[The Great Satan]

This is not intended to be a value judgement on my part -- the US will NOT use nukes, tactical or strategic, unless either the US is hit first by WMD and the attack can be traced to particular offending country

What if we are hit by WMD and the attack cannot be traced to a particular offending country? Or, to take another case, what if it can be traced to a particular country, but the connection is sufficiently murky to be publicly deniable? What does Bush do then?

[mikegi]

This is the nightmare scenario - no specific target to retaliate against. Worse still is the detonation of a small nuke in one of our big cities followed up by demands which, if not met, will result in more prepositioned nukes going off in our cities. Bush's only choice would be to succomb to the terrorists' demands while frantically searching for the loose nukes. The terrorists could greatly amplify the chaos here by naming a bunch of target cities.

Would the gloves come off if we were nuked? I doubt it. The correct response would be to take control of the entire Middle East. That's the only way to shutdown the terrorist infrastructure. We don't have enough manpower to do it conventionally. How many ICBMs would it take to essentially destroy the militaries of all the ME countries? At 10 warheads per MX, it wouldn't take too many to destroy all the significant military bases in the Arab countries. Those countries would then be wide open to our conventional forces.