[RickSp]

With all due respects, I think the authors are nuts. They sound like throw-backs to the Eisenhower years when generals talked about fighting and winning nuclear wars.

Nuclear weapons are useful only for the suicidal and the crazy. Talk about a madman's update of the "burn the village to save it" canard, except that this is on a global scale. Using nukes would involve killing huge numbers of civilians and making vast areas uninhabitable for generations. The blather about using "tactical nuke bunker busters" is almost funny. To use them effectively would require intel far more accurate than we clearly have. Lacking this we fall back to just dropping more an more megatonnage, murdering more and more civilians.

What makes this insanity even more absurd is that it ignores the realities of today. The US military is being weakened and possibly crippled not by countries with nuclear weapons but by insurgents with IEDs. We may have made MAD obsolete but still have no means to counter a handfull of men and boys with RPGs. And as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the greatest risk of nuclear attack on the US is probably by a terrorist cell smuggling in a stolen bomb. If a terrorist took out New York or Los Angelos with nuke, what good would our vaunted nuclear arsenal do us then?

It would be a particularly sick irony if the imperialists solved global warmer by triggering a nuclear winter.