This would be a world disaster, wouldn’t it?
Every nation except maybe North Korea knows this, correct?
It will never happen, even under the very very worst of circumstances short of NK getting serious intercontinental capabilities, right right?
Right?
I think it’s very plausible we’re going to have actual war sometime soon between the big guys, because holy shit Donald.
Nobody’d actually take out population centers right? Right? Please?
Like, worst case scenario, Donald aims and fires nukes at Beijing, and his generals actually carry out the order like cowards.
I wanted to ask “surely they’ll just try to disarm us, won’t take out major population centers in return because if for example NY or LA go down that’s an incredible disaster for everyone not just the US, right?”
But that’s pollyannaism, isn’t it.
Tactical uses of nuclear weapons leads very quickly to escalation. Why on earth wouldn’t an opponent look to eliminate a primary city and harbour complex? If you’re going to worry about China, LA, San Fransico and Seattle would likely be targets.
Of course China “only” has a hundred or so weapons compared to the US arsenal. They may choose to target military launch sites but the US submarine force would be safe to counter-counter strike.
Of course it would be a major global disaster. But nuking Beijing would also be one. If you can contemplate the one actually happening, then why not the other? And if Beijing did actually get nuked, what would China have to lose?
China’s nuclear deterrent exists precisely for that purpose; to fire back at anyone who nukes them. Of course Washington DC would be a primary target, and heck, maybe NYC.
A more likely scenario is war with Russia, though. As much as Trump is in debt to Putin, bear in mind Kaiser Wilhelm II was George V’s cousin, too. It’s not likely a nuclear war would start over someone just blowing up the other side’s city. It would probably be the result of an escalation, staring with a misunderstanding over what one side would allow or not allow. Suppose Russia believes Trump is okay with them taking over parts of eastern Poland, but when they do, it turns out that wasn’t Trump’s understanding at all, but, alas, he wanted to be “unpredictable” and send mixed messages. So a land war starts in Poland, and one side starts to lose badly and uses a nuclear weapon on the battlefield to try to reverse things. Then another is launched, and then there’s a full scale launch and we’re all doomed.
North Korea’s a very unlikely source of a nuclear war in the near future. Russia, much more so.
Depends on your war you’re imagining.
MAD between us and the Soviets was to prevent war. If both sides had enough nukes to turn every military target and population center above 50,000 into rubble, then a rational person would never risk starting a war. It was “mad” in it’s own rational way. (And it worked)
But in this post-cold war world, it isn’t Russia we have to worry about. It’s some third-world terrorist who gets a stolen (or not, depending on your level of conspiracy theory thinking) nuke and shipping it to NYC in a container. One nuke on an American city (THE American city, for some purposes), and no actual proof as to who sent it. What is the reaction? Nuke Iran? North Korea? Syria? Who??
You have to have a response, but how large? And what if you react with military action, and someone ships another nuke to LA? Or San Francisco? Or Honolulu? or Duluth, just for shits n giggles? When everyone lives in fear of the next one, what do you do? Is nuking Yemen going to help? or stop the next one?
And if you determine China is behind it, then what? Full on war? We’d “win” that one, but at what cost?
And all the time, Putin is sitting quietly and rubbing his dirty hands together as we take out all the major players, including ourselves.
I am so glad I’m not President!
Too late to edit.
Look on the bright side. A nuclear war might put up a lot of dust in the air, diminishing incoming solar radiation and cooling the planet. That’s one way to stop global warming. :eek:
The reality is places like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago are not major targets for nuclear attacks. Nuking a big city would just give a country a good reason to retaliate while doing nothing to prevent that retaliation.
If a foreign country launches a nuclear attack it will be aimed at our military. Targets will be things like command centers, missile bases, and air force bases. In a nuclear war, Knob Noster, Missouri would be more important than New York City.
This is assuming we’re talking about a military attack. Terrorists have a different agenda. If terrorists get a hold of a nuclear weapon, they would target a big city.
I disagree. A rational player isn’t going to nuke NYC or any random city as a war first strike against us. They’d target Charleston, New London, San Diego, Pearl harbor - cities with large military bases. But, even for Omaha, you’d nuke the base rather than the city. Nuking the city proper gets you no tactical advantage.
North Korea might use its puny arsenal against cities. It could nuke Seoul or any American city it could reach just to see what happens. There’s no point in them trying to nuke military sites. All that would do is get NK removed from the world. But one not-quite-sure-it-was NK lone city strike? What is the proper reaction? Do we turn them to glass for that? How many of them? Killing every NKorean is impossible (and counter-productive). All you do is create a refugee crisis.
The North Korea nuclear missle scenario goes like this. NK nukes Seoul, or Tokyo, or in a longshot Honolulu. (or rather tries to nuke, as there is a pretty good chance the nukes a dud or lands in the ocean). North Korea gets obliterated. China and South Korea fight diplomatically over who has to clean up the mess that’s left over.
It may be difficult to determine who actually shipped the nuke to NYC in that scenario, but it’s not very difficult to determine which nation produced the bomb, so I vote we start with nuking them (assuming it wasn’t our own). We can call it the really-strong-incentive-to-not-lose-your-nukes plan.
I don’t think I’d use the word “impossible” here. It would certainly be brutal, and genocide isn’t really a thing we do as a country (any more), but I think we’ve got the capability to kill practically all North Koreans (perhaps with some help from radioactive fallout, starvation, and disease), or at least to the point where there aren’t enough of them left to create a refugee crisis. What could get us to that point? I don’t know, but nuking NYC is one possibility.
Everything you said applies to rational state actors. But there are other entities that cannot be deterred this way, and may indeed see world disaster as a great thing. If ISIS had the means to deliver a nuke to NYC, they’d probably do it. World disaster? Great. Destruction of the world economy? Wonderful. America nukes the Middle East in return? Acceptable, or maybe might even play into ISIS’ hands somehow.
I hope not.
OP: Consider this.
I know for sure that Al Qaeda doesn’t have a nuke yet. How do I know that? Downtown NYC still exists.
Nitey nite.
Just to give you some food for thought.
3K people died on 9/11, since then over several million people have died, directly or indirectly from military action in two major campaigns (Afganistan/Iraq) and indirectly with Libya, Syria, Yemen and countless other smaller scale military actions.
If someone lights NYC up with some canned sunshine, the retaliation will be potentially in the billions of casualties. Regardless of what you might think now, first America will bury her dead, then she goes to war.
The above is irregardless of whose fault any particular thing is.
Isn’t ISIS in the ME? Maybe it gets them to their 72 virgins quicker, I guess.
So, what if someone stealthily sneaks a nuke into Washington and blows it up. Who’s left to launch a evaluate the situation and launch a strike in retaliation?
Yes, but they are apocalyptic; in fact IIRC, they believe that many of their own will be killed off until only a remnant, but that then a religious being will intervene on their behalf and save the day, so I could see nukes hitting the Middle East being totally compatible with their view.
At any given moment, the POTUS might not be in Washington, and/or he and the Vice POTUS might be separate by a considerable distance, or he and/or the veep might survive the attack, or the long line of presidential line of succession might kick in (more than 20+ people in line of succession!) One way or another there would be a replacement government.
I’m going to assume that someone smart enough to obtain and smuggle a nuke into a foreign capital could figure out the schedules of those he wants to be there when he blows it up. I would think that someone who could orchestrate this might plan for dealing with those not in town at the moment as well.
How long would it take for #21 or lower on the list to get up to speed given that a good portion of those who would help in that endeavor are nuclear dust?
Also worth mentioning that a nuke won’t necessarily kill everyone in Washington DC. It’ll kill a lot of people, but, for example, if you were to airburst detonate a 300kt warhead between the Capitol building and the White House, you might not destroy either one.