So you're proposing that in the event of a nuclear terrorist attack, we drop nuclear weapons on millions/billions of people that haven't attacked us, regardless of whether it accomplishes anything?
Brilliant.
Tell me though, how would you go about deciding where to drop the weapons? If a Palestinian plants a bomb, are you willing to destroy Israel? If a U.S. citizen is involved, would you wipe out Denver to teach us a lesson?
You've clearly given this a lot of well-reasoned thought, so I'm quite curious to hear how you think it would work.
No, I'm not. That portion of the post was really intended to convey that I think we would lash out in that sort of situation without a lot of clear control. Anybody who looked at us wrong would get a nuke. I also meant to include wording that attacks would primarily be directed at Muslims and traditional enemies like North Korea, but wanted to get across the idea that, at least during the initial reaction period, we would be likely to toss nukes with a very low threshold for the decision and it might be just anybody and everybody. Clearly I blew conveying that idea and the post was poorly worded, in many regards, it seems.
More importantly I wasn't "proposing" this as the correct course of action. I was warning that it was a likely reaction, more likely under certain circumstances than others. Say the President and Vice President are both killed in Washington or someplace else together and the Presidency falls to an embattled Denny Hastert or, worse, a known lunatic like Nancy Pelosi? How rational do you think someone like her would be in reacting to such an attack?
Beyond the nukes, you know and I know that no mosque or "foreign looking" person would be safe to reprisal from the members of the general public, at least during the initial reaction period. The point of the post was that all assumptions about rational reactions and calm responses are likely to be fantasies. Remember how the people of this country reacted in the first weeks after 9/11. Really remember, not the rose colored glasses version imposed by the DBM who refuse to show any of the images because they're "too emotional." They're actually right about them being likely to invoke an emotional response and they have to suppress that response because it would clearly (IMO) result in a very quick turnaround in opinions on dealing with the Jihadis and the Democrat vs Republican approach to terrorists and terrorism.
Right after 9/11 the mood in this country was to lash out and just about anyone would do and that was basically over the attack on 3 buildings with only 3,000 killed. We quickly directed our anger at Muslims but then President Bush managed to channel that anger into a much more narrowly focused thing concentrating on "terrorism." What will be the reaction if a nuke takes out 500,000 and the heart of a major American city? How likely is it that anyone will be able to pull off that sort of management of our reactions again, particularly with that much larger a scale?
Bush and Cheney would probably be able to restrain random knee jerk reactions, but someone would get a nuke up the wazoo and it wouldn't take evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. Several someones would get nukes at a lot lower threshold if they crossed us in any way shape or form for a very long time after such an event. Several folks would also clearly be off limits, such as China and Russia, because of their capacity to strike back, but things might easily get out of control. Tthe freak show that is the DBM and the screaming politicos, particularly the current crop of "pacifists" in the Dhimmicrat ranks, would be the first to demand we start hitting "enemies," real or imagined, on the slightest suspicion of involvement. The dims and not a few pubbies would constantly be standing in front of microphones demanding that Bush or Cheney, if they're still around, must strike back over this outrage!
Do you think we'd not nuke Pakistan, particularly the areas now controlled by Al Qaeda and the Taliban, if NEST determines that the nuke came from the Pakistani arsenal or was made with Pakistani nuclear material? You do know that they can tell that within hours from the fall out? I know from personal connections that getting samples from all of the Pakistani sources of nuclear material was part of the price of not including Pakistan in the post 9/11 "axis of evil." Those border mountains with Afghanistan would be molten slag as would all of the sites with Pakistani nukes. On principle, under those circumstances, I bet Iran and Syria would also at least be threatened with nukes if they didn't disarm immediately and provide us (NOT IAEA) open and complete access to anywhere we wanted to look for nukes. Same with KFR (the Kim Family Regime, as our Pentagon refers to North Korea), assuming we didn't just find lil Kimmah and drop a tactical nuke just to make sure. Anyone who argued against such a thing in the immediate aftermath would be pilloried by everyone, led by the DBM.
Again, I'm not advocating this. I'm warning that it is a serious likelihood IMO. It's like looking for a bigger earthquake after you have an initial quake. The odds are actually in favor of a second, stronger shock, in the initial aftermath of a serious earthquake. They go down over time, actually in a logarithmic manner, so it's a good analogy (10 to 1 in favor shortly after a big quake, then even money, then 10 to 1 against, progressing rapidly to 100 to 1 against, 1,000 to 1 against, and so on). The same kind of progression would apply to our reaction to a nuke hitting us. I actually hope that we don't identify the source immediately, and I pray that we don't leave the decision in the hands of someone like Nancy P, but I'm convinced somebody, and probably several somebodies, would end up getting nuked.
Therefore my main argument is that "it just won't happen" is naive. It's a "failure of imagination." Look up the phrase on the Internet for perfect examples of why I disagree so strongly with that kind of argument. That caused me to overreact in my post and say things poorly. I hope I'm more clear this time. Then remember my tag line.