Big Red wrote:
Jordan wrote:

Oh no

The upper heirarchy among the Arab states has but one purpose- to
survive. Nuclear war's have never been very popular- because a nuclear
exchange will amount to complete destruction. No ruling class has ever
knowingly destroyed itself- which is basically what an exchange of
nukes amounts to.

Your claim that "a nuclear exchange will amount to complete
destruction" is simply an assertion. You are making the big assumption
that each party to the "exchange" is able to score enough hits on the
other party to "destroy" it (and what exactly do you mean by
"destruction?" Reduction of status as a Power? Collapse of regime?
Severe depopulation? Near-complete genocide? Each of those levels
requires an increasing number of average hits per city to effect).

Ah, but you're assuming that Arab Powers aren't prone to suicidal acts
of aggression. Witness the fate of Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a
counter-example.

How many wars have the Arab powers fought with Israel after the Jewish
state developed tactical nuclear weapons?

Two major ones (1973 and 1982) and numerous minor ones, one of which is
going on right now. The Israelis got their first few nuclear weapons
by 1970. Egypt and Syria launched an unprovoked invasion of Israel in
1973. In 1982, Syrian-backed border attacks on Israel (which by then
had dozens of atomic weapons) led to Operation Peace For Galilee, the
Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Right now Israel has at least a hundred,
possibly hundreds of atomic weapons, and Syria is backing a series of
Palestinian raids on Israel which may quite possibly lead to another
Syrian-Israeli war.

NONE of the Arab states that attacked Israel, as far as I know, has
ever had _any_ operational nuclear weapons. What has protected them
from annihilation has essentially been Israel's humaneness -- a frail
shield considering that the Arabs wish to annihilate Israel.

This does not fill me with vast confidence regarding Arab strategic
common sense.

Even Saddam's invasion was
tacitical. Kuwait is just a sheikdom that has some oil. He gambled that
the Russians and the Chinese could stop the U.N., and America wouldn't
rush into a war without allies. He fatally underestimated how powerful
America was, especially what the U.S. could do with a smaller superior
force, and command of the sky. However, Saddam's invasion didn't amount
to sucide, as he retained power after the war.

No, what amounted to suicide was his continued violation of the truce
terms _after_ the end of Desert Storms, including an attempt to
assassinate ex-President Bush. This led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
the overthrow of Saddam, and his likely execution on charges of crimes
against humanity.

" I disagree with your general proposition"

I would challenge you to devise a scenario for a nation that contains
an aresenal of viable tacitical nuclear missles to be destroyed.

Oh, that's easy. Some other nation which has enough nuclear missiles
to hit all of the target nation's major conurbations does so. End of
the target nation.

You said _nothing_ about "be destroyed without taking the attacker down
with it." You simply assumed a sane potential aggressor being deterred
by the threat of retaliation. This is not a safe assumption, as not
all potential aggressors are sane.

Especially one that has can deploy these missles in subs or in secure
silos. No viable system has ever been deployed to stop an inbound
nuclear missle with 100% accuracy

No viable system will ever be developed to stop an inbound ANYTHING
with 100% accuracy. But who said that 100% accuracy was required?

and no stratedgy could made could
hope to take out all of an exisisting nuclear power's missles, silos,
and submarine based weapons.

Who said that taking out "all" of an existing nuclear power's missiles,
silos and submarine based weapons was required?

You want a scenario involving one nuclear power attacking another
nuclear power and NOT being deterred or destroyed by the threat of
retaliation? Ok, here's one.

At some future date Iran has 10 nuclear missiles capable of hitting
Israel. The Israelis have 200 missiles capable of hitting Iran, and an
ABM deployment capable of engaging all 10 nuclear missiles if launched
simultaneously with an expected success rate of around 95% (I'm
simplifying tremendously here, but my assumption is a per shot expected
kill around 50% and multiple shots taken per incoming missile).

Iran goes to war with Israel, backing terrorist teams who use nerve gas
to kill 1000 Israelis, but has not yet launched an atomic strike.
Israel becomes convinced on the basis of intelligence reports that Iran
is going to launch an atomic strike the moment Israel retaliates
against this atrocity. Israel decides that it cannot permit the
continuance of these attacks and launches a pre-emptive attack on Iran.

The Israelis begin with a stealthy (*) attack against the Iranian
missile silos. This employs tactical nuclear weapons. The attack
succeds in destroying 50% of the missiles. Unfortunately the Iranians
have adopted a Launch On Warning policy against just such a
contingency, and 5 nuclear missiles scream towards Israel.

The chance of the Israeli defense system hitting each missile is 0.95.
Hence the chance of the Israeli defense system letting at least one
missle through is 0.95 to the 5th power, or around 0.77.

In 77% of the universes in which this war happens, Iran is disarmed
with no hits on Israel. In around 23% of the universes in which this
war happens, Iran gets at least one hit on Israel. But in around 80%
of those universes in which Iran hits Israel, Iran gets ONLY one hit on
Israel.

Assuming that the Iranians are using atomic bombs, one hit on Israel is
not going to destroy Israel. It is not even going to destroy a large
Israeli city; it will simply damage that city.

Hence we can say, with some degree of confidence, that this atomic war
ends with Iran's nuclear arsenal gone, Israel surviving, and Iran now
at the mercy of an Israeli victor. If the Iranians are actually stupid
and fanatical enough to declare that they will continue the war,
building more atomic weapons and resuming the attack, Israel then
probably launches a series of atomic strikes aimed at eliminating Iran
as a Power with the resources to build more atomic weapons; millions of
Iranians die, and the chances are that not one Israeli dies as a result
of any Iranian atomic attack.

If you think that this is unrealisticaly lopsided (in particular that I
am unreasonably assuming that the Iranians will not work through the
logic that I have just had and thus avoid the initial terrorist attacks
in the first place) consider that at least one influential faction in
the Iranian government has repeatedly, publically argued that it is the
religious duty of any Islamic state to immediately attack Israel with
atomic weapons as soon as it has _any_ atomic weapons with which to
attack that country. It's also reasonable to assume that an
atomic-armed Iran would at first have only a half-dozen to a dozen
nuclear missiles, and most estimates of the Israeli arsenal put it at
low hundreds.

My estimate of the chances of the defense system are based on the
performance of the Patriot II-III in battle, coupled with the
assumption that in a situation where atomic attack was expected a
battery, rather than individual missile, would engage each incoming
threat. I could have made the defense stronger or weaker, and I
deliberately simplified the math by stating that each _volley_ of
missiles had a roughly 95% chance of succeeding with a per-shot in each
volley success chance of 50%; the actual math of such engagements is
_much_ more complicated than what I did.

You might argue that I didn't give Iran "secure" siloes (what does that
mean anyway?) or ballistic missile submarines. Well, as far as I know
Iran doesn't have any siloes that are "secure" by any means other than
the usual hardening, and Iran also has no SSBN's. (In fact, only
America, Britain, China, France and Russia, to my knowledge, have any
SSBN's at all -- it's a large and expensive type of submarine which is
not very useful unless you have at least hundreds of total atomic
devices and at least three such submarines so that one can be
maintained on station at all times). I could, of course, have assumed
that Iran modified one of their existing submarines to carry a _few_
nuclear missiles of some type (not a true SSBN, but perhaps an SSG with
a couple of nuclear cruise missiles in its loadout, such as our _Los
Angeles_ class). But then, cruise missiles are a lot easier to shoot
down than are ballistic missiles.

Finally - nuclear war, involving the
destruction of an entire nation, is only a possibility in the minds of
the most sociopathic members of the human species.

Unfortunately, such persons sometimes rise to power as the heads of
states. Witness Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Kim Il
Sung and Kim Jong Il, and I could extend the list considerably without
even leaving the 20th century.

Furthermore, you're assuming that nuclear war must necessarily involve
the destruction of an entire nation. In the one that we have actually
fought so far (World War II) no nation was in fact entirely destroyed.

- Jordan

(*) I'm talking about the use of electronic warfare and radar
avoidance tactics in general, not the specific use of B-2 or F-117
aircraft, none of which are possessed afaik by the Israelis. The
Israelis used such tactics in their strike on the Iraqi atomic reactor.