[RLRWai4B]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
napoleon wouldnt have been stumped by MAD, hed have figured out a way to make nukes useable.

The obvious one is to turn MAD on its head, so to speak. A nukes B. Selectively. Then A says to B - if you hit me back, I will launch the rest of my arsenal at you. B, if rational, and cautious, should be deterred from launching a second strike, for precisely the same reasons MAD is supposed to work in the first place. I don't think that would work. First of all, I don't see any government that would let another government nuke some part of its mainland without retaliation in kind. If the U.S.S.R. nuked Norfolk and only Norfolk, then I think that the U.S. would at least nuke something Soviet military stronghold like Kaliningrad. Then the Soviets would strike back, and, instead of being destruction all at once, it would be piecemeal nuclear destruction (up to a point. Eventually one party would feel threatened enough and unleash everything that they had. Then the other side would do the same).

Let's say that the nuclear attack was limited to a naval fleet. I still think that M.A.D. logic would hold. If the target was important enough that Country X believed that it was worth the risk of nuclear annihilation just to take out that target, then Country Y, now deprived of that super vital resource, would feel threatened enough to respond with some sort of nuclear retaliation to level the playing field. As in scenario 1, I don't think that governments will have enough restraints once the nuclear genie has been uncorked and the nukes are falling.

Now from 1946 to today no one's had the cojones to try this as A. We Yanks of course are peaceloving folks whod never do that. The Soviets didnt have a decent arsenal till Stalin was dead, and Khruschev didnt want to nuke anything cause he genuinely believed communism would win anyway, and Brezhnev was a cautious dude, and Mao was a true believer like Stalin, and not one to rely on technology in war.

But Alexander, Ghengis and Nappy? Youre really sure none of them would have gone beyond the caution and the ideological platitudes of the Cold War era? I don't know about those guys, but there's only one regime that I could envisage starting an offensive nuclear war... you guessed it, the Third Reich. Try imagining a Cuban Missle Crisis situation in which its the U.S. vs. the Nazis. This means that the Nazis have already subjugated the USSR and the Brits. They still have their scientists like von Braun, so they have a leg up on the U.S. in terms of ICBMs. They're faced with the option of launching an offensive nuclear strike in which they would lose 30% of their population, but annihilate the U.S. in the process. I think that Hitler or Himmler or Göring or Heydrich or whichever lovely fanatic who happend to be Führer would have ordered such an attack if presented with the opportunity to do so.

However, I don't think that they would launch such an attack if they knew that they were on equal nuclear terms with the U.S. Even they weren't so crazy to attack someone they didn't believe that they were going to conquer.