A nuclear WWIII will never happen. Dishonor will prevent it.

Wars are fought for honor and a nuclear WWII would have nothing but shame for the initiator of such a war.

Our leaders know that there would be no honor in a nuclear war that would destroy our environment and insure that there is no real winner. Any leader or military war machine under his command that would initiate such a war would know dishonor like the world has never seen. The hate for Hitler and his regime and ideology is still alive and well in the world and that hate would be dwarfed by the hate that the initiator of a third WWIII would feel from the world.

The main reason for that hate and denial of honor would stem from the fact that any nuclear war would be fought against cities and their citizen instead of having an honorable battlefield war. No leader or military force will dishonor itself the way the U.S. did in Japan. Honor in war comes from facing an enemy man to man and our technology has now made that impossible. There is no honor in killing innocent non-combatant citizens in their beds from thousands of miles away. Ordinary people know this and so do their leaders and military.

Mutual assured destruction says that any nuclear war will be self-genocide. Some who do not know why wars are fought, and honor sought, may think some leaders are foolish enough to initiate a nuclear war but forget that no high ranking military man, especially of Asian descent, would ever dishonor himself and his family by initiating such a war. Such a man of honor would never initiate such a dishonorable war. A man of honor would know though that he would not be doing his duty if he did not retaliate. Reciprocity is fair play and is honorable and duty and honor would force a reciprocal reply.

Do you understand the psychological principles at play shown above and do you agree?

Regards
DL

Gnostic Bishop wrote:A nuclear WWIII will never happen. Dishonor will prevent it.Wars are fought for honor and a nuclear WWII would have nothing but shame for the initiator of such a war.
Our leaders know that there would be no honor in a nuclear war that would destroy our environment and insure that there is no real winner. Any leader or military war machine under his command that would initiate such a war would know dishonor like the world has never seen.

A sensible observation, that there would be no honor in it, but I sense a few problems.

The first is that, to a military mind, voluntarily accepting defeat rather than using a weapon at your disposal is an even worse type of dishonor. You imagine that nuclear war involves a crass decision to launch them as an aggressive attack, Curtis LeMay fashion, and I agree that the considerations you discuss would preclude that.

But that raises the second problem, which is that nukes wait in the background of a separate escalation of "conventional" weapon use. I don't think Trump could persuade the military to attack North Korea with nukes pre-emptively, but he could probably attack with enough non-nuclear fire and fury that NK would consider it a matter of honor to use their nukes in retaliation, and away we go.

I read quite a bit of the Wiki article on the Cuban missile crisis, including the story of Vasili Arkhipov, one of the three commanding officers of a submarine armed with nukes. In response to an (almost accidental) attack with depth charges, they were (pre-)authorized to launch a nuclear strike. Arkhipov objected and thereby forestalled WWIII. The leaders had tickled the dragon's tail to an extent that permitted such an unplanned launch, and two of the three were willing to go ahead with the dishonor.

Gnostic Bishop wrote:The main reason for that hate and denial of honor would stem from the fact that any nuclear war would be fought against cities and their citizen instead of having an honorable battlefield war. No leader or military force will dishonor itself the way the U.S. did in Japan. Honor in war comes from facing an enemy man to man and our technology has now made that impossible. There is no honor in killing innocent non-combatant citizens in their beds from thousands of miles away. Ordinary people know this and so do their leaders and military.

This part I have trouble taking seriously. If anything, it's an observation about why such a dishonorable first strike might happen. Our entire military is now geared up for "shock and awe" that might as well be an Xbox game. Cruise missiles, drone strikes, rocket launchers, heat seeking guided missiles. Not much sense of honor in all that. You note that face-to-face combat has been made impossible, but to my mind that means abstract decisions about faceless enemies are more likely to be abominable, not less.

Gnostic Bishop wrote: no high ranking military man, especially of Asian descent, would ever dishonor himself and his family by initiating such a war. Such a man of honor would never initiate such a dishonorable war. A man of honor would know though that he would not be doing his duty if he did not retaliate. Reciprocity is fair play and is honorable and duty and honor would force a reciprocal reply.

If this is an argument that we don't need to try to pre-emptively take out North Korea's nukes, I would tend to agree. No matter how crazy the rulers are, I don't think they would start with a first strike or put themselves in danger of a situation which might call for one. I just wish I could count on the U.S. militarists not to flirt with such situations themselves.

Anything like an exit strategy for the U.S. looks like regime change, and we have shown ourselves willing to push awfully hard to try to put the leaders in an untenable position vis-a-vis patriotic supporters. So far, with very little effect. Yet the pressure of, on one hand, 45's "we have to do something" bluster, and on the other, the issues you raise such as nuclear winter, could result in a sideways path of least resistance toward a strategy of pressure on the regime. And I can imagine that resulting in conventional escalation.

Thanks, by the way, for getting into the ins and outs of the NK issue. It has been one of those things my mind tends to bounce off with a shudder, refusing to think things through to such an extent that I find myself accepting much of the propaganda line of the right.

My thought is whether G.B. is relying perhaps too heavily on a culturally-bound notion of honor more pertinent to traditional Asian cultures than to the West. Not that there hasn't been a lot of attention given to honor in the West, but my feeling is that, here, honor might be more tied to the importance of not letting oneself get pushed around or threatened, than by a consideration of the dishonorable consequences of nuclear fallout. Thus, I don't find it inconceivable that the U.S. could use nuclear weapons. It's unlikely to happen in first-strike fashion, as Harry says, but gets more likely by the path that he also lays out.

Wars are not fought for honor.

Wars are fought for profit. It is extremely rare that our country is at war in an existential threat.
The job of a good commander is not to pit his best fighters against the opponents best fighters. Their job is to ensure that the tables are properly tilted so that our worst fighters can beat their best fighters.

If it were about honor then people would be dueling with swords or bare hands. Drone strikes by death robots controlled remotely with night vision from an ocean away says honor has little to do with war.

Make no mistake, Donald Trump does not give a single fuck about honor. His conduct screams that from the rooftops.

If people were actually governed by their desire to be remembered as honorable the world would be a much better place.

Gnostic Bishop wrote: No leader or military force will dishonor itself the way the U.S. did in Japan.

How many Americans do you think perceive those nuclear acts of terror as dishonorable? Gut feel says it's much less than 1%. No, we see those as acts of heroism, saving huge numbers of American lives (even though Japan was attempting to negotiate surrender at the time). None of our leaders dispute those values, so you got that way wrong.

I think some Presidents do fight wars for honor. GW Bush comes to mind. Remember he used to repeat "I'm a war President," meaning "I'm not just any ol' President, I AM A F-ING WAR PRESIDENT!" I also suspect one reason he attacked Iraq was to reclaim some FDR glory as a TWO-FRONT WAR President.

This is why Trump must start a war. The Presidents we most revere started or prosecuted wars. (Except perhaps Reagan, but he "won the cold war.") Trump knows he is a great President. To prove that - and more importantly to prove he is not weak - he will start a war and may even push the nuke button. In that case he might make the simple minded calculation that he'd rather millions of Koreans or Iranians die "over there" than any Americans on our soil.

President dipshit is passionately terrified of war, it would be the demise of his term of service, it would destroy his true agenda. President mouth breather wants to change the senate more than anything. The U.S. senate has stalled the Trump agenda. His first priority is to load the senate with christian fascist ideologues. These are people with zero honor, they are cretins. Honor wasn't considered at Nagasaki or Hiroshima, it was fear. In the U.S. we have canonized the second amendment, this despite the vulgar examples of abuse. The world is become a vulgarity, honor is become extinct among the new world leadership. There may be a silver lining though it is tenuous and that's this; With so many of earths leaders being the totals creeps that they are it meets a certain logic that we have one of our own right up there among all the others. Honor will get you killed, dishonor will get you laid, for some if not all the creeps out there the blood of others is an aphrodisiac that stimulates patriotism a most dishonorable state indeed. When there is no shame in a society there is no fear of dishonor.