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from the it's-"talk-softly-and-CARRY-a-big-stick" dept.
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."
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Tuesday September 01 2015, @07:26PM
Maybe for a funny definition of "restrained".
...
Sure, using nuclear weapons would have made it worse
worse? WORSE?! you have no idea about the shear devastation that a nuclear attack would unleash. you are complaining that an angry gorilla gave people paper cuts when it could have just as easily torn them limb from limb!
The result of those massive incursions was to destabilize the entire area. Today, ISIS owes its success, and perhaps its very existence to the US.
if we nuked Afghanistan, how do you know we would even bother with the other countries? how do you know how other countries would respond after such a complete annihilation?
On 9/11, around 3000 people died. In the course of the various wars, the US has inflicted around 100 times as many casualties. Add in the deaths caused indirectly by the US (for example, fighting ISIS), and it's quite the butcher's bill.
it would have been easier to nuke them resulting in a 100 times more death.
it should have been possible to turn the terrorists, and the nations supporting them, into pariahs. Cut them off from the rest of the world, and let the wither.
Pakistan has done that but it has done nothing to slow them down. Why do you think doing the same would render a different result?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @09:32PM
I was recently reading an article [counterpunch.org] that mentions how poor an understanding most people have of the destructive capability of a nuclear warhead. [google.com]
(Thanks, corrupt bureaucrats for making up the lies and thanks corrupt Lamestream Media for repeating the soft-pedaled crap.)
The Hiroshima bomb had a yield of 13 kilotons.
It obliterated a city and killed 140,000 people (mostly civilians, a third of them children).
Modern weapons dwarf that weapon by orders of magnitude.
...and these heinous modern weapons are actually smaller than the multi-megaton weapons of an earlier generation.
Additionally, Chernobyl was a -steam- explosion and it caused increased cancer rates in northern Sweden--hundreds of miles away.
-- gewg_