Recuring theme in SciFi, Action/Adventure, biothriller movies and novels is a city or town has an outbreak of a deadly virus and the federal government must consider droping a bomb (usually nuclear) on it as a last resort to contain the ourbreak. Does this have any basis in reality? What would be the legal basis for such an act?
The general governmental power to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public. Less extreme examples (that have actually occured in US history) include the involuntary quarantines of areas or persons (to prevent the spread of disease), and the dynamiting of houses (to prevent the spread of fire).
There is no legal basis for such an act, and almost certainly it has no basis in reality.
But among all the conceivable speculative possibilities, how could anyone state that for sure? Undefined hypotheticals don’t have factual answers. You should have learned that with your last fifty questions.
Sorry, that last was uncalled for.
Not true. It is generally accepted that Bush or Cheney authorized the Air Force to shoot down the highjacked jets on 9/11.
Cite: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50745-2004Jun17.html
The fighters didn’t make it in time, of course, but the order was, IMO, lawful.
The possibility of the gov’t bombing cities, just adds one more reason for living out here in the boonies. :rolleyes:
Most of those sci-fi/horror movies have it that a city has pretty much turned into a bunch of mindless, flesh eating zombies. If it came to that I would think somehow, someway someone would manage to get around to nuking the city rather than see the whole United States and perhaps the world succumb to the same fate.
The only ficitonal instance of this that ever really got me bothered was the movie Fail Safe. Always wondered if in such an extreme circumstance the final solution in that movie could be done. I think the spoiler term should be well up on that movie by now but just in case…
In that movie an american bomber gets faulty orders to go nuke Moscow during the Cold War and all attempts at recalling it or stopping it are unsuccessful. The plane succeeds in its mission and vaporizes Moscow. To placate the Soviets and avoid full-out nuclear war the American President intentionally nukes New York to even the score.
That’s the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.
I don’t know why they would use the nuclear bomb, given the unpleasant consequences (aside from blowing up hundreds of thousands of constituents), but wouldn’t a MOAB be more practical?
Remember the movie was made in 1964. I do not think they had MOABs back then. Besides, the point was to appease the Soviets from a counterstrike so the President did a tit-for-tat to ourselves in the movie. I doubt a MOAB would have turned the trick since the Soviets would likely say it was:
A) Not a big enough boom compared to a city buster nuke
B) Misses all the nastiness (radiation) Moscow would be facing so wouldn;t really count as a fair trade
I disagree entirely that this is comparable to bombing a city. It’s the difference between justifiable homicide, when one’s life is in immediate, imminent danger, and premeditated murder, killing for a presumed later assault.
Matt Drudge reports that Milo Minderbinder has been tapped as Secretary of State during the second Bush administration, as Colin Powell announces his decision to retire in order to “be at home for my son’s senior year of high school – yeah, that’s the ticket.”
The government (or at least a unit of government) has bombed part of an American city.
I can’t remember what the outcomes of the various civil suits against the city were.
This is a diy google - in the early 50’s, the AS (Air Force, IIRC) actually sprayed San Franciso and the peninsula with some kind of distictive respiratory bug - and used the resulting diagnoses to determine the effectiveness of thier new-fangled arial dispersion system.
The oath of office specifies only that the office-holder act in the best interest of the country - we have no problem with killing a few for the greater good. I doubt that any society which lasted longer than 1 generation (anyone remember the Shakers? They forbade sex - even amongst marrieds - separate dorms by sex that didn’t laast long.) would have any problem with sacrificing the few in the perceived interest of the many.
I meant that perhaps a MOAB would be used instead of a nuke in today’s world. That is, the MOAB would…destroy? the air within a given area, killing all of the microbes, or viruses or whatever and not make the land uninhabitable for X million years. Of course, whatever was blown up in said city probably would spread contaminants of it’s own, but you know.
What is the destructive potential of one of those anyway?
Killing people is relatively easy. Killing microbes and viruses is much harder. I can kill you by hitting you on the head with a rock. Killing all of the cells, bacteria and viruses in your body would take massive doses of ionizing radiation, incineration or a vat of some suitably nasty and toxic chemical.
A MOAB isn’t going to do much to simple life forms. Even a nuke has a limited range where its radiation and thermal effects are guaranteed to kill all forms of life.
Well, if you’re going to count that, then it’s happened lots of times. We had a case here in Minneapolis where a drug squad raided a house, and used something called a ‘flash-bang gernade’ to distract the occupants while the squad rushed the house. Apparently it was over-powered, and it started a fire, and killed 2 occupants of the house.
So you could say our police department ‘bombed’ a house, too. But it would be only slightly accurate, and only vaugely related to the OP.
I’m now lawyer, but…how about martial law? Under that, as I remember, you can kill looters and rioters—perhaps highly infectious plague victims might qualify as threats to public safety, or something.
And rampaging zombies might qualify as “rioters”—perhaps even “enemy combatants.” Hell, they might be classified as dangerous animals, or simply inanimate objects. So (re)killing them might be a little easier, legally.
There is a qualitative difference between “police used a flash-bang grenade as part of a raid” and “police flew a helicopter over a house and dropped a bomb on it.”
Nonsense. A flash-bang is a [theoretically non-lethal] concussion device used to stun hostiles to make them vulnerable to a rush by authorities/soldiers. (I suppose, at a stretch, you could classify it as a ‘distraction’, but it’s designed to stun the belligerents and slow their reactions.)
The bomb dropped by the police in Philadelphia was designed to demo. a “bunker” on top of the building. The resulting fire destroyed more than 50 homes. It was in every sense of the word a “bomb.”
On the Failsafe scenario:
I used to frequent a listserv that had quite a few former U.S. military members. At one point this scenario came up, and they all said that they would not have obeyed such an order, and they couldn’t imagine anyone who would – they had sworn to obey “lawful orders”, and this would not be lawful.