And China is going to do what? Start a nuclear war with the US to defend the honor of Kim Jong-Un? China needs the US as an ally a LOT more than they do North Korea.
Depends - real from scratch or using the nasty canned crap?:dubious:
Why don’t we try nuking them with enormous marshmallow peeps?
You can’t leave the Chinese out of this discussion. They will likely attempt to control the response through threats of direct intervention or economic reprisals against the US.
Recall the Chinese fought the US and UN troops in the Korean War. China fought to create a buffer state in North Korea and will not want to give that up. And while China is moving toward a capitalist model, it is still ruled by the Communist Party. The Party takes a very strong stance when it comes to territory. Taiwan is a perfect example. The Chinese could see this leading to a US ally on its southern boarder just as they have one in Taiwan to the North.
The premise of this whole discussion is strained. Why only one missile? Is it an accident; a show of force; part of a larger plan? Why would they fire a missile at the US when they know they can’t reach it? Is the Dear Leader a completely deranged nut bag? (Don’t answer that) The only way I can a single missile being fired (aside from Kim being completely divorced from reality) would be an attempt by one political faction inside North Korea looking to provide a reason for regime change. They hope to make Kim look totally unstable and count on China saying “we’ll handle this” and taking out the Kim Family and replacing them with the provocateurs. The North Korean economy is smaller than it was 20 years ago. There solders are not being fed and are defecting to China (and being returned). The country has been mismanaged for decades and is slowly dying. And their usual tactics of being crazy and threatening war have not resulted in more aid. Things are likely more crazy in side that country than they seem from our vantage point.
Okay, so you suppose that a European nation launches a failed nuclear attack in the US. But (in order for the scenario to remain the same) you have every reason to suspect that they will continue to try to attack you. You don’t feel as though I would advocate for a destruction of their offensive military capability?
What evidence do you have of this?
Do you understand that are basically calling me equivalent to Hitler - and I don’t mean in an exaggerated Godwin sort of way, I mean you literally feel that I advocate the slaughter of millions of people based on their race? What evidence do you have for such a vitriolic claim?
There’s a lot I disagree with in your post, but for the most part it’s philosophical so I’ll just leave it alone.
I picked out this particular statement to respond to because I believe you’re factually wrong here. The USA would NOT be guaranteed victory in a conventional “total war” against Iran. If the goal is “hurt them more than they hurt us back” then absolutely yes we’d be guaranteed to stomp them, but if the goal is “remove the current leadership from power and ensure the new leadership can never develop a nuke,” then you’re severely underestimating Iran’s size, economy, population, military, and resolve.
In order for me to be “factually wrong” I would have needed to make a such a statement which, obviously, I did not. I wrote nothing about such goals. You are projecting something which I never addressed.
The question I looked at in my post was Mosier assertion that the best response to any attempt was a “full-scale nuclear retaliation,” and he argued that under game theory, it makes sense. I disagree for many reasons, part of which I outlined in my post.
The question here specifically about Iran is would using convention weapons instead of nuclear ones against North Korea be significantly less of a deterrent to Iran when it eventually acquires nuclear capacity.
The US has the capacity to defeat the PDRK forces and force a regime change in North Korea, which would most likely be having it reunited with South Korea. Someone above suggested having China run it, but that would be unacceptable not only to South Korea, but to our allies in the area. Encouraging China to expand its empire while we are attempting to curtail in other areas is counterproductive.
But back to the question of deterrence. While being an armchair general or diplomat is considerably easier than being one in real life, I don’t believe so. Although the classic philosophy of nuclear response was to escalate the odds so greatly as to make their use abhorrent to a rational leader, this strategy was developed with under the framework of the cold war, but two great powers struggling for worldwide influence while having to ensure their own survival.
The US can and should continue to maintain the option to use nuclear weapons whenever necessary. Were it necessary, it would still be possible to threaten Iran with a “full scale” nuclear response to any use of nuclear weapons against US forces, allies or territory. That we chose to not respond in one particular situation does not limit our actions in another.
Because the question of how America would fare in a conventional war with Iran is so tangential to the discussion, I’m willing to drop that line of argument.
Please let me sum up our arguments, and you can point out where I might be mistaken.
Your position is “using nukes to respond to an attempted nuclear attack by NK is not necessary, and won’t affect our ability to use nukes to respond to future attacks by unnamed sources.” Is that pretty much it?
My position is “NOT using nukes in retaliation to any attempted nuclear attack diminishes the value of nukes as a deterrent to preemptive nuclear attacks.”
I just want to make sure we’re not talking past each other here. Are these the terms of the discussion as you understand them?
You could nuke them at a high altitude as an electrical impulse weapon to shut down their power grid. Not sure anyone would notice it.
Tone it down and just give Steven Segal a Medal of Honor.
These are part, but this cannot be divorced from your original position which is that any attempted use of nuclear weapons must be met with a “full scale” response which annihilates the country in question.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, you are proposing to kill a great share of the 25 million citizens of North Korea, combatants, grandmothers and babies simply to give pause to any other party who might possibly consider its use in the future. In the absence of compelling evidence or a compelling argument that anything short of this would fail to provide deterrence, then the willingness to annihilate tens millions of people go beyond what many people find acceptable thinking.
You need to make your case that anything short of total annihilation would fail to provide effective deterrence. The US cannot tolerate the use of nuclear weapons against it or any of our allies. That we agree.
However, there are several questions. Does it really require a massive retaliation response? Or would other steps would also be effective at deterring other potential tin pot dictators or terrorists? Are you claiming that dropping say only one or a couple of atomic bombs on Pyongyang which only kills a few million but which certainly doesn’t lay waste to the entire country would not stop short any future nuts?
You claimed that game theory would show this, but to show this, you must demonstrate that only annihilation would provide deterrence.
Another point in the discussion is historical. My assertion is that the doctrine of massive retaliation and then later MAD were developed in response to the treat from the Soviet Union. At the time these nuclear policies were in development, the US was in a situation which was incomparable to anything now.
While Iraq and Afganistan have shown again the extreme difficulty of building friendly governments in unfriendly populations, the point is that the US has an overwhelming military advantage and the ability to cripple any government we wish to.
Finally, this is not an exercise with unlimited potential enemies. We know the possible players for the next decade, so any discussion of game theory can be limited in scope. The chance of the UK becoming our enemy in the next ten years is so remote it’s pointless to discuss it.
from orbit.
The important thing is stopping any follow-up, and that probably means immediate unilateral obliteration of any missile facilities in NK. I’m guessing the US knows where the launchers are. If they can be obliterated with conventional explosives that’s the preferred route --it’s more precise and way less politically loaded-- but if tactical nukes are needed, then they are needed.
When the US is 99.9% sure there’s no capability for a follow-up then multilateral actions with SKorea/Japan/China/others can be discussed.
There’s absolutely no reason to vaporize the innocent population of a whole country just to try to teach a lesson to one crazy person. Other crazy people won’t learn from the lesson. It would escalate world wide tension and probably lead to more crazy people coming to power in countries around the world. It would not make the world safer for the US or anyone else.
I didn’t get a “Harumph!” from that guy!
I voted “non-nuclear multi-lateral yadda yadda” for two main reasons. Firstly, any response that doesn’t involve at least talking to China about our planned response will potentially have unpleasant consequences. Frankly I wouldn’t at all be surprised if China already had people in place in the DPRK ready to rapidly “remove” Kim and/or any overly gung-ho generals if they pose a real threat to international stability (i.e. “business as usual”) and replace them with more pliant puppets, and saying to China (behind closed doors) that “either you can fix this quickly or we’ll fix it messily” is a realistic option. I’m not a big fan of the grand violent gesture of military dickswinging if quiet diplomacy can get the job done; those who matter will know what happened and those who don’t know won’t matter.
Secondly, once nukes are used the game changes for good. If the US shows that it is willing to drop nukes in response to an unsuccessful attack where other options were reasonably available, the rest of the world will assume the same position. No longer will the prevailing view be “nukes only as the last, most extreme option”; it will be “nukes whenever we feel the threat is particularly severe, even pre-emptively, and we get to decide the severity level”. Imagine Russia, China, Pakistan wielding that rationale. That would be the new world we created. And to set one off in China and Russia’s backyard would give both of them additional impetus to use theirs when the next opportunity arose. We would hardly be in a position to argue.
Much better to stick with conventional weapons - sink every ship, down every plane, and tell the NK leadership that for every shell that lands on Seoul, a hundred shells and bombs will rain down on them (preferably military targets but we’d have to see how these things go). If China can’t rein in their pet we’d have to neuter it ourselves, but let’s not make things worse in the process.
As an aside, anyone have any data on what NK’s artillery shell supply is likely to be? Those things don’t have an infinite shelf life, so unless they’ve been buying up large numbers of them from China or Iran or wherever, their plan to rain 10,000 shells on Seoul may not be so feasible.
The concept behind MAD and our nuclear deterrence policy is that those who send nukes against us should be destroyed utterly. There is no reason that this destruction has to be from nukes. If we were attacked by cold war Russia then a massive nuclear exchange was the only way to enforce this deterrence, but in the case of North Korea we should be able to do it with conventional weapons.
Using nukes against such an opponent would change the worlds view of us from attacked victim to nuke happy aggressor. This is the same thing that happened to us under the Bush administration. After 9/11 the worlds support and sympathy for the US reached an all time high. Bush squandered that good will by taking unilateral aggressive stance. Using unnecessary nukes in this conflict would have the same affect but increased by an order of magnitude. After such an attack the headlines in the foreign press wouldn’t be “US justly responds in kind to nuclear threat”, rather it would be “Holy shit!! The US just nuked someone.”
In the Cavazos article I linked to, he estimates the North’s fuel and ammunition would be exhausted within two weeks.
With Russia, the only way to do MAD is with nukes. The country is too vast for conventional weapons to be a deterrent. And vice-versa. We can wipe out NK without going nuclear.
The whole thing’s moot anyway. It’s not like NK will launch a single missile at the US and sit and wait to get spanked. They realize that once they launch, they’re done. No matter how the US retaliates, they will have - at most - 3 days. Not before we attack, but until they are dead.
They have no choice but to go all out. By the time the US shoots down their missile(s), Seoul will already be in ruins.
I voted for a non-nuclear retaliation but I’m sure that you realize that our nation-state building track record is not exactly exemplary.
And Skald, blackberry > peach.
Why would they need to buy? I’d guess they can manufacture a variety of shells, as well as dis-assemble and replace aged components - propellant or explosive/chemical/biological.