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Bush Considered Using Nuclear Weapons Against Afghanistan After 9/11

posted by martyb on Tuesday September 01 2015, @08:04AM   
from the it's-"talk-softly-and-CARRY-a-big-stick" dept.

HughPickens.com writes:

Oder Aderet reports at Haaretz that the United States considered using nuclear weapons against Afghanistan in response to the September 11 attack according to Michael Steiner, who served as a political advisor to then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, as reported in Der Spiegel. "The papers were written," Steiner said when asked whether the U.S. had considered using nuclear weapons in response to the attacks orchestrated by Al-Qaida's Osama bin Laden, in which almost 3,000 people were killed. "They had really played through all possibilities." Steiner added that Schröder feared that the US, which was in a state of shock following the attacks, would overreact. "After Sept. 11, the entire administration positively dug in. We no longer had access to Rice, much less to the president. It wasn't just our experience, but also that of the French and British as well. Of course that made us enormously worried."

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Original Submission

• Re:what if we had? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:59PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @12:59PM (#230776)

  one interesting thought experiment is how things would be if we had nuked Afghanistan. how would things be different today?

  Well, detonating a nuclear bomb quite close to Russia would certainly have not improved the American-Russian relations. Also the relation to the allies would have suffered. Well, maybe there would not have been a war in Iraq because no one would have been willing to fight with the mad Americans. Or maybe the war would have happened anyway, just with the USA as only aggressor.

  Terrorist groups would have had far more convincing arguments to get more followers. There probably would have been a dramatic increase of terror attacks to the US and its allies; possibly causing some allies reacting by ceasing to be allies (it would be more easily justified, too, as America threw the bomb). And the USA would then have gotten much less solidarity, as then many people would have said, they asked for it by throwing the bomb.

  There's a worldwide consensus that nuclear weapons are weapons of last resort. Afghanistan was no last-resort situation, and therefore the reaction of the world to America nuking Afghanistan would have been be accordingly.

  Parent