re: I like my side to do the using (of WMD), not the bad guys.
Isn't that exactly what Saddam was thinking, when he gassed the Kurds? To him, the Kurds were the "bad guys", traitors who were siding with the Iranian enemy, and tearing apart the Iraqi nation.
Saddam's justification for using gas against the Kurds, was better than the U.S.'s justification for nuking Japan in August 1945.
If your side uses nuclear weapons, then you are the bad guys.
Especially if you use them on an enemy who is so weak, he is already defeated, and poses no threat to you. Japan is a cold, infertile, rocky, overcrowded island, which doesn't grow enough food to feed the population, and lacks a long list of raw materials essential to making weapons. By August 1945, we had imposed an airtight blockade, sunk the entire Japanese fleet, and were bombing them at will. We killed 100,000 civilians in one raid on Tokyo, using conventional weapons. And we did such raids over and over, on all their cities, and they were powerless to hinder us. Using nukes was overkill. If the U.S. had had nukes in 1942, with Japan occupying Alaskan islands, and Germany at the gates of Moscow, then their use could have been justified as a defensive tool to end aggression. But that excuse was gone, by August 1945.
Nukes are useless in our failing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. And they will be equally useless, to stop Jihad coming out of our real enemies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Nukes are and will continue to be useless to Israel, in defending against the Intifada (what are they going to do, nuke East Jerusalem?). Nukes will not help prop up our client despots in Egypt and Kuwait and elsewhere. They are big hammers, with no nails to hit. They are the wrong tool, and even threatening First Use is counterproductive. |
