Iraq uses chemical weapons against coalition in '91

On nukes it depends. Are we talking city destroyers or small, tactical nukes that can say take out just a city block or a block of government buildings?

Maybe just detonating a tactical nuke on a remote army outpost with the message more were coming would give Saddam the message to surrender.
 
What sorts of chemical weapons are we talking about anyway? Puke gas? VX? Something else entirely...?
 
On nukes it depends. Are we talking city destroyers or small, tactical nukes that can say take out just a city block or a block of government buildings?

Maybe just detonating a tactical nuke on a remote army outpost with the message more were coming would give Saddam the message to surrender.

oh, come on!!!!

Saddam would just call America's bluff, as he would KNOW that if American wiped Bagdad off the map, Public opinion would IMMEDIATELY turn against Washington for slaughtering “poor, innocent civvies”.
 

Sandman396

Banned
Um, no. "Guaranteed vengance" is the mechanism through which deterrence works. Because the enemy knows that retaliation will come, he will not strike. It is one of those paradoxes quite commonly found in nuclear strategy: in order to prevent the use of WMDs, you must be ready and willing to retaliate with WMDs.

So you are saying that the only thing that stopped the use of nukes during the cold war was the risk of retaliation?
 
So you are saying that the only thing that stopped the use of nukes during the cold war was the risk of retaliation?

An oversimplification (and I wouldn't exactly use that wording... see below), but yes. War is a means of achieving policy and hence is a cost/benefit calculation. What nuclear weapons (especially when in the possession of an opponent) do is make the costs of war near-guaranteed to completely outweigh any benefits.

That is not to say that two states having nuclear weapons will totally stop those two states from going too war and/or using their nuclear weapons. What it does do is decrease the chance of war between the two states enormously.

On the flip side, if two nations with nuclear weapons do wind up in a war then the chance of the use of nuclear weapons is higher then a nuclear power vs a non-nuclear power.

This is also somewhat dependent on the policy of the nations involved... for instance, US nuclear policy in the 1980's and early-90's was that the United States reserved the right to use nuclear weapons first even in otherwise purely-conventional conflicts if the President judged it necessary. That same policy then went on to say that chemical or biological weapons would be retaliated against with nuclear force.

The Soviets at this same time period, on the other hand, viewed chemical weapons as an 'intermediate' weapon... something to which you retaliate against with your own chemical weapons, not nuclear weapons.

With that in mind, I certainly do not think that the US would retaliate against Iraq civilian targets with nuclear weapons should Saddam use chemical weapons. However, all those Iraqi divisions (particularly the Republican Guard ones) deployed along the Kuwait/Iraq-Saudi border are ideal targets for battlefield nuclear weapons. Unlike heavily urbanized Central Europe, the large swathes of uninhabited desert in that part of the Middle East means that civilian collateral damage from initial blast effects and short-term radiation would be light, possibly even non-existant. Long-term radiation casualties would be more modest but those are less severe by nature, even more so if the number of warheads used is kept limited (<10) and low yield (<50 kilotons).

In my view, nuclear retaliation against Iraqi chemical weapons is probable (but not garunteed) and the retaliation would be limited, the strikes made against military targets, and would fall on the Iraqi units deployed in the deserts of Kuwait and Western Iraq.
 
oh, come on!!!!

Saddam would just call America's bluff, as he would KNOW that if American wiped Bagdad off the map, Public opinion would IMMEDIATELY turn against Washington for slaughtering “poor, innocent civvies”.
Wiped Baghdad off the map?

You are going way further. Now I'm no nuke expert and I dont know all the specifics but I've heard of small battlefield nukes that would have only wiped out say a square mile or so. The majority of Baghdad would have survived.
 
Borrowed from a similar discussion elsewhere:

Gen. NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF: My nightmare scenario was that our forces would attack into Iraq and find themselves in such a great concentration that they became targeted by chemical weapons or some sort of a rudimentary nuclear device that would cause mass casualties.

That's exactly what the Iraqis did in the Iran-Iraq war. They would take the attacking masses of the Iranians, let them run up against their barrier system, and when there were thousands of people massed against the barrier system, they would drop chemical weapons on them and kill thousands of people.

Gen. WALT BOOMER, Commander, U.S. Marines: I was overwhelmingly concerned about casualties. We were outnumbered when we attacked into Kuwait. Sometimes people have lost sight of that. But in addition to being outnumbered, there was this overriding concern, overwhelming concern about chemical warfare. This just occupied most of my waking moments.

Col. JOHN ADMIRE, U.S. Marines: We expected casualties somewhere in the 25 to 30 percent range. But there were essentially no firefights, essentially no battles. The Iraqis were there, but they chose_ they elected not to fight. In many respects, they could retreat and they could surrender much faster than we could attack or advance and the_ the war really became a war of collection of enemy prisoners of war.

Gen. WALT BOOMER: While I remain apprehensive about some of their capability, I'm also confident that we can work through that. I think we can work through their chemical capability.

Gen. CALVIN WALLER, Deputy Commander in Chief, Coalition Forces: I don't think anyone predicted that the Marines would get much farther than maybe five kilometers - at the very most, maybe eight - and that then, with the enormous, overwhelming forces that were arrayed in that area, that it would stop the Marines.

Gen. COLIN POWELL: Knocking off the dams on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers would have caused enormous destruction downstream. The loss of civilian life would have_ would have been terrible and we really had not thoroughly analyzed_ we knew how to hit the dams, but I don't know if we analyzed what the effect downstream would have been. But nevertheless, it would have been a good one to threaten the Iraqis with.

And, of course, there was always the implicit threat of nuclear weapons. I don't think we ever would have used them, but nevertheless, the Iraqis didn't know that. And we could have if the provocation was serious enough.

I am pretty sure it was De La Billiere who mentioned the 20-40% Kuwaiti breaching unit casualty numbers. But you Americans being Americans, the PBS version of the BBC Gulf War documentary (the quotes above are from the PBS transcript) cut out all the British interviews apart from the Tornado crew that got captured. The BBC version of the documentary is on YouTube.
 
So you are saying that the only thing that stopped the use of nukes during the cold war was the risk of retaliation?

Eh, IMHO it wasn't the risk of retaliation so much as the long span in the Cold War where any nuclear war would have been far more devastating to the USSR than it would have ever been to the USA. By the time the USSR managed to actually match and then start bypassing the USA in terms of potential in a nuclear war it was too close to its own disintegration for this to have ultimately mattered.
 
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