Military response to failed enemy nuclear strike

[Broomstick]

Has anyone suggested a not massive response? I don't think so. The question is does massive = nuclear.

Well... it's either nukes or a mobilization such as we haven't seen since WWII. But the nukes are ready NOW, ramping up conventional forces will take much more time.

[Alferd Packer]

Timothy's right. If you want to retain your nukes as a deterrent, there is no other response other than nuclear to successful nuclear attack. Really, the only point of contention would be balancing out the need to destroy any second strike capability North Korea might have with allowing time for civilians in allied nations to prepare for the environmental catastrophe which will be caused by the fallout, as well as allowing China time to withdraw any forces it might have near the border. But that may not even be a point of contention-- the first volley of SLBMs may very well be in the air as soon as the impact is deemed imminent, with ICBMs possibly to follow.

[Patroklos]

Has anyone suggested a not massive response? I don't think so. The question is does massive = nuclear.

Well... it's either nukes or a mobilization such as we haven't seen since WWII. But the nukes are ready NOW, ramping up conventional forces will take much more time.

This is making the assumption that the US will be providing the ground pounders for a Korean peninsular war. While we would certainly contribute on the order of a multi hundred thousand man force and would ramp somewhat to do so Korean war repeat scenarios generally have us providing the bulk of the high tech assets. Fleets, aircraft, EW, etc. and there is no beefing those up on any meaningful timetable. The focus for ground forces long ago shifted tp the South Koreans and they have far more on hand to contribute than we could ever hope to muster on the pennisula. The ROK Army has roughly 500K active/reserves, half of the US army which is impressive considering they have one sixth the population. More importantly they are already there with all their equipment and logistics. Of course there is no possibility of the US invading NK without the South shoulder to shoulder with us, and there is no possibility of the South tolerating the existence of a NK lobbing nukes around.

What I am saying is regardless of whether we decide to nuke NK or not, an initial or follow on conventional invasion will be primarily a South Korean show. The US may be third fiddle regarding forces committed overall if China decides to play and they would. They can't have active US/South Korean forces operating in combat along one of their land borders.

[Simon_Jester]

In a small exchange situation like this I do wonder if we respond with nukes at all actually. One or two nukes on the west coast of Hawaii is tragic for sure but do we just absorb it and be the better man and respond conventionally or vaporize the oppressed millions in NK out of vengeance? A Machiavellian politician could play either role to good effect depending on how the public reacts.

Seriously? The American public is going to react by wanting blood, and lots of it. No way in hell will the US "just absorb it".

I would expect it depends on what the missiles hit.

If they hit a city, likely yes. If they hit a random stretch of countryside and level a small town or two, the reaction will be more mixed. And since North Korean ICBMs are likely to be quite inaccurate... yeah.

A nuclear strike on the US without a nuclear response would immediately call into question all US defense treaties around the world, and would likely result in mass proliferation combined with a massive decrease in America's geopolitical standing in the world.

Not exactly, it depends. For instance SK, facing a situation where their long lost countrymen are now going to be liberated one way or the other, could beg for us NOT to vaporize them just before the long sought reunion. Its not that our resolve was disproved, but rather our commitment to our allies is reaffirmed. We can be off the hook, but at the same time the situation is so niche that it obviously is not exploitable in other circumstances.

Although that would rely on a very specific combination of circumstances.

And it wouldn't invalidate the basic question: "if the US is not willing to use nuclear weapons to retaliate against attacks on its own soil, and instead calls for 'moderation,' surely it will also call for 'moderation' if there is a nuclear attack on us." For a country like Japan or Taiwan or Poland, that's an extremely unpleasant notion. And the sort of thing that makes countries want their own nuclear arsenal to defend themselves.

South Korea has a lot of american troops and is also very friendly to the US, and even though China and US have a lot of trade going on, they're not that good friends military speaking AFAIK. I think China looks upon NK as a buffer zone between US influence and themselves, and would like to have it that way.

The main problem is that North Korea is in many ways a worse neighbor than a US client state would be. Especially now that China is strong enough that it can realistically stand up to US pressure by itself without resorting to violence (in the 1950s or 1970s, it wasn't). So there was compelling strategic logic behind China's decision to prop up North Korea back in the day, but there would also be compelling reasons for them to revisit that decision today.

Neither US (as the only country to ever have used nukes in wartime), Japan (as the receiving end) or China (as the neighbor of a possible mushroom cloud) would be very happy to see Pyongyang as a nuclear wasteland, so I'm not too sure that the US would retaliate with a nuke, but the US would most likely do Dresden-style conventional bombing of the capital and known military installations and then "liberate" the poor civilians from their horrible leadership via a joint attack on NK with the help of other countries. Politically kinda like Gulf war #1.

Another possibility is nuclear attacks targeted on the key facilities of the North Korean air defense network. Use of them in the Demilitarized Zone would run into problems because of proximity to Seoul, although it might be better than just letting the North Koreans shell the city- I don't feel like I can judge.

I have a hard time imagining the US not responding to a nuclear attack with nuclear weapons, even if it was from North Korea.

Here's the big question...what would we target? If NK launched one nuke at us, a proportional response would be to launch ONE back...

Classically, that is not how it works. I can't speak for current US nuclear doctrine as such, but the theory is simple:

You do not want to create a situation where an enemy thinks they can inflict serious harm on you, and survive because you will 'only' inflict an equal amount of harm on them. Not when nuclear weapons are involved and the level of harm is potentially nation-ending. One nuclear first strike can turn a nation from 'mildly horrid dictatorship' to 'bigger mass murderer than Hitler' in an afternoon.

You can't play tit-for-tat with that. You can't use half measures.

And so... in my honest opinion, a sensibly planned nuclear response doesn't say "you killed five million of us, we'll kill five million of you." Or "you destroyed one of our city, we'll destroy X of your tanks and jets."

It says "when the smoke clears, you will not be a country anymore, and we will do what we have to in order to make that happen."

In the case of North Korea, I think that "what we have to" would consist of a laydown of a small number of nuclear weapons to paralyze their command structure, followed by conventional military campaign, with tactical nuclear strikes to blast apart any place where the North Koreans amass enough of their own conventional hardware to be a serious problem.

Has anyone suggested a not massive response? I don't think so. The question is does massive = nuclear.

The response must be nuclear or the entire nature of the deterrent fails.

Seriously, what is so hard for everyone in this thread to understand that.

I think a lot of them do.

To expand on this, though... the reason he's saying this, I think, is as follows. The worst possible result, the scenario everyone's had as a nightmare since 1946, is of mass nuclear proliferation leading to a world in which almost every mid-sized nation has the atomic bomb, and sooner or later someone lights the fuse that sets in motion a chain reaction that destroys the world. Preventing this has a lot to do with the structure of the world order as we know it today.

One of the big parts of that is that both the US and to a lesser extent the Soviets were able to create large networks of client states during the Cold War that, lacking nuclear weapons themselves, could rely on a powerful ally's nuclear deterrent for security.

If the US does not respond to a nuclear attack by an enemy nation against the US itself with a nuclear attack, this goes away entirely. If the US won't use nuclear weapons against North Korea in retaliation for a nuclear attack on Los Angeles, you may be quite sure the US won't use nuclear weapons against Russia in retaliation for an attack on Warsaw. The Poles will feel a need for their own nuclear arsenal as a result, and many other countries will be in a similar position.

Moreover, it will become a realistic notion for war planners in hostile nations to convince themselves that US nuclear weapons will never be used, and aren't actually a threat at all... in which case, quite frankly, the odds of the US being hit with future nuclear attacks go up drastically. For example, some relatively unstable or corrupt nation with nuclear weapons might think it can get away with a 'deniable' attack by slipping nuclear weapons to terrorists.

[LadyTevar]

Personally, we don't need nukes to bomb them back, our convention guided missiles can reach anywhere inside Nork from Naval platforms.
We have our long-distance bombers and our bombing drones, all of which can wipe out not only the DMZ as a hazard, but keep Pyongyang under total blitz. While I doubt we'll have Nork soldiers surrendering to drones (as Hussan's troops did in Kuwait), the same 100-day mix of fuel-air, bunker-busters, and other assorted aerial assault would pave the way for the boots to move and mop up.

The problem is the Nork populace are brainwashed. This will be the battle we tried to avoid in WWII by dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasake. Kim will tell them to fight (while he flees into China), and every man, woman, and even the children will fight to the death, and fall apologizing to both the Kims and their own ancestors for failing to stop the invaders. It will be a massacre.

(BTW: I see Kim firing at Seoul more likely than the US. His missiles won't reach that far)

[Patroklos]

The question here is WHY did they not get used, not that the US would simple not use them as a matter of course. I gave you a scenario where it wasn't the US that called for moderation, it was an ally. If allies can rely on the US to respond to them in that fashion regarding holding back nuclear attacks based on a nuclear attack on the US proper that doesn't dissolve confidence in the US as an ally, it makes them the best fucking friends you could ever have. Note that scenario did not change anything for NK, it wasn't a choice between a nuclear response or no response or even a nuclear response or some minimal response. The response is massive either way, NK still end up utterly defeated.

Its also worth noting that most of the nuclear calculations from the Cold War were based on affiliation with a nuclear power with a peer arsenal to either the US or the Soviet Union. It was not plausible to defeat either conventionally without endangering escalation to complete and utter nuclear oblivion. There is no follow on threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation with a NK. They are on their own. The same holds true for a nuclear Iran. They have no ability to deliver a strike large enough to lead to a MAD scenario, but to do so to either of those nations the US doesn't have to rely on nuclear weapons. We can just as completely conquer them and more important to the people running those places depose and replace them using conventional means as with nuclear. To a person who just watched NK get run over by a million man coalition of the most modern armies in the world the lesson is the same: Use nukes and its game over for us.

The objection I have here is to the notion that just because we decided not to nuke someone for reasons X, Y and Z that we won't ever do so to anyone. That logic doesn't follow unless you make unwarranted assumptions about a potential adversaries decision making process, assume a nuclear response is the only one that can give pause to someone contemplating a limited nuclear option, and unnecessarily limits the US to a single option. An option that requires them to kill millions of civilians no less.

[Nephtys]

I do think the more interesting question here besides what's been gone over on the necessity of massive retaliation as a deterrent is... what happens to a fizzled attack? An ICBM shot down? Or one that botches a stage separation and ends up landing in the pacific instead of on top of San Diego?

Could the North Koreans spin it as a malfunction? If that's not bought into, would it be in the realm of massive retaliation even though no lives were lost to a (presumably) nuclear weapon? What happens if at that point, NK begins a general (conventional) offensive against SK... or what if it does not and keeps pushing the line of either a failed Sat launch, or a malfunctioning non-armed warhead?

[Darmalus]

I think that a fizzled attack will ultimately have the same result, just far fewer immediate corpses. NK exists in a very delicate state where it's occasional saber rattling and other nonsense is less of a problem to deal with than the massive humanitarian crisis that will be unleashed if NK falls apart.

It really wouldn't matter how he fails, nukes some poor fish in the Pacific or drops a few tons of unexploded uranium in downtown Tokyo or Seoul, all that matters is NK has signaled it's no longer worth if for the country to be left as is. The leadership has gone crazy and tried to nuke it's neighbors, it's now better to crush them and deal with the resulting humanitarian crisis than contain them and let them try again.

[Broomstick]

If you want to own and launch a nuke then you need to accept tit-for-tat. You can't get a big boy weapon, use it, then plead you're a tiny little state. While an ally might appreciate US restraint in opting for a conventional instead of a nuclear response the "message" isn't just for allies, it's also for enemies. The US has a history of massive response to even a minor attack on its territory, I just can't see a "moderate" response to being nuked.

Now, a failed nuke, that might be a situation where opting for a massive conventional response is an option. Maybe. But I think a successful nuke on US soil is going to mean a nuclear response.

[TimothyC]

Personally, we don't need nukes to bomb them back, our convention guided missiles can reach anywhere inside Nork from Naval platforms.

You're smarter than that Tev.

It isn't a matter of military need, but of geopolitical need.

If you want to own and launch a nuke then you need to accept tit-for-tat. You can't get a big boy weapon, use it, then plead you're a tiny little state. While an ally might appreciate US restraint in opting for a conventional instead of a nuclear response the "message" isn't just for allies, it's also for enemies. The US has a history of massive response to even a minor attack on its territory, I just can't see a "moderate" response to being nuked.

More or less this. Owning nuclear weapons means that you are likely to never see American tanks rolling down the streets of your capital. It does however mean that if you make the US really mad, you will stop existing as a country, and start existing as air pollution.

Patroklos et. all.: You need to re-read your Kahn

[The Romulan Republic]

Personally, we don't need nukes to bomb them back, our convention guided missiles can reach anywhere inside Nork from Naval platforms.
We have our long-distance bombers and our bombing drones, all of which can wipe out not only the DMZ as a hazard, but keep Pyongyang under total blitz. While I doubt we'll have Nork soldiers surrendering to drones (as Hussan's troops did in Kuwait), the same 100-day mix of fuel-air, bunker-busters, and other assorted aerial assault would pave the way for the boots to move and mop up.

The problem is the Nork populace are brainwashed. This will be the battle we tried to avoid in WWII by dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasake. Kim will tell them to fight (while he flees into China), and every man, woman, and even the children will fight to the death, and fall apologizing to both the Kims and their own ancestors for failing to stop the invaders. It will be a massacre.

(BTW: I see Kim firing at Seoul more likely than the US. His missiles won't reach that far)

I very much doubt every single North Korean will fight to the death. I honestly wonder how much of the legendary brainwashed loyalty of North Korea is genuine and how many people just put on a good show because they don't want to be imprisoned, tortured, or killed.

That's not to say that their won't be horrific casualties, or fanatics who will fight to the death, but what you're arguing seems like just writing off the entire country by saying their are no civilians in order to justify exterminating them all.

Also, what are the odds that China would accept a fleeing Kim Jong Un in this scenario? If they did, wouldn't that make it pretty much a given that it was a war between the US and China as well? I can't imagine the US effectively saying "Well, he nuked us and/or one of our allies, but he's in China now so we can't touch him" and leaving it at that.

[Broomstick]

I could see China taken in a fleeing Kim then turning around and handing him over to another country for PR and for the benefit of China. If you nuke someone else it gives the nation you're asking for asylum and easy out by declaring you a criminal and saying they're handing you over for trial.

[Simon_Jester]

Personally, we don't need nukes to bomb them back, our convention guided missiles can reach anywhere inside Nork from Naval platforms.

The big issue is scale. Point to any one building, bunker, or gun emplacement in North Korea, and we can hit it with a Tomahawk or some such.

The problem is that we wouldn't just be aiming to "bomb them back," we'd be aiming to end the current regime. Even if it weren't being done for the shades of our dead, we'd have to do it anyway, because of the disastrous precedent it would otherwise set if Kim Jong Un got to spend the next fifty years patting himself on the back for launching a nuclear attack on the United States and getting away with it.

To do that, with conventional weapons alone, would take far longer and be far costlier in both lives and resources than to do it with a mix of nuclear and conventional weapons. Thus, I would myself favor the use of nuclear weapons in the resulting war against North Korea, whenever appropriate to the circumstances.

We have our long-distance bombers and our bombing drones, all of which can wipe out not only the DMZ as a hazard, but keep Pyongyang under total blitz. While I doubt we'll have Nork soldiers surrendering to drones (as Hussan's troops did in Kuwait), the same 100-day mix of fuel-air, bunker-busters, and other assorted aerial assault would pave the way for the boots to move and mop up.

The problem is the Nork populace are brainwashed. This will be the battle we tried to avoid in WWII by dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasake. Kim will tell them to fight (while he flees into China), and every man, woman, and even the children will fight to the death, and fall apologizing to both the Kims and their own ancestors for failing to stop the invaders. It will be a massacre.

This is actually one of the best reasons to aggressively target command and control. Without a centralized system to give orders from Pyongyang (or some command bunker or whatever), it is entirely possible that the North Korean regime will fall apart from sheer paralysis.

And with Kim's ability to enforce his orders out of the picture, and the population in danger of starvation, I for one am not so sure they'd exhibit the kind of fanaticism you might expect. The big difference between North Korea and, say, 1944-era Japan is that all the super-crazed nationalism of North Korea is top-down and imposed from above by a tyranny that will murder you for disagreeing with them.

In early Showa Japan, you'd get murdered for questioning nationalism... but it would be done by volunteers, who in some cases (i.e. assassination of prominent politicians) would get convicted of murder and sentenced to death... And then other fanatical volunteers would step up to volunteer to be executed in their places!

The main reason the US Army Air Corps decided not to drop nuclear bombs on Tokyo and the emperor's palace was because of the concern that with the emperor dead, there'd be nobody left alive in Japan capable of ordering the nation to surrender, whose commands might be obeyed- because much of the population would ignore a command to surrender unless it came directly and personally from the emperor.

I don't think North Korea has that. If nothing else, because the Kim dynasty has had far more incentive to instill obedience into the population than actual zeal. Zeal can be turned against the ruling authorities; what the Kims have needed and wanted is abject, hopeless obedience and devotion.

...There is no follow on threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation with a NK. They are on their own. The same holds true for a nuclear Iran. They have no ability to deliver a strike large enough to lead to a MAD scenario, but to do so to either of those nations the US doesn't have to rely on nuclear weapons. We can just as completely conquer them and more important to the people running those places depose and replace them using conventional means as with nuclear. To a person who just watched NK get run over by a million man coalition of the most modern armies in the world the lesson is the same: Use nukes and its game over for us.

Firstly, my government might conclude "all you need to do is be able to fight off that million man coalition... and hey, you have a nuclear arsenal to do just that with!"

Secondly, small fanatical groups may well think they can escape retribution, resulting in separatist or radical factions using nuclear weapons in an unstable state as tools for their own strategic advantage. Such groups are less likely to try this if they know it means disaster for the whole nation, not just for the regime. Likewise there is less security to be had in giving your nuclear weapons to a 'deniable' group if you know nuclear retaliation is likely.

The objection I have here is to the notion that just because we decided not to nuke someone for reasons X, Y and Z that we won't ever do so to anyone. That logic doesn't follow unless you make unwarranted assumptions about a potential adversaries decision making process, assume a nuclear response is the only one that can give pause to someone contemplating a limited nuclear option, and unnecessarily limits the US to a single option. An option that requires them to kill millions of civilians no less.

Depending on what you decide to attack, it is far from necessary for a nuclear attack to directly kill millions of civilians. The indirect effects might do that- but the indirect effects of a protracted conventional war would do that to a country like North Korea anyway, since the North Koreans would (and did) starve en masse if other countries weren't actively and constantly shipping them food.

I do think the more interesting question here besides what's been gone over on the necessity of massive retaliation as a deterrent is... what happens to a fizzled attack? An ICBM shot down? Or one that botches a stage separation and ends up landing in the pacific instead of on top of San Diego?

Could the North Koreans spin it as a malfunction? If that's not bought into, would it be in the realm of massive retaliation even though no lives were lost to a (presumably) nuclear weapon? What happens if at that point, NK begins a general (conventional) offensive against SK... or what if it does not and keeps pushing the line of either a failed Sat launch, or a malfunctioning non-armed warhead?

In that case, massive nuclear retaliation becomes less likely, but conventional war becomes virtually certain, and nuclear weapons might well be used specifically against North Korea's own nuclear capabilities, or be held in reserve if the North Koreans even look like they're trying to use their own nuclear weapons in the resulting war.