Now, I realize that every situation is so unique it's pretty hard to hypothosize anything without knowing the exact details of the situation. But when, if ever, should the United States use nuclear weapons?

Also, should I be capitalizing "Nuclear Weapons"? We capitalize names and places. I'd think the bomb that could destory mankind deserves that kind of respect.

I will throw out a scenerio, since we were just discussing this in the other thread.

Iran nukes Israel. Kills 20% of the population. Israel's nukes, for whatever reason, are no longer available. What should the U.S. do in this situation?

Outside of the middle east, it gets kind of silly to speculate. If Russia ever used a nuke on anyone - we really couldn't retaliate with a nuke - could we? Wouldn't it be mutually assured destruction?

I'm nore interested in North Korea, Iran, Pakistan. Places that have not thousands of nukes but a relatively small number.

Do we hold the people responsible for their non-elected leaders? Should innocent Iranians pay the price for what a relatively small number of people decided to do?

There is approx .000000001% chance of Iran nuking anyone, even if they do develop nukes.

I guess i wouldn't feel at all comfortable about being in that position to decide.

I'm not even comfortable with speculating on it and making a hypothetical decision.

I understand the odds of Iran developing and using them are unbelievably remote.

But I think the chance of a nation-state using one in the next 50 years is higher than you might think.

The question really is do we hold the people responsible for their unelected leader or for safe harboring the terrorists that are in their country?

I see no scenario where American use of nuclear weapons would be either the best choice or a choice that would improve an obviously bad situation.

it's the JFK/Bay of Pigs dilemma... what are the chances that they'll act first? in Fog of War, didn't McNamara say something to the extent of, "we'd rather bomb first to prevent them from conducting a bombing that would initiate the destruction of the world"? in the case of the Bay of Pigs, they granted enough "good will" to the motives of the Russians to never bomb in the first place. good call JFK

also, I'm curious about how many bombs would need to be detonated to really fuck up the earth's atmosphere/life cycle to the point of earth being more or less uninhabitable... it's one thing if cities are destroyed and we just go back to living dispersed across the land, it's another thing if humans can't even occupy the planet

I can't see anyone using Nucs in this day and age...except for a country that does not care if they usher in the end of mankind.

I guess the only time we could use one is to stop them from doing it first. But any country that falls into that category of crazy doesn't have the nuclear capability to take out mankind. So, unless we ALLOW them to get that capability, we're okay.

aren't you setting up a justification to pre-emptively strike Iran??

I really can't imagine them striking Israel first. I could see it as retaliation, but only for a damn near equal action by Israel or her allies against Iran

I don't really know enough about the subject to justify anything.

If we allowed Iran to gain enough weapons to threaten mankind, and then we convinced that they were going to do that very thing? I don't know. What else can you do besides stop it from happening before it get there?

barter w Iran for agreements about protecting and securing their arsenal, so that they are enabled to develop them but are out of the reach of extremists/non-national groups... Ahmidenijab is extremist in rhetoric, but I think he understands he's also the head of a state

didn't a scary investigative report just come out in a newspaper about how un-secured Pakistan's weapons are/were?

He also has little-to-no say in the foreign policy of Iran.

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=214

The Most Powerful Bomb Ever Constructed
Written by Alan Bellows on October 2nd, 2006 at 7:56 pm
From DamnInteresting.com
This is a classic Damn Interesting article which was originally published on 13 January 2006.

On October 30, 1961, the most powerful weapon ever constructed by mankind was exploded over the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Sea. The device was code-named "Ivan," and it was a multi-stage hydrogen bomb which was built in only fifteen weeks by engineers in the USSR, using off-the-shelf nuclear weapon components.

It was intended as a display of Soviet superiority during a period of grave tension between the USSR and the United States. The Russians had erected the Berlin wall only two months earlier, and they had just ended a shaky, three-year moratorium on atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. Before Ivan, the largest explosion the world had seen was an incredible 15 megatons, an event which caused a mushroom cloud five kilometers across. Ivan's explosion was over three times more powerful, despite the fact that the device was deliberately prevented from operating to its full potential.

The completed weapon weighed 27 metric tons, and though it was technically "aircraft-deliverable," it was too large to fit inside the bomb bay of the largest soviet bomber of that era, the Tu-95. Consequently, a Tu-95 was specially modified for the task, including the removal of the bomb bay doors to allow the bomb to protrude from the plane, and a coating of a special reflective paint to minimize the heat damage it would sustain from the fireball. Ivan was also attached to a parachute to prevent it from descending too rapidly, thereby giving the bomber adequate time to get out of range of the blast.

Because the project had been rushed, much of the mathematical analysis was skipped, and estimations were used instead. This led to uncertainties about the system performance, and last-minute design modifications. Doubts and uncertainties notwithstanding, on October 30, 1961 the Tu-95 dropped Ivan from an altitude of 34,500 feet over the Mityushikha Bay Nuclear Testing Range at Novaya Zemlya. The weapon's on-board barometric sensors detonated the bomb at approximately 13,000 feet at 11:32am.

Despite the cloudy weather, the flash of light was visible as far as 1,000 kilometers distant, though the sound of the blast would not reach that far for forty-nine minutes, in the form of an indistinct, heavy blow. The giant fireball reached from ground-level to about 34,000 feet into the air, violently releasing 3800 times more explosive energy than the Hiroshima bomb– equivalent to fifty million metric tons of TNT. One hundred kilometers from ground zero the heat would have inflicted third degree burns. Atmospheric focusing produced areas of destruction hundreds of kilometers from ground zero, including wooden structures which were completely destroyed, and some shattered windows in Finland. The explosion's atmospheric shockwave traveled around the Earth three times before it dissipated.

The mushroom cloud which followed the blast was enormous in scale. It stretched sixty kilometers into the sky, and had a diameter of about forty kilometers. Ionization from the explosion disrupted radio communications for the better part of an hour.

Some time after the explosion, a team was dispatched to ground zero to take photographs. One witness reported: "The ground surface of the island has been levelled, swept and licked so that it looks like a skating rink. The same goes for rocks. The snow has melted and their sides and edges are shiny. There is not a trace of unevenness in the ground… Everything in this area has been swept clean, scoured, melted and blown away." Analysis of the explosion showed that the area of complete destruction had a radius of twenty-five kilometers from ground zero.

Naturally, the United States was outraged, and responded by rattling its nuclear sabre in return. The U.S. soon followed suit with an extensive series of nuclear weapons tests.

Ivan– sometimes referred to as "Tsar Bomba" or "King of Bombs"– was originally designed to yield a 100 megaton explosion, but the soviets decided that such a blast would create too great a risk of nuclear fallout, and an almost certain chance that the release plane would be unable to reach safety before detonation. Prior to testing, the engineers replaced a portion of the radioactive uranium with a lead tamper, cutting its explosive potential in half, to a "mere" 50 megatons. Later analysis showed that the fallout from a 100 megaton detonation would have resulted in lethal levels of radioactive fallout over an enormous area.

Even at half strength, Ivan was so powerful that it was completely impractical. Much of the explosion's energy radiated upwards into space, and that which didn't was so excessive that using the device on any populated targets world would have resulted in adverse effects on Russian interests. It served as nothing more than a show of force, and in that respect, it served its purpose well. Thankfully, no other weapon with the massive destructive power of Tsar Bomba has ever been built.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield

Hiroshima's "Little Boy" gravity bomb: 12–15 kt — gun type uranium-235 fission bomb (the first of the two nuclear weapons that have been used in warfare).
Nagasaki's "Fat Man" gravity bomb: 20–22 kt — implosion type Plutonium-239 fission bomb (the second of the two nuclear weapons used in warfare).
W76 warhead 100 kt (12 of these may be in a MIRVed Trident II missile; treaty limited to .
B61 nuclear bomb: Mod 7 (up to 350 kt), Mod 10 (4 yield options: 0.3 kt, 1.5 kt, 60 kt, and 170 kt), and Mod 11 (undisclosed yield).
W87 warhead: 300 kt (10 of these were in a MIRVed LG-118A Peacekeeper).
W88 warhead: 475 kt (12 of these may be in a Trident II missile; treaty limited to .
Ivy King device: 500 kt — second most powerful pure fission bomb [UK Orange Herald: 700kt]; 60 kg uranium; implosion type.
B83 nuclear bomb: variable, up to 1.2 Mt; most powerful U.S. weapon in active service.
B53 nuclear bomb: 9Mt, most powerful US warhead; no longer in active service, but 50 are retained as part of the "Hedge" portion of the Enduring Stockpile; similar to the W-53 warhead that has been used in the Titan II Missile, decommissioned in 1987.
Castle Bravo device: 15 Mt — most powerful US test.
EC17/Mk-17, the EC24/Mk-24, and the B41 (Mk-41) (most powerful US weapons ever: 25 Mt; the Mk-17 was also the largest by size and mass: ca. 20 tons; the Mk-41 had a mass of 4800 kg; gravity bombs carried by B-36 bomber (retired by 1957).
The entire Operation Castle nuclear test series: 48.2 Mt — the highest-yielding test series conducted by the U.S.
Ivan/Tsar Bomba device: 50 Mt — USSR, most powerful explosive device ever, mass of 27 short tons (24 metric tons), in its "full" form (i.e. with a depleted uranium tamper instead of one made of lead) it would have been 100 Mt.

Krakatoa has on at least two occasions in teh past 2000 years erupted to such an extent that it changed the climate of teh entire earth for several years afterwards. That's just dust and ash, no radioactive materials involved.

I think five bombs would pretty well fuck things up for quite a while. No uninhabitable, but bad news for people everywhere.

Surely, from actual testing, there is an adequate answer to this question somewhere.

Here's another scenario. If Iran, or anyone else decided to preemptively nuke someone, would it be more likely that they would use tactical nuclear weapons, on the order of tens of kilotons, and leave no footprint behind?

How likely would it be that any country would choose to launch strategic nuclear weapons (megatons worth of explosive) against that kind of uncertainty? The bombs that were so devastating at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had less tonnage than what we currently consider tactical nuclear weapons.

in light of the numbers that have been tested, this doesn't seem accurate

Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences

Twenty years ago, the results of climate model simulations of the response to smoke and dust from a massive nuclear exchange between the superpowers could be summarized as “nuclear winter,” with rapid temperature, precipitation, and insolation drops at the surface that would threaten global agriculture for at least a year. The global nuclear arsenal has fallen by a factor of three since then, but there has been an expansion of the number of nuclear weapons states, with additional states trying to develop nuclear arsenals. We use a modern climate model to reexamine the climate response to a range of nuclear wars, producing 50 and 150 Tg of smoke, using moderate and large portions of the current global arsenal, and find that there would be significant climatic responses to all the scenarios. This is the first time that an atmosphere-ocean general circulation model has been used for such a simulation and the first time that 10-year simulations have been conducted. The response to the 150 Tg scenario can still be characterized as “nuclear winter,” but both produce global catastrophic consequences. The changes are more long-lasting than previously thought, however, because the new model, National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE, is able to represent the atmosphere up to 80 km, and simulates plume rise to the middle and upper stratosphere, producing a long aerosol lifetime. The indirect effects of nuclear weapons would have devastating consequences for the planet, and continued nuclear arsenal reductions will be needed before the threat of nuclear winter is removed from the Earth.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2 ... 8235.shtml

My sig is from Lord Byron's reaction to the "darkness more than night" that fell on the Northern Hemisphere after the eruption of Mount Tambora resulted in catastrophic climate changes in the year 1816.

It is insane how many Nuclear Weapons we have. I know we were in a cold war - but I mean was this really necessary?