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View Poll Results: Did Trump Say It?
Yes 3 21.43%
No 1 7.14%
We don't know 6 42.86%
We don't know, but I trust Joe Scarborough 1 7.14%
It's too believable to not be true 3 21.43%
Voters: 14. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 24th June 2019, 08:31 AM   #1
theprestige
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Epistemology of Trump - Did He Say It?

Here's Joe Scarborough in 2016, claiming Donald Trump doesn't know why we can't use nuclear weapons:

https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box...-using-nuclear

So far, so good, but let's examine the claim.

First, here's what we know Donald Trump actually said:
Originally Posted by Donald Trump

Here's what someone in the room with Trump at the time claims they witnessed:
Originally Posted by Eyewitness

And finally, here's what Joe Scarborough claims an anonymous "foreign policy expert" claims they witnessed Trump say:
Originally Posted by Joe Scarborough
‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’

So. Did Trump actually say that?
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Old 24th June 2019, 09:20 AM   #2
carlitos
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No evidence, no source, no video, but it fits with the other things that Trump has said. And, when Chris Matthews pressed him on this, here's how it went.

Quote:

MATTHEWS (intro - from a separate broadcast) : Given President Trump`s decision to rip up the Iran nuclear deal
and pursue a separate agreement with North Korea, his past views on nuclear
weapons are relevant. Back in 2016, he told me he wouldn`t rule out using
a nuclear weapon as president, even in Europe.

.......

MATTHEWS: OK. The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it. David Cameron in Britain heard it. The Japanese, where we bombed them in 45, heard it. They`re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.

TRUMP: Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?


...........

MATTHEWS: Can you tell the Middle East we`re not using a nuclear weapon on
anybody?

TRUMP: I would never say that. I would never take any of my cards off the
table.

MATTHEWS: How about Europe? We won`t use it in Europe?

TRUMP: I – I`m not going to take it off the table.

MATTHEWS: You might use it in Europe?

(LAUGHTER)

TRUMP: No, I don`t think so. But I`m not taking –

MATTHEWS: Well, just say it. I will never use a nuclear weapon in Europe.

TRUMP: I am not – I am not taking cards off the table.

So - what's the difference between:
"a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons". .....

TRUMP: Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?

AND
‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’
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Old 24th June 2019, 09:33 AM   #3
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Originally Posted by carlitos View Post
No evidence, no source, no video, but it fits with the other things that Trump has said. And, when Chris Matthews pressed him on this, here's how it went.

So - what's the difference between:
"a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons". .....

TRUMP: Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?

AND
‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’
Yeah, seems like a weird hair to split. This is totally in line with stuff Trump says.
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Old 24th June 2019, 09:43 AM   #4
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Jeremy Corbyn in the UK at one time said he would never use nuclear weapons, there was quite a bit of backlash.

Apparently it was a bad thing to say as it makes them pointless as a deterrent.
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Old 24th June 2019, 09:44 AM   #5
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Originally Posted by carlitos View Post
No evidence, no source, no video, but it fits with the other things that Trump has said. And, when Chris Matthews pressed him on this, here's how it went.




So - what's the difference between:
"a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons". .....

TRUMP: Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?

AND
‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’
Good point. The nice thing about the Matthews interview is that it's direct evidence. We can see for ourselves exactly what was said, and the context in which it was said.

Since I believe that the worst thing you can do with nuclear weapons is promise to never use them, I'm glad that Trump at least refused to do that, even when pressed by Chris Matthews. I'm pretty sure this is consistent with longstanding US nuclear policy, and is exactly the kind of message the US president should be sending.

His "then why are we making them?" is turning the issue around and pointing it back at Chris Matthews. It's pressing Matthews to examine his own - our own! - begged question about nuclear weapons policy.
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Old 24th June 2019, 09:46 AM   #6
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Originally Posted by plague311 View Post
Yeah, seems like a weird hair to split. This is totally in line with stuff Trump says.
But not necessarily in line with what we believe Trump thinks. Like I said to carlitos, the Matthews interview gives us some context for the kind of question Trump is asking.

---

Maybe I should start another thread, asking the Membership here why we can't use nuclear weapons, and see how well we do as "foreign policy advisors".

Do you think Chris Matthews knows why we make nuclear weapons?
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Old 24th June 2019, 09:48 AM   #7
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
Good point. The nice thing about the Matthews interview is that it's direct evidence. We can see for ourselves exactly what was said, and the context in which it was said.

Since I believe that the worst thing you can do with nuclear weapons is promise to never use them, I'm glad that Trump at least refused to do that, even when pressed by Chris Matthews. I'm pretty sure this is consistent with longstanding US nuclear policy, and is exactly the kind of message the US president should be sending.

His "then why are we making them?" is turning the issue around and pointing it back at Chris Matthews. It's pressing Matthews to examine his own - our own! - begged question about nuclear weapons policy.
Oooh-kay...
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Old 24th June 2019, 09:56 AM   #8
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
Since I believe that the worst thing you can do with nuclear weapons is promise to never use them, I'm glad that Trump at least refused to do that, even when pressed by Chris Matthews.
He did, however, say he'd be the last one to use nuclear weapons.
Quote:
As a candidate, Trump seemed to shy from nuclear weapons at times, saying the “biggest problem, to me, in the world, is nuclear, and proliferation.” He said using such weapons would be an “absolute last step.” He added in April that, “I will be the last to use nuclear weapons. It's a horror to use nuclear weapons.”
This is one of the many problems with Trump. He is fundamentally untrustworthy. Anything he says has such a short shelf-life as to be largely meaningless.
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Old 24th June 2019, 10:01 AM   #9
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
But not necessarily in line with what we believe Trump thinks.
I don't try to understand what Trump thinks. As an extremely intelligent superhero said, Trump's "mind is a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on him." Understanding what he's thinking from one minute to the next is like trying to catch a knuckleball. No one knows where that thing will hit the ground.

Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
Maybe I should start another thread, asking the Membership here why we can't use nuclear weapons, and see how well we do as "foreign policy advisors".

Do you think Chris Matthews knows why we make nuclear weapons?
I'm sure he does, but the reason why we can't (Not sure where can't comes from, shouldn't might be better) use nuclear weapons is because the reasoning to use them would have to be fairly extreme. It's like swatting a fly with a semi truck. Yeah, it'll get the job done, but it's not the best way to do something.
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Old 24th June 2019, 10:29 AM   #10
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Originally Posted by Regnad Kcin View Post
Oooh-kay...
Ha. Fair enough. There are some uses of nuclear weapons that would be worse than promising to never use them.

But promising to never use them is definitely near the top of my list of bad things to do with nuclear weapons.

The doctrine of nuclear deterrence relies on the credible threat of their use. In both directions. In MAD, it deters other nuclear powers from using their weapons against you. It also deters other belligerents from doing things that would properly call for the use of nuclear weapons in response.

None of this works if you successfully convince other belligerents that you will never use such weapons.
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Old 24th June 2019, 10:32 AM   #11
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Originally Posted by Upchurch View Post
He did, however, say he'd be the last one to use nuclear weapons.

This is one of the many problems with Trump. He is fundamentally untrustworthy. Anything he says has such a short shelf-life as to be largely meaningless.
What's so untrustworthy about this? And look how different this is from the impression given by Scarborough. When we examine what Trump actually says, it's somewhat difference from what you may think he's been saying.
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Old 24th June 2019, 10:38 AM   #12
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You can ask Trump if he said what Joe said he said, or you can ask him if he said what he actually said.

In either case, he will insist that he said and meant something completely different, and you are Fake News for saying otherwise.
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Old 24th June 2019, 10:41 AM   #13
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Originally Posted by The Great Zaganza View Post
You can ask Trump if he said what Joe said he said, or you can ask him if he said what he actually said.

In either case, he will insist that he said and meant something completely different, and you are Fake News for saying otherwise.
Should a president-elect *not* ask why we can't use nuclear weapons?
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Old 24th June 2019, 11:02 AM   #14
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
What's so untrustworthy about this?
I wasn't saying this statement was untrustworthy. I was saying that it is functionally equivalent to saying he would never use them, which you said is the worst thing you could do with nuclear weapons and something you claimed Trump didn't do.

Trump's dishonesty, as a broader topic, has been long established for years, if not decades. As President, the evidence starts on inauguration day. I'm sure you've heard about that.
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Old 24th June 2019, 11:16 AM   #15
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Originally Posted by Upchurch View Post
>snip<

Trump's dishonesty, as a broader topic, has been long established for years, if not decades. As President, the evidence starts on inauguration day. I'm sure you've heard about that.
According to the WAPO, as of June 10, Trump has made 10, 796 verified false or misleading claims as president. That was two weeks ago so clearly the number has increased.
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Old 24th June 2019, 11:30 AM   #16
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Originally Posted by Upchurch View Post
I wasn't saying this statement was untrustworthy. I was saying that it is functionally equivalent to saying he would never use them, which you said is the worst thing you could do with nuclear weapons and something you claimed Trump didn't do.

Trump's dishonesty, as a broader topic, has been long established for years, if not decades. As President, the evidence starts on inauguration day. I'm sure you've heard about that.
I don't think it's functionally equivalent at all.
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Old 24th June 2019, 11:55 AM   #17
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
Should a president-elect *not* ask why we can't use nuclear weapons?
An expert?

Sure.
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Old 24th June 2019, 11:56 AM   #18
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Thing is, there is no point in Stellmanning Trump, since he never sticks to any opinion anyway.
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Old 24th June 2019, 01:02 PM   #19
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
I don't think it's functionally equivalent at all.
Well, of course, you don't.

If we were to take Trump at his word... no, really. Stop laughing.

If we take Trump at his word, everyone with nuclear weapon capacity would have to use their nukes before Trump would. Right? What are the odds of that really happening?
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Old 24th June 2019, 01:18 PM   #20
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
Here's Joe Scarborough in 2016, claiming Donald Trump doesn't know why we can't use nuclear weapons:

https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box...-using-nuclear

So far, so good, but let's examine the claim.

First, here's what we know Donald Trump actually said:



Here's what someone in the room with Trump at the time claims they witnessed:



And finally, here's what Joe Scarborough claims an anonymous "foreign policy expert" claims they witnessed Trump say:



So. Did Trump actually say that?
The quote has entered the cannon of Trump Stupidity. What difference does the actual quote make if the spin can be used to make him like dumber than he is? I haven't the slightest problem using the quote if it damages Trump. As to what he actually said or meant, I don't know nor do I care.

Uranium One justifies any dirty trick, deceit or unfair spin.
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Old 24th June 2019, 01:22 PM   #21
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Originally Posted by The Great Zaganza View Post
An expert?

Sure.
I'm not sure I understand. According to Scarborough, he did ask an expert. But that anecdote seems to be a centerpiece of the claim that Trump is a fool.

But why does it have to be an expert? Why not ask you? Do you consider yourself incompetent to study the weapons, and reason about their use, and reach ethical and practical conclusions of your own?

As a voting member of a democracy that has nuclear weapons in its arsenal, do you think it's not not your responsibility to have your own answers to these kinds of questions? Do you think Chris Matthews shouldn't be able to answer at least as any "foreign policy expert"? Maybe not about specific detailed scenarios, but at the very least about the general principles?

---

If the president asked you whether we should use nuclear weapons, I'd expect you to have an informed opinion, at least.

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Old 24th June 2019, 02:16 PM   #22
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Originally Posted by Craig4 View Post
...the cannon of Trump Stupidity.
It's opportunities like these that make me wish I was better at Photoshop.

ETA -

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Old 24th June 2019, 02:22 PM   #23
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Here’s how I see it.
Imagine you are running for president and assume you are trying to win the election.

You are in an interview and hear this:
OK. The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it. David Cameron in Britain heard it. The Japanese, where we bombed them in 45, heard it. They`re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.
You are a quick thinker and come up with 4 or 5 ways to answer the question. Are you really going to go with “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?” You have a chance to clarify your position but instead of doing that you act like a school child who hasn’t done his homework.

So, quick show of hands. How many people here would have given President Trump’s answer in this setting?

Wouldn’t it have been easier, more helpful, and more foresightful to say, “we’re willing to use them but only as part of MAD. I have no intention of adopting a first strike nuclear attack. We are willing to use them to defend ourselves a military ally who has been struck by nukes, but we are not going to say ‘you attacked us with a convention missile so we will attack you with a nuclear missile’”?

.........
As far as I am concerned, we can leave aside the question of stupidity, we can leave behind the question of mental illness, but isn’t there ample evidence that this guy is in over his head?
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Old 24th June 2019, 03:14 PM   #24
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Sidebar.

I think that the issue with nuclear weapons stems from World War 2. People had just seen several years of unrelenting total industrial warfare between nation states. Victory was understood to be a matter of smashing the enemy state - its industry, its people, its infrastructure. Whole cities were being destroyed. At the very end of the war, a major victory was achieved with the destruction of two more cities, more efficiently than ever before in human history.

So that's what people were thinking about, when nuclear weapons first appeared on the scene: Total industrial warfare, with belligerents racing to smash entire countries as quickly as possible. As horrific as that already was, nuclear bombs promised to dial the horror up to eleven. What used to take legions of tanks and planes years to accomplish could now be done by a few bombers in a few hours. So people were very reasonably terrified of the implications.

One result of this was the MAD doctrine: The guarantee that any attempt to use nuclear weapons as tools of total industrial warfare would trigger immediate escalation to the final position - total destruction for all participants. Nobody wanted to see total nuclear warfare, and MAD was the policy that prevented it from happening.

Another result, following from the first, was two whole generations of people who thought of nuclear weapons exclusively in those terms: Either you don't use them at all, or everybody dies.

And for a long time, this made sense. Nukes were extremely cost-effective at the high end of the destruction scale, but the only belligerents who might require that level of destruction were superpowers who also had nuclear arsenals and also adhered to the MAD doctrine.

But other doctrines were also proposed. Nuclear Utilization Target Selection (NUTS). I assume the acronym was chosen with the same degree of black humor as MAD. Under the NUTS doctrine, it was possible to use nuclear weapons in a limited capacity. Not for total destruction of nation-states, as in WW2, but in more precise and restricted attacks that would not escalate to total nuclear war between belligerents.

I'm not sure NUTS would ever have worked against another nuclear power. Certainly it's in every nuclear power's best interest to promise that any application of NUTS against them will result in immediate escalation to MAD. I think the theorists behind NUTS may have had some idea that one could perhaps strike a carrier at sea, or a vital military complex with a single nuke, and use the Red Phone or similar to convince the opposing leadership to *not* immediately go full retard in response.

However.

Today things are a little bit different. Modern nukes are much smaller, and much more accurate. This means that precision attacks against single targets are possible. It also means that effective attacks against hardened targets, with limited collateral damage, are also possible.

At the same time, there is a growing list of potential targets, both politically and militarily, for such weapons. The B61 nuclear bomb in the US arsenal, for example, can have a yield as low as 0.3 kilotons. By comparison, the first hydrogen bomb, Fat Man, had a yield of 21 kilotons. Precision strikes by about five such bombs would probably be sufficient to decapitate the North Korean military-industrial complex, with collateral damage comparable to the same strikes carried out with conventional explosives. Given the volume of conventional explosives needed to achieve the same result, that might not even be a practical option. Similar solutions might someday soon be worth considering for Iran as well.

Nuclear bombs produce toxic fallout that persists for years. This is a serious ethical concern. However, I think this is essentially the same concern that arises whenever you must consider collateral damage and the use of weapons. A thousand cancer cases over thirty years may be preferable to ten thousand deaths and maimings from large scale conventional bombing. Those numbers are pulled from my ass. At some point we'd have to come up with more realistic estimates, and see how they affect the collateral damage calculus.

Anyway, there's no rule that says that Russia must immediately to go MAD, or even consider it, just because North Korea got hit with a handful of small precision nukes. There's no existential threat to Russia in that. Nor to China.

Basically we're entering a world where there are - I think anyway - legitimate targets for nuclear weapons, outside the context of total industrial warfare between nation states. And outside of that context, MAD is not a concern. The remaining concerns are simply those that arise whenever we decide to use weapons: Military necessity, distinction, and proportionality. These concerns can be addressed with the use of nuclear weapons just as easily as any other weapons. If you can figure out when it's appropriate to use a bullet or a bunker-buster, you can figure out when it's appropriate to use a nuke.
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Old 24th June 2019, 03:46 PM   #25
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
Here's Joe Scarborough in 2016, claiming Donald Trump doesn't know why we can't use nuclear weapons:

https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box...-using-nuclear

So far, so good, but let's examine the claim.

First, here's what we know Donald Trump actually said:

Here's what someone in the room with Trump at the time claims they witnessed:

And finally, here's what Joe Scarborough claims an anonymous "foreign policy expert" claims they witnessed Trump say:

So. Did Trump actually say that?
You're worried someone put words in Trump's mouth?

Might I remind you of the phenomena "There's a Tweet for that"?

Why should anyone care if Trump was misquoted?
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Old 24th June 2019, 03:51 PM   #26
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Originally Posted by Skeptic Ginger View Post
You're worried someone put words in Trump's mouth?



Might I remind you of the phenomena "There's a Tweet for that"?



Why should anyone care if Trump was misquoted?
Why are you not concerned?

Anyway, my point is that there's no Trump quote to be misquoted, here.

You subscribe to the Yale group theory of remote diagnosis, and you don't care about the quality of the data you're relying on?
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Old 24th June 2019, 04:57 PM   #27
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Originally Posted by carlitos View Post
It's opportunities like these that make me wish I was better at Photoshop.

ETA -
You're welcome for the set up.
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Old 24th June 2019, 05:35 PM   #28
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At this point I wonder why anyone should care if he said it or not. Trump says lots of things and there is little chance that he means any of them. He lies so often that there is no point in attaching any seriousness to anything he says at all.

If he said it he will claim he didn't. If he didn't say it he will claim he did. It just depends on whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear. Truth is irrelevant to Trump.

Believing anything Trump says is a stupid thing to do and I would advise strongly against it.
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Old 24th June 2019, 06:23 PM   #29
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I'm quite surprised with this thread.

I'm not a trump supporter by any means, I really don't like what he stands for,
but, keeping nuclear weapons on the table as a deterrent is what he is supposed to do isn't he?.

In the UK, corbyn got it in the neck for saying he would not use nuclear weapons, so keeping them on the table seems to be policy here, too.

Yet this thread seems to be full of 'you can't believe anything he says anyway' sort of thing and not really addressing the point?

It's like everyone is just dismissing him out of hand, rather than addressing the shizzle he says,
pls don't do that, that's what enabled him to become your president in the first place.

Last edited by p0lka; 24th June 2019 at 06:28 PM.
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Old 24th June 2019, 11:10 PM   #30
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
A thousand cancer cases over thirty years may be preferable to ten thousand deaths and maimings from large scale conventional bombing.
There could be very significant difference. How many of thousand deaths might be South Korea or even Japan?
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Old 25th June 2019, 03:18 AM   #31
The Great Zaganza
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
I'm not sure I understand. According to Scarborough, he did ask an expert. But that anecdote seems to be a centerpiece of the claim that Trump is a fool.

But why does it have to be an expert? Why not ask you? Do you consider yourself incompetent to study the weapons, and reason about their use, and reach ethical and practical conclusions of your own?

As a voting member of a democracy that has nuclear weapons in its arsenal, do you think it's not not your responsibility to have your own answers to these kinds of questions? Do you think Chris Matthews shouldn't be able to answer at least as any "foreign policy expert"? Maybe not about specific detailed scenarios, but at the very least about the general principles?

---

If the president asked you whether we should use nuclear weapons, I'd expect you to have an informed opinion, at least.
If Trump is interested in the complexities of nuclear deterrent, he has to ask experts in a private setting with plenty of opportunity for clarification.
That is, if he actually wants to learn something.
But he himself claimed to be an expert already, since some relative of his studied nuclear physics.

Trump never asked to get an answer, only to pretend to make a point.
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Old 25th June 2019, 04:45 AM   #32
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
But that anecdote seems to be a centerpiece of the claim that Trump is a fool.
Ah, yes, if we can show that Trump only said something similar to a statement but not exactly that statement, then magically every other stupid thing he has said and done disappears! Poof, he's no longer a fool!

Fringe resets are fun, for those who can't hear or remember anything they don't want to. Not so much for the rest of us, though.
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Old 25th June 2019, 07:47 AM   #33
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Originally Posted by Ladewig View Post
There could be very significant difference. How many of thousand deaths might be South Korea or even Japan?
That's a good question, and definitely something to consider seriously with the use of weapons.

But I doubt an attack on North Korea, even with low yield nukes, would cause any any deaths in Japan.
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Old 25th June 2019, 08:24 AM   #34
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Originally Posted by wareyin View Post
Ah, yes, if we can show that Trump only said something similar to a statement but not exactly that statement, then magically every other stupid thing he has said and done disappears! Poof, he's no longer a fool!

Fringe resets are fun, for those who can't hear or remember anything they don't want to. Not so much for the rest of us, though.
This thread is an odd one for me. I'm happy to stipulate that Joe Scarborough is a lying, dastardly villain who either made up a just-so story about Trump saying something or repeated a story that he heard, or embellished the story that he heard. Moreover, that the lie then traveled around the liberal-media-world before the Truth could put its pants on.

So what? It's one data point, and Trump showed over and over and over during the campaign that he didn't know jack squat about nuclear anything, but he was going to hire "the best people" so we needn't worry. Also, he was going to act so Presidential that we'd be sleepy and bored..
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Old 25th June 2019, 08:41 AM   #35
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We can't know what Trump actually said. Even when you hear or read the things Trumps said it is difficult to impossible to "know" what he said.
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Old 25th June 2019, 09:00 AM   #36
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
.....
But promising to never use them is definitely near the top of my list of bad things to do with nuclear weapons.

The doctrine of nuclear deterrence relies on the credible threat of their use.
.....
It does not contradict the principle of nuclear deterrence to promise never to use nuclear weapons FIRST. Anyone else who would launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. knows it would face annihilation. But no one should need to fear that the U.S. would launch nuclear weapons first during some non-nuclear dispute. The worst thing would be for another power to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the U.S. in anticipation that the U.S. was about to launch their own.

Interestingly, most nuclear powers, including Russia, have embraced the "no first use" doctrine to some degree (sometimes making exceptions in the face of overwhelming conventional attacks). But the U.S. has not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use

Nevertheless, we expect every President to approach the idea of ending human civilization with appropriate seriousness and gravity. "Why do we have'em if we can't use'em?" reflects a chilling ignorance of the issues, exacerbated by Trump's rants about raining hellfire on North Korea, Iran etc. Suppose North Korea decides that an attack is imminent and unavoidable, and launches it's dozen or so nuclear missiles against the U.S. Then what?
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Old 26th June 2019, 12:00 AM   #37
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Originally Posted by carlitos View Post
So - what's the difference between:
"a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons". .....

TRUMP: Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?

AND
‘If we have them, why can’t we use them?’
The difference is: one can be wriggled around by partisan deniers looking for any way out (no matter how ridiculous), while the other one can't.

But actually that's not true. There is no statement Trump makes that can't be wriggled around.

"when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."? Locker room talk.

"******** countries"? “we do not recall the president saying these comments specifically.”

"Russia, if you're listening..."? I was joking.
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Old 26th June 2019, 12:23 AM   #38
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Originally Posted by carlitos View Post
So what? It's one data point,
One data point that might not be entirely accurate, out of thousands? That means I win!

Classic partisan debating tactic. Same as counting that one scientist out of thousands who isn't quite sure about AGW, or that one democrat voter whose signature 'didn't match'. Never mind that you're losing the war a thousand times over - just cite one battle whose outcome is disputed (by you) and claim victory!
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Old 29th June 2019, 09:36 AM   #39
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Originally Posted by theprestige View Post
Sidebar.

I think that the issue with nuclear weapons stems from World War 2. People had just seen several years of unrelenting total industrial warfare between nation states. Victory was understood to be a matter of smashing the enemy state - its industry, its people, its infrastructure. Whole cities were being destroyed. At the very end of the war, a major victory was achieved with the destruction of two more cities, more efficiently than ever before in human history.

So that's what people were thinking about, when nuclear weapons first appeared on the scene: Total industrial warfare, with belligerents racing to smash entire countries as quickly as possible. As horrific as that already was, nuclear bombs promised to dial the horror up to eleven. What used to take legions of tanks and planes years to accomplish could now be done by a few bombers in a few hours. So people were very reasonably terrified of the implications.

One result of this was the MAD doctrine: The guarantee that any attempt to use nuclear weapons as tools of total industrial warfare would trigger immediate escalation to the final position - total destruction for all participants. Nobody wanted to see total nuclear warfare, and MAD was the policy that prevented it from happening.

Another result, following from the first, was two whole generations of people who thought of nuclear weapons exclusively in those terms: Either you don't use them at all, or everybody dies.

And for a long time, this made sense. Nukes were extremely cost-effective at the high end of the destruction scale, but the only belligerents who might require that level of destruction were superpowers who also had nuclear arsenals and also adhered to the MAD doctrine.

But other doctrines were also proposed. Nuclear Utilization Target Selection (NUTS). I assume the acronym was chosen with the same degree of black humor as MAD. Under the NUTS doctrine, it was possible to use nuclear weapons in a limited capacity. Not for total destruction of nation-states, as in WW2, but in more precise and restricted attacks that would not escalate to total nuclear war between belligerents.

I'm not sure NUTS would ever have worked against another nuclear power. Certainly it's in every nuclear power's best interest to promise that any application of NUTS against them will result in immediate escalation to MAD. I think the theorists behind NUTS may have had some idea that one could perhaps strike a carrier at sea, or a vital military complex with a single nuke, and use the Red Phone or similar to convince the opposing leadership to *not* immediately go full retard in response.

However.

Today things are a little bit different. Modern nukes are much smaller, and much more accurate. This means that precision attacks against single targets are possible. It also means that effective attacks against hardened targets, with limited collateral damage, are also possible.

At the same time, there is a growing list of potential targets, both politically and militarily, for such weapons. The B61 nuclear bomb in the US arsenal, for example, can have a yield as low as 0.3 kilotons. By comparison, the first hydrogen bomb, Fat Man, had a yield of 21 kilotons. Precision strikes by about five such bombs would probably be sufficient to decapitate the North Korean military-industrial complex, with collateral damage comparable to the same strikes carried out with conventional explosives. Given the volume of conventional explosives needed to achieve the same result, that might not even be a practical option. Similar solutions might someday soon be worth considering for Iran as well.

Nuclear bombs produce toxic fallout that persists for years. This is a serious ethical concern. However, I think this is essentially the same concern that arises whenever you must consider collateral damage and the use of weapons. A thousand cancer cases over thirty years may be preferable to ten thousand deaths and maimings from large scale conventional bombing. Those numbers are pulled from my ass. At some point we'd have to come up with more realistic estimates, and see how they affect the collateral damage calculus.

Anyway, there's no rule that says that Russia must immediately to go MAD, or even consider it, just because North Korea got hit with a handful of small precision nukes. There's no existential threat to Russia in that. Nor to China.

Basically we're entering a world where there are - I think anyway - legitimate targets for nuclear weapons, outside the context of total industrial warfare between nation states. And outside of that context, MAD is not a concern. The remaining concerns are simply those that arise whenever we decide to use weapons: Military necessity, distinction, and proportionality. These concerns can be addressed with the use of nuclear weapons just as easily as any other weapons. If you can figure out when it's appropriate to use a bullet or a bunker-buster, you can figure out when it's appropriate to use a nuke.
A competent President would have said something like this.
I happen to agree with your analysis, at least roughly.

Nit-pick, Fat Man was the first plutonium bomb. It was not a fusion device.
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Old 29th June 2019, 10:50 AM   #40
theprestige
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Originally Posted by autumn1971 View Post
A competent President would have said something like this.
Here's the thing, though: There's no record of any president ever saying something like this.
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