No, it’s not. I pointed out that plenty of national leaders have had the ability to start a general nuclear war but all of them, including Truman in 1945 and Putin in the two decades he’s been in power, have chosen not to do so. So if somebody has a theory that Putin in 2022 is different than this theory needs some evidence . You can’t simply declare it’s a fact.
It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve pointed out a national leader could have started a nuclear war. You’ve got one instance where a nuclear war happened when absolutely no one had the ability to respond. You’re extrapolating from that how the US would respond to a nuclear attack on an undeclared ally by the other gigantic nuclear power on the planet, who has been threatening nuclear assault on anyone who looks at it funny for the last few months, including yourself. I can’t imagine how the situations could be more different, but I can easily be accused of a lack of imagination.
Most people realize that Truman wouldn’t have used the atomic bombs on Japan if he thought someone would have responded in kind, and the idea that he was going to pummel the earth in some power mad festival of destruction is a bizarre fantasy. On the other hand, Putin has actually done everything short of threaten to attack countries that even supply Ukraine with weapons with war.
On top of the fact that Truman’s behavior was tempered in the idea that the US had the only such weapons in existence, the advent of putting them on reliable ICBMs or submarine launched missiles was even further away. You can wave those changes in the world away, but it’s not going to convince me. I think that if one of Japan’s allies wasn’t defeated and had access to nuclear weapons, the US would have been hit with what they could bring, at the very least. That would have been a slow, nasty slog. I’d almost rather an ICBM exchange, when I think about it. (No, take any discussion of this to another thread, please)
Like it or not, this is a broken ass version of the prisoner’s dilemma. The other guy has advertised that he has every intention of not cooperating. Fuck him, and you might get fucked a little less.
I apologize, I assumed that when you wrote “So Truman kept dropping more atomic bombs on other cities”, that was your counterargument to the likes of Chronos, by way of taking his position to the absurd conclusion that Truman dropped over nine atomic bombs on cities. The absurd conclusion did not follow from Chronos’s position, or anybody else’s in this thread so far as I can tell. So whoever you were mocking, they have lost all credibility for constructing such a straw man.
~Max
So why is this a bizarre fantasy for everyone else but it’s exactly what Putin would do?
What makes Putin different than every other national leader who’s had control of nuclear weapons?
That’s easy. Only Putin is given as nuking a city (Kyiv), post-1945, in the title of this thread. No other national leaders.
ETA: I don’t think he would do it under present circumstances. But we’re supposed to be talking about our response, not whether he’d do it.
~Max
I’ve quoted Chronos’ post already. What I described is what Chronos wrote. He wrote that if Putin used one nuclear weapon then he would keep launching more at every city on Earth outside of Russia. The only way to stop Putin from launching nuclear missiles would be to attack him with our nuclear missiles.
Do you see some other interpretation of what Chronos wrote?
My belief is that even if Putin did make a nuclear attack against Kiev, it does not follow that he would make other nuclear attacks against other countries.
I think if Putin made a nuclear attack against Kiev, he would be doing it to win his war in Ukraine. And he would not attack outside of Ukraine.
I’m not minimizing that. Even using a single nuclear weapon would be a terrible thing. And I have said I would want to see Putin put before a firing squad for doing it.
But blow up the world? No, I don’t see a need to do that.
I missed this before and will try to address it directly now.
Presuming Kyiv has been completely levelled by a nuclear weapon, I am president of the U.S., we are not presently engaged in hostilities with Russia, and I have strong evidence that Putin has no rational mind left,
My first act as President is to ascertain whether hostile nuclear warheads have been deployed. We should be able to pick up ICBMs and aircraft-delivered bombs, and hope to God we have intel about submarine activity. I want full intel exchange of deployed hostile nuclear weapons with allies, and potentially worldwide, in realtime. DEFCON 1, scramble the fighters along the western seaboard, put the VP and if advisable myself in bunkers. America first.
If there are hostile warheads en-route to the U.S., today is doomsday and MAD doctrine has failed. Send all the nukes immediately, deploy everything and everything that could possibly intercept or disable incoming warheads. Russia will be given at least a three minute advance warning of our retaliatory strike, hopefully ten minutes if possible without jeopardizing the payloads and if we have that much time before we are hit ourselves. I want ten seconds to broadcast to the public the dire situation with my own voice, more if advisable, but there may be chain of command issues or other doomsday contingencies to attend to.
If there are no other known warheads in play, I order the Navy and coast guard to do what they have to do to give me as much advance warning of a Russian submarine attack as possible. I want to address the American public, at the top of the next hour between 7am and 9pm unless advised sooner. Meanwhile I want military options presented ASAP, because I need to meet with Congressional leadership within the hour to broach a decapitation strike.
If Congress wants to declare WWIII I will go with it, on the evidence that Putin is insane and has used weapons of mass destruction. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter provides weak support for a limited strike. There are reports of Russian attacks in Romanian territorial waters which, along with Art V of the North Atlantic Treaty could be also be used as formal casus foederis. But that’s not necessarily what I’m looking for and I doubt that’s going to happen with our Congress over Kyiv, Ukraine. Threatening a decapitation strike in retaliation for deploying nuclear bombs is a nice bluff but in this hypo the bluff was called, and it’s not worth carrying through on the threat (though it is my duty as President to do so if Congress declares war). I really want an understanding that they will approve an immediate retaliatory decapitation strike in the event that the Russians attack NATO (i.e. Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania/Romania) or any other state we have a defensive pact with*. In either case timing of the declaration should be lined up with the strike so as to prevent the President from escaping. Honestly President Biden should already have had this conversation, and all the ducks should be lined up for such a contingency. (I believe as President I do not have the power to enter the United States into an offensive war without Congressional authorization, and I do not believe the North Atlantic Treaty grants me that power in the event of one of them being attacked. And I do consider a decapitation strike, even a preemptive one, to be offensive.)
If Congress will do nothing, I will have to look at other options such as breaking diplomatic ties and total sanctions. Ukraine, of course, would capitulate. We would just have to wait & see whether Putin is willing to irrationally attack our military alliances.
Really all of this contingency should have been in place since March, when President Biden met with NATO members.
* The U.S. has other defensive pact obligations aside from NATO, notably with countries in South America, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea.
~Max
That’s not exactly what he wrote, and in no way does Chronos’s position imply that Truman - who is not Putin - launched or even considered launching nuclear strikes against London, Moscow, Mexico City, Berlin, Rome, etc.
ETA: I do think Chronos may be willing to say Truman would have used another atomic bomb if we had gone to war again while still having a monopoly on nuclear weapons. But the Soviet Union got the bomb in '49, and the Korean War didn’t start until '50.
~Max
Well, in this theoretical case, Putin is the only person who’s looked at the prisoner’s dilemma of MAD and decided “Yeah, I can win that one!”
Please note: the OP states only nuclear. A more likely scenario is the use of a tactical level nuclear device that takes out several blocks but does not level a city.
Nobody is saying “Don’t fuck him”, what we’re discussing is the best way to fuck him. A massive nuclear launch that will, with damn near absolute certainty, be matched by a massive Russian launch might not be the most effective way to fuck him.
I’d say, “I don’t see a need to do that” as our first and only possible response. We can try some other things first. If they fail, we can’t really end up much worse off, some people’s fantasies about “taking out his nukes” to the contrary.
We disagree on that. I feel it is exactly what Chronos wrote.
I do agree that Truman didn’t act that way and never considered acting that way. The point I was trying to make was that Truman didn’t do this, no other person in this position did this, so there is very little reason to believe that Putin would do this. Putin is no more likely to start launching nuclear missiles at London, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome, and Mexico City than Truman was.
Do you seriously think that Truman is, in any way, comparable to Putin?
Truman used nukes because another nation had attacked us, and we didn’t want the war, and wanted it to end as quickly as possible. In that context, there was no reason to nuke anyone else, because we were already at peace with everyone else, and we liked it that way. Putin, in this hypothetical, used nukes because he wanted to conquer another nation, and so started a war to that effect, and that war that he himself wanted and started didn’t go the way he wanted. He likes war, and given that, why wouldn’t he start more wars?
I also find it unlikely that Putin would start nuking global cities on a whim. But if his release of nuclear weapons wasn’t punished in some way, I expect he would again take up the project of recreating the Russian Empire. There would be more military adventures into the Baltics, into Poland, and elsewhere. There would be fierce military resistance from NATO, and Putin would feel more confident that a couple of nukes might force NATO to stand down.
Russia’s annual Zapad military exercise has always wrapped up with a simulated nuclear strike on Poland. This exercise is generally seen as the rehearsal for the Ukraine invasion we’re seeing now.
To be candid, I think a release of nukes in Ukraine would most likely escalate to a full exchange, eventually. The only question is whether to wait for the inevitable, or to go ahead and make it happen. Nobody likes to lose a dick-measuring contest, but given there are potentially billions of lives at stake, I’d want to defer major action until it seemed like all options were exhausted.
I see it as a bigger problem than just Putin. If Putin makes a nuclear attack against Ukraine then the world needs to see that he is punished severely for it. As I’ve written, I would want to see him tried as a war criminal and then executed.
If that didn’t happen it’s not just Putin who would begin seeing nuclear weapons as a viable option. There are other dictators who would begin including nuclear attacks in their own military plans - and other dictators who would start developing nuclear weapons so they could use them in their military plans. Putin would need to be executed so every other dictator could see that using nuclear weapons is a dead end strategy.
In a discussion of national leaders using nuclear weapons, Truman’s name is going to come up.
If you think the United States was happy with the Soviet Union in 1945, I suggest you go learn something about the subject.
You keep saying that, but you haven’t explained how you actually think that’s going to happen.
Do you understand that this is a message board? People can see the posts that have been made.
I explained it in my first post.