| "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 hyperbolic." Is quite clearly a strawman. > You're using present tense with incredibly broad terminology > you really think we're currently, actively holding a nuclear gun to everyone's head over every little thing. Nope. Though perhaps I haven't made myself clear. Here it is more clearly: The US judiciously uses the threat of nuclear attacks on civilian population centers to achieve what it wants. This is one lever of power which the US pulls to achieve coercion and it uses its other levers much more frequently. It is the only nation that uses first-strike nuclear threats for coercive leverage in this way. Is that more clear? > Do you have any historical examples of the US actively strong-armining an opponent with the threat of a first strike over a political existential threat? Soviet Union (before they developed their own nuclear weapons, for instance), China (over Taiwan), DPRK (over the peninsula in proxy war aftermath), Iraq (in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq). Off the top of my head. But of course it has used the leverage in many other cases, and for its extended nuclear deterrence. > How about an economic existential threat? Hasn't happened, though NatSec considers economic competitiveness a core principle of National Security. The Cold War in fact was economic competition as well as political. So maybe we could use that. > How about cross-domain warfare with the threat of a nuclear first strike? We've got a nice list going on now don't we? > But to my knowledge they have never even come close to mplementation outside of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Did you miss the entire nuclear umbrella concept - a key US policy for the last 70 years? Wouldn't you have to admit that the deployment of a nuclear threat in the face of non-nuclear challenge (above) is cross-domain. So I think we've satisfied this one. I don't really know how to reply to the rambling at the end of the post. It wasn't really a question. |
But in any case, we've clearly never followed through on the threat of a nuclear first strike, and according to this page we haven't issued one since the 1950s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_blackmail
I was especially shocked to hear we threatened Iraq with one in the run up to 2003... I just googled around to be sure and while there was tons of rhetoric about "pre-emptive strikes" it was always in a conventional context.
Where are you getting your information exactly?
Also that "rambling" was me poiting out scenarios where a nuclear reponse would be reasonable under your terminology, or at least understandable when taken in context. It wasn't meant as a question.