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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CountofMoneyCristo who wrote (296)	9/18/2001 8:30:45 PM
From: RocketMan	Respond to of 281500

Though wild talk of nuclear exchanges is just that and off the charts Not so wild, not so off the charts. I hope, for the sake of the world, that the terrorist cells and radical Islamic governments understand the nuclear implications of last week's act, but I'm afraid that they don't. During the Cold War, the world was polarized and came to the brink several times, but there were always unwritten rules governing brinksmanship. We knew, for example, that a decapitation attack was an invitation to massive retaliation, since destroying the leadership structure would devolve to a fragmented command and control network in which nuclear release might occur in order to save the remaining force. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia and the U.S. have lowered their alert status, but they have also lessened the attention paid to these matters, and yet the nuclear arsenal remains large enough to destroy the world many times over. Any rational society should look at the type of attack attempted as a potential trigger to the unthinkable. Had the terrorists been successful at taking out the Pentagon leadership, the President, and the Capitol, who can be assured that in the fog of war a nuclear strike would not have been ordered? With a retaliatory strike to follow? If nothing else, this should provide the strongest incentive to organized governments around the world to unite and destroy the radical elements that are acting outside of civilized society and whose end goals are in opposition to all that we hold dear. Conversely, given that we have organized societies who, regardless of the moral implications, have developed nuclear weapons, I find it illogical to think that we would preclude their use in special cases when they could be used to save lives by, say, taking out underground caches of chemical, biological, or nuclear material that would otherwise be used by organized bands of terrorists to kill in orders of magnitude larger than at the WTC.