Where Would You Use the Bomb?
Thu July 31st, 2003 20:41 MSTAssume you are a fanatic Islamist - say, Bin Laden himself (If you really are, please stop reading and turn yourself in to the nearest U.S. Marine). You still have quite an organization and probably a lot of money salted away. You want to do the worst possible damage to the non-lunatic (i.e. non-Islamist) world. You notice that Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, has a nuke for sale.
The question is: after you buy it, where do you set it off?
Read on to see my choice…
Moscow
Give it to the Chechens and let them nuke Moscow.
Any idea how the decrepit but paranoid Russian nuclear command system would react to the vaporization of Moscow with no warning?
I’ll leave that one for your nightmares… while I shop for real estate somewhere far from any targets…
Sweet dreams.
Terrorism is primarily about theater…Moscow has relatively little theatrical value.
There is one primary target, with more theatrical value than a dozen other cities put together, and it has already been hit once…Manhattan. Washington, DC is next on the list. After that, it’s a target in Israel.
Las Vegas, nuking Sin City would greatly cheer the mohammedeans, but I feel NYC and DC are the top 2 targets. If they only have 1 nuke I’d bet they’d nuke the USA before Israel
Terrorism USED to be about theater. Terrorism using weapons of mass destruction is simply warfare - an attempt to destroy the enemy.
Al Quaeda is interested in theater, but they would be a lot happier if Russia and the West simply nuked each other.
The most likely reaction would be a complete nuking of… Chechnya. And maybe other Arab lands.
While we are still perceieved as a threat (everyone is perceived by the Russians as a threat), the Chechen war has dragged on now for over a decade. Not even the Russians would pre-emptively nuke America without checking to see if the Islamists did it. They’ve been fighting Islamists longer, and harder, than we have. They *know* that Islamists are capable of large-scale terror operations in Moscow; anyone remember the opera house held hostage?
There are better world capitals to nuke if you want to start a nuclear war. New Delhi or Islamabad would probably be the best choices; they are the closest to being a loose cannon.
Of course, consider that the Islamists don’t want to end the world; they want a living world ruled by Islam. Thus, they won’t do things they think might cause the end of the world — such as global thermonuclear war.
*Limited* thermonuclear war, on the other hand, is a quite legitimate exercise.
They would certainly risk the nuking of Chechnya… but they might consider it worth it, if there was also a significant probability of setting off a US/USSR exchange. Note that the former president and now 2nd highest Ayatolla in Iran (Rafsanjani) said last December that it would be appropriate to nuke Israel, because there are a billion muslims and the Israeli retaliation couldn’t kill all of them!
I wish I shared your view of how the Russian command structure would react, just after the top of the structure had been vaporized by a mysterious but obviously nuclear explosion in the heart of the capital. Fog of war and all that…
There is precedent. In the ’90s [Post Soviet, Post communist, Post cold war], they went to full alert, activated the “football” and told Yeltsin he had 3 minutes to use his weapons or lose his choice, as it appeared that a missile was inbound to Moscow. Fortunately, before he had to decide it was determined that the rocket was not on that trajectory (it was a scientific rocket, and the Russians had been properly notified of the launch but lost the notification).
Also, the loss of early warning satellites means that Russia now has no early warning capability against American launches during as much as 8 hours a day, given them an extremely short decision time. If Moscow was nuked during that interval, they might believe that an entire first strike package out of the US was just 3 or 4 minutes out.
See Study: Decaying Russian sensors increase risk of nuclear war
Second, the Islamists wouldn’t want to just set off such a nuclear war. They would want their enemies to attack each other. Pakistan is one of their best refuges, so they don’t really want to start that war (although some of them, probably not in a position to actually get a bomb, may be nutty enough to try it).
Third, a global thermonuclear war probably would not “end the world.” Although we don’t know for sure about “nuclear winter,” we do know that it’s chief proponent was wrong about the effects of the oil fires in the first gulf war. As far as radiation effects, they would be negligible for most humans on earth - see this for some quantitative information that dispells the typical “Global Nuclear War = End of Mankind” superstition.
I’m sure the Russians have thought about this problem. So have we. Surprise bombing of Washington: what do you do?
The one thing you *don’t* do is immediately nuke your neighbor, because surely both sides have realized that someone could induce the U.S./Russian exchange surreptiously in just this manner.
The correct response is to wait three minutes. If anyplace *else* gets nuked, fire your weapons. If not, burn up the lines to Washington (and Beijing, and London, and Paris, and New Delhi, and Islamabad, and Jerusalem) to find out if they’re in a similar panic. If you don’t get an ultimatum, nuke the Chechens.
The proper way to nuke someone blind is to set all the missiles so that they hit simultaneously. If your opponent has no early warning systems, then it’s best to time all the detonations to occur more-or-less simultaneously. That way, no one has time to react before they, too, are nuked.
So the belief that a first-strike package is coming is a poor decision, even for the Russian Army. (No offense to any Russian Army readers.)
You’re right that Pakistan wouldn’t be a member of any nuclear exhange initiated by the Islamists. The next most likely non-US exchange is India-China. However, neither exchange is likely to extinguish the country in question (they are the #1 and #2 most populous countries).
And aren’t most of the Russian warheads on a fifteen-minute programming delay, precisely to preclude this sort of scenario?
Again, I hope you are right.
However, the incident with Yeltsin and the scientific sounding rocket is not encouraging. They seemed to think that a single missile decapitation strike might be a plausible scenario.
I am not saying that a nuclear explosion in Moscow would guarantee a Russian launch, but rather that given the poor state of their systems and their continued paranoia, it has a significant chance of it. For example, how well would communications work in that event? Russian systems are always breaking down. Is everything adequately redundant? Who has the arming (PAL) codes - how far down into the command structure does launch authority exist?
After all, in the US in the past, and maybe currently, two individuals could launch a missile squadron with no outside authorization. I believe that the Russians had a similar setup.
As to the 15 minute programming delay… does anyone really believe that? Remember when Clinton said that all the nuke in the US and Russia were pointed at the Indian Ocean, so we were safe?
Shortly after Clinton’s claim, I took a tour of the “Titan Missile Museum” in Green Valley, AZ. This is a retired Titan silo with all the equipment (including a missile) in it. The guide that day had been a missile control officer (or whatever they called them) in that silo, in the ’60s. He showed us the re-targetting systems (paper tape loaded at the time) and noted that way back then they could retarget in 30 seconds! [BTW… for anyone in the area, this is a fascinating and rather scary place - well worth the triup]
There are measures in place to reduce the probabilities. For example, the Russians now have access to some of our early warning data, and we have a Russian at Norad and an American at the Russian equivalent, just to help with misunderstandings.
But… well…
As for China India. That would not work. The reason is that India would undoubtedly also attack Pakistan in such a circumstance, since Pakistan is China’s proxy in the whole struggle (just like North Korea seems to be another Chinese proxy in their struggle against the US).
A good argument for boosting funding to liasion programs designed to secure the Russian nukes, eh?
Good discussion guys. Leopards never do change their spots and I can assure you that China and Russia are as full of hate towards the USA as ever before. America is being sucked into thinking that these 2 countries could ever behave in a reasonable fashion. Mark my words, The destruction of the USA is paramount on their agenda. Again, MARK MY WORDS and don’t allow crappy feelgood politics to foul up the equation. The dawn of destruction has already been discussed. All they need now is an opportunity. Watch for China to look for an incident to mix it with the US. When that happens, surprise, surprise, Russia will show her true colors. Watch for multiple simultaneous strikes, but then again, don’t watch. Run!!
Should have used in afghanistan mountains. tacs that it is.
http://usethebomb.com