Well, yes, after the bomb goes off, the distinction doesn’t matter. But you might note that this hasn’t happened yet, so the distinction is still pretty significant. I take it, from your hamfisted attempts at being coy, that you think a nuclear attack at some point in the foreseeable future is inevitable. Furthermore, by your bizarre distortions of what other people have said, it appears you think that this nuclear attack is so certain, that a person would have to be kind of dumb to not see it coming. Is this the case? If so, can you state what leads you to believe that this event is so entirely unavoidable?
[QUOTE=OldOlds;15541611
I don’t see why this will really ever end. I think it naive to assume that we will eliminate, once and for all, the efforts by ALL nations to obtain such weapons. Furthermore, I have to assume that technology just makes these things ever easier to obtain. Computing power, automated manufacturing,[/QUOTE]
As a weapon, they should slowly start to fade away. I would imagine that some of the smaller nations would still try to make them, but other than engineering demolitions devices , they have more cons than pros.
Between the next generation percision weapons in the conventional realm, and gravity assisted mass drivers from orbit, can achieve the desired result, without the additional radiation fallout.
So your looking at at least a century of nuclear weapons, but after I would expect a severe reduction in the arsenal.
Declan
There has actually been more times than you would think.
Truman,Nixon (twice) , RR (nuke humor, dont think the soviets got it) GHB (re: saddam and chem weapons).
I dont believe Carter, Clinton or W seriously concidered nukes.
So going backwards
W : Had 911 been tied to a nation state or very strong evidence, then a nuclear threat may have been issued.
Bubba : never had a serious enough situation that would have meant nukes on the table.
Carter: Was probably advised to threaten Iran with nukes, but between the man and the times then, I doubt he would have seriously concidered it.
RR : other than that blooper that was caught on tape, he was antagonistic enough that a direct threat from his administration was probably not needed. Between Able Archer and the shenagins with sending half the airforce towards Cuba and then turning around, more countries probably walked softly around the US at this time.
Tricky Dick: Nixon deployed nukes to Vietnam with the intention of destroying the dikes , north of Hanoi but never carried through. Whether or not Vietnam started peace talks or got serious about them, would be co-incidental.
Nixon: Yom Kippur, seriously regenerated Israel’s military forces with war stocks taken straight from Europe, again no direct threat, but alot of people at that time, thought it a brink event.
Truman, ordered the use of the wartime bombs, but as well deployed Bombers to both England , in case the Berlin Blockade went the other way, and Korea, to force an end to the Korean conflict.
Bear in mind, the difference between an uttered threat and an implied threat can be the same thing in diplomacy. That, and we dont really know how many times, atomic diplomacy was used against the states, after the bomb started to get more international.
Declan
To get back to the OP’s question about the inevitability of a nuclear attack, I would have a hard time believing that we will not see some sort of nuclear attack in the next 20 years.
I also believe that, against the momentum of the discussion, the most likely place where the attack will happen is in the India/Pakistan region.
Even removing the instability of Pakistan for the moment and the terrorist factions involved, I see an inherent danger caused by the proximity of the two countries and the moderately higher feasibility of a successful first strike.
It is as if both are caught in a game where the first to move wins…probably; and, both sides know this. Just how itchy are the trigger-fingers when you know that in case someone goes for the probable win, you only have a few minutes…maybe only a matter of seconds…to respond? This does not leave too much time for double-checking or for cooler heads to prevail. Even the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. came mighty close to starting a nuclear war because of initial reports indicating that the other side had already done so. For India and Pakistan, the time to react is even shorter.
Bremidon the political and military leaders of both countries are aware of the issues that you raise in your post. indeed several steps have been taken to mitigate the threat including a gentlemens agreement to keep launchers and warheads separate, notification procedures for tests and exercises, hotlines between Military commanders and political leaders of both countries, exchange of lists of nuclear sites etc.
To get back to the OP’s question, I think the it’s clear that with the proliferation of non-state actors, and their ability in the future to get a nuclear weapon, that there will be a detonation, but I don’t think they will get their hands on one any time soon. If Osama bin Laden was able to get one, and was able to get it into the United States or Great Britain, is there any doubt that he would have done so?
Less clear is what would happen if a dictatorship had one and was losing power and facing death, such as Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad or Kim Jung-un. If they, and as importantly their immediate circle viewed that there is no hope for life after the regime ended, they may go out in a “blaze of glory” as it were.
The least likely that I can see are nation states, including the United States. They have much less to gain and much more to be concerned with, not the least of which is retaliation in kind. I can’t envision any European power using them first, and weak arguments above to the contrary, I can’t the U.S. either. Many here put Bush on par with Stalin for God’s sake, and he didn’t contemplate the use of nuclear weapons post-9/11. Just isn’t going to happen.
I don’t think Truman was red-faced with steam coming out of his ears when he authorized dropping Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan - there was quite a bit of discussion and hand-wringing over it.
I think there was less discussion and hand wringing than you might think.
There had been an enormous amount of money, time and effort spend on the development of the bomb. And there were tens or hundreds of thousands of American lives at stake. Truman was going to end the war in the most expeditious way possible and few at the time felt that using the atomic bomb wouldn’t help in that effort.
But we hijack . . .
(continuing the hijack) Considering that Okinawa alone resulted in around 250,000 total casualties, and considering the fanaticism of the Kamikaze attacks, I cannot see exactly what other realistic choices Truman had given the information at his disposal.
Frankly, Iran having a few nuclear bombs changes very little. Bibi Netanyahu shows us a cartoon bomb-what does he think?
The fact is, any attack by Iran (using nukes or not) on Israel would be met by a crushing response-which would probably result in most of Iran’s (expensive) nuclear fuel processing plant being destroyed.
Why would Iran risk that? It’s much better for Ahmadinejad to keep making inflammatory speeches that allows Iran to tweak the lion’s tail.
The mullahs are not stupid, nor do they intend to commit suicide.
Perhaps a hijack: What’s the closest the world’s gotten to a nuclear exchange since WW2?
Would it be the Cuban Missile Crisis or Stanislav Petrov’s incident? MacArthur during the Korean Conflict?
What about non-US vs USSR? Has Israel every started the engines humming? Were India and Pakistan pretty close during their border clashes? China vs Vietnam, etc?
The incident involving the Soviet B59 submarine during the cuban missile crisis when 2 out of 3 officers wanted to launch a nuclear tipped torpedo is truly horrifying.
The Stanislov Petrov incident sounds rather more tame, in that it was very unlikely that the US would launch only 5 missiles instead of all out attack and also they knew that the early warning system was new and untested so they had good reason to doubt that there had been a real launch.
Possession of nukes would serve as a deterrent, essentially allowing Iran to say “Fuck you” to the US and other powers in the region, and presumably allowing Iran to get away with more shit than it does. But that pales beside the threat of nuclear terrorism- that nukes of “unknown” origin might be set off. Iran has been pretty heavily into clandestine (or not so clandestine) support of terrorism. If Iran thought that it could nuke DC or NY and with plausible deniability claim that it was done by North Korea, or rogue Pakistanis, or a black market Russian nuke, they presumably would.
IIRC, from fallout you can detect where the Plutonium and I think HEU came from.