If Iran considers through a proxy to spread WMD through a US city, dont you want them to think we may retaliate with WMD?
Iran knows that if they spread WMD through a US city, they will be retaliated against. Hard. So does N. Korea. So, for that matter, does anyone. If we can find them. This policy does nothing to change that. It just gives countries that are considering developing WMDs of any sort one more reason not to develop them.
Do you think it has been just by chance that WMD has not been used since 1945?
First of all, they have been used since then--minimally, Iraq used them against Kurds and Iranians in the 1980s. You likely don't consider Agent Orange a WMD, but it caused plenty of destruction in Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s and 1970s, and it had some of the same characteristics.
Second, any number of massacres have taken place without WMDs--Cambodia and Darfur come immediately to mind and if I thought about it, I could likely come up with more examples than those two. Nuclear deterrents aren't effective against all sorts of threats. In fact, it is hard for me to come up with a real life example of what they do deter, other than perhaps a nuclear attack from another state. It wouldn't deter a stateless terrorist organization if that organization somehow got hold of a nuclear weapon that it could actually deliver. And it may well not deter a crazy leader who thought that he could build his own little underground bunker that would "protect" him from a nuclear strike. As if anyone could be protected.
Are you aware of the alternate outcomes to the use of nukes in WWII. Perhaps the millions that would have perished invading and conquering Japan?
Yeah, and perhaps not. The Japanese were far from unanimous in wanting to fight on. By the time the bombs were dropped, they were on their last legs, and everyone knew it, including most of them. Would it even have been necessary to invade them? A blockade along with some strategic conventional air strikes might well have driven them to surrender within a few months or a year. Or just a demonstration of what a nuke could do on a desert island somewhere. In your mind, the discussion is framed as: either nuke a Japanese city or two, or a conventional army invasion. But those weren't the only two alternatives.
Last I check Al Qaeda did not use WMD. But they could perhaps develop and deliver it with help if a nation such as North Korea or Iran.
Aside from the fact that that wouldn't be easy to do, it also wouldn't be easy to find the means to deliver it. And aside from that fact, it wouldn't be easy to do either one without anyone knowing it. And if somehow they did this, whosever fingerprints were on those WMDs would be crushed. With or without nukes. The presence of nukes wouldn't deter such an attack--we have plenty of conventional weapons that are lethal enough. |
