I’d ask for a cite (being an obedient doper). Because I know that North Korea has no capability to nuke anybody, nor any motive to do so. Nor certainly any capability to launch a series of such strikes, so defense is rather pointless. I cannot think of anything to be gained by killing several million faultless Koreans out of a snit of vindictive spite. Perpetuating the endless cycle of mindless retaliation and retribution is not what would come first to mind, as the president of a people who would be in need of reconstructive leadership.
Gonna be a lot of glow-in-the-dark Commies very shortly.
If this article from The Atlantic is correct, he or an aide near him, should already have the identification protocols (The “biscuit,” if I’m reading the article right.) sufficient to verify his identity him to the relevant military official as a member of the Presidential Line of Succession. Once he and a relevant second person have been identified, and are in communication with elements of the military able to relay his orders to operational units, then whoever he’s on the line with can walk the new President through the dizzying array of operational plans available. The relevant second person is interesting: in things like the wiki for the Gold Codes, the second person is usually listed as the Secretary of Defense, an option not available in your hypo. But certainly contemplated already, I’m sure.
So, SecAg reaches into their wallet, pulls out the sealed card with a list of numbers, reads off the right set of numbers to whoever’s at the other end of the phone, and then gets told their options. In your hypo, the football’s already there, which is strange—I’d think that they’d only be in the presence of the President, the Vice President, any Designated Survivor if applicable, and that’s it. In your hypo, those would all have already been nuked. After the new President decides what s/he wants to do, tells it to any of the NEACP or other command posts, the second person next to the President confirms the order, the posts then go through the work of getting the message out to whichever military units are needed to execute the order.
I don’t know if SecAg can devolve their responsibilities to a command post, which presumably has a much better understanding of the crisis and how to respond than someone whose previous competency was in understanding the ins and outs of agriculture. Sort of a, “Here are the goals I want to achieve. General, fight this war and get back to me when you’re done.”
Anyway, you might find the Atlantic article funny and interesting.
Also seems odd that so many people are ahead of sec def. I guess you might need a diplomat so sec state is fine I guess although having a military person there might be better in a situation where the chain of command was just decapitated. Having an accountant, sec treasury, take over seems a bit odd.
I remember reading that Lyndon Johnson was president the instant that Kennedy died. The swearing in was done, but wasn’t really necessary.
RIP NK.
Yep. The minute the President is confirmed dead then the VP - or whomever is highest in the chain of succession is IT. The hand on the bible bit is optional - and probably a good idea because rituals are important - but not necessary.
I’m a good democrat and if there were confirmation that it was a North Korean attacked that destroyed DC I’d use the ‘no two stones left standing’ approach. There must be seen to be consequences for such actions.
Mind you, confirmation doesn’t come from one O4 or O5 with a box of gear. That’s getting confirm from someone with multiple stars on his or her shoulders.
If China (remember: Red China or Communist China?) screws up so badly that NK is able to attack the US with anything larger than a small mortar, then China is either completely off the rails or in cahoots with Kim.
To find out: Call Xi (or whoever) and tell him he has 15 minutes to glass NK or I will. No, I’m not landing any troops and will guarantee the ROK will not cross the 38th. It’s just that DPRK must be glassed. If the wind patterns mean that Beijing will get clear but very hot air, well, you should have thought of that before letting the nut case loose.
Better make that a conference call with Vlad - there is a high-priority rocket and/or nuke base on the East side of DPRK and quite near Russia.
Vlad can toss a few nukes into the party if they want.
You and I don’t agree on geopolitics often, so it’s refreshing when we do. This is really one of those scenarios where I glue Hitler’s kneecap onto the nano-nuke controller before sending my billions of nano-nukes up Kim Jong Il’s nostrils. I mean, c’mon, really?
More realistically, I handle it by saying, “shyeah, right, good one,” and walking away.
The underlying question isn’t quite so ridiculous, however, and it’s this: am I willing to kill a lot of civilians as a deterrent action against nuclear threat?
The answer is, hell no. There’s no guarantee whatsoever that this will work, and there’s a chance that it’ll backfire, as the rest of the world decides the US is completely out of control and needs to be stopped. Sure, it might work, but I’m not going to gamble a few million innocent lives on that possibility. There are alternative ways to try to minimize the chance of a nuclear strike that don’t involve mass killing, and as near as I can tell those are the ways that work in the real world, so I’d take those ways.
And THIS is why you will never have even so much as a glimpse of the football.
You don’t have strategic nukes so you have things to Never, Ever use because an innocent might get a boo-boo.
You have them to use as retaliation, among other uses.
This is clearly untrue. You have them so that you can threaten to use them against someone who uses them on you first.
In this scenario, the nukes have failed at their main function. The question then becomes, what’s the most effective approach to a world after the Mad Dog Threat stratagem has failed? Is it to follow through on the threat, or is it to use the moment to take an entirely different tack?
I posit that, when the mad dog approach fails, doubling down is the wrong approach.
I think I probably wouldn’t be in too big of a hurry; the North Koreans neither have big bombs or very many at all, and any strike on DC was likely something along the lines of a terrorist attack, considering that the N. Koreans have no missiles with that kind of range. The likelihood of much of a follow-up is small, I’d think.
So I’d consult the joint chiefs, consult congressional leaders, and possibly even consult some foreign ones (like the UK’s Prime Minister), and then if the evidence was pretty convincingly true that the N. Koreans were definitely behind it, commence to nuking every population center that we had the available ICBMs and SLBMs to destroy.
Not so much as punishment to N. Korea, but as more of an object lesson to any other present or future rogue nations that can, will and have responded in that fashion to nuclear attacks on our home soil.
The murder of babies doesn’t qualify as an object lesson.
Sure it does. Quite effectively too.
At the risk of returning to our usual status of disagreement on geo-politics, I didn’t interpret the idea of a nuclear response to an NK first strike so much as a deterrent to further strikes, as a prevention of further strikes. Although it would have both effects as well.
If we have enough conventional missiles and bombers to make a smoking crater of everything north of the 38th parallel, and don’t resort to nukes, so much the better. I rather doubt any fewer civiilians are going to get splattered into goo, but the “nukes should be avoided at nearly any cost” idea is one that is worth preserving. If possible.
If, in the hypothetical, the general tells me, The Clueless Leader of the Free World, that he is 80% sure that the North Koreans have another missile, that they are going to fire it, and we don’t have enough conventional arms to prevent it but we do have some nukes handy that we could lob over and be pretty sure of preventing another nuke launched at us - or Seoul, or Tokyo - then it might be time to resort to the Ultimate Boomy Noise, followed closely by a heartfelt apology to the Chinese for the radioactive cloud headed their way, and the large number of glow-in-the-dark casualities in its wake.
Because I don’t think there is any way to prevent further war that doesn’t involve mass killing. I rather doubt a negotiated surrender is practical, by anyone, and we are going to have to kill lots of North Koreans anyway. Is it better to kill them with conventional bombs and missiles and air strikes than with nukes? In a bizarre way, I would say Yes. Not that they are going to be any deader one way or 'tother, but from a PR point of view. The US gets too much shit for “being the only nation to use nukes in wartime” and that use was completely justified. But we don’t need to make a habit of it, if we can decorate the landscape with scorched corpses in other ways.
Deterrence that says, in essence, “you fired a nuke at me - don’t do it again or I will be very peevish” is not serious deterrence. Serious deterrence says 'North Korea got ideas way above their pay grade - see what happened to them, and we didn’t even resort to nukes". Or else “see? I told you what would happen if you nuked us. Sorry about the radioactive rubble - we would be glad to pitch in with the clean up”.
Regards,
Shodan
I think the order of cabinet secretaries in Presidential succession is based upon department seniority (i.e. with executive department was organized first.) Also, the first Presidential Succession Act was enacted in 1792, so I don’t think they had a nuclear strike in mind.
Tell the officer to go suck eggs. North Korea would not have the capability to launch a massive attack, if they managed to hit DC with one lucky shot there would still be plenty of country left. Contact our allies and Russia and China and tell them what options I was considering and that I would give them a heads up if I was to launch a missile so they don’t mistake it as an attack on them. I’d be more concerned about rebuilding the government and getting the various governors to appoint new congressmen and Senators than I would be immediate action. There would be plenty of time to take military action, nothing need be done at once except put the military on full alert and mobilize all the National Guard units.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/north-korea-launches-missile-from-submarine-seoul-says/2016/04/23/f6ec241b-2773-4aa0-938b-484bd422c00a_story.htmlNorth Korea launches sub based missile
You had me quaking in my boots, until I got to this part:
*
But missile experts later said that the launch was faked and that the pictures had been doctored.*
I am not exactly terrified of a regime that can’t shoot a 1960’s weapon more than 20 miles. Or, at all. Depending on which version you believe.
The missile was fired from a submarine off North Korea’s east coast, in the Sea of Japan, about 6:30 p.m. local time, the joint chiefs said. The missile flew for only about 20 miles, well short of a submarine-launched ballistic missile’s minimum range of 200 miles, Yonhap News Agency reported.
Color me less than impressed about the thread that North Korea poses to the continential United States, or even Hawaii.
Stranger