The problem I see with your analysis is that it is indeed assuming a single loose bomb; perhaps more saliently, that the US would know it was a single loose bomb.
A smart terrorist group with one bomb is going to know that once you’ve shot your one big bullet, there’s nowhere to go. They’ll use it for blackmail, unless perhaps they think they can bluff about having more.
Of course I’m assuming “a smart terrorist group,” which may be unsound. Still, though the far greater threat is that they will have bomb-making ability, or that the US will think they do.
This wouldn’t come near to calming the shitstorm that would come out of Brussels and Berkley.
I think the MAD policy probably already has been communicated to everyone who needs to know
The carrot you propose fails to account for the Grand Fenwick moral hazard: if giving up a WMD program gets all these goodies, there’s a powerful motive for getting one and then giving it up. Someone like Quaddafi ends up looking like a sap, and Syria (which might want all the close-relationship goodies you propose) would be smart to covertly get materials from NK (who doesn’t, but does want hard cash)
Your proposal to indiscriminately and genocidally nuke a host of MENA countries as retribution for a terrorist splinter group nuking NYC is madness and would never be supported by rational Americans, leading me to conclude you underestimate the American people.
There’s no doubt this nation would witness an outcry for nuclear retaliation–i.e. The Limbaugh DittoHead contingent–but cooler heads in the administration would prevail.
>>> As president, how many Middle East countries/cities/population centers would you advise targeting for systematic destruction, in this scenario?
Would you find 10 million dead acceptable? 50 million? Would you target only military sites or cities themselves? What warnings would you give expats? What outcome would you hope for in destroying much of the Middle East?
Read the last poll that was taken in Iraq vis-a-vis the US occupation? Here, allow me: fight your own ignorance.
Mind you, those results are a year old – must seem like “the good old days” to a great many Iraqi compared to what the situation is like now. Little wonder no more polling is being done.
Propaganda. The percentage of foreign fighters in Iraq is actually quite low as General John Abizaid has to admit in mid-spin:
Moreover, those kill ratios you so proudly mention? They only produce more insurgents:
So much for the Flypaper Theory.
Hmmm…my irony meter just exploded.
On the one hand you decry the behavior of your soldiers and on the other, you proceed to dehumanize your enemy. No possible cause and effect relationship comes to mind? No? Nothing at all?
Good point. I suspect, though, that there would be a pretty good chance of the US (eventually) determining how many nukes are in play, or were in play, when the electronic intelligence data gets sifted and analyzed. Something like, oh, a series of urgent phone calls placed by panicky Pakistani army officers yelling and screaming in Arabic up the chain of command that x number of nukes are missing. There’s even a small possibility that we’d be tipped off by Musharraf in timely fashion, which could come in handy, since we probably wouldn’t detect such a hot lead in anything like real time. In theory, though, those phone calls would be stored away in a data bank somewhere in the Echelon system.
I don’t think so. Al Qaeda leaders have already gone on the record threatening us with nuclear destruction. They’re not going to go to all the trouble and expense of securing a nuke only to sit on it and try to finagle a transfer to a Swiss bank account. It’s not about the money, you see. They really want to kill us and destroy our [western, predominantly Christian, yet secular] civilization.
Underestimating the enemy is the single worst mistake a gov’t. can make. The Pentagon mantra in this regard is to “plan for the worst and hope for the best”. But I doubt that even the more paranoid red-teamers assume that terrorists can engineer nuclear fission from scratch, or will ever be able to do so. Dirty bombs, yes, using materials stolen or procured elsewhere. Maybe even cobbling together a nuke from components, but constructing the whole thing? Think of the sheer scale of the enterprise – the engineering, the machine-tooling, the economics, the tricky part about refining uranium into plutonium… it won’t happen that way. That’s much more involved and costly than simply stealing one via bribery or a staged raid on a military depot.
No way that a president gutsy enough to announce such a doctrine would be dissuaded by this. As if there isn’t a constant shitstorm from the France-Germany contingent and Berkeley anyway…
Unfortunately, it hasn’t. There has to be the public proclamation of an official, new US policy (at least under that particular president). It has to be loudly, clearly, unequivocally, and unapologetically declared to the entire world. (Indeed, the pres’ resolve in defending his doctrine would be the first indication of his resolve to implement it in a worst-case scenario.) Why do it, given the political backlash at home and abroad? Because *we don’t have diplomatic relations with terrorists, 'k? *
First, furt, I gotta give you HUGE props for referring to “The Mouse That Roared” (one of my favorite Ealings) and for using one of my favorite concepts, “moral hazard”. (If I led a band, it’d be called “Moral Hazard”.) But I don’t think your logic holds generally (with the exception being NK; see below); WMDs (and esp. nukes) are too expensive to develop, with too heavy a diplomatic and economic opportunity cost, for even most dictators to undertake them so cynically.
I think the recent policy turnaround by Libya’s Moammar Q/G. (I’m not touching the spelling issue with that one) illustrates this. Here’s a guy who’s been stealthily fostering a super-secret nuke program which, even though it hadn’t produced one usable bomb, had managed to run rings around the CIA (spit-take reaction: “Libyan nuke program? What nuke program?”). I don’t think Moammar’s was a soulful conversion or an epiphany in the traditional sense. I doubt he saw the light on his way to Damascus, unless it was an accountant’s green-shaded lamp on a cost-benefit analysis chart. You know: “Nukes, pro: can use once, then kiss ass good-bye. Nukes, con: rogue-state status with all the austerity trimmings; mounting signs of public discontent with authoritarian rule; spending too much on guns, not enough on butter, etc.”. He may have also been further convinced by our gung-hoism against Saddam Hussein and maybe a photo or two of statue-topplings in Baghdad. Maybe he was further apprehensive that a future high-level defector would spill the beans on his nuke program. And just maybe he foresaw that the stock portfolio of isolated, Arab rogue-state regimes was about to tank, and that it was time to cut his losses. But if he had planned to establish a nuke program with the intent to just bargain for its dismantling, then his strategy has backfired. His turnaround didn’t let him off the hook re. paying compensation to the families of the victims of the jet bombing from the '80’s (he’s still committed to paying out about $300 million, IIRC). I believe our relations with Libya are probably still improving, but only very slowly and incrementally – from a starting point in the diplomatic sub-basement.
So I doubt the “Fenwick” strategy is what’s motivating these regimes – with a caveat. The notable exception would be North Korea, which has milked the nuke development card for about two decades’ worth of emergency economic, medical, and food aid (most of which gets siphoned off to the army). But NK is exceptional in other ways, too: in the profound extent of their diplomatic and popular isolation, and the neo-Stone Age stagnation in which they languish, which has literally darkened the lights under the Kims’ juche ideology; in their geographical [read: heavy artillery and short-range missile] proximity to the Asian Tiger economies the whole world is tied to; and Jong-Il’s personal reputation as being just the sort of wild-'n-crazy guy who just might do something really stupid (even if NK-watcher and “Under the Loving Care of Our Heavenly Father”-author Bradley K. Martin doubts he would).
But what ultimately sets NK apart from the worst Arab regimes is the total isolation of its wretched population from the rest of the world, and the resultant opacity of NK public opinion and support for their regime. We may not always know what Libya’s leader is likely to do, but we’re pretty sure that the average Libyan knows that he’s poor, relatively isolated from the world, and ruled by a guy that most of the world despises.
The only window we’ve had on NK public opinion has come from a steady stream of defectors, from all ranks of NK society, and the debriefing interviews in Martin’s book make for very sobering reading – the worst revelation being that during the worst of times, probably most NKs welcomed the coming war they saw as imminent, if only because their death would release them from their endless suffering. The interviews shed some light on questions which have had NK analysts baffled for decades: do the North Koreans sincerely idolize their Great Father (or, under Jong-Il, “Dear Leader”), or is it all a Stakhanovite display of unctuous affection? (Basically, it’s real.) Do they realize just how poor and backwards they are, and that the rest of the world both pities them and considers them a bunch of brainwashed freaks? (Absolute poverty, yes, but not the relative, aberrant extent of it; as for global perception of them, no, not a clue.) That the South Koreans are rich by comparison? (Generally, no.) Are they willing to fight for Kim Jong-Il? (Yep, even though the army defectors reported not believing they’d win.) To strike first? (Yes.) Would the army hold together, and would it use nukes in a first strike if instructed? (Probably; Kim has been playing off factions against each other and establishing airtight internal security intelligence oversight of the army, so that plotters are exposed and executed before they can act.) Are they willing to kill tens of millions of South Koreans in a war whose ostensible goal would be reunification under Kim? (Yes; in fact, NK propaganda has inculcated the belief that such a reunification is their paramount goal, and that war to accomplish it may yet prove to be a historical necessity.)
I can’t tell you just how relieved I am that Kim Jong-Il has just assented to formal, six-party (USA, NK, and NK’s neighbors) talks to discuss terms for a possible hold (and disarmament?) on the building of more nukes. They, and by extension we, may have a future after all…
I do not hope it is what will happen, but I think it is what will happen in the event of a nuclear attack against a large U.S. city. What I hope will happen is that the terrorists continue to keep the elephant dancing, but not enrage it to the point it runs amuck and kills everybody. But I am not at all optimistic that this will occur. Terrorists terrorize, Al Qaeda is known to have shown great interest in gettin their hands on nukes … I wonder why. I’m betting their Saudi and Syrian masters have kept them away from the nukes.
As I have already said, I hope this will not happen. I would be against indiscriminately nuking Middle Eastern countries. I would be all for finding out what countries supported the terrorists and razing it to the ground. Conventional bombs should do the trick. But I would want to be very sure it was the country behind the terrorists.
I also agree with the logic that you can’t stop terrorists after a big strike against us by just attacking the terrorists. A LOT of money and government support for terrorists happens in the middle east. Maybe not through official channels, but definitely through back channels. It’s pretty much known that one of the top Saudi princes was a major supporter of Al Qaeda, for instance.
Oh, and the outcome I would hope for in destroying the Middle Eastern country that supported terrorists in a big strike against the U.S. would be to make the other Middle Eastern countries frightened enough to cut off their support for terrorists. Right now they consider what’s going on to be a form of diplomacy. They should not be permitted to continue to think like that.
I don’t think that we are giving the world’s oldest republicenough credit here. Individual freedoms are firmly entrenched in the US. It is nonsense to assume that the military will just take over. There is nothing in our culture or history to suggest this. DO you have any logic behind that statement? And the military culture in not one to think “We should run this place.”
[QUOTE=Nicodemus2004 I do think that our responce would be well informed… and terrible for those responsible. We lost two buildings, they lost two regimes.[/QUOTE]
Ummm…
We lost more than two buildings. Does that mean we can keep invading places?
Since I live in NYC, well, I’d probably die.
Or become a mutant.
But I’m sure the good people at Haliburton would rebuild the city really nice and maybe this time we can get more Applebee’s restaurants in the city.
As far the nuking the ME goes. Well if Ramadan was just around the corner, I wouldn’t be hanging out in Mecca. I do think Bush would go for Iran or Syria. He would have more international support this time.
Relieved–why relieved? Do you seriously think NK’s megalomaniacal leader has any intention of negotiating away his nuclear arsenal? His overriding concern is to remain on the national stage, not exchange his stockpile for sacks of rice, nuclear power plants, hard currency, you fill in the blank. Without the bomb, he’s the leader of a pissant fourth-world basketcase. With it, he’s an internationally prominent wild card with street cred, stature, gravitas. Kim personally gains nothing by negotiating away his nukes. He cares not a whit for the general NK population. As a textbook narcissist and paranoid, he’s using his expanding nuclear arsenal to consolidate power, feed his ego, and get respect from party officials. Disarmament talks with NK–three-way, five-way, 20-way–is a quest for Eldorado. In 15 years, his arsenal and international reach will be much larger, not smaller.
Well, that’s just it; how good of a chance. I’m not about as optimistic about our intelligence gathering as you are (though I don’t pretend to be especially well-informed on our current abilities). The crucial thing will be what margin of error is deemed acceptable … “Yes, sir, we’re 70% sure there are no more nukes.”
I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean blackmail for cash, but blackmail for other things they want; e.g. ending aid to Israel, all US forces out of the Middle East, non-interference in a Saudi Arabian civil war, that sort of thing. ISTM that a sober Islamist would think of those sort of incremental strategic gains – which the threat of a nuke could well get – would be better for their cause in the long run than the tactical thrill of taking a hill they can’t hold.
Well again, I don’t claim to be a technician; but it doesn’t need to be “from scratch.” Plutonium from the Koreans, equipment from the Iranians, Russians and the black market, Technicians from Pakistan and money from SA, all meeting in a basement in Istanbul.
Gotta give 'em back for getting it.
Well, yes, and I was not under any illusions that Colonel Mo had become a gentle lamb – but the cost/benefit analysis he did is exactly what you are talking about changing. If breaking a rule gets me spanked, I won’t break rules. If you add in that saying I’m sorry gets me a cookie, I might ask myself whether a cookie is worth a spanking.
And all it takes is one nuke-producing state. If one can pick up a dozen citypoppers from the Hair Club of Pyongyang for a measly hundred million, while Uncle Sam will pay billions to stop having them, a cottage industry is born.
Now you may be right about the prohibitive diplomatic cost; but ISTM that there are – or could be in the future – a few states willing to pay it (how more unpopular can Assad get?). And certainly I’ve no better ideas.
I think you’re missing the point, old bean. When Kim talks, he’s biding his time and beefing up his nuclear inventory. When he keeps mum, he’s biding his time and beefing up his nuclear inventory. The difference between A and B is a mix of shrewd Realpolitik and US diplomatic masturbation. (If there’s any consolation, it’s that most US diplomats understand that Kim will never surrender his nuclear arsenal.)
Point two: Kim can rattle cages all day long, but the minute he goes nuclear–the moment he pushs buttons, in your parlance–a US sub parked in the Sea of Japan will slide open a couple of silos and release hell on Earth.
