No, it is required that they BELIEVE that you will follow through for it to work. When it comes down to it, though, if someone is stupid enough to push the button, do you want several million deaths on your conscience out of revenge?
I don’t accept the premiss it could be considered revenge.
What else could it be? “We’re already dead, so let’s take as many of them with us as we can” is one of the most vengeful statements ever stated. When it’s just you being attacked and you can identify your assailants it’s not an unreasonable statement to make. When we’re speaking of the faceless masses ruled by governments that aren’t even transparent enough to let them know what’s going on it’s the moral equivalent of murder.
As I stated above, it states a dangerous precidense for any other country that was not involved in the attack. Besides that, you will not know the condition of your country, how many are alive, how strong your fighting force is, but you do know you were attacked and you have the power to cripple the enemy’s ability to destroy what is left of your country. Not acting would be horriable, not only you would be (IMHO) a traitor but condemed the world to be taken over.
By counterstriking you will hopefully lower their ability to attack and both coutries (USSR, USA) will fall below the ‘power’ level of other countries(Great Brittan, China) who were not involved in the attack.
THe message will be clear, launch a nuke attack against a nuke country and you will give up superpower status and fall to 3rd world status. A pretty good reason not to attack ever again.
Deterrence against future strikes, by anybody against anybody.
True. But then again, they might not, and boy won’t you feel stupid?
I mean, we’re talking about killing more than a handful of people, here. We may be talking about killing hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of people. And if the target country survives the attack, the lesson the leaders may learn (and consider that the first-strike country’s leaders are among the citizens most likely to sruvive such an attack) is that THEY can make it through such an attack. So maybe they’ll be encouraged to rebuild and make future such attacks.
Whereas if we don’t retaliate, then instantly the first-strike nation goes down in history books as humanity’s worst murderers. You think the world reaction to the Holocaust was something? You ain’t seen nothing compared to the world reaction to the first full-scale unilateral nuclear strike.
Committing the world’s worst genocide on spec just isn’t a bargain a moral person should make.
Daniel
And these murderers, still holding intact all of their infrastructure and now the undisputed Kings of the World, become tired of such criticism and … what?
The rest of the world is counting on the target repsonding to the bully.
Then we have a case of AD, Assured Destruction of us. If a country/government does not have the fortitude to genuinely follow through on the return strike, you do not have a deterrent. There is no Mutual.
Given the state of leaks in our government (both sides), the other side would know that we wouldn’t push the button, and retaliate, therefore almost guaranteeing a first strike against us… there is no “downside” for the agressor. Deterrence through strenght has no meaning if there is no fortitude to use that strength. If this is how you truely feel, let’s just disband the military, destroy the nukes, and welcome our foreign overlords.
If the missiles are flying at us, you can be certain that my last act upon this world would be to reap total destruction, with everything I had in my arsenal upon the agressor. I’d do the same if an intruder was in my home, threatening my family. For the president/leader of a nation, they have a moral imperative to provide this protection.
and they look at the entire rest of the world suddenly united against them, and at the fact that their own citizenry, appalled at their acts and astonished at the final mercy of their government’s last victims, is rising up all over the place against them? And they look at members of their own military who can’t hold their weapons any longer in defense of such monsters?
We’re talking about an act unprecedented in human history, remember. We’re talking about a government committing murder on a scale that no other government could achieve. The severest reactions against dictators that have happened in history prior to this event would similarly pale in comparison to the reaction against the leaders who massacred an entire country in an eyeblink.
This is incorrect, for reasons that Airman and I have discussed above. There’s a difference between threatening to retaliate and actually retaliating.
Daniel
…and think, hey, how about a Stalinesque lesson for that citzenry and military? Do our bidding, or we will nuke you. Civil wars can be nuclear, too.
Like a protracted conventional war against these nuke-wielding monsters, perhaps (which the monsters would also win)? I’d suggest that this is less of a deterrent than the original target simply carrying out the original threatened response.
Thus setting the precedent for future mosters to call such a bluff based on the statistics to date.
MAD = Mexican Standoff
AD = A guy with a gun pointed at an unarmed man
Ironically, you’re lecturing us on the lessons of history when you seemed to have failed that course, yourself.
If the first-strike nation is the one that survives to write the history books, then the judgement of history is hardly a major deterrent. In any case, how history will view your action should be about the one-thousandth factor to consider when deciding how to react to the deaths of millions of your fellow countrymen. You certainly have larger problems on your plate at the time.
Tragically, it wasn’t something, or at least not something with a lasting effect. Though it’s become the yardstick by which genocides are measured, our knowledge of it didn’t prevent Cambodia or Rwanda, it’s not helping to prevent the Sudan, it’ll be of little regard to someone willing to strike first with a nuke.
I understand you’re using the appeal to emotion. Got anything else?
The question is if the rest of the world and all the future generations will be more thankful that you thoughtfully put them all under the unopposed thumb of the “worst murderers in history” (though, as others have pointed out, They will re-write history), than if you leveled the playing field in the most terribly literal way?
What good is it to save billions from the quick death of a thermonuclear holocaust if all you’ve done is served them up as fodder for the pogroms and slaughter of an intact military power that thought First Strike was a good idea?
Refusing to retaliate in kind is, in effect, saying “I think these people that would choose to murder billions of our people, and in so doing risk the lives of billions of their people based on our expected response, will do a pretty good job in the Brave New World created by this act.”
What’s the moral verdict on willingly giving the world to the worst murderers in the history of the world?