After reading this thread, If terrorists got and atomic bomb, what would they do with it?, it got me to thinking what the response would be if Islamic terrorists used a nuke on a city in the west, specifically the US.
For many years the US and the USSR had nukes pointed at each other in such numbers that it guaranteed that both countries would be completely annhilated no matter who fired the first shot. Both countries were willing to completely wipe out everyone in the opposing country even though they knew they wouldn’t survive. I imagine that there were many scenarios considered where each side tried to determine how it could win such a war while still surviving the exchange and neutralizing the threat against them permanently.
The response to the ~3000 people dieing in the WTC attack was to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq. While the attack was tragic and senseless there was little concern for the survival of the US as a nation or for the safety of the vast majority of its people.
-
What would be the response if Al-Qaeda or Iran got their hands on a nuke and set it off over New York? We can assume a lot more people would die than in the WTC.
A second nuke goes off over Washington.
A third nuke goes off in the port of Houston.
Can you assume that the terrorists don’t have more nukes after 1, 2, or 3? -
What happens on the home front? Given the response of some people in the US to their Muslim neighbours after 9-11, what would happen after one or more nukes went off? Would we see camps like the Japanese were put in during WW2? Would there be shootings and lynching? How would the authorities try to stop such killings and what if they were occurring country wide?
-
At what point does it become a war of ‘survival’? Would the response be just against those who perpetrated the crime (was Iraq involved in 9-11?), or against the culture in general who allow guys like Osama to flourish, or people like President Ahmadinejad to come to power? What I’m asking here is whether there comes a point where it is determined that Islam and the West have ‘irreconcilable differences’ and one has to go? Remember the vast majority of both people in the US and the USSR were more than willing to allow the other side to live and let live did, but would still have ended up as ash for what their leader’s choices were.
Standard disclaimer. I am not advocating anything here least of all genocide. The topic is the response to a terrorist nuke attack in all its aspects not limited to my scenario above. That being said I don’t think it necessary to go into details on how a bomb might be acquired by terrorists, or delivered to specific targets, as that has been covered in other threads (and maybe this topic has, too, but I couldn’t find anything recently).