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Yes, because we've totally just been nuking or threatening to nuke anyone who looked at us cross-eyed for the last few decades... /s Your nomenclature is a bit

• jwtadvice 9y ago
  First. Strawman. Not helpful. I actually lifted the nomenclature directly from National Security experts. I did not invent or distort any of the nomenclature. Further, it is a very accurate representation of the terminology and nomenclature. The point I hope to drive home is that 70 years later the same "chilling" (title word, not mine) is in effect. > "competitor countries" in the nuclear context mean "countries that threaten us with nuclear war" No. If you look at the list of target nations they include non-nuclear countries (Syria, Iran, etc). > "coercive tactic" and "when it serves the US national interest" correspondingly means "threatening nuclear war to dissuade existential threats" Mostly wrong. An existential threat could be an economic or political existential threat, or it could be conventional. And it can also be used (IS used) for non-existential coercion: say defending an ally. > "competitive disadvantage" means "being on the losing side of a nuclear exchange". No. It means facing a large risk of losing in a conflict of some kind for which there is a large interest in the US of winning. This does not apply only to nuclear exchange and indeed National Security practitioners are quite keen to discuss "cross-domain" warfare (lawfare, sanctions, political entanglement, etc). > We can debate what the official policy should or should not say but please don't take the terms out of context to make them sound scary You've taken the terms out of context. I hope I didn't make them sound scary. I mean, reality is a bit scary some times but I wrote that as quite matter-of-fact.
  • gozur88 9y ago
    >If you look at the list of target nations they include non-nuclear countries (Syria, Iran, etc). US policy is to respond to non-nuclear WMD attacks with nuclear weapons, and it's a good policy. Because otherwise we would need to develop and maintain large stocks of chemical and biological weapons if the policy was to respond to WMD with the same kind of WMD.
    • jwtadvice 9y ago
      That is not the US policy. The US policy is to use the threat of overwhelming force, nuclear and non-nuclear, for leverage in interstate conflict whatever that conflict may be and whether or not that conflict is a threat to the United States or its persons or just the outcomes it is interested in. It's possible that nuclear forces could be used in a scenario like you suggest, but to round that up to policy is inaccurate and it is misleading.
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      > US policy is to respond to non-nuclear WMD attacks with nuclear weapons Source? Every policy statement I've seen neither requires a WMD attack to trigger a nuclear response nor commits to respond to WMD attacks with a nuclear response, and in the occasions when US forces have been targeted by non-conventional weapons it has not responded with nuclear weapons. It seems to me US policy is to generally not to rule in or out the use of nuclear weapons in advance, and to use them if and when it feels the specific circumstances warrant it. (Though the most recent Nuclear Posture Review [0] both adopted a goal of reaching a state where the use could adopt a “sole use” policy, and explicitly stated a policy of of neither using nor threatening to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-armed states that are parties to an in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the former of which would completely and the latter of which does generally conflict with use of nuclear weapons as a general deterrent for non-nuclear WMD attacks.) [0] https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/features/defenseReviews/NPR/2010_Nuclear_Posture_Review_Report.pdf https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/features/defenseReviews/NP... see page ix
      • gozur88 9y ago