What If: Nuclear Bomb detonates in New York City

[K. A. Pital]

The US is not a "bedrock of civil stability". Not that it has ever been. France had no "violent revolutions" in the early 1960s.

[Lonestar]

I came to the conclusion based upon the overall history of the US. Even today, despite what some people on the board would have you believe, the US is uniformly one of civil order. We have problems with crime, but that is not the same as swaths of the population(and government) working to violently overthrow the existing society.

The US is not a "bedrock of civil stability". Not that it has ever been. France had no "violent revolutions" in the early 1960s.

Oh Stas, you are so full of it.

(1)I didn't say "France had a violent revolution in the 60s", I said that France had a history of it every few decades or so. Heck, there are those who view Vichy France as part of the continuing struggle between the Right and Left in France.

(2)Compared to a lot of countries, including the two you call home, the USA is a bedrock of civil stability. You're just pissed off that it doesn't fit your narrative of "IT IS LIKELY THAT MEMBERS OF THE US MILITARY ARE GOING TO STEAL AMERICAN NUKES AND BLOW SHIT UP". We don't have military coups, we don't have violent secessionist movements, we don't have widespread movements whose goal is to violently overthrow existing society. You occasionally get a one-off like Eric Rudolph, but the Tea Party(or Occupy movement, if you watch Fox) is not one that is using violent means to reach their political goals.

[CaptHawkeye]

The US is not a "bedrock of civil stability". Not that it has ever been. France had no "violent revolutions" in the early 1960s.

How isn't the US stable? When was the last time we had a major civil war? Or an attempted coup?

On topic: I'm a little wary of immediate nuclear retaliation even if the US was nuked. You have to realize that the people in countries like Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, etc are totally kept in the dark about what their government or organizations related to them are doing. They have no input, and are usually mistreated anyway. If you go full nuclear retard you'll be attacking 98% of people who had nothing to do with the attack. The scenario posed in the thread isn't World War III, it's a random terrorist attack. The only response to which is conventional, and the Pentagon will have absolutely no problems with enlistment numbers, funding, and procurement. You'll see a national gathering not unlike the response to 9/11 with even more momentum. You just have to avoid pulling a Bush and squandering it on an invasion of an unrelated country.

The nuclear genie is only partially out of the bottle. It hurts, but it's not provocation enough for the US to go around removing hemispheres from existence.

[Col. Crackpot]

The US is not a "bedrock of civil stability". Not that it has ever been. France had no "violent revolutions" in the early 1960s.

How isn't the US stable? When was the last time we had a major civil war? Or an attempted coup?

On topic: I'm a little wary of immediate nuclear retaliation even if the US was nuked. You have to realize that the people in countries like Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, etc are totally kept in the dark about what their government or organizations related to them are doing. They have no input, and are usually mistreated anyway. If you go full nuclear retard you'll be attacking 98% of people who had nothing to do with the attack. The scenario posed in the thread isn't World War III, it's a random terrorist attack. The only response to which is conventional, and the Pentagon will have absolutely no problems with enlistment numbers, funding, and procurement. You'll see a national gathering not unlike the response to 9/11 with even more momentum. You just have to avoid pulling a Bush and squandering it on an invasion of an unrelated country.

The nuclear genie is only partially out of the bottle. It hurts, but it's not provocation enough for the US to go around removing hemispheres from existence.

AGAIN, No one (sane)is advocating that we give anybody the full Curtis LeMay treatment by glassing the entire country in retaliation. But the efficacy of a nuclear deterrent becomes nil if a state sponsored nuclear attack is not met in kind. Identify high value military targets, nuclear infrastructure and leadership in the offending country. Eliminate them with tactical nuclear weaponry. Do not target civilian areas with no military value. Work to minimize collateral damage. Make the entire country a UN protectorate after elimination of regime. As much as i hate tit for tat a non nuclear response to a nuclear attack on any country will open the door for even more nuclear death in the long run.

[CaptHawkeye]

AGAIN, No one (sane)is advocating that we give anybody the full Curtis LeMay treatment by glassing the entire country in retaliation. But the efficacy of a nuclear deterrent becomes nil if a state sponsored nuclear attack is not met in kind. Identify high value military targets, nuclear infrastructure and leadership in the offending country. Eliminate them with tactical nuclear weaponry. Do not target civilian areas with no military value. Work to minimize collateral damage. Make the entire country a UN protectorate after elimination of regime. As much as i hate tit for tat a non nuclear response to a nuclear attack on any country will open the door for even more nuclear death in the long run.

This is my problem though. This is too much of a gray area. How often have military and civilian areas been totally divorced from one another? Because history seems to show rarely to never. I can't help but imagine the list of military-only targets will become exhausted very quickly with little appreciable value on an overall war effort.

Again we're still failing to differentiate between a terror organization or a state sanctioned, and supplied attack. If it was performed on a state level than you'll find that in order to wage war against the country you *will* have to target locations like bridges, airports, power plants, etc sooner or later. Which can be done the usual way with precision weapons, or the "retaliation" way with wanton tactical nuke use. (I also find the concept of limited tactical nuclear war to be laughable, but that's a separate subject.)

If the attack was performed by a terror organization than tactical nuclear strikes are out of the question by virtue of being moot. Terror organizations like Al Qaeda don't have anything to nuke. They don't have factories, or harbors, or airfields. So why just piss everyone off with zero gain nuclear attacks?

In both cases the civilian population is likely to have played no part.

the efficacy of a nuclear deterrent becomes nil if a state sponsored nuclear attack is not met in kind.

Says who? This prophecy has always struck me as a subjective and motivated by raw paranoia.

[K. A. Pital]

I came to the conclusion based upon the overall history of the US. Even today, despite what some people on the board would have you believe, the US is uniformly one of civil order. We have problems with crime, but that is not the same as swaths of the population(and government) working to violently overthrow the existing society.

Considering your incarceration rates, I think those "large swaths" who could make up a recruitment pool for violent movements against current order might be spending time in prison. But yeah, valid points, I guess you could argue for stability because Europe had wars raging on own territory every now and then, which made violent rebellion, separatism, secessionism all the more likely. However, the US is nowhere near the stability of, say, Scandinavia, and yet I wouldn't be surprised if a violent and brutal organization evolved under the cover of either the military or special services even in "stable" nations.

This occurs because these institutions are separated from the society, and the processes which occur in society can't be directly extrapolated onto violent entities like armies fighting foreign wars or security agencies stirring shit up here and there. Militarized structures are dangerous no matter how calm society itself is.

[Mr Bean]

Considering your incarceration rates *snip.

Consider our incarceration rates on what they were prior to 1970 vs after the start of the War on Drugs and look at those incarceration rates again. Our criminals are no more criminal than anywhere else. However since the 70's we've been highly aggressive in going after those who smoke, sniff, snort, shoot up various illicit drugs creating an entire massive multi-billion dollar a year illegal import industry resulting in states were Marijuana production is a greater cash corp them actual crops and you understand exactly how America came to imprison millions of it's own citizens for the usage of substances that nine percent of our population admit to using if not weekly then at least yearly where even a single instance of being caught with greater than two or three days worth of supply will result in a decade in jail under trafficking charges.

There are towns I could show you where Meth changed the entire police force as small towns in the midwest went from one or two murders per year of the impulse variety, various small thefts the odd bank robbery and lots of sitting around. Along comes meth in the 90s into the big time and these same small towns are spending 60% of their time tracking down backyard meth labs and taking in tons of cash since states have laws letting police confiscate property of drug criminals and auction that off to raise money for the department. I was in a small town in Indiana in the 90s where the cops went from the guys who would be sitting in their squad car on the end of main street to a well equipped paramilitary outfit with two dozen officers (Up from nine) with new squad cars and SWAT style gear for nearly every officer thanks to the fact they were busting two meth labs a week on average. Meth labs were found in an unused room in the basement of a local Catholic church, in a abandon quarry and in one instance a small scale operation on the roof of a McDonalds, in addition to all the basement meth labs one expects to find.

[Sephirius]

Stas is just mad that there's no way this can be the US's fault, par for the course for him. Ignore his reality distortion field.

With respect to the original question, if it is confirmed to be Taliban/Al Quaeda (with pakistani ordnance), expect the border region of Pakistan/Afghanistan to become a radioactive desert coated in land mines, Afghanistan to completely become a US protectorate with no government of its own, and Pakistan to be extremely lucky if it is not decapitated and split up by the US and the Indians.

[K. A. Pital]

*laughs* I'm just picking the most probable option instead of engaging in la-la fantasies about arabs with nukes pulled out of Jack Bauer's ass. "Taliban", "Al-Quaeda"... boo-boo, scary-scary. Fear. Nukes. New York. Millions of casualties.

Seriously, just what the fuck is it with people and their strange desire to discuss possible nuclear detonations in their own megacities? Is that some sort of masochistic "wannabe a terrorist victim" complex or something?

I merely provided a plausible scenario for an American device being used, since that was mentioned, you know. If it was not mentioned, the entire thread would consist of masturbatory mass death fantasies about -stans becoming radioactive glass, which is completely sickening to a normal human being.

But hey, why interrupt, carry on. Write out in great detail how nuclear rains of retaliation will turn the entire Arab world into a Grave of the Fireflies, and don't let anything get in the way of that "productive discussion".

[JointStrikeFighter]

Seriously, just what the fuck is it with people and their strange desire to discuss possible nuclear detonations in their own megacities? Is that some sort of masochistic "wannabe a terrorist victim" complex or something?

Oh yeah why would people be better able to comprehend and relate to events set in their own environment?

[Simon_Jester]

*laughs* I'm just picking the most probable option instead of engaging in la-la fantasies about arabs with nukes pulled out of Jack Bauer's ass. "Taliban", "Al-Quaeda"... boo-boo, scary-scary. Fear. Nukes. New York. Millions of casualties.

Seriously, just what the fuck is it with people and their strange desire to discuss possible nuclear detonations in their own megacities? Is that some sort of masochistic "wannabe a terrorist victim" complex or something?

Once upon a time, people were asking the same damn question about Russians with nukes that the Russians had.

Nuclear weapons are outside normal people's experience, but we know they're huge and scary and can kill us in vast numbers. That alone explains why people ask questions about it, just like they ask questions about "what would happen if a big asteroid hit X?"

the efficacy of a nuclear deterrent becomes nil if a state sponsored nuclear attack is not met in kind.

Says who? This prophecy has always struck me as a subjective and motivated by raw paranoia.

The real problem is that state sponsored nuclear attacks are actually pretty easy to do, when you think about it.

In real life, nuclear warheads are designed so that they can't explode unless they're fired out of a missile silo at umpty thousand miles an hour, or dropped from a plane that's got special launch codes, or something along those lines. They're heavily guarded and rigged with anti-tampering mechanisms (at least, they are these days, things were different in the '50s). Stealing a nuclear weapon would be very hard, and modifying it to blow it up like a demolition charge would be hard too.

But if someone actually wanted to build a nuclear warhead that would blow up at the push of a button, and which could be carried around in the back of a delivery van... it wouldn't actually be that hard to do so, for a country with a serious nuclear weapons establishment. People did this in the early days- the "suitcase nuke" may be a myth, but the backpack nuke isn't.

The US government can't stop thousands of tons of marijuana from getting snuck into the US every year, and we're already spending huge sums of money looking for it and building up intel on foreign growers. If a serious, competent country decides to build several dozen nuclear warheads in secret and sneak them into an enemy's land, there's an alarmingly good chance of succeeding with the attack undetected, compared to the odds of getting away with something like a missile barrage without anyone knowing you were responsible.

So the idea that you can launch this sort of attack in a deniable way and not suffer government-shattering penalties for doing it... there are people on Earth I do not want getting that idea. The US government is high on the list of those people.

...

Hm. Random thought. If a country with a serious nuclear program actually wanted to make an 'untraceable' nuke, one that it would be impractical to trace back to its origin, could they? Detection methods rely on our educated guesses about bomb composition and isotope ratios; are those things potentially fakeable for someone with enough resources?

The resources in question might well be beyond what a minor nuclear state like North Korea or Israel can manage, but someone like the US has more options and money.

[K. A. Pital]

Oh yeah why would people be better able to comprehend and relate to events set in their own environment?

Americans have an unhealthy habit of depicting their own nation as a ravaged nuclear wasteland; aliens ripping the hell out of their cities for no other reason than to look at the Uber-Realistic Carnage. I could understand when that is like, a flick or two. And possibly when you ramble about a putative nuclear apocalypse when you push for disarmament, or when you seek to make a point - like some of those Cold War books about human extinction (Neville Shute, duh).

I don't understand when it boils down to "Let's discuss how Taliban blows up a nuke in New York and we glass them... glass Mecca... Glass EVERYTHING that is hostile and related to the attack, glory to god I just had a NUCLEAR ORGASM". I mean, I could understand that shit when it's coming from Shep. He's... just thinking that way all the time, a modus operandi I would say.

But this thread is full of it. The moment you suggest something more complex, like "Well maybe there won't be a direct way to retaliate with nuclear megacide of brown people since the bomb was taken from a Party X which is inside the US/inside the First World/comes from a massively massive nuclear power like Russia", you get angry replies that your scenario is getting in the way of the 1001th NUKE MECCA IRAN IRAQ AFGHANISTAN SAUDI ARABIA PAKISTAN post.

What does this tell us? It tells us that whenever you actually ask a serious question, what if there's a deadly WMD attack which can't be directly retaliated with genocide that would make people so happy, people prefer to hide their head into the sand. "It must be THEM. GENOCIDE must be the solution".

[Ariphaos]

We're through the looking glass here

So in the 'Jolly old Terry Wrist attacks the convoy and is looking like getting away with it' is there a contingency which involves conceding an entire neighbourhood to a Bayesque airstrike or something similarly cheerful?

Shep forgot to mention what the suburbans escorting these convoys are armed with.

Organizations like this rarely use e-mail contact, they prefer to rely on direct communications. If there would be such an organization among the higher officer ranks, why on earth would they use the internet to relay something about their politics if they know the CIA's watching them? There are ways to communicate securely even over the net (e.g. skype voice calls).

...what the hell are you smoking, Stas?

[Ziggy Stardust]

Americans have an unhealthy habit of depicting their own nation as a ravaged nuclear wasteland; aliens ripping the hell out of their cities for no other reason than to look at the Uber-Realistic Carnage. I could understand when that is like, a flick or two.

Americans are the only people on the planet interested in post-apocalyptic literature, sure. It has nothing to do with it being a staple of speculative fiction, and everything to do with RAH RAH FUCK AMERICANS.

[K. A. Pital]

...what the hell are you smoking, Stas?

Real life:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... e-MI6.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12 ... pe_pwnage/
http://www.securitymanagement.com/news/ ... ons-009640
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Skype-Bl ... 1695.shtml
And the workarounds, which include dropping spyware on call-out or receiving computers:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 20038.html
That's totally not happening, right?

Americans are the only people on the planet interested in post-apocalyptic literature, sure.

The sheer volume of not "post-apocalypse" (!) but simply APOCALYPSE film and book coming out of America is staggering. I'm not talking about Fallout or Hunger Games, pardon me. I'm talking about apocalypse itself: D-Day, Day after Tomorrow, Volcano, Deep Impact, etc. You could list much more than these movies and you'd be hard pressed to run out of examples.

Americans created the masterpiece of apocalypse as well, with Proyas' "Knowing" (an excellent movie by any account).

It has nothing to do with it being a staple of speculative fiction, and everything to do with RAH RAH FUCK AMERICANS.

Post-apocalypse is popular everywhere. Apocalyptic fiction and film? In the US and Japan, I guess, more than elsewhere.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Maybe it's because America makes more media than everyone else. Fucking hell it's not complicated.

[Eleas]

Maybe it's because America makes more media than everyone else. Fucking hell it's not complicated.

I don't think so, really. The "disaster movie" love is, as far as I can tell, a largely American phenomenon. My bet is, it ties into evangelism and the Judgement Day motif, which really seems much stronger in the USA than anywhere else.

[Ariphaos]

...what the hell are you smoking, Stas?

Real life:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... e-MI6.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12 ... pe_pwnage/
http://www.securitymanagement.com/news/ ... ons-009640
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Skype-Bl ... 1695.shtml
And the workarounds, which include dropping spyware on call-out or receiving computers:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 20038.html
That's totally not happening, right?

I love how trustworthy some of these sources are. "A spyware kingpin claims the NSA is offering money!" And claims that Skype is Europe-based when the company owning it was, as it is now, American (eBay then, Microsoft now) who can update their software to their specifications at any time. Above and beyond Skype's own rather sordid security history.

Skype is one of the most byzantine protocols in widespread use, second in complexity to perhaps only e-mail itself - which probably doesn't even have single implementation that follows all RFCs. The protocol does some ridiculously dodgy things, and wastes a ton of bandwidth in doing so. I'd be very interested to hear why you think e.g. hole-punching is 'secure'.

Compare to say, Mumble with pre-shared certificates, where you can actually personally evaluate the algorithms in use.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, Stas. Let's think about it.

Apocalyptic fiction has its roots in WWI's disastrous confrontation between the great armies of Europe, and really got its strength after the post-WWII realization that nuclear war could wipe out civilization as we know it. The World Wars were the first time in history when people believed that civilization could be totally eradicated from the Earth, with the possible exception of the Mongol conquests and the collapse of native American civilization after Columbus, neither of which left much of an extensive mass produced body of literature.

Now, we would expect 'nuclear' apocalyptic fiction to be strongest in states where the fear of imminent nuclear attack was high, thus creating supply of such literature among artists inspired by the fear, and a demand among citizens who had the fear. That pushes the US and USSR to the very top of the list- and in the USSR, it would not have been so easy to write apocalyptic fiction, because there was a degree of censorship in place. It seems to me that there's no wonder that the genre of apocalyptic fiction would find fertile ground in the US, where authors could write stories about America losing a nuclear war without fear of censorship. Whereas authors in, say, Asia or South America would have less interest in telling such tales.

Other types of apocalyptic fiction, such as the modern 'grand disaster' movie, simply follow on from the trends already laid out during the Cold War.

[K. A. Pital]

Grand disaster is a rather modern genre, as it seems, and does not strictly follow the "nuclear apocalypse" story. It centers on the carnage itself, not on the aftermath, like Fallout, Threads and other icons of PA.

[PainRack]

Australia had Mad Max and its series. Britain had 28 days later and that franchise. Hell, even silly little Singapore had its own military WW3 novel series, it didn't sell primarily because local markets are small.

I would hesitate to argue that volume= fascination, since as stated, America is the media king of the modern world. Bollywood has their own staples that focuses entirely on action epic in a malfunctioning Indian civil system....

So... yeah. I'm going to say that this could be bias on your part Stas.

[Simon_Jester]

Grand disaster is a rather modern genre, as it seems, and does not strictly follow the "nuclear apocalypse" story. It centers on the carnage itself, not on the aftermath, like Fallout, Threads and other icons of PA.

I would argue that the "grand disaster" genre is related to and partly descended from "apocalypse" and "monster movie" genres. There's a logical chain of progression from, say, horror movies featuring vampires or whatever and zombie movies featuring hordes of the undead rising from the grave. Or from cities being destroyed by nuclear fire to cities being destroyed by comets. Some of the same constraints and conventions apply, and anyone who makes money at one kind of movie might logically experiment with the other.

Also, you're forgetting the impact of CGI: it's much easier to present a grand disaster destroying cities in a massive, impressive way. There has been a surge in the number of large, spectacular movies coming out of Hollywood's CGI establishment in the past twenty years, and that's purely a technological development, not a function of American culture being at all unique.

[K. A. Pital]

I didn't say it's really completely unique to America. Japan was churning out disaster movies as well, for example. However, I do find it unhealthy, compared to, say:

Bollywood has their own staples that focuses entirely on action epic in a malfunctioning Indian civil system....

Oh, and Mad Max is a classic PA genre, not "massive destruction" genre as it is. One could argue that even 28 days isn't entirely fitting the Grand Disaster narrative since it is lacking explosions or tidal forces or whatnot massively destroying civilization in an instant.

I'm going to say that this could be bias on your part Stas.

Could be. This whole genre seems absolutely alien to me. Not PA; the "city buster" one.

[PeZook]

Unfortunately Stas is partially right, but used a wrong example - he should've pointed towards technothrillers. Because the theme of "poor underdog innocent America viciously attacked by crazy foreign terrorists/armies retaliates with overwhelming force against a convenient target" is virtually omnipresent in those (books and movies).

I mean, why is Clancy such a huge succesful and best selling author, when 90% of his books are the EXACT PLOT I outlined in the paragraph above?

It's because Americans love to feel like the underdog while not actually being one (because the latter half of the abovementioned plot is ALWAYS America bringing its incredible military might to crush The Enemy like a bug, whether the IMM is in the form of badass commandos or jet aircraft and bombs).

[Simon_Jester]

Unfortunately Stas is partially right, but used a wrong example - he should've pointed towards technothrillers. Because the theme of "poor underdog innocent America viciously attacked by crazy foreign terrorists/armies retaliates with overwhelming force against a convenient target" is virtually omnipresent in those (books and movies).

I mean, why is Clancy such a huge succesful and best selling author, when 90% of his books are the EXACT PLOT I outlined in the paragraph above?

It's because Americans love to feel like the underdog while not actually being one (because the latter half of the abovementioned plot is ALWAYS America bringing its incredible military might to crush The Enemy like a bug, whether the IMM is in the form of badass commandos or jet aircraft and bombs).

This, yes, is a better example.

Honestly, is there any nation whose people DON'T like feeling like the underdog without actually being one? I imagine that, say, Poles would love to be able to feel like the underdog without actually being one, as opposed to being the underdog in reality and getting invaded and conquered from twenty-seven directions at once. Any nation that makes a lot of war movies is likely to portray itself as the good guy.

So the real question is: why are America's favorite stories about itself war stories?

And I think that's where we can make a point that wouldn't be equally true of any other nation on the face of the Earth: Americans are often uneasy with the idea of "The Man" as an enemy. When an American movie shows the mechanisms of the state or the corporate world as a villain, it's an unusual part of the system, a broken piece- a corrupt policeman, a single corporation that's actually a front operation for an evil mastermind. You don't see very many movies that are based on the premise that the entire domestic political system is corrupt- Hollywood does not produce revolutionary films.