The Nuclear Option

Great Debates
21

I found this chart quite relieving, in that I now know that a large nuclear blast in Toronto would probably allow us to survive out here in Burlington. Hopefully I won’t be looking eastward - the flash would still blind you - but we’d have a chance to survive.

Hooray!

At the risk of sounding picky, of course we would never be “Thrown back into the Stone Age” unless you’re saying we’d somehow forget how to use metal. I mean, that’s what the Stone Age was; no metal tools.

The effects of nuclear war would be unimaginably horrible, but unless it’s an absolutely all-out balls-to-the-wall holocaust that completely vaporizes most of the Northern Hemisphere, billions would die or suffer but civilization would go on and would recover faster than you might think. Oh, it might take generations, but someone somewhere would come out okay; perhaps the world would end up being recolonized by Australians, a horrifying throught, I admit, but they are technically human and so there you go. I wouldn’t want to take the risk of being one of the ones who DOESN’T make it, but someone would, and they would not be left in the Stone Age.

But having said that, make no mistake: I do think people tend to underestimate the horror such a war would cause, though; we’ve got people in other threads saying the U.S. could win a war against Europe even with nukes in play. As I said over there, one British SSBN can end the United States; even just blowing up 10-20 big urban centres would be beyond the government’s capability to deal with. The USA as we currently understand it would no longer exist. And theoretically a British SSBM could blow up a hundred urban centres.

Stephen King has a little short story in which New York City is incinerated by a hydrogen bomb, to the horror and shock of onlookers at a distance safe enough to witness the event without being roasted. You never find out what happens afterward; it’s just a story about people seeing it happen, and ends as the fireball is still rising. It’s difficult to imagine how the USA could deal with THAT (or how Canada could deal with Toronto being wiped off the map, to use the example in my first paragraph.) 9/11 killed three thousand people and was a terrible shock but it didn’t even slow Manhattan down for more than a week. But wiping the city out, killing several million people and turning ten million more into refugees? That’d make Katrina look like a game of tic tac toe. Now multiply it by ten, and include Washington in the list of vaporized cities. I sincerely doubt there could be any sort of effective internal response to such a catastrophe. The rule of law would break down.

For all the fear people have these days over terrorists and global warming and genetically modified foods, I believe the greatest threat we face is still nuclear war. Maybe climate change will hurt us and maybe it won’t and maybe it’ll hurt some and not hurt others but a nice toasty nuclear war is still one misunderstanding away and could kill five hundred million people between lunch and dinner.

But, shit, human beings somewhere would keep on rolling. I bet someone somewhere would be making mp3 players the next year.

22

Why do you guys keep focusing on massive exhanges? You’re telling us destruction of hundreds of major cities around the world would be a big deal? REALLY? I woulda never guessed.

Wasnt there some little tift back in the 40’s that burned down a few villages and had a minor impact on the world economy? How did we ever recover?

What if some piss ant country uses a nuke or three on the USA or one of our less capable friends?

Is it immoral to lob a nuke or three back in their general direction?

23

I think it would be stupid not to respond (or at least stupid to automatically rule it out)to a small nuke attack with a significant nuke attack, if only to make it absolutely clear to any future rogue state that for every city they destroy, they’ll lose five of their own. At the very least, the U.S. should make it clear that the possibility exists of such retaliation. A president who flatly declared that there would never be any such response is a fool.

Nuclear weapons aren’t only useful for blowing things up - they’re useful for threatening to blow things up. I occasionally see soft-hearted posters here talking about how if they were in charge, the military would only be used as a last resort. Well, sorry pal, but such a stance practically guarantees that you’ll need that military, and you’ll be using it under the worst possible conditions, i.e. when the enemy has been allowed to freely choose the timing and manner of attack. Having a military or nukes on standby means you can respond to threats before they turn into disasters, and do so in such a way that a potential enemy has to be very careful about what kinds of threats they make.

24

No, we’re not all focusing on massive exchanges. I pointed out what 8 modern nuclear weapons would do to a country the size of the United States. The damage to infrastructure would be so financially massive that it would take down the world economy. Think about it. California is currently paying out debt with IOU’s. if the LA basin was hit it would destroy trillions of dollars in infrastructure. It would never come back. Silicon Valley would take on new meaning because it would be an irradiated glass bowl.

We recovered because the United States and Canada had the majority of the world’s manufacturing infrastructure and it remained completely intact. We literally were able to rebuild Germany and Japan and it did not happen overnight. To this day we are the world’s breadbasket. Emerging economic power houses like China and India are doing well if they can feed themselves. Russia recovered using slave labor and to this day would be hard pressed to pick up the slack.

25

Who ever survives the nuclear war will develop mutant abilities so rebuilding may not be as difficult as a lot of you imagine. (A Phoenix-like mutant would have unlimited PK potential)

26

Because a limited nuclear exchange makes no sense - nuclear weapons are only used when a countries vital interests are threatened and there is no other option. The situation has to be desperate enough that you’d gamble a second strike and prefer those odds to the current lot.

By using ‘the nuclear option’ you are guaranteeing a nuclear response; leaving the enemies capabilities intact by using a limited strike basically signs your own death warrant.

WWII is not even comparable; wikipedia numbers U.S. casualties at 416,800 military personnel KIA and 1,700 civilians dead. Just one nuclear device (which, as noted, would make no sense - first strikes being designed to overwhelm and utterly destroy the enemy) in any major U.S. urban centre would dwarf those numbers.

By ‘piss ant country’ I’m assuming you mean North Korea (the other nuclear armed states are not what I’d call piss ant); which doesn’t have the delivery capabilities to lob a couple of nukes at the U.S. (apart from Alaska), and even lil Kim isn’t insane enough to use them; if he launched his nuclear missiles in aggression Pyongyang would be a mushroom cloud shortly after. Everyone know that’s how the nuclear game is played, a second strike must always be assumed for there to be any sort of deterrence.

@ RickJay; admittedly ‘Stone’ Age was a hyperbolic means of saying that civilisation would change; see my above post for the reasons why I mentioned it.

27

(Missed the edit window, apologies for the double post)

I’d also completely agree with what Magiver said; even in the bizarre situation of a ‘limited’ nuclear exchange the damage would be so immense as to render the word ‘limited’ almost comical.

28

well… “limited” exchanges with nuclear powers wouldn’t exist but one against a rogue state who can only afford to build one or two nuclear devices would be pretty limited wouldn’t it?

However, the economic and militaristic consequences of someone like N. Korea using a nuclear weapon would be so catastrophic that they wouldn’t even consider it. Even if Kim Jong Il was insane enough to pull the trigger, everyone down the chain of command would have the sense not to press the button. Even if they did, the destruction done by a single nuclear device (not 8) would be tough but manageable.

The real threat of a “limited exchange” comes from terrorists - people who we can’t direct retaliation against. If in the impossible scenario that a group of radicals could somehow either develop or more likely highjack a nuclear device and detonate it, the US really has no effective course of action. That’s where the MAD clause fails and people like Jack Bauer come into play.

29

The problem with terrorists and nuclear weapons is that your nuclear arsenal is pretty much irrelevant, as you have ‘no return address’, so to speak. The OP assumes a traditional exchange, though.

I agree that a rogue nation would have to completely lose their minds to fire a payload of only a few missiles.

30

just took a second look at the OP.

the primary “justification” is that it’s a huge bomb. the secondary justification is the deterrent aspect. other than that, there really isn’t any moral/practical justification. but then again, you could say the same of anything involving armed forces.

again, this has more to do with warfare as a whole than just the bomb - appeasement specifically. i.e. european powers believed that an armed response to a armed attack on the sudetenland would only worsen the future political and environment[al] situation for all of us. so… Germany got to keep the west czech for free.

31

So… nightmarish hellscape: yes.
Stone Age: no.

Did I get that right?

32

You may be able to build a house but the infrastructure that connects people would be gone. Even if it was another country the economic devastation would mean many of the things we take for granted would be unknown in the future. Might want to stock up on Sears catalogs.