I ask this question because i am a fan of the show Jericho. In the show government conspirators set off nukes in 23 US cities and point the blame over to Iran and North Korea. The bombs are not from missiles but were set off at ground level. The result causes the US to split up and go into somewhat of a state of Civil War. During an episode one of the character states the the us “Wiped two counties off the map”. Would this really happen in real life? Would the current state of world Politics allow a country to respond in such a manner after a nuclear attack? How much out cry would there be?
MAD has been the order of the day for some time now. It is almost a certainty that any nation hit by WMD’s would respond with extreme prejudice, most likely with nukes. In response to a nuclear attack, most nuclear nations would, at the very least, unleash nuclear annihilation against an enemy nation’s capital and/or seat of militant/political power. This would, first of all, be carried out as a message to any other nations as to the price of WMD attacks. Secondarily it would be done to swiftly remove an enemy’s abilities to wage war.
If, as in the scenario you’ve presented, there was a massive series of WMD attacks against the US, it’s quite possible that we would glass any number of nations that we held responsible.
Well, drop a nuke on every population center over 100,000 and you’ve gone a fair way to wiping a country off the map. 90% of the population is dead, almost all the leadership is dead, all transportation infrastructure is useless, and the people who aren’t dead yet will soon be dying of radiation sickness, and a few weeks after that dying of starvation.
As for whether a massive nuclear attack on another country would be possible, it’s hard to say what might be possible if everyone were convinced that 23 US cities had been destroyed.
At that point the international reaction to the US reaction would be pretty much irrelevant, there wouldn’t be anything any other country could do to stop our retaliatory strike short of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against our land-based nuclear forces. Of course, that’s not going to stop our SLBMs, if the boomers get the order to launch against North Korea and Iran after watching 23 US cities incinerated I don’t think you’ll see a high rate of ships refusing to launch. And of course our carrier groups also have nuclear capability as well, so you’ll see short range bombers dropping nukes too.
Even if there were international outcry afterwards, so what? That’s not going to do anything, and anyway there’s not going to be much left of the US to complain about anyway. Seriously, is the President, while watching New York and LA and 21 other cities incinerated going to worry about getting a strongly worded letter from the French afterwards?
The Chinese might get a tad nervous when we launched against North Korea, just because they couldn’t be sure it wasn’t against them. Other than that, no-one would care a whit if North Korea became a nightlight. It’s also small enough that fallout could render the majority of its area uninhabitable for thousands of years. Iran would be a bit harder, if only because the country is larger and more spread out. But we could still eradicate the population centers down to about the 10,000 people mark without breaking a sweat. Even after 23 of our cities were toasted.
If 23 American cities were destroyed by parties unknown, it’s unclear the U.S. would have a clear chain of command with which to order such an attack. If a nuclear weapon kills the President, Vice President and much of Congress, who would order a counterattack? Where would the intelligence be put together to conclude who it was?
Nothing like what is being described has ever happened, so it’s impossible to know what the next thing to happen would be.
It is quite certain, though, that once a nuclear war goes international, in all likelihood ALL nuclear powers will attack one another, and we would see the destruction of most of civilization. A large number of nuclear detonations would ravage the world’s climate.
I don’t think there would be any outcry at all. Almost no one was against the war in Afghanistan after 9/11 and that wasn’t even a very direct connection to the events. The U.S. still has a hair trigger on nuclear readiness. U.S. nuclear subs are hiding all over the world right this second including under polar ice caps waiting for the launch order to come in. The long-range bomber B-52 fleet is staged and on alert with nukes ready to be deployed with less than an hour’s notice. The one person the President is always with 100% of the time is a military officer with the nuclear football that contains the current launch plans. The president gets the launch codes daily to keep on him at all times. The president has to be willing every second to evaluate foreign launch report data and launch a retaliatory nuclear strike on any nation within 30 minutes before ICBM’s hit the U.S. mainland.
I know the OP said that the nukes would be ground based and probably terrorist related but 23 of them is a big stretch for reality. Someone would have loved to smuggle just one of them into Manhattan by now if it was that easy. Still, intelligence data would come in rapidly and the originating country would need to be destroyed right away. The only real defense against country to country nuclear strikes is MAD and it has to be followed through even if it costs millions of lives.
This is incorrect. Public opinion polls in 2001 showed that supermajorities in Europe and Latin American preferred alternatives to U.S. bombing, invasion, and occupation of Afghanistan. The only countries which had majorities supporting the war were the U.S., Israel, and India. Despite this, politicians and media organizations have continued the meme that “no one was against” the war in Afghanistan.
As for the thread, of course there would be a massive outcry if the U.S. wiped countries off the map, even if it suffered catastrophic damage itself and was obviously retaliatory. If amorphous terrorist cells are setting off nukes all over then there’s no clear answer as to what we should do, hence there would probably be a widespread perception that we were just bombing for the sake of revenge and “getting rid of the Arabs” or just lashing out in general or some such. And with some justification.
Now, in the case of nation vs. nation MAD then there would still be a lot of hue and cry but much less so. IMO.
I imagine the idea there was “nobody in the US” was opposed.
I’ve always been told that there are subs out there, and nobody knows where they are, and if they don’t get some signal when they come up once every so often they blow certain places to Kingdom Come. Is that not true? Is my whole childhood a lie?
I used to ask my parents, but what if their antenna was broken and they didn’t know it and they thought they had to fire the missiles but really we were all fine and then the Russkies killed us all? It really worried me.
Terrorist nukes would be a sticky wicket, especially if it was stolen or bought from a rogue military commander. Think about what would happen if Russian nukes were lost and subsequently blown up in a few American cities. Would we nuke Russia? Highly unlikely. If we could somehow determine the origin of the terrorists, and they turned out to be, let’s say, from Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, would we nuke those two countries? That’s slightly more likely, but then again, they didn’t provide the nukes.
I imagine we would give all of the countries whose citizens are involved (in this example, Russia, Saudi, and Lebanon) an ultimatum, that they immediately open their borders to our investigators and assist in every possible way or face immediate nuclear retaliation. Those countries would rush to offer up the appropriate scapegoats (including some tangentially guilty parties), and we would execute them. We’d also utterly gut the organizations (terrorist or otherwise) whose names are even halfway connected to the bombings, jailing and killing a lot of innocents as well. The world will offer up mild protest but otherwise look the other way. At some point, the accused terrorist host countries’ governments will make some waves about national sovereignty and due process, but will be extremely careful to not even give the impression of being uncooperative. Enough public shows of “justice” and the American lust for revenge will be somewhat sated.
The American Congress will pass bills that make the Patriot Act look like a liberal circle-jerk.
No, that is not true. Nuclear missles do not have some sort of passive “dead man switch” fail safe mode that releases them for launch if a signal is not given. Probably because it would be recklessly dangerous for the very reason you describe.
And so what? Of course there would be massive outcry around the world if the U.S. responded to a nuclear attack with a retaliatory nuclear attack.
That doesn’t mean such outcry would convince whatever is left of the US chain of command not to launch that retaliatory attack. As you say, there was massive opposition to the war in Afghanistan, forget Iraq. And that massive opposition to the war in Afghanistan had what effect? That’s right, nothing. It had no effect.
If the US gets nuked, we might or might not retaliate with nukes, but the potential reaction of the European left will have absolutely no influence on the decision.
If the U.S. was attacked enough so that it was essentially ‘wiped off the map’ say 90%+ population and infrastructure destroyed and the U.S. didn’t know who did it…
…I imagine they would launch at every country perceived to be ‘happy’ at this happening to the U.S. Go out in a blaze and take your enemies with you sort of thing.
That’s not what the poster was referring to. The post was in reference to submarines, which supposedly resurface every few months and check for predetermined signals and if not, will nuke their predetermined targets.
I do not know how accurate that is, but it is not nearly as dangerous as your interpretation would be, as you would still have the chain of command within the sub to make sure that the nukes aren’t set off in haste, for example:
COMM OFFICER: Captain! We aren’t receiving a signal on G-6 like we we supposed to, should we prepare for nukes right away.
CAPTAIN: Yes, that is what we’re told. That means that we must have been nuked in the meantime, so we need to retaliate since we’re now a lone wolf by ourselves.
ENSIGN BOB: But I can still hear WABC on my Walkman!
CAPTAIN: So?
ENSIGN BOB: It’s playing Led Zeppelin! And I can hear CBC and NBC_Radio broadcasts, too!
CAPTAIN: Okay, so maybe half the world isn’t nuked, and the secret transmitter is just down for repairs…still, better check in with HQ
ENSIGN BOB: No, seriously, they’re playing Britney Spears! Listen!
CAPTAIN: That’s it, arm the nukes!
I was opposed.
Tris
I’ve always understood the “no signal=nuke 'em” situation to have a lot of steps in between, including, like Ludovic mentions, calling home to see if everything’s all right.
On the subject of taking out command and control of nuclear forces, naah.
Our C&C was designed with the best efforts of the Soviet Union in mind, back when they were able to launch a sterilizing attack against a continental target. No fantasy terrorist organization, or Illuminati conspiracy has or could ever have that kind of strike capability. Taking out the fifty largest cities in the United States would not cripple our retaliatory force readiness by more than a token amount. And everyone who knows about military planning in the modern world knows that.
Not even the legendary “operations spoilsport” nuclear sub has prior authorization to launch nuclear attacks. They could receive such authorization, or perhaps even such contingency authorization, but only from National Command Authority.
Multiple nuclear events in the US, without any penetration alert would not be interpreted as an attack by terrorists, because there is no rational explanation of how terrorists could execute such a mission. the Nebraska National Guard are a more likely source for that kind of attack. I doubt that NORAD is gonna nuke Nebraska.
But, if it happened, there would be a lot of folks with non nuclear weapons, and orders to use them at any sign of non-cooperation, world wide, in very short order. People don’t seem to understand that we don’t need nuclear weapons to destroy almost any nation in the world except a very few. Half of those are our long standing allies.
I have no doubt that bombs would fall. I have no doubt that innocents would die. I have no doubt that the sensibilities of peaceful people the world over would be outraged. And I have no doubt that the US response would show wrath proportionate with the willful slaughter of millions of our citizens. But I think that massive nuclear strikes need massive targets, no matter how angry you are.
Tris
What would it take for the US to “wipe a country off the map”?
The first step would be wresting control of all the companies that make maps. From there, it’s simple.
Casting back 25 years or so when I was an undergrad studying nuclear deterrence, ISTR that the US and SU were really only able to effectively target to destroy something like 60-70% of each others’ population and industry, because to get any higher than that you’d have to target mom and pop drug stores and the like. But my memory could certainly be faulty.
And smaller nations would undoubtedly have greater population density. For example, we could pretty easily turn something the size of Lichtenstein into a smoking crater just by targetting on a grid pattern.
I was in the Electronic Intelligence field and while I was Army, not Navy, I can guarantee you there are Elints listening to and analyzing everything and they’d know if the US really got nuked or not.