On Sep 14, 2006, at 9:21 PM, jdiebremse wrote:
--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], Gibson Jonathan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Because the USA may be the target of nuclear terrorism. OTOH,
nuclear terrorists might explode a bomb anywhere they can, just
to show they have it.
OK.
How does this make any difference? We faced nuclear megadeath
of enormous proportions for decades w/o erosion of our rights -
well, actually we have, but that's another topic - or, at least
the ones we curtailed are a "comfortable pain" we are already
long familiar with.
Nuclear Islamic Terrorism is far more dangerous than Nuclear
Communism. They had something to lose, while the islamic fanatics
don't - not even if the retaliation would reduce every sacred
islamic place to radioactive dust.
Nonesense. Why do the puppetmasters pushing suicide bombers have less
to lose than the soviet aparatchniks did? There are any number off
technical, political, cultural, etc, reasons for a ffoolish leadership
to intentionally, or by blender, trigger nuclear bombs. The scale of
mistakes is obviously much worse under the old Cold War than an
isolated nuke going off here or there. Losing Morder, er Washington
DC, to an attack would be bad, but nothing compared to
globe-straddling
nuclear winter after a typical US-v-USSR script.
The scale is obvious and one you don't address.
I can think of a number of reasons.
1) In a world with numerous sources of nuclear bombs, it may be
impossible for the victim of nuclear bomb terrorism to identify with
certainty the source of the terrorism.
I've been stewing on this for a decade as a minor plot point in a
story. Certain isotope ratios can help trace the origin, but this may
not always lead to an actual instigator and it would be easily to set
up a third country as the fall guy. Still, it's a risk zealots are
probably willing to make because retribution may be hard to deliver
exactly as well.
I still argue the nuclear winter scenario is much worse - and there are
many nukes still ready to go relatively quickly both in the US and
Russia. We almost went over this brink a number of times for a number
of reasons. We still could.
2) The source of the terrorism may be a non-State actor. For example,
if Osama bin Laden steals a Pakistani nuclear weapon and ships it on a
container ship to Seattle - how does the US retalitate? What does he
have to lose?
Do you think an enraged American electorate will care? Look at the
Depleted Uranium we prodigiously dumped on Iraq already w/o a care. DC
would blanket the entire region with mushroom clouds - certainly if
this administration is still holding the levers. CheneyCo is ready to
act on some 1% likelihood, if what we read in David Siskinds' new book
is accurate.
3) Nuclear weapons are primarily suitable for killing civilians and
destroying infrastructure. Most modern democracies have officially
disavowed the tactic of intentionally killing civilians in warfare and
retaliation. As such, an Islamic terrorist may reasonably conclude
that the US would not retaliate with nuclear weapons to an incident of
nuclear terrorism. Note: *whether* the US would actually retaliate
with nuclear weapons is not of first-order importance. It is only
important, at the first order, that it is possible for an Islamic
terrorist to *believe* that the US would not retaliate with nuclear
weapons.
JDG
Gee, I thought all modern warfare had the aim of reducing populations
instead of battlefield theaters - the civ death rates certainly went up
dramatically once the "modern era" of industrial warfare began last
century.
Look at GwB's Schlock & Offal campaign trying to "decapitate" {Oh, was
it after this the jihadi's decided to behead victims?} the Iraqi
leadership - fecklessly as it happens with some zero for fifty score.
Only civilians died around this "precision" ultra-clean {cough} method.
I was reading yesterday how a senior Israeli commander denounced his
dropping cluster bombs across southern Lebanon villages - bomblettes
manufactured right here in the good ol' USA and now maiming children
daily.
As for nukes, it seems to me that our policy is still pre-emption on
the suspicion that someone has such weapons and might {that slim 1%,
again} do us harm. Certainly was the main skeery-monster pretext for
an invasion of Iraq. As I said, I find it hard to believe that after
our global knee-jerking overreaction to 9-11 that such terrorists would
believe the Republican Guard dug in around DC wouldn't gleefully smite
with righteous vindication anybody who makes a sour face at us - so to
speak.
Jonathan Gibson
www.formandfunction.com/word
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