’s point: given the choice between ending the world and only ending part of it, it seems kind of hard to argue that there’s any point to killing further people, most of them innocent. Of course, those might not always be the only realistic choices. For instance, if the President has a nice bunker, then he might decide that his own safety and relative power is worth the deaths of billions.
Apos has summed up my moral position very succinctly**.
You can nuke NYC without making Syracuse uninhabitable.
You can nuke LA and still live in Bakersfield
More to the point, the realistic danger is not that someone will drop 50 ICBMs, but that they will set off a tactical nuke or 2 in Manhattan or the Mall. That would cause a horrific amount of damage (human and otherwise), while still leaving the vast majority of the country unscathed and well worth defending.
I would agree with you if the choice were indeed between “ending the world” or not. But it isn’t.
For that matter, even if we imagine a hypothetical situation in which I know for sure that every single man, woman and child in the US would die from the incoming ICBMs, and that my retalitory nukes, even if aimed at military targets, would kill millions of men women and children in Enemy Nation X, I might still launch them; because presumably Enemy Nation X would then use nukes on Europe, Australia, etc. (We have already established the leaders of ENX are psychos) If I’m doomed, might as well help those who will remain.
Oh, and as I pushed the button, I’d say “See you in hell, you bastards.”
I don’t know much about nuclear strategy, but I know enough to know that none of us know much about it, and we are now debating ethics in fantasy scenarios that will never occur.
There is only one country that can stage a full assault on the US that stands any chance of success (however you define that term), and that is, obviously, Russia. I think MAD has proven itself as an effective deterrence strategy with regard to the US-Russian relationship. And even if Russia were to attack, the first strike would not be on the 50 most populous cities, leaving US Air Force and Naval officers, then free of the burden of having to worry about their families, the ability to retaliate.
Now, if it were some country other than Russia that uses WMD, I can see how Mr. Bush would think it might make some sense to make an example of that country so that another country doesn’t try to take a similar sucker punch in the future. The only way to make sure they don’t bloody the US nose is to promise that before the day is over, their nose will be 10 or 100 times bloodier than ours.
That doesn’t necessarily mean wholesale annihilation of an entire culture. Everyone here seems to be talking about nuclear weapons as if they necessarily involve city strikes against the innocent. Wholesale annihilation is guaranteed only in the MAD scenario with Russia. I know that’s what we all grew up with, but times have changed. In all other cases (e.g, the cases we now face), nuclear weapons can be used in a measured fashion against targets of opportunity. That sounds strange to a Cold War child, but it is reality.
Personally, I think Saddam’s biggest fear has to be seeing US troops retreating over the horizon…
Yes, I feel SO much safer knowing that China knows it can get away with nuking/invading/blackmailing us at the first oppurtunity without any threat of consequences under a possible Diogenes Administration.