US approach makes the Chirac Doctrine look even better
It appears to us that war may be best waged one of two ways. Either go in hard and fast with devastating power, or, like the Islamists, wage a long, twilight psychological struggle over generations. Both approaches appear to work. As we have discussed, Jacques Chirac has chosen for France the former, in the case of certain terrorist attacks or a cutoff of strategic supplies: he’s going to nuke Iran. Meanwhile, get a load of the approach the US is apparently taking if a nuke goes off in Times Square:
The Pentagon has formed a team of nuclear experts to analyze the fallout from a terrorist nuclear attack on American soil in an effort to identify the attackers, officials have said. The team, which can draw on hundreds of federal experts, uses such tools as robots that gather radioactive debris and sensitive gear to detect the origins of a device, whether a true atomic weapon or a so-called dirty bomb, that uses ordinary explosives to spew radioactivity. The objective is to determine quickly who exploded the device and where it came from, in part to clarify the options to strike back, the officials said….
A senior military official, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose details of the program, said the threat reduction agency successfully conducted an exercise in October involving hundreds of people from many agencies. The participants, he said, included field workers gathering radioactive samples, nuclear analysts in laboratories working on the data and intelligence experts.
This is insanity in the case of a nuclear detonation. If the US policy upon being nuked is to conduct a study of fallout, then, as the saying goes, the terrorists have won. Imagine the situation: a nuke goes off in NYC. Within some days, the government starts gathering fallout and processing the information. “Hundreds of people from many agencies” contribute their input and expertise into a careful weighing of the evidence. The plutonium had a hint of cardamom — could it be from India? The bomb’s bearings showed traces of pistachio oil — what could that mean? Kimchi among the caracasses — aha!
Meanwhile, a month goes by. The TV shows weeping women and children in Teheran and Pyongong, grieving for the US dead and fearing and pleading for their lives. Prayer and peace vigils are set up outside the White House. Cable news experts say there is no way to definitively identify the attacker. The clock continues to tick. Before long, retaliation will become the crime.
Teams of robots and government scientists studying this and that have no deterrent value whatsoever. It appears to us that the only sensible approach is Chirac’s: let the likeliest suspect(s) know in advance that, should the untoward happen, the official government policy is to nuke first and ask questions later.
UPDATE
To those who think it is a foregone conclusion with 100% certainty that the US would massively counterattack immediately some terrorist state following a suitcase nuke explosion in NYC — ask yourself what probability you would attach to Jimmy Carter’s refraining, for humanitarian reasons, from a counterattack against a USSR first strike when he was president. It’s more than zero, isn’t it?
February 2nd, 2006 at 9:40 am
Of there two reputational descriptions:
“He is reasonable and proportionate…”
“He is crazy…”
Which is more likely to be concluded with
” I ain’t fucking with him.”?
I will always believe that one reason the Soviets didn’t fight in the 1980s was that they bought into the media theme that President Reagan was unstable.
February 2nd, 2006 at 12:23 pm
At first I thought that they would want to determine if
radiation from say, medical waste vs power plant fuel vs
weapons’ grade in case of dirty bomb.
Then I realized that it would be to the benefit of the sponsoring state to provide medical waste for a dirty bomb – many more sources with global trade.
A real nuke – don’t think we’d be hesitating – just
lock and loading.
February 3rd, 2006 at 4:10 pm
I completely agree with your reservations, Dinocrat. Bush was tough immediately after 9/11, but the nation’s resolve has softened considerably since then, and even Bush has lacked the courage to take on Iran and Syria. Now we’re playing a game of “wait and see.” Still, how stupid do we think the terrorists are? I seriously doubt they would set off a nuke in the United States while Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al., are in power. They’ll wait for a spineless Democrat to win the White House or at least a Republican who lacks Bush’s underlying self-confidence.