August 14, 2017
DONALD'S FREE HAND IN PYONGYANG:
Trump or not, Americans Would Nuke an Iranian city : Trump is not the only American willing to rain "fire and fury" on a foreign land, explains (Rashmee Roshan Lall, 8/;13/17, Middle East Online)
Anyone who shakes their head over the insanity of US President Donald Trump's threatened "fire and fury" against nuclear-armed North Korea might want to take a look at a rather dry paper in the Massachusetts Institute Technology journal International Security.The paper is titled "Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran." Academics Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino examine the United States' so-called nuclear taboo, which is supposed to have created an ethical norm for the use of nuclear weapons after the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They address the strength of the taboo and the supposed rise of a humanitarian spirit that makes Americans squeamish about killing large numbers of non-combatant foreigners. They look at the proclivities of 21st-century Americans using a hypothetical scenario that revolves around a war started by non-nuclear-armed Iran.The results of the survey experiments can only be described as chilling. When a representative sample of the US public was asked about a situation that approximately replicated 1945 and substituted Iran for Japan, "a clear majority of Americans (56%) would approve of using nuclear weapons first against the civilian population of a non-nuclear-armed adversary, killing 2 million Iranian civilians, if they believed that such use would save the lives of 20,000 US soldiers."
We've told this story before, but at the neighborhood's annual 4th of July BBQ a number of us were talking about nukes and two of the profs said that we'd never use them because the public wouldn't stand for it. Another neighbor and I laughed and said that most Americans wouldn't even blink if a president nuked Iran, given the lingering animus over the hostage crisis. That led to this paper.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 14, 2017 5:27 AM