If you were the President of the United States of America and World War 3 began when the enemy launched several hundred nuclear missiles toward the United States would you launch American nuclear missiles in response? There is no way to prevent the enemy’s missiles from reaching America so would you try to kill as many of them as they kill your people.
I would say yes.
I wouldn’t. At that point it is “game over”, mutually-assured destruction didn’t work as a deterrent. I can’t see what the purpose, at that point, of annihilating millions of the enemy citizens, would serve other than assuring they wouldn’t ‘win’. I think I once read an Arthur C. Clarke story based on this premise.
This is why I’d be a crap president. MAD only works when your response to attack is inevitable.
But just to show how flexible my morals are, I would retaliate against a limited strike. Go figure.
So, basically, if you’re already doomed, you would try to kill as many people as possible, including innocent civilians, for some sort of revenge? What if those people you ordered killed included lots of pregnant women? So much for pro-life, eh?
Sure, it has to be done according to the MAD doctrine under any full-launch and some limited launch circumstances. It doesn’t have to be pointless. It would serve as a lesson to those that survive and rebuild later what will happen when you engage in nuclear war just like most people learned lessons from World War II.
If they’ve already handed power to a lunatic willing to launch nukes without provocation, someone needs to stop the guy simply crowning himself Supreme Dictator of the World. What do you suggest, that the world rolls over and plays dead for a psychopath?
Well, if there was a WWIII, I’d say they didn’t learn any lessons from WWII.
But no, I don’t think I could justify killing a few hundred million people, even if I believed it might teach some hypothetical future civilization some sort of lesson. I mean, what is the lesson going to protect the future civilization from that’s worse then the death of hundreds of millions.
The OP didn’t say it was without provocation, or that the other leader was a lunatic.
To be fair, a smaller version of this scenario has happened in real life due to a Russian computer glitch. The fill-in Russian Colonel on duty that night in the nuclear bunker control center, Stanislav Petrov, refused orders to launch the nukes against the U.S. in 1983, the height of the Cold War, but he suffered serious consequences because of it. The world would be a very different place now without him.
In this scenario - they wouldn’t be “playing” dead. They’d be dead.
That’s not exactly what happened. Petrov wasn’t in charge of launching nukes and he wasn’t ordered to launch anything. He was in charge of early-warning equipment. The equipment indicated an incoming ICBM, but he decided not to report it because he correctly believed that it was a glitch.
I think refusing to launch a petty retaliative strike in the face of certain death will speak more poignantly against nuclear war. Or maybe it won’t, but MAD should remain only a bluff in my opinion.
He was never ordered to fire his missiles and didn’t have missiles at his disposal to fire anyways. His role was commander of an early detection post. Instead of reporting the launches up the chain of command he decided that they were glitches. That’s all he did. There’s no evidence to suggest and no reason to believe that his superiors would have ordered a nuclear retaliation if he had reported the false contacts. His role as a savior of the world is way way overblown.
Of course I would! So all you people with nukes, don’t even think about pressing that button!!
<looks around furtively>
Okay, I really wouldn’t, but dangit, mutually assured destruction doesn’t work as a deterrent if you don’t assure them that the destruction would be mutual!
He firmly believed that the USSR would launch as soon as he reported it however which is likely correct. This was 1983 after all, the same year that the movie Wargames was released as well as the TV special The Day After. Most leaders were working with a hair trigger then. It was very different than today and we are talking about the military after all which doesn’t work the same way as the civilian world.
Slight nitpick: wouldn’t more than two countries have to be involved for it to be World War III?
I’m not the kind of guy who tends to think of large civilian populations as cockroaches to be exterminated. I’d probably refuse to give the go code for a full exchange, and would therefore probably be immediately strung up by some of the more militant members of my administration.
Assuming facts not in evidence, seems to me, but if we go ahead and state the our hypothetical enemy is state led by a single totalitarian leader, a limited nuclear strike on his most likely places of refuge would be more than sufficient, and would result in more than enough horrible civilian casualties to satisfy most anyone’s bloodlust.
The thing is, MAD didn’t work, and we’re all damn lucky it didn’t. If it did work, then we’d all have been killed on one of the occasions Russia saw us launch a first-strike nuclear attack. Or probably one of the times we saw Russia launch such an attack, though I haven’t heard any specific examples of that.
He just started WWIII, and made an all-out nuclear attack against the U.S. That makes him a lunatic.
The Americans would, and quite a few citizens of Provokia would, but there’s still the rest of the world which probably would prefer not to live under Provokia’s heel. As El_Kabong has noted, you don’t even need to destroy the whole country, just enough of it to kill the idiots stupid enough to start World War III.
Also, remember that it’s possible the Soviets don’t have all their birds in the air yet. There could be technical problems, they could be holding some in reserve, whatever. If there’s even a chance that some of the enemy missiles are still in their silos, it’s worth trying to keep them from getting launched. Sure, getting hit with thousands of nukes is bad - but getting hit with one more nuke is still worth avoiding.
Also, there are plenty of conventional targets worth hitting. I don’t know what the world would be like after the Soviets launched an all-out nuclear attack, but it would probably be a better place with rather fewer Soviet armored divisions and airbases in it.
Of course launching the missiles would be pointless and murderous - that goes without saying. But if you go and *say *that, you’re practically inviting the other side to launch, thus pointlessly murdering your own people.
So the proper answer to the question is this: yes, I would launch. And under no circumstances will I even hint that I don’t really mean it. I’ll probably even force myself to mean it, just so I never show any doubt.
Nope. If the missiles are already on their way, the rest of the world is going to have a tough enough time surviving- at this point, my obligation wouldn’t be to my country, it would be to humanity and its survival.
Yup, and I’d deliberately nuke third world countries (such as India) too, just for good measure.
Then sit in a fetal position in the corner, sweating and jibbering madly until the end.
Oh, and I’d aim the biggest buster bombs of all, set for ground burst, at the world’s Supervolcanos, such as Yellowstone.