Monday, February 07, 2005
Wretchard, as usual, demonstrates a masterful grasp of international power politics and game theory:
I'm not sure where he's going when he says that the only thing worse than waking up to find New York incinerated by a shadowy group is waking up to find Islamabad destroyed.
Either eventuality sucks. But I still haven't gone to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Lara St. John lives in New York City. So I'm still rather more attached to New York City than Islamabad.
It is debateable whether al Qaeda was ever deterrable and the hypothetical Islamic faculty cell would be no different. What the GWOT did was deter the states which may have considered supplying al Qaeda-like organizations with the material for building nuclear weapons with the threat of collective responsibility. Deterrence has always, from its inception, been based on this immoral principle and it isn't necessary to approve to recognize it was the case. For most of the Cold War, opposing nations held each other's civilian populations hostage. Early delivery systems were too inaccurate to target the threatening military assets themselves. With the so-called "counterforce" strategy unavailable, only "countervalue" was available. That meant, in effect, that America was prepared to incinerate every man, woman and child in the Soviet Union in response to a nuclear attack. In most Cold War-game scenarios enemy leaders buried deep in bunkers or circling in command aircraft would be the last to die. Some believed they should not be targeted at all in order to preserve a command structure with which one could negotiate a post-holocaust peace.
To the question 'who might America retaliate against if a shadowy group detonated nukes in Manhattan' the probable answer is 'against everyone who might have stood to gain'.
I'm not sure where he's going when he says that the only thing worse than waking up to find New York incinerated by a shadowy group is waking up to find Islamabad destroyed.
Either eventuality sucks. But I still haven't gone to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Lara St. John lives in New York City. So I'm still rather more attached to New York City than Islamabad.
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