There seems to be a psychological power to the nuclear weapon that doesn’t exist with other weapons. To this day people still have complaints about the atomic bomb despite how many more people we killed in Tokyo with conventional weapons.
Marc
True but I think it is the relative ease that a nuke can take out a city compared to conventional means that gets people’s panties in a bunch. Loading up several hundred bombers with several thousand bombs and attacking a city would be problematical for the US today and simply not possible at all for most other countries. Further, there is a sense that bombers can be defended against (if only in a theoretical sense as a country such as Afghanistan can’t defend itself against our bombers at all). It is simply easier to use a nuke for the US and the only option for most countries and 100% the only way a terrorist can hope to take out a city in one go. No one wants to think killing a few hundred thousand people should ever be ‘easy’. Add in the nastiness of radioactive fallout and you get a more visceral reaction to nukes than 10,000 incendiary bombs.
Depends on the President, depends on the nature of the attack.
A nuclear bomb going off in a major US city would create a rage the likes of which hasn’t been seen in the US in a long time, maybe since Pearl Harbor. People compare 9/11 to Pearl Harbor, but it didn’t incite rage, so much as sorrow and a swelling of pride. Sure, we wanted to get the guys who did it, but we supported a measured response that avoided killing innocents.
A nuclear attack would change the American mood considerably. After Pearl Harbor, Americans wanted to total defeat of the Japanese by any means necessary. We killed over a million civilians in the process. If Americans were angry enough, I could easily see us taking out tens of millions of Arabs in a single afternoon in retaliation for a nuclear attack.
I really don’t see that happening, but then I guess I view Americans in a more rational light then you.
I like to think I view Americans in a rational light, but I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass for the chances of any country with a terrorist cell operating in it that nuked an American city. We might or might not use nukes, but there would be no stone left standing upon a stone when we were through.
I mean, does it make sense to kill a couple of dozen terrorists when they kill hundreds of thousands of us, knowing that in the society that spawned them, there are hundreds or thousands to replace them? I don’t think so.
My best plan would be proactive intervention in other societies likely to spawn terrorist, intervention involving the use of our very best intelligence and cultural capability rather than force. But this has never been popular among the guys in the White House (of both parties) who seem to derive some kind of weird associational machismo from propping up right wing dictators “in order to preserve democracy.” That always did sound stupid to me, and friends, right now we’re seeing just how stupid it is.
Surely a 1920s Style Death Ray would be more effective in diverting an oncoming asteroid/meotorite or whatever.
I’m sorry but someone had to say it.
I guess this is part of my concern with a president who was “called by God” to fight “evil”.
In the case of a retaliatory strike, it wouldn’t have to be right, it would just have to be “righteous”…
Actually, the most likely scenario would be to use small tactical nuclear weapons as “bunker busters” to knock out caves and bunkers that can’t be destroyed using conventional weapons. The idea circulated for awhile last year but not surprisingly it has sort of fallen off the shelf.
It may or may not be wrong to kill masses of people to defend onesself from future attack, but its not irrational. Its pretty obvious who could set up a sort of nuclear attack, and this sort of retaliation would be a very effective means of discouraging future attack.
I pray neither happens.
The world would probably with you if an American city was nuked, until that is, you get to the part of slaughtering “tens of millions” of Arabs. Then you would be condemned. **
So when confronted with the core emptiness of the “This is a military war! Bombs away.” mentality. You decide that the correct action is not to fixate the constructive effort to win the hearts and minds of the Arab/Islamic/World populous, but you opt. to instead increase your bombings. This time you will include innocent (although Arab/Islamic) civilians in your death toll, in a vain effort to satisfy your blood lust with out-n-out Genocide.
I do hate playing the “bleeding heart” in threads like these, but the idea’s of some people are really sick. You have taught me one thing; you have educated me in my foolishly naive thinking of American “rationality”.**
It is nice to know at least that this is your best plan, even though your “plan B” stinks.
Inncorrect, genocide (on any scale let alone tens of millions) is not morally right or rational. Neither is the random killing of “masses of people”**
I have a feeling it wouldn’t stop there.
Was the American response to the Japanese irrational? Some say so now, but anyone who lived during that time still thinks our response was entirely appropriate.
I think that in the aftermath of the deaths of a million Americans, we would mostly want victory by any means necessary. ANY means.
I think we would too, but I have the feeling that most people, even those in power, would realize it would be a Pyrhic victory at best. Short of an intentional act of war, such as a country using WMD on us or an ally or a mass invasion, I dont’ see a scenario where an isolated incident without government backing would result in the US using nuclear weapons.
I think, and this is just a personal observation and a partial aside, that most people view the use of nuclear weapons as very final. For most of the twentieth century, people lived under the assumption that when the first bomb fell, all the others would follow and there is a serious gravity associated with it. And who wants to be the person to unleash that on the world?
–greenphan
Well, first, there is pretty much no chance of a nuclear attack on the US without government backing. It’s not completely impossible of course, but very unlikely. And even if no government purposely allows it, chances are it will be planned and originate from a sovereign nation like Iran or Syria. So chances are, we will have a state to retaliate against.
Obvoiusly, any war involving nuclear weapons is going to involve a pyrhhic victory. But to not respond at all, or to respond in a piecemeal fashion, would only encourage a second attack. Our response has to be so horrible that even a madman like a bin Laden would never even consider trying it again. Even bin Laden has goals that he considers rational. If he suspects that say, Mecca would be destroyed in a counterstrike, he would probably not want to pay that price. If it meant the end of the entire Arab world, he would probably be even less willing to pay that price.
In the end, our first priority is to protect ourselves. If you had told an average American during WWII that the price of winning the war would have been the total destruction of Germany and Japan, he would have unhestitatingly said, “No problem”. And that was just for a bombing raid that killed 3000. Imagine a million dead Americans and the kind of vengeance that would be demanded and then carried out.
Now, who is being irrational?
It was the 30’s and American was at war with Japan. What is America at war with now? Islam? Arabs?
How is that irrational? Detterence is based on the theory that you will do something extremely horrible if someone does something to you. So horrible, in fact, that it would be madness to contemplate doing it.
The idea is that if you make it horrible enough, you will never actually have to carry it out.
A nuclear attack would have the effect of radicalizing Americans in much the same way Muslims have been radicalized by our actions. The difference is that we would actually be able to do to them what they’d like to do to us.
Japan once awoke the sleeping giant. The Islamic radicals are playing with fire here, and they, like the Japanese, can’t even begin to comprehend how dangerous the game they are playing is.
Actually it’s not my PLAN, it’s what I’m pretty sure would happen. What have you got in the way of response to a nuked city other than, “Just bend over and take it”?
We’re at war with anyone who nukes us or who helps those who nuke us. Any other response is laughably stupid.