It’s an hypothetical. Like having your child in a burning car that you’re unable to access and a gun in your hand.
The part you’re forgetting in your scenario is the perpetrator driving a truck full of explosives that will flatten the neighborhood before the officers will have time to open fire.
Personnally, I would expect them to gain time and negociate with the perpetrator, not to let the truck explode. In fact, that’s what the police does all the time with hostage takers, even though hostage taking usually doesn’t involve a nuclear bomb. “No way we’re going to discuss with you, scum, just kill those hostages already” isn’t the typical attitude.
Nuclear blackmail with non-trivial demands is currently being made successfully, and will continue to be made successfully, going by the results of the currently running experiment.
There’s a little nation called Pakistan, non-mighty, its economy in the doldrums, and almost on the brink of collapse, that seems to have learned the techniques to keep mighty uncle sam at bay with its nuclear arsenal.
While the US and its allies feed it billions, this nation continues to provide safe havens to all types of nasties, and props up the bad guys who actually go out and do the killing. If Pakistan were a Iraq or Vietnam, the west would have pounded them with napalm. The only reason it does not do so - and instead actually gives billions in aid with no accounting whatsoever - is because, Pakistan has a small but potent nuclear arsenal, and is irrational enough, like noko, to consider using it like tactical battlefield weapons.
Neither the west nor Pakistan trumpet about this from the rooftops, and the generals are not fools to overtly announce it a blackmail, but this is practical blackmail and so far the world has played along with the blackmailer. There’s no reason why we wouldn’t humor Noko too, when the time comes.
Stopping aid would not cause them to collapse. All it would do is piss of China and endanger South Korea and our troops stationed there.
So if a robber pointed a gun at your family and demanded your wallet, you wouldn’t give it to him? Even if you only had a dollar, and there was no way to intervene (because you’re too far away to grab the gun and you aren’t armed yourself)? Any principle that would lead to that decision is an idiotic principle.
But if he had meant it as a threat?
Because that increases the risk that we would just wipe them out. We pay them not because we cant beat them but because its not worth the effort.
Even if we are at the top of a very slippery slope, it doesn’t make sense to act as if we are at the bottom of that slope.
Yeah but lets try not to let millions of people die in the process.
To try and improve on your analogy, lets say you BOTH have guns and the robber demanded the dollar in your wallet. Maybe you could kill him before he fired a gun at your family but why the fuck would you risk that for the dollar in your wallet? Hell, lets say he demanded your rolex watch.
The gun in your hand might be enough to prevent him from asking for your wedding bands or your wife’s engagement ring but I’d hand over my rolex even if I had a gun.
This leads to interesting questions. At what point would you conclude that the trouble of killing the robber is indeed worth taking? You would probably draw the line easily if the robber were to make a dramatic demand - such as asking for your wife’s hand - but perhaps not if the robber establishes a pattern of slowly escalating demands.
He wants your rolex, you concede it. Next he wants your credit card and you concede that. With each concession, you reinforce his behavior and make it harder for yourself to refuse the next demand because it is just a little more than his previous demand that you willingly conceded.
The obvious analogy is the frog that gets boiled alive because it won’t respond to the small increases in temperature of the water as it is being (slowly) heated to a boil.
Precisely the same dynamics today govern the western experience with Pakistan: at first they asked for a little aid, which they got; then “compensation” for (pretending to) fight their own boys, which they got… Today they get billions every year, and kill our troops with brazen impunity, but we seemingly can do nothing about it, because they have calibrated their assault so well, and we cannot explain why we would act today when we didn’t act last year, unless they do a really big atrocity, which they haven’t and won’t.
We need not act like you are at the bottom of the slope, but it’s going to be a certain descent to that point - but a little at a time.
It’s not like the US or any other country would waste warheads on civilian targets. You go for a decap strike and take out command & control functions and the launchers. If these happen to be in the middle of Pyongyang, so be it.
hniyer - The second Pakistan states directly that it has nukes aimed at US targets is the day it loses everything. So far they have been playing a careful, regional game. Saying “Pay up or we nuke DC” changes that game. Carefully targeted cruise missles would start being deployed on Diego Garcia by the weekend.
As for the robber analogy - if you kill them the second they threaten you and yours, you never have to worry about escalation.
I think that is a slippery slope argument.
And pakistan isn’t threatening us, they’re conning us.
Wow. I asked the same question here a while back about the Cold War. Say, for instance, that we detect thousands of incoming city-busters. We never did have the tech to shoot them down. So, at that point, we will suffer extraordinary extremes of loss regardless, and I asked what purpose is served by nuking back? Should we really take tens of millions of lives with retribution being the only purpose? Sure, the threats are logical as a deterrence, but when it fails should we end civilization as we know it, rather than just take the hit and let the Soviets do what they want? Turned out I was the only one who thought we shouldn’t nuke back and the roll tanks over the rubble to fight with what’s left. So the responses in this threat don’t particularly surprise me, but they do disturb me.
Of course in this thread the threat is much smaller, and oh so easily averted. Just give them the money. It’s not worth the lives. Look at the war on terror. It’s completely insignificant. More people die in auto accidents, and yet so much money is spent, millions of dollars a head, to take out some psychotic criminals halfway around the world. The lives that could be saved with that money spent other ways are much, much more than the potential losses in future attacks. It leads to less paranoia, less repression, and bottom line, more living people and less grieving families if we spend the money other ways. Why is a life lost in a terrorist attack worth exponentially more than a life lost in a car crash, or a drug overdose? But people have collectively decided the way people die is important, and that we should spend billions to save a few African lives that AL-Queda would versus spending millions to save thousands of African lives.
Yeah, it’s a slippery slope, and so what? Both you and the robber have a gun. Even if you have to personally chop off your wives hand with a machete to save her life, are you arguing that your principles and her hand are worth more than her life? Maybe you are, but I disagree. Also this scenario only applies if it’s more like bows and arrows, where the foe has time to see you deny their threat and act first then launch an attack you can’t stop before they die. Only when what is asked for exceeds the value of what you stand to lose is fighting back a reasonable option. I’m not saying we should let such threats go on forever, obviously we do everything we can to stop future threats and to take the bite out of the opponent, but for the immediate crisis, why let our wife die in order to save her hand? If she dies her hand does anyways.
Even if we do sentence millions of our own to death be denying Kim a little spending money, I still don’t think we should nuke. Send conventional weapons on ICBMs, send in the bombers, everything to take him out, but don’t nuke back. If nuking Pyongyang for their military installations is a valid attack, then nuking Washington DC or New York is a valid attack on military objectives. Hell, if the military has offices in the WTC, that would make that a valid attack on a military installation. That’s the disparity of military versus civilian casualties you’re looking at here. In WWII we could barely hit a city, so choice was not an option. It is today.
“Ok guys, we’ve got three armored SUVs stolen from the secret service; the most advanced assault rifles, sidearms and body armor in the world; and backing us up are a half dozen of the most highly trained ex-special forces badasses money can buy. Now let’s go rob the corner liquor store!”
Seriously if Kim Jong Un gets a nuclear arsenal that could threaten the globe–he probably won’t–he’s not going to ask for petty cash.
Not having read the read I’ll simply answer the OP’s question.
Tell North Korea to pack a lunch then nuke the fuck outta 'em. Negotiate? Hellz no.
Right winger, since you asked.
That’s precisely why they won’t. And they don’t need to. They are getting what they want from you - your money - and doing to you what they want - kill and maim. They pursue their own goals that are at complete variance from ours. And we can do scratch about it because they have the nukes. This is the classic definition of blackmail, and the world’s most audacious, longest-running instance of nuclear blackmail.
I dont buy your argument that they are playing a regional game. Do you know what Pakistan’s role was in 9/11? They acted halfway across the planet! Virtually every terrorist plan or successful strike has been traced back to Pakistan. You still believe they are a regional threat?
At least the Soviets didn’t get our money in the billions and then kill our troops. We had the balls to stand up to them. So why cannot we stand up against Pakistan? Because it’s a calibrated blackmail by an irrational state, not a military challenge from a rational one.
The second we are out of Afghanistan, Pakistan becomes irrelevant. At that point I’m all for cutting them off at the knees.
There is a point at which we risk everyone dying but losing my rolex is not that point.
If you want to be pragmatic, you have to realize that whether or not you pay has no bearing on whether or not they will actually carry out their threat. If they were going to nuke us, they will still nuke us. All we do is buy time until they make an unreasonable demand.
The only correct solution is to make it seem like we’re agreeing to their demands while secretly undermining their ability to do anything to us, which, yes, probably means decapitating their government. Sure, we give them money, but not because of the extortion, but because they will need it to deal with the turmoil of their country being liberated.
We do have to worry about sending the message that we can easily be bullied, as that just props up other dictators. Fortunately, I think we’ve already done so in the past, and this scenario will not happen.
Hey, this thread has reappeared! Good, I never got so far as commenting like I wanted to.
I think this is a hypothetical that needs to be fought. The real problem here is credibility: nobody would really believe that North Korea was willing to start a nuclear war over a pathetic ransom. It simply makes no sense. Instead, the whole world would have a good laugh. After they’d finished laughing, they would basically say, “Actually, what we give you for not nuking us is not nuking you, either. And we already give you that, so let’s continue.” There might be some (relatively mild) punitive measures against the DPRK for having the temerity to try to upset the nuclear equilibrium, and of course the military would look at its retaliatory and non-nuclear preemptory options, but you wouldn’t see a preemptive nuclear war on the part of the rest of the world. It just isn’t worthwhile over a non-credible threat.