Under what circumstance may the United States use nuclear weapons on an enemy .?

Question

Be specific .
Is it if they use them first .
is it if they threaten to use them .
Is it if the kill a particular number of americans say 50,000 250,000 1,000,000
What would it take for you to say lets nuke them .
If you are against the use of advanced weapons then is the use of machine guns ok on people who have only sticks and knifes .
Do you feel war is like a police action and that you can only use deadly force when confronted with those who threaten your immediate safety .

Who is preventing us from winning then , if we can not use the force needed to win a war .

Truman said that dropping the bombs saved hundreds of thousand of American lives and shortened the war by 5 years .

Japan like terrorists are willing to fight to the last man .

So a hard choice was made .

I want men like Truman running america and not wishy washy drug addicts with drunk driving convictions like Bush & Chenny

Answer 1

What's the best way to get a bandaid off: one quick yank or slow and easy?
So what's better: a few months of global uproar or years of agonizing warfare?
If 9/11 had been answered by a single nuclear blast on a dark moonless night in the middle-east, a clear message would have been driven home. All in the middle-east would have known that a force greater than Allah existed on the other side of the world.
The global community might have been a little upset, but I think the act would have appeared justified if it had come swiftly.

Answer 2

Are you assuming Iraqis are terrorists? They are citizens fighting off invaders if you want to get technical. There would be absolutely no difference if the UN or Russia or China invaded the US for getting into everyone's business and staging a war against right wing conservatives. Just because we have a different philosophy on things does not make us right. Saddam needed to be killed and he is dead. His government needed to be overthrown and it was. Now we are occupying Iraq and it will be very costly but necessary to stabilize the area.
Now for first strike nukes. If we are nuked then I would support a nuke attack if you could determine where the nuke came from or what country financed it. Same goes for chemical or biological weapons. If we were invaded by another country, such as mexico is doing right now in a very subtle way, I would support nukes being used. If russia or china invaded or attacked the US or its allies we would use nukes and I would support that. Basically anyone we could not overthrow in a short time with little loss of life I would support the use of nukes. However, think of the consequences. A single megaton has never been dropped and we have multimegaton warheads. This crap they taught us during the cold war is just that, crap. A small nuke would vaporize everything in a 10 mile radius. 10 miles past that everything would die immediately from the heat storm. 20 miles past that everything in that area would be dead in a matter of a couple of days from the radiation, 50 miles past that everything would die within 6 months from the radiation. past that the number of deaths drop from 100% gradually outward from the blast site depending on direction of the wind. That is just one nuke. One small nuke. Imagine, if you can the destruction.

Answer 3

This is a good question.

I'm usually quick on the draw to answer these questions, but I'm honestly not sure what conditions would justify using a nuke on anyone.

This may not be a situation that can be assessed in advance. As you say, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were a tough decision. And that situation was unique. No one knew what we had. Everyone wanted the war over. The Japanese would not surrender, not even after the first strike.

That situation is not likely to occur again.

Kudos for asking a good question, tho.

Answer 4

I really have to say this. Nuclear war. Think about it. Throughout the years, ya know, the last like..... 5000 years, it's been proven that violence can be fought with one thing- VIOLENCE. So, I would have to say that being the person that I am, call me crazy, would nuke the piss out of some one who nuked my homeland. And then, I would nuke them even more, to show my hatred towards them. I would never use them first. Nukes are deterent. Why would you screw with someone that has a nuke? Nuclear war can be won. If China and the U.S.A. were to get into nuclear war, and the U.S.A. shot down all of the missiles thatchina threw at us, and we annihalated them, thats victory right? What I'm trying to say is, that nukes were'nt made to be launched (I mean they were, but just read). Its like this: I punch you, to pull a knife, I pull a pistol, you pull a machine gun, i pull a shotgun, you grab a rocket launcher, I get in a tank, you get a jet, I get a ship, you get a submarine, I get a ICBM, you get an ICBM, and then I get an ABM, then you get an ABM. Now what? we are stuck. we won't screw with their nukes unless they screw with ours.

Answer 5

The exact standards for a U.S. nuclear response are unknown for the reason that the U.S. does not want countries working around it. Generally speaking, our nuclear forces are intended to defer and actualize our MAD theory (mutually assured destruction). As far as any civilian is concerned the only case in which the U.S. would use nuclear weapons is in counterattack to an already executed nuclear attack on the United States. So if you see silos opening up, take cover, someone else's bombs are coming in fast.

Personally I would only use nuclear weapons as a response to a nuclear attack on our country - however it would be proportionate (i.e. one nuke hits nyc we launch one nuke at country x's largest city).

The use of advanced weapons have only occured twice, and were used without the threat of an equal response (the Japanese or anybody for that matter didn't have atom bombs when the U.S. first did.) Thus it is difficult to answer that question. But people attacking a force of machine-gun laden soldiers would hopefully seek other means of attacking them aside from a frontal assault.

War is politics by other means and it is difficult to categorize such situations in reality. In Rwanda American troops were told not to fire until fired upon, even know machete armed revolutionaries were killing unarmed women and children. Would you only fire if fired upon in such a situation? It is difficult to say unless actually confronted with such circumstances.

You attempt to parallel WWII and the current war in Iraq...you simply cannot do that. nearly 50 million people died in WWII by the end....600,000 American soldiers. barely 3,000 have died and the current size of the American military barely amounts to the invasion force that was to invade Japan in the event they did not surrender. People were unsure of the long term consequences of the use of such weapons....nuclear weapons used in Iraq would render the land useless for decades....

two different wars, two different times, two different understandings thus you cannot apply the same logic used by Truman to the present circumstance. reductio ad absurdum, if the U.S. did not surrender in face of a foreign invasion and said they would fight to the last man - you would agree nukes should be used on all of us?

Answer 6

1) I am opposed to nuclear weapons.
2) I am a firm believer in B-52 and Battleship Diplomacy.
3) I believe in heavy battlefield preparations, using bombs, missiles, and air to surface surgical strikes.
4) I believe the first wave of attack should establish a beach head, and become strongly entrenched with artillery emplacements.
5) I believe we do not use armor or combat jets liberally enough to subjugate our opponents.
6) I believe too many Congressmen and women, who have never attended classes in any of the DoD's schools for officers, try to be generals in a time of armed conflict.
7) I believe the US Constitution does not apply to foreign soil, meaning that the press has no rights in a combat zone, and as such, goes into the area under their own judgment, and with no provision required of our forces. I also believe any member of the press corps who divulges the whereabouts of troops, before it is cleared by the military, should be taken into custody for an act of high treason (endangering the troops).

Answer 7

I think if we nuke them its pretty indescriminate killing and how does nuking resolve a civil war when the fighting is all within the same town.
Nuking Iran would result in instant middle east unity and we would likely get oil embargos. Then hows your safety if the ambulance cant get to your house?
Nukes are a first strike deturrent and like N. Korea everyone wants to negotiate when you have them rather than first strike you.

Answer 8

unfortunately i think we'll fire them off when we're caught with our pants down as they are about to decimate every last American city.

we've become too PC and pansyish to make the first move.. we're too scared of the consequences to make a ballsy move like that. Truman would have made it so that this war would've been done a long time ago and these soldiers would be home with their kids and spouses. but Truman can't make us laugh like bush (at him) or clinton (with him) can.. so i doubt anyone like him can make it into office nowadays.

we shouldn't use nukes, but if someone has his hand in the red button, i'd like to think that we wouldn't let it get pressed.. but that is a super last ditch effort so save our country. we shouldn't use it as a solution to a problem..

Answer 9

Think about what would happen if Bush actually did drop an atomic bomb on Iran. Think of how much the democrats would cut him up. Besides, there are good and bad Iranians. Dropping one giant nuke would kill them all. I think we should just nuke them, but if we did, the republicans would never hear the end of it.

Answer 10

It depends on which party is in office and how close to home the act of aggression is. If there is a Republican in office and it becomes necessary to nuke a few cities in order to prevent the downfall of our country, consider those cities dead. If there is a Democrat in office, there would have to be hundreds of high-level attacks inside our borders before the option would be raised. Even then, it would probably be up to whomever we surrendered to who decides how to use our nukes.