I was always told that there were armed soldiers on duty who took orders without question and were excellent marksmen.
As for whose orders, its never been made clear to me.
(I just make popcorn & vote)
Not really interested in a drawn-out debate, but I was responding to what you posted about it being “political suicide”. Now you’re injecting something completely different into the conversation.
Once the opposing nukes are launched, launching our own provides neither defense nor protection. Only vengeance.
The basis of the OP is kind of weird. What recourse will we have against a president who doesn’t launch the nukes? None. Or against anything else. We won’t have any recourse on anything. We will all be dead. Our only choice is how many other people will also all be dead with us.
The only winning move is not to play.
Which begs the question (yeah, I know): Would we all be dead in this scenario?
Well, the somewhat less than half the voters who cast votes for him, anyway.
No, the answer doesn’t change, other than the hypothesis that Trump is a Russian stooge. The President of the United States has plenary authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. In certain provisions of the SIOP (now referred to more generically as an OPLAN, and the currently is specifically OPLAN 8010) in which central authority has been removed or hindered, a MAJCOM commander may have the authority to independently deploy and use nuclear weapons for retaliatory or counterforce use. The details of the OPLAN are highly classified so we could only speculate but one critical element of deterrence is a robust response to a disarming first strike such that the opponent cannot be assured of disabling the defender.
However, this assumes that the President and successors are incapacitated or otherwise out of contact; if the President is alive and secure, there is no independent authoritzation for the use of nuclear weapons until the President releases them to the control of major or theater commanders. (Although there has been discussion of using nuclear weapons in a “tactical battlefield” context, I’m not aware of any serious plan to release control of nuclear weapons to local combat commanders, and such a move would be highly destabilizing.)
Trump, of course, knows literally nothing about our nuclear forces as evidenced by his performance during a primary debate.. Putin, on the other hand, seems well versed in the basics of deterrence theory, and has effectively used the appearance of developing and deploying new nuclear forces as an implied threat even if such forces may not actually be operationally ready or reliable. He and his advisors are also likely aware that the state of the US and UK nuclear arsenal, while not what it was at the end of the Cold War, is still enough to devastate Russia, and nuking the US would provide no benefit to him whatsoever since he needs the US to be a bogeyman justifying the increase in military readiness.
As for the logic and ethics of retaliation once a nuclear strike has been launched: it should be understood that nuclear weapons are not weapons in the conventional sense and their purpose, as we have used them for the past sixty years for deterrence, is as political bargaining chips. If anyone actually launches nuclear armed missiles or sends bombers to drop nuclear weapons, deterrence goes out the window and there really is no governing logic. The immorality of killing a bunch of innocent people may be tempered by the potential to prevent further attacks (although the highly mobile Russian nuclear weapons are fairly robust against counterstrike, and strategic nuclear weapons are generally aimed at population and industrial centers), but a full force strike on the continental United States would essentially leave the nation without any industrial or transportation infrastructure, and a highly compromised agricultural capability; in essence, the US would cease to exist as an industrial power and likely as a national authority
The Russians are co-opting the Attourney General, there are millions of invisible people at the Inauguration, the city is covfefe; none of this makes any sense!
Much of the dialogue in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is actually drawn from the lectures of nuclear strategist Herman Kahn and his treatise On Nuclear War, particularly the discussion than ends with Gen. Turgidson claiming, “Ten to twenty million, tops!” It hews far closer to Kahn’s musings on nuclear strategy and the fallacies of deterrrence theory than Peter George’s novel on which the film is nominally based.
Stranger
An optimistic assessment is that ~20% of the population would die of immediate blast effects and initial radiation within the first 48 to 72 hours. In the intermediate term, famine, disease, residual radiation (fallout and activated materials), civil unrest, loss of civil sanitation, hygiene, and medical resources, et cetera could result in the death of upward of 80% of the population. Long term you’d expect populations to form in areas that are the least affected and amenable to cultivation, essentially reducing the United States (and probably Canada and northern Mexico) to pre-industrial levels of civilization for the foreseeable future. Any legal or political action against the President, even if he or she were to survive the calamity, would just be a notional action; it would not serve to change any outcome.
Stranger
It worked for Jack Ryan.
Not necessarily. If there are any survivors at all, you are helping to protect them from future attack by the Russians by crippling the Russian ability to continue to make war on them.
Which argues for a retaliatory strike, since the remaining population would otherwise come under Russian control. Of course, we might come under the control of some other country, too, but why up the odds?
Exactly. We can’t allow the Russkis a chance the seize our valuable radioactive craters and slag heaps.
Plus, Russia might be in a position to take over the rest of the world (after they restock their weapons, of course). If we didn’t take them out, the Europeans probably would. NATO, don’t you know. Would any country in the world, maybe besides Belarus, be comfortable with a Russia that just took out the US?
The Russians are likely less interested in our now-radioactive wasteland and the starvelings residing within it than unimpeded ability to plunder other nations’ land and resources without contest, and if they were preparing for this unilateral strike they’d be keeping troops and munitions away from likely target areas, so that would really argue for striking at their own desired targets in a policy of “scorched earth” denial. There is really about the use of nuclear weapons that makes much sense if deterrence is ineffective. It would make far more sense to render an enforceable agreement to limit the size of these arsenals to something less than the ability to destroy nations in less time than it takes to order pizza delivery, but I’m not under any illusions that this will happen any time soon.
Stranger
We must not allow a mineshaft gap!
If they moved all their troops to non-strategic areas, we and our allies would know. Plus what I said in post #31. Who wants to be in a world where the Russians just took out the US and they are not made to pay for that action?
You probably wouldn’t be. The San Francisco Bay Area and Lawrence Livermore National Labs are for certain high value targets that are going to going to receive multiple love taps.
I’m not backing the argument that the US should not respond because the resolve to respond with an even more devastating attack is an inherent part of deterrence theory.
But regardless of response, in a full fledged nuclear exchange the United States would cease to exist as a industrial power, and likely as a nation at all. And I find it legitimately frightening that Donald Trump holds in his stubby fingers the authority for the world’s most destructive weapon system about which he has demonstrated zero knowledge, insight, or respect for the power he wields. It is like giving a flamethrower to an infant and then placing him in the middle of an oil refinery.
Stranger
I’ll respond to that post if and when this thread gets moved out of GQ.
True. Not only would it not save anyone, it would kill hundreds of millions more people and make it that much harder for civilization to reestablish itself. Furthermore, there have never been any seriously knowledgable people who have ever believed that the Russians, or the Soviets before them, would just launch a surprise nuclear attack out of the blue, just like it is inconceivable that the US would decide to do likewise tomorrow. Therefore, if there is information that such an attack is underway, it is most likely a false alarm.
In fact, one man, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov probably saved the world from nuclear Armageddon.
But what about all the other people - Russia can’t launch them all their weapons at once (currently only about 1900 of 7000 active) and will have many left after lobbing the first volley that they could use on other nations. Maybe nations that are our allies (if they didn’t already get them all). Or launch more at the US to finish off any survivors. It’s unlikely every single person in the US will be killed. Many, certainly, but not all. Those survivors still deserve defense. Now you can argue those lives aren’t worth the more lives in Russia (presuming, amazingly, neither France nor the UK launched weapons at Russia), but their existence should be acknowledged. Of course, long-term survival is a bit different; though nuclear winter seems less of a consensus than it once was.
Now that part I agree with.
Most likely, yes, but you can’t just assume that. You have to investigate and try to get the facts.
Are there any actual technical barriers to the military just launching a nuclear strike without authorization from POTUS?
There’s a whole game theory argument addressing that issue.
The basic argument is that you should fully commit to full retaliation. Because if there are doubts about whether you will retaliate, then an opposing nation might be willing to risk a nuclear attack against you. And even a one-sided attack with no retaliation would be the biggest loss of life in history. Obviously you want to avert that attack. And the way to do that is to make it clear you can and will retaliate. So threatening to kill a billion people is a way to prevent the death of five hundred million people.