If We Are Nuked

Donald Sensing raises again the issue of what we would do if we fail to defeat the jihadis, help Islam control and marginalize the fanatics, and do all this before some jihadi nutball gets a nuclear weapon and one of our cities is nuked.

Some have suggested an eye for an eye should we lose a city. If they destroy New York, we slag Mecca, for example. Sensing does not think this is wise, moral, or sane:

I simply do not understand why this seems acceptable to some people. It is a shockingly immoral proposal. I have been blogging since March 2002, and I have consistently pointed out that the purpose of war is never war itself. That is, simply inflicting destruction upon the enemy or the enemy’s people is never a just end in war.

Some may respond that I invoke just conduct of war only upon our own side, that the Islamists reject our Just War model and feel no compunction or moral restraint in the wholesale slaughter of American noncombatants.

Their objections are correct. We are self-restrained, our enemy is not. That’s what makes them terrorists. But we are not to become terrorists in response.

I agree in part. We should not slaughter Moslems simply because they live under the rule of whatever nutball launched the nuke or hosted or supported the non-state group that carried out the attack.

In an early post on this subject (scroll down to May 22, 2003--this is pre-Blogger and pre-pseudo permalinks), I noted that our enemies would not even believe we would retaliate with nuclear weapons, which is why I wanted small nuclear weapons to be developed:

I think it addresses a worry I have had recently regarding deterrence. Namely, during the war debate, some said we could deter Iraq since we could always retaliate with a devastating response. This bloodthirsty acceptance of nuclear mega-deaths was promoted even by leftist anti-war types who claimed war is not the answer. Their basic logic was that it was immoral to attack Iraq to prevent them from getting nukes; but if they got them and used them, well we can just nuke them back. How do they reconcile this logic? Easy, I suspect: they would never under any circumstances actually approve of a nuclear retaliation. They just said they did to stop the war.

And this reluctance to murder tens of thousands of foreign citizens unlucky enough to be ruled by a dictator willing to nuke us and dare us to shoot back would be known to our enemies with nukes. We have a conscience. They do not. Listen to this opponent of small nuclear weapons:

"To my mind, even considering the use of these weapons threatens to undermine our efforts to stop proliferation," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California.

Sadly, if our enemies think our leadership wouldn't even consider using nukes, our enemies will never believe we will retaliate with nuclear weapons. And be clear, should we ever be hit with a nuclear weapon and fail to retaliate with nukes ourselves, we will have kissed nuclear deterrence goodbye and declared open season on our cities. Even a blistering American conventional retaliation would not erase the psychological impact of letting somebody get away with nuking the world's only superpower.

So, we would need to retaliate and we would need to use nukes. But we don't want to kill innocents. What do we do?

Well, we could target the armed forces of the state that either used the nuclear weapon or harbored the group suspected of carrying out the attack. Then we invade and destroy the regime. Small nukes, cleaner than older models to contain the damage just to the site of the impact, would minimize the loss of innocent life and minimize the destruction that could hinder our conventional invasion.

Later, I worried that it might really be a case of defeating the enemy with conventional weapons or physically destroying them:

All the talk of our inability to identify exactly who pulled the trigger on the bomb that destroys Charleston ignores the reality that we will destroy all the usual suspects if a nuclear weapon is detonated on American soil. We won't even need hatred to do this. The simple logic of deterrence will require us to go ballistic on those who spew hatred and inspire or support such mass murderers. Failure to respond to nukes with our own nukes would mean open season on Americans. For once we let a nuclear attack go unanswered, nobody will ever believe we'd use nukes in our own defense.

So though it may seem hard line to pursue victory over our Islamist enemies and unreasonable to kill them wherever we find them, it is really a kindness to the larger society that has spawned them. Since that society cannot suppress the jihadis, we must kill them for that society. It is for their own good, really.

Yet this was my worst fear as I wrote just days after we were attacked on September 11, 2001:

It is common already to call September 11, 2001, this generation's Pearl Harbor. After the actual Pearl Harbor, America eventually used nuclear weapons to end the war and preclude a devastating and bloody ground invasion. While I hope we will never need to resort to such horrible weapons, once again a terrible war has been thrust upon us and we must not lose. Our enemies must fear what we will do to them more than we fear what they can do to us.

On the fourth anniversary of 9-11, I again addressed the issue of small nukes as weapons we must have:

If we are to avoid getting struck we must inspire fear abroad among those rational enough to know fear. And we must be prepared to use nuclear weapons first when we think we are under threat of a biological or nuclear attack.

But if fear isn't enough and if we can't strike first, we must also be prepared to respond to a nuclear strike or even an attempt--there is no such thing as no harm, no foul when it comes to nukes--with a nuclear response.

So we need a variety of nuclear weapons in order to retain credibility by having realistic nuclear counter-strike options. For if we ever take a nuclear hit and fail to respond with a nuclear weapon--even a devastating conventional retaliation will not cut it--we will have declared open season on the American people. Deterrence will have died for good.

We must not commit mass murder against innocents even if we are murdered in the millions. Our response must be designed not for vengeance but to prevent further nuclear attacks on our people. But part of this attack simply must include nuclear weapons. If we fail to respond to a nuclear attack with nuclear retaliation, we have destroyed deterrence. Who will believe we will ever respond with nukes in the future?

But the nuclear response we would have to unleash must be against enemy military and political assets and not against civilian targets.

The Left likes to pretend they are so very pro-Moslem by opposing the war. But in truth, by hindering or slowing our victory, the Left makes it more likely that we might annihilate the Moslem world if we are hurt too much by fanatics that Islam fails to control. And if we fail to control our anger and demand vengeance rather than victory. I do fear that, too.