Trump: If we have nukes why can't we use them?

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"Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can't we use them," Scarborough said on his "Morning Joe" program.

The only thing nukes are good for is as a deterrant against mutually assured destruction. That's it. Ironically, MAD wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if nukes didn't exist in the first place. If they were actually used as weapons, the cost to human lives and health as well as the environment would simply be far too great.

When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I don't think they intended to cause long-term damage through radiation, though I'm not 100% certain about this. Truth be told, it's kind of a tough issue to ponder, because on the one hand the effects of dropping the bombs were simply horrific, too much so for words to describe, but on the other hand it has been theorized that the bombs were necessary to end WWII, and that Japan would've lost most of its population if the war were prolonged further. As well, we may not have learned just how truly terrible nuclear weapons are if it weren't for them being used in a real wartime scenario.

I can see limited use for time sensitive targets in areas away from large civilian populations as valid and justifiable.

Nuking Tora Bora would have ended the war in Afghanistan before it even started (if all you wanted was to take out Osama and mess up Al-Q in Afghanistan), with limited civilian casualties and monetary expenditure in comparison to a prolonged COIN war. The conventional bombardment of Tora Bora and subsequent ground operations weren't enough to take out Osama. A B61 set for airburst should have been fine at causing enough damage to the mountain complex.

There's little fallout from an airburst.

No point in having them if you don't use them in arguably valid operations.

MAD for theater level weapons isn't a valid reason to use them by anyone, and by the time people got to the point of having this capability, it shouldn't be on the board (it's completely homicidal and no one has targeted primarily civilian centers, not even ze evil Rooskies). No nation really has got to the point of assured destruction yet; perhaps government and military destruction to the point of uselessness abroad, but by no means "wiping out most of the population of a country". That's in the realms of fiction.

The U.S. targeted 2 primarily civilian centers in 1945.

They had military value; high level military complex, production facilities and ports/shipyards.

They weren't civilian dormitories.

If a city has a military base in its downtown district or nearby, that's a valid target (Cold War was the same), and collateral will effect nearby areas.

I guess you can say the villages and towns around Tora Bora would have been the collateral here in my example above.

You need to weigh up the positives and negatives here. I can't say that limited use of nuclear weapons can't be justified in specific instances.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were as good a military target as any other, but they were mainly civilian cities.
If you look at Tokyo at the end of the war, it looks just like hiroshima, - but it was flatened with conventional bombs.
The difference between tokyo and hiroshima was really only the damage done to "soft targets" through radiation.
The diseases caused by radiation and the societal stigma coming from that made life of thousands of civilians hell, for decades.
Unlike we in the west like to think, it didn't even end the war. Russia declaring war on Japan made them surrender.

Yes, I can imagine a hypothetical scenarion in which nukes might be the best option.
But irradiating a large civil population is not one of them.

bombing tora bora with a nuke would have not necessary lead to the death of osama bin laden, actually. Or the End of Al Qaeda. When you look at the atomic dome in hiroshima, that structure was less than 300 meter away from the bomb. Sure, today's nukes, hydrogen bombs and so on are vastly more powerful, but we're talking mountain ranges, when we talk tora bora. This isn't just two feet of solid concrete.
So, no, tora bora would have not been a good target for nukes.
the fallout would have poisoned civilians though, with AlQaeda sitting in their cave-bunkers.

so, all things considered: using nukes is an option, but not exactly a good one. And then you'd have to justify to the whole world why you couldn't just have used cluster bombs and all that stuff.
there's enough other options. And nukes just have a very long lasting effect on civilian populations and ruin your international reputation.

god, please keep that man away from the codes.

The cave complex was about 300 meters underground; a B-61 airburst @ 340 kilotons on the complex will leave a crater about 50 meters deep; 1 should be enough to collapse any of the tunnels at the depth of 300 meters. A followup strike in the same area would assure its destruction.

So, it'd work.

You'd probably kill several thousand people in the surrounding area, in addition to the several hundred Al-Q and Osama.

There's been about 30 thousand civilians killed in Afghanistan so far, and another 20 thousand Taliban.

There'll be little fallout due to the airburst (no real radiation danger on the ground); it's only ground bursts that cause local and lethal fallout due to radiated particulate matter getting blown into the air and falling back to earth.

I guess if the certainty of killing Osama was high enough, you could say it would be worth it in the end if you didn't plan on staying around after he and Al-Q were finished.

This definitely puts tactical strikes in the valid category, anyway.

knowing now how bad the US screwed up in Afghanistan and Iraq, I can see the point.

but it's very hard to know the future... and now is not then.
The reason we're leaving the fight against Isis to Putin, Assad, the Kurds and whoever else wants to have a go is to avoid becoming the enemy of Islam that Isis tries to make us.
If we use nukes, they have an enemy to rally their troops against. And if things go teally bad and it turns into the war on islam... well, then we have 1.7 billion people against us.
So... let's keep negotiating with the devil (Putin), so he takes them out, and buy some of his oil and gas. It's the lesser of two evils, for now, but we can all see where this might lead.

I found this one interesting... and abit harrowing in its conclusion:
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-pro ... terrorism/

If they weren't civilian then why did more civilians die than Japanese soldiers? That's the problem with weapons of mass destruction-- they're about MASS DESTRUCTION, not accuracy, which means anytime you use them you're proclaiming war on the civilian population as well as the military.

Edit: also, radiation isn't just contained at the blast site, it circulates through air, wide, wide distances. Granted the decay is exponential so it's about 1/10,000th of the initial radiation after about 2 weeks, it's still radiation and using nuclear bombs repeatedly just pumps more of that radiation into the troposphere-- which we all breathe. The radiation from the WWII bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are STILL in the air today and will be approximately another 40,000 years. Not to mention all the nuclear testing done in the 50's + 60's. Like I said, it's not much radiation after about 2 weeks, but if one's constantly dropping nukes that small amount very quickly turns into a large amount and will effect the health of the entire species, not just the "culture" that got the bomb dropped on it. I provide this chart to illustrate the point: Per capita thyroid doses in the continental United States resulting from all exposure routes from all atmospheric nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site from 1951-1962.

Last edited by Aristophanes on 03 Aug 2016, 6:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Technically, a large portion of the civilians killed were producing for the war effort to some extent; which means they're valid targets in total war. It sucks for them, but perhaps they should have stopped the war by overthrowing their government.

By no mistake, civilians of a country fueling a war aren't innocent. You just don't go out of your way in targeting them if they're not fighting back. Worker ants are just as important as warrior ones for making war.

Yes, they're weapons that cause large collateral damage; sometimes though, you need a large boom to effectively destroy the target.

Which is the point here: sometimes you may need to use them in a situation where other means won't be effective, and you'll probably cause a similar level of collateral damage going either way in the end.

Sorry, that's just too short-sighted for me to agree with. Anytime you drop a nuclear weapon you are hurting YOURSELF through radiation, as well as every other creature on the planet-- it is a no win weapon, hence the reason people don't use them anymore. Now, if we ignore those health risks, then yes we'll probably start dropping more, and eventually the species goes extinct because we haven't evolved to breathe radioactive air, nor will we adapt. So no that "collateral damage" isn't the same as a conventional weapon, not even close.

if Billary were more clever, she would update that commercial and use it herself.

The radiation isn't of much concern for limited use. Airburst removes the local fallout; you have radiation from the casing traversing the globe, but it's really no more dangerous than anything else we do in modern society. Breathing the air in the city will be more carcinogenic; we aren't stopping that.

The problem is a full scale exchange between superpowers with multiple ground bursts (hardened bunkers and silos) with multimegaton warheads. The radiation won't kill humans and other life off, not by a long shot. Millions will die in the radiation clouds around the hit areas, however.

Limited and full scale are two different things.

Again, if you have a time sensitive target of utmost value and there's no other way to destroy it, you'll consider a nuclear strike if the pros outweigh the cons. If you only have one choice that has any chance of working, it's one you'll consider.

Last edited by Dillogic on 03 Aug 2016, 6:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

She could benefit from a study of this following ad, too, the tone of which is clearly suited for dealing with a pathological liar like Trump. If she doesn't have the guts to do it, maybe one of the third party nominees could produce it.