i’m wrong–you’re old enough. 
You’re forgetting MAD: As long as everyone is committed to brinksmanship and has the weapons to back it up, any nuclear exchange will inevitably escalate to humanity-killing proportions. Since there can be no limited use, there can be no first use.
Says who? MAD is only applicable in situations where both parties posess large enough arsenals to obliterate each other and only applies to the US/Russia standoff. If either wanted to nuke China and was prepared to trade off a few cities and a lot of pollution for it, there’s nothing to stop them. China, India, Israel and so on have made the calculation that they don’t need the firepower for total desctruction so long as they can inflict sufficient harm to deter their enemies. This calculation is probably correct, although North Korea and Iran might change matters a bit.
But even if some rogue state decided to kick off an exchange, it’s not going to be the end of the world unless someone in Moscow or Washington loses their head.
Band name, penis name, and techno hook.
Do, do, do, do, do-
the deep penetration mini-nuke
do, do, do, do, do
the deep penetration mini-nuke
has been stopped.
slaphead: That is potentially true. It is also why we’re more at risk now of a nuclear war than we were during the Cold War.
Hey, but on the bright side a nuclear between a few minor states would still leave a few billion of us alive to scavenge a new civilization out of the smoking ruins.
That’s operating on the assumption that we’re not fighting, and will never again fight, a nuclear-armed nation? Because it’s one thing to use them against someone who can’t reply in kind and call it a “win”, but another thing entirely to open a full-scale exchange.
Frankly, nuclear-armed nations have in some cases shown restraint and “lost” or at least backed down rather than nuke – for example, Truman (the only leader to ever actually authorize a nuclear attack) settled for a high-casualties stalemate in Korea, and dismissed MacArthur, who wanted to nuke the invading Chinese army. So there is some precedent for being able to keep the genie in the bottle even under wartime conditions. Admittedly, the US was not facing unconditional defeat when it showed that restraint.
Still, leaving aside for the moment the iussue of MAD deterrence, I think the best argument for not using nukes under any foreseeable circumstances is to deliberately stigmatize them.
The world can ill afford a single, small-scale nuclear exchange, let alone a tradition of casual nuclear war fought at anything like the rate we fight our conventional wars. Stigmatizing nuclear weapons and making thinking people recoil from the idea of using them intentionally is our best hope of preventing this sort of thing and living into a putative future age when we can somehow reduce the danger.
I work at a government agency…never mind which one…that deals with defense nuclear issues. I also read a fair amount of military history and even some def3ense periodicals. IANA engineer, soldier, or scientist, though.
Speaking strictly from an unclassified, personal interest perspective, I have seen a lot of information about all kinds of weaponry and creative military thinking, and I simply do not believe that we can’t find a non-nuclear way to deal with hardened bunkers.*
For example, when one kid closes himself in his room, the other kid grabs the doorknob and doesn’t let him out. Why can’t we drop laser-guided canisters of fast-drying sealant onto the exits, and leave the bunkered foes to perish? Or use weapopns like the French Durandal or the American GBU-24 (which broke open hardened shelters in Iraq)? I know the bunker-buster nukes were intended for far more deeply-buried targets, but that’s just a matter of degree, not a whole new technology. Surely something can be made to work – our ingenuity at killing each other did not dry up in 1945.
*Note: I do find it believable that the technical folks who work with nuclear weapons would like a new project with funding and interesting things to do. 
Sailboat