#3
My gut reaction would be nuke but that’s one of the reason my finger should never be anywhere a button.
If I donate to the Clinton Foundation, can we avoid both scenarios?
Posting before reading other answers.
If the President is asking my opinion, I suppose I had better come up with one. That said, I hope the Prez will be informed by my opinion and will still consider the other lengthy amounts of information available.
I voted “invade”: yeah, my child’s butt is hanging out in front, but I doubt there’s much safety anywhere, not with nukes as the option. Better an invasion where we can apply at least a little discretion in inflicting casualties.
There is no check box for my answer.
Foreign policy can not be made based upon the potential outcome to one individual. A leader of any country who did so is an absolute fool.
There are perhaps 100 political, strategic, tactical, and military based reasons for a decision either way. The outcome to one person or his parents feelings is not one of them for consideration.
News Flash!
No military operation is free of “collateral damage” - "innocents get killed either way.
Al least nukes don’t rape before killing.
How large is the target country? The closest sized nuke? Would an invading force need to cover the same area as would be destroyed by nuke?
Would the target be the size of Grenada or Russia?
The choice is easy. Do nothing.
“Nothing is worth fighting for, because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation.”
–J. M. Coetzee
By “grave outrage”, do you mean something ilke 9-11? Did that really justify what followed in Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo and finally Syria and who knows what next? Was Vietnam worth fighting for? In what way does North Korea represent a grave threat to the American Republic and its way of life?
Why do so many people think that retaliation and revenge are the only responses?
I choose not to answer.
There is a huge misunderstanding about nuclear weapons. They are not “one size fits all”. Instead they vary in size, power, and energy - much like the common or garden bomb normally used by the military.
In essence a nuclear bomb is just a bigger version of a conventional weapon. Indeed it can be smaller. The benefit is that a precision target can be hit and evaporated with limited harm to non-combatants. But against that, conventional missiles are nearly the same without fallout so why use a nuke at all?
Not a question so far, which can be rationally answered.
It’s been >70 years since the end of WWII. In that time, have we ever faced such a choice?
The closest, I guess, would have been the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and since we’d already (extremely unsuccessfully!) tried invading, that was off the boards. Yet we didn’t nuke, though we came close.
IOW, I’m finding the hypothetical rather far-fetched.
I would demand lunch before answering.
I would want to at least know the nature of the outrage. The OP implies that we do know that, but doesn’t say what it is.
Absent that information, though, my response is “do nothing”. Or maybe a cyberattack. Or a Special Forces operation. Or a UN resolution against the offenders. Or an embargo. The point is, there are a lot of possible responses, and the best one will depend on the nature of the outrage, and invasion nor nukes will seldom be the best one.
I vote invade.
There is no good outcome of nuke.
Nuke, people are going to die guaranteed, most likely mostly non combatants too.
No possibility of negotiation, quick resolution etc.
And it wont just be the “Bad” people dying.
You can’t control where the fall out wants to go.
And if you nuke, there is the problem of who suddenly sides with this party, and retaliatory strikes, and now were are barbecuing people all round.
And guess what, said child is definitely going to become a KIA in that kind of mess.
So yea, i’d tell him you invade.
And you damned well better make sure they have EVERY tool EVERY piece of equipment EVERY supply needed to do the job, and i want command in theater so they are motivated to do it correctly.
I’ve actually just finished reading a 1986 book* with the premise that in a similar incident to the KAL-007 incident the Soviets shoot down a 747 carrying the vice-president after it accidentally strays into restricted airspace.
*Starmageddon by Richard Rohmer, not high art but a fun read which does show how things could escalate due to human error.
From the OP i’m just assuming something Pearl Harbor-esque or something of that nature